Trans 101 With Julie: Things We Never Want To Tell You, Part 1

Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 With Julie.

This time around, and for a few other installments which will probably come out when I have either the strength or rawness to handle what I'll be writing, I want to cover some stuff that is going to be once again intensely personal, interspersed with anecdotes which should not be construed as data but rather simply observations from my particular view of the community I have somehow collected around me.

That's...that's an incredibly long sentence.

In a way, however, that really encompasses how difficult this is to go through. I think it's essential though.

While I can, let's begin.

~~~//||\\~~~

As I've written in the past, I have known for literal decades that I'm a Julie. Single digits, certainly. I know that I've been depressed for a very very long time...but that's really a subject for another article (one, in fact, that I plan to write in the not distant future, dog willing and the creek don't rise). Being trans comes with its own set of complications, and those complications vary wildly from person to person. And while I certainly have no hard and fast data to strengthen any kind of blanket statement I might make were I a person trying to push an agenda, I think that there is a tendency for trans femme and trans women to have at least some kind of phase during which hyper-masculinity is a coping mechanism.

This is where we start hitting the nitty and the gritty, as well as the very uncomfortable.

In grade school, I was pulled in two wildly different directions. On one hand, I was in gifted and talented. I spent more time talking to teachers than I did kids in my classes. I don't think I talk to any of the people I went to grade school with anymore...I don't think any of them really knew me and those are connections that just don't exist. I had a breakdown in 7th grade when my 4th marking period report card was all As and 1 B.

On the other hand I was a huge baseball fan and I wanted to play baseball. And I was on the team in 7th grade. And I was horrible.

In high school I wanted to play football...and I don't mean proper football, I mean the hyper-masculine sport with shoulder pads and grunting and sweating and tight pants and...umm...that kind of football. I tried out for the team. I'd never have made it.

I quit.

And y'all know that I was way involved in music and theatre. I've written about my senior musical, my trip to Austria for choir, my singing the Mozart Coronation Mass and being in madrigals and chamber choir, my coming back to sing at my choir director's final performance leading the high school choir I sang in (and how that brought me back to music and reignited my love of classical music). I may have talked once or twice about reciting Jabberwocky in a mixed up Scouser/Cockney accent.

Here's what you don't know about my high school years.

You don't know that I spent time in the weight room, doing high weight reps.

You don't know about the time I was playing indoor lacrosse in gym class, when someone hip checked me and I went after him, across the floor, stick checked him into the bleachers, then threw my stick down and went after him, fists flying.

You don't know about the time, at a battle of the bands, that a bunch of Nazi skins showed up cos one of the bands had 2 black people in it (including one who would go on to play in a band y'all might have heard of called TV On The Radio), and of all the people there, two of us squared up to go in on them, with one of them being me.

Why did I do these things?

I am sure you could make some very good, and very accurate guesses.

Here's what else you don't know about my high school years.

I used to hang out with people after school, and I'd leave conversations intentionally to see if anyone would notice I was gone, because I was sure no one actually cared. Most often, I felt I was right. (It was only later, talking to a friend over coffees at Panera, that I learned the truth...they knew I was gone, knew something was terribly wrong, and no one had any idea what to do or say to broach that gap I'd imposed. No one had the language for it, the slightest scintilla of idea how to eve begin, and they were frozen with fear. I was then told, gravely, that none of them ever expected to see me again after graduation, and when I'd walked through the door for the concert, several of them started crying when they saw me.)

You don't know that I was someone who knew everyone and whom no one knew. I could walk up to anyone in my class and ask them about something I knew they were into, or talk to one of them about how they did at their basketball game the previous night. I was...inscrutable. And so it was when, senior year in high school, I caused a near riot when at my prom I was seen doing 'the forbidden dance' (a.k.a. Lambada) with someone, as there was no way I had that in me. Virtually cause célèbre.

What do all of these things have in common?

The answer is impossibly, deceptively simple.

Every one was a somewhat valiant, yet horribly ill conceived attempt at trying to be the man I wasn't.

The stereotype, of course, is that guys don't talk about their emotions. How could I talk about MY emotions when I barely understood them myself, let alone say the terrifying words 'please, I'm not a boy, someone help me?' Easier by far to play the part, suck up, be strong and silent...and kill myself inside.

Easier to lash out at someone in the most masculine way possible for a perceived slight in gym class, allowing 12 years (at that point) of pent up frustration at being bullied and mocked and ridiculed to explode in one hyper-masc display of violence.

Easier to try and impress in gym class by lifting well over twice my body weight, even if it meant I couldn't walk afterwards. If I could be man enough, if I could flex hard enough figuratively or otherwise, I'd be seen as one of them and I could get through each day, week, month, year. I obviously didn't know that one one had that thought at all about me...in fact, too many were worried by what they were seeing, but in my mind, this all made perfect sense.

Fake it till you make it, you know?

Balancing this with the fact that none of this was at all comfortable for me was, of course, pretty fracturing. How do you reconcile the fact that you're much more comfortable in rehearsal for the school musical, wearing a gown and singing soprano, than you are trying to press 500 pounds? How do you reconcile the fact that you sit at home at night, listening to WYSP or WNEW late at night, wanting to femme up your clothes and wear makeup to school, with the fact that when you get on the gym floor to play hockey you're looking at who exactly you're going to target and take out of the game? All the while knowing that you're doing that simply because if you act a certain way people will see you a certain way which means you actually will be that certain way?

As I type this, it sounds ludicrous.

This is how complex my high school years were.

~~~//||\\~~~

As I was nearing graduation from high school, I made what now seems like an absolutely off the wall, out of left field, completely irrational decision.

I decided I wanted to join the Army.

Now, I can hear you through your looks of incredulity.

But it gets better.

Because, you see, not only did I want to join the Army, I wanted to be...a grunt.

Go ahead. Please laugh. I'll wait.

In fact, I'll go make a sandwich so you have time to get it out of your system.

*goes and makes sandwich*

All done?

Good.

But really, think about it in conjunction with everything else you've read above. In the context of that, it makes perfect sense. The one way I could prove once and for all to everyone, and thus to myself, that I was actually 100% man and not at all the woman I knew I was but really I couldn't be because men were men and women were women (except we know that isn't true in the sense that I'm saying I believed it was at the time) was to join the military and do the dirtiest, most physically demanding thing I could think of.

As you can imagine...it didn't happen.

The day before I was due to sign the papers, I chickened out.

In retrospect, this was probably a wise choice on multiple levels. Not long after this tensions rose to critical levels in the Middle East, and soon we were amassing troops in and near Iraq for what would be Operation Desert Storm. I doubt I'd have even made it through basic, to be honest...I'd either have failed a mental health exam (I'd already had one failed suicide attempt, a fact the recruiter knew about and told me to not mention on my application), or a physical (I was already showing signs of what I now know to be osteoarthritis on my right side)...or I'd have burned out. Or I'd have lost it and shot someone. Or I'd have killed myself.

But it was the choice I thought was the best way for me to prove once and for all that I was a man.

And obviously...I'm not.

Here's a neat thing...I know (not just me following them, but them following me and having conversations type people) at least 4 or 5 trans women on Twitter who were active military. And I really don't know what their motivations were for going into the military, but if they were to tell me that one of their deciding factors was similar to mine, I'd not be the least bit surprised.

I know several who were heavily involved in sport...and still are in many cases, including one who was a wrestler (and I don't mean freestyle or Graeco-Roman).

I am not saying their experiences are the same as mine...I am a strong adherent to the proposition that the plural of anecdote is not data...but the coincidental preponderance of points of information is something of interest to me.

Keep in mind this is not to say that doing any of these things are BAD. Sport is awesome. I love my football as much if not more than I ever have. And while I have no interest in lifting weights or checking someone into the boards, I like getting out and about when my body allows me to. Trans men and women in the military have done, and will continue to do, amazing things, even if I do not support the military-industrial complex or the government that used said same as an iron fist to colonise and propagate fascist/cap systems of government around the globe.

Oh...there's my inner anarchist coming out.

Apologies.

The point is, I think a lot of us go to the other extreme when we're fighting ourselves. Much as so many trans women are accused wrongly of embracing femme stereotypes once they are out (when in fact so many do as a way of trying to shield themselves from the likewise wrong assertion that they're aren't REAL women or woman ENOUGH), I think it is not only natural but almost normal for those of us struggling with identity issues to over-compensate in an effort to try and right what we think is a listing shop. It's not until we're able to more clearly understand the dichotomy of those two sides that we're able to get them into some kind of equilibrium.

Remember that when I'm writing this, I'm doing so from a very extremely binary female point of view. I am happily binary, with a full understanding that the spectrum of trans identity is far from a 0-1, black-white system. What I express and describe can only be my experiences, and I'm only speaking for those experiences and not for the community as any kind of holistic entity. A non-binary trans woman (be they gender queer, gender fluid, transfemme, or any of hundreds of other possibilities) will not only have different experiences but different ways of feeling how those experiences impacted them in their quest to become who they are internally.

~~~//||\\~~~

I want to thank you, as always, for reading along. The past week or so has been very difficult for me, and as a result I've really been facing some very difficult things and trying to make sense of them. Right now, that makes it a bit...I don't want to say easier, because it's anything but easy...but perhaps more readily possible...for me to look at some of these things and try to evaluate where they fit into my personal history and how they continue to cause tremors to this day, or how they have affected my internal landscapes and structures.

I'll see you next time for more Trans 101.

Transmission ends.

(This is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.) 

Some random thoughts about gaming, RPGs and the holy trinity

I want to talk about games for a moment.

I actually have another piece I am writing about computer gaming that is very different than this, but for the moment, and for today, I want to talk about roles and stereotypes and so on.

Basically, most CRPGs and MMOs are based around what's called a holy trinity, which is Tank/Healer/DPS. There have been times that things have moved away from that somewhat (WoW did introduce a concept called scenarios during Mists of Pandaria in which 3 people of any class/spec could succeed, but even there some really benefited from a dedicated tank in there), but at the core, all end game content that isn't PvP is really designed with that in mind.

For the uninitiated:

Tank: basically a meat shield. High health, high armour, lower DPS, designed to survive big hits and keep enemies and bosses occupied.

Healer: does what it says on the tin. They keep everyone vertical, with emphasis on the tank.

DPS: the cannons that kill the boss. Often made of glass. They break easily.

When I started playing WoW in 2008, I had illusions of what a tank really was. How do you keep threat on something? By doing more damage than anyone else. I was shocked to find out when I was tanking I'd be doing the least (this has improved a LOT since then, but it was not until recently that tanks could be so competitive)...in fact, the first dungeon I tried to tank I tanked with a 2 handed sword because, when asked if I could hold threat, I said 'well, I have a big sword.'

I tanked basically non stop through the last year of Burning Crusade and all of Wrath of the Lich King. I took time off during Cataclysm as I was being less involved in guild activities...basically seeing myself frozen out of a lot of stuff. I came back at the end because a friend wanted a thing to play with me and so I picked it back up from the last content patch in Cataclysm and played non-stop through the first 3 months of the newest expansion.

I'd gone through a sea change tho.

You see, tanking is one of the two hardest jobs in the game, and I think heals tops it. If you're a good healer no one ever notices. If you're a bad healer, well...people notice. If you're a good tank everyone notices. If you're a bad one...it's bad. Really bad.

Because I started tanking in Burning Crusade, I have a different toolkit for tanking. I do line of sight pulls. I am more methodical because you could not pull an entire room and AoE (area of effect) them down. Trash had mechanics. You had to pay attention. Today we have a bigger toolbox for tanking...which I did not understand at first, but now I think makes all the sense in the world...I was super squish in protection spec and just...gave up. The stress had gotten too much, coupled with being in a progression guild for Wrath, and...

I just couldn't do it.

I mean to the point that I even stopped running dungeons and stuff as a DPS because I'd freeze up at the thought of zoning in.

In Legion, things have been a bit different.

For one, I have a dedicated healer with whom I am in voice contact. Add to that that we're a thing, and stuff becomes...verbal comm goes away? She knows how I pull mobs, she knows how I'll position and when I'll use cooldowns and that I WILL use my active abilities to minimise my incoming damage, and she can focus more on triage for everyone rather than dumping mass heals on be cos I feel I can pull an entire room and stuff.

Even tho I prolly could.

It means when I tank a dungeon it takes 18 minutes rather than 15.

But no one dies.

My pocket healer doesn't scream in my headset on every pull (which is fucking adorable by the way and makes me giggle).

Stuff gets done.

I love the ease of playing DPS, and I think I'm a better DPS because I tanked and tank.

I laugh about the fact that I pull a boss and the DPS runs around to the back...only to find that's where I already am because I am trained to face the boss away from the group. I guess that's not a thing anymore. It used to be.

I don't love tanking. I'll be honest, there are times I don't even  >like< tanking. It's hella stressful. I do get very anxious. I would rather be mindless and just hit things hard with 7 foot long pieces of magicked metal.

But.

When I run 5 mythic dungeons in one night...and watch a tank pull things madly, leaving people behind...and a DPS who shall remain nameless but whose name might just rhyme with unruly might possibly get hit by a boulder and knocked into trash mobs that were never killed, which decide oops we're gonna eat you thank you...I realise that I can do a better job, keep myself alive, keep everyone alive, and not stress out my healer whom I eventually will be crashing out with.

Roles are hard...and tanking is a job that I associate with a still closeted Julie trying desperately to...something. But I realise also some of the best tanks I ever played with were women, and...this role is something I can do.

And with someone at my side to support, I can do it well.

Trans 101 With Julie: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

 Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 with Julie. I am your clumsy fingered hostess with the toastses (mmm, toast) Julie.

  I want to talk today about one of the most popular misconceptions that gets bandied about when someone comes out publicly (or even privately) as transgender. That misconception, to lay things out at the beginning, is this:

“But you've changed!”

  The thing is, we really haven't.

  At least, not in a bad way at all.

  What you are seeing is someone who has finally given up one of the biggest things holding them back, and now they finally maybe feel free enough to talk about some of the things they've kept drawn close to the vest for years and years.

  You may also be seeing someone who is letting go of things they claimed they liked as a kind of safety net they used in order to blend in and stealth through life.

  To use myself as an example:

People who are very very close to me were not the least bit surprised when I told them I was transgender. Depending on the person, they saw me struggle with it for years or decades, or watched me go through failed and furtive attempts to ratchet the door open, only to come up short each time. Others saw my willingness to throw myself headlong into things like RHPS or stage stuff, specifically roles that may or may not have involved playing a woman (or a man playing a woman) on stage, and realised there were things I was hiding.

  And here on my wall...yes. I talk about clothes and makeup from time to time. Remember that for me this is puberty point two. I am finally having to teach myself how to navigate things I was never socialised with as a teen, even tho I sorely wanted to be. It doesn't mean I've changes...it means I've grown.

I will always post about FC Bayern and proper football, because there is nothing on this world or any other that will diminish my love for the beautiful game. I didn't fall for soccer because I was trying to hide behind it...I fell in love with it cos when I was tiny Pele signed with the NY Cosmos, and I learned about football off a cereal box back. Likewise, I still love baseball, always will, and I blame Burger King and their Yankees baseball cards for that.

Well, and Nolan Ryan.

But, like...in HS I tried doing the football thing, and I couldn't do it. Nothing was worth putting myself through that hell. If that meant I'd get tagged a choir queer, so be it. I still have issues with American football because of that.

And I will always love the music I love...it's a running joke that I'll post all the classical stuff on my wall (Classical Music Julie, anyone?) and then someone will get on Skype or Discord with me and they'll hear a wall of white noise, blast beats, and black metal scream. When I say I love all kinds of music, I really do mean it.

And all those interests are inherent. They're ME.

  But me also likes dresses. And learning what my aesthetic is. And makeup. Me is going through physical changes that are amazing to witness, if not always the easiest things to deal with. I do tend to NOT talk about those because I do know people have their limits, but each day I move further and further away from the shell/husk I used to be and closer and closer to me. I am, to quote/paraphrase Janet Mock, redefining my reality and surpassing certainty.

  I know girls who are madly into muscle cars...to the point that their Youtube channels are chock a block filled with vids about their Mustangs or whatever. One of my friends is a mad off-road biker. I know someone who played league football in the UK, someone else who builds Gundam models, and another who cosplays as 2B from Nier: Automata. One of my close friends is a business owner, another is a well known blogger and published author on gender studies, several other are ex-military...

The point is, I am betting in almost every case these are things they have been into for years if not decades.

But when we come out, when we start talking about things we never have before, those new things often seem to overshadow all the other things we've always liked...those other things becomes like background noise and the new stuff seems amplified. We've...we've changed. Even if we haven't really.

One other thing to keep in mind is this:

Often we do go to the extreme end of the binary, as much as a coping mechanism as anything else. We're so afraid of not being seen as real trans people that we go over the top in expressing or presenting in an overtly binary fashion. There's mingled unmitigated joy at the fact that this whole new world shining glimmering splendid is before us, and we dive in head first. But it's also armour, a way to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows hurled at us.

“But LOOK! I am so femme!”

“LOOK! I'm a real girl!”

“LOOK!”

  We learn, some quicker than others, that those end up being tells that we can't risk. We learn to reel it back, to actually embrace the resplendence in divergence that is the entirety of the femme experience.

It's not personality changing.

It's called the growth game.

I'm two years-ish in in a public sense. Y'all have seen so many of my growing pains, and there's certainly a billion more slips and pitfalls and pratfalls ahead of me as I learn my way through. I'm becoming myself, more surely every day, and more fully in every way. Will I cast off things? Most likely and I might not even know what they are, because they'll literally be things I don't even think about as I go along. We all do that, trans, cis, enby, agender, doesn't matter.

That's called living.

Anything else is stasis and homogeneity.  

  And if you think I've changed...maybe instead you should look at how your perception of me may have changed as a result of new data.
  Each one of us going through transition, no matter how that is (CHT, surgery, nothing at all if they medically can't) is essentially going through a second puberty...only we're doing it without the benefit of a cadre of others going through it with us in close proximity. Do you have any idea how difficult puberty was for me, seeing body hair and feeling bits...descend...and waking up with this stuff stuck to my sheets...and then getting to school and seeing the other girls in my class talking about outfits and stuff, and knowing that as much as those were conversations I was desperate to have, at this time they were decidedly off limits to me?

  So everything is new, and exciting, and terrifying.

  We talk about make up as much because we're discovering it as it is because we hope that if we do, the women around us who grew up learning about it will be able to give us tips and hints and pointers. We talk about clothing, and post pix, because as much as we may be proud of how we pulled off a certain look, sometimes we can get amazing advice on how to put things together better, or without being too over the top, or where we could push things a little. For so many of us, this is a foreign language we're having to learn by the collective butts of our britches, and without the benefit of a life lived with these things, we have to play catch up exceptionally fast and with great furiousness.

And potentially with far less Vin Diesel than we'd like.

And yes, to the outside these things can seem like evidence that we've changed.

But they're really not.

They're excitement mingles with fear crossed with a sincere desire for help as we try to pack 20 years of childhood and puberty and adolescence into a 3 or 4 year period in the hopes that we don't get clocked and get clocked...or worse.

  Trust me...we're still in there. We're still us. We're just...us plus.

We're ourselves, upgraded.

Julie point two :-P

(You had to know, at some point, I'd have to work in a Doctor Who reference into one of these essays. Anything less would be...less. Less...Julie. Less...of a certain je nais se quois, a certain savoir faire, a certain...Jacques Chirac.)

  Thanks once again for hanging out with me. I hope this helps you get some idea of the things we're dealing with and trying to pick up as we go through a major change in our lives for the first time for the second time. As always, I encourage questions, comments, insights, anything you might have, ad there's plenty of room below to add your bits, bobs, and allsorts. Take care of yourselves, eat good food, hug your loved ones, and stay alive.
  See you here next time.




 (This is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)

Things and stuff...

A heap of broken images from the past several days...

1) A very close family member is having a long series of medical tests, which started Monday and continues today preceding a surgical procedure next week. Vibes for them are gladly appreciated, as I need them to be well.

2) My bun, the love of my life, the star-flecked night sky my moon travels through and with, should be getting her full regimen of HRT within the next 2 weeks. This is more exciting for me than when I got mine.

3) I made it through some game stuff in WoW that I'd been struggling with. WoW has been a huge escape for me through much of the last decade of my life, and having some great friends to play it with right now is a big thing. I'm in a very trans-friendly guild on Wyrmrest Accord, an RP server, and my guildies are in many cases friends that I've known for a long time.

In any event...

The first, and biggest, one was that I finally made it past the warrior class mount challenge:

That's my battlelord's proto-drake :-)

Secondly, I finally made it past the fire mage artifact empowerment quest...AND I somehow found a hidden appearance for mine!

Those really made me happy.

4) Speaking of gaming....I am working on a piece for here and my FB page about gaming and how important it can be for trans men and women. It's one of several pieces I have in the works, and hopefully you'll be seeing it soon. I still have a backlog of 4 or 5 essays that haven't been posted here, so...patience.

5) Speaking of writing...since I began my essay series on FB back in December (the same week I started HRT) I have written some 40,000 words on the subject. It's likely by the time I hit the 1 year anniversary of the essays and my estrogen that I'll be close to 100,000 words.

I am strongly considering assembling all of it in a book.

We'll see.

6) BTW....obviously my PC is rebuilt :-)

See y'all back here soon.

Stay frosty this summer.

Trans 101 With Julie, Lesson 7: Let's Talk About...Sex

I see you looking at the title of this entry in my essay series, and I can see the look on your face. I know what you're thinking...'Julie's getting to the good stuff now, yeah boy.'

I'd laugh, but you wouldn't be able to hear me laugh.

You see, I'm not going to be talking about having sex. I'm not interested in discussing the mechanics of sex, and tabs a and b and slots c and d and so on. If that's the kind of thing you like, I'd recommend one of several free fic or vid sites (but really, you should be supporting the performers, and not stealing their work) and give this a wide berth.

If that's not what you're here for, then read on. Because I am going to talk about people's impressions of trans sexuality, the marketing of said same, and how Julie is incredibly hypocritical about certain things in some ways but not really but maybe.

A few installments ago I talked about labels and how we use them for good purposes, like self-identification and self-realisation, as well as building communities. I also talked some about their use in the world of professional sex work, e.g. the fact that a lot of trans erotica on the video side is marketed or identified as tranny or shemale porn. As we go along in this essay, I'll be offering up some comments and insight from one of my friends who works in the industry, in the hopes that it offers a more direct view than me speaking from the outside.

Let's start off with a few thesis points:

1) For many people, trans erotica is a major fetish.
2) For some people, transgender women and men in general are a major fetish.
3) Fetishes aren't bad...except when they are.
4) There are massive correlation dissonances dealing with hetero/homosexuality and fetishised transgender/transsexual men and women.
5) One of the largest sources of violence against trans men and women is internalised self loathing due to perceived homosexual activity on the part of the attacker.
6) Pejorative terms, such as the ones mentioned above, are used mainly as a methodology of advertising, even if/though some performers have no issue with identifying as such
7) A man having sex with a transwoman is not gay.
8) A woman having sex with a transman is not gay.
9) Gender does not equal orientation.

A number of these can be packaged together as we go along, but breaking them out helps to create some more easily digested points of reference. Additionally, if you are frequently scared by the lengths that some of my essays get, you can read those bullet points above and get a pretty good overview of all the things I'm going to say in a Cliff's Notes kind of manner, and thus impress your friends at the next office party with your sociological acumen.

A note of warning: I will be using frank language throughout this edition of Trans 101. It may not be work friendly. Additionally, I will put it right out there that I use slurs in here. They are words that get tossed at me and #GirlsLikeMe all the time. I don't use them otherwise. You should NEVER use them. Period. Seriously, I have a spork here with your name on it already waiting for you to fuck up. Listener discretion is advised. Julie is not responsible for any trouble you get into for reading this. All rights reserved. Void where prohibited. Past performance is not an indicator of future results.

So with that said, let's begin.

~~~//||\\~~~

Fetishes, as a rule, are not a bad thing. I know the ice cream analogy gets used a lot, and as much of a hoary warhorse as it is, I really do like it. There are many many flavours of ice cream, and some people like to stick with one or two old favourites. And that's awesome. Some people like lots of flavours, and likewise, that is fulled with awesome. And some people...well...they either like to mix loads of flavours together in a technicolour dreamcoat of sensory overload, or they go for the really weird umami flavours that seem to be the rage. And honestly? As long as they're happy, then it's good.

(By happy, I mean they are satisfied, the person they are with is satisfied, and everything is risk aware and consensual (RACK).)

Now, Julie does NOT kink shame. She does NOT fetish shame. You like role play? Woot! You like being tied upside down to your girlfriend's radiator while she plays Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and bemoans the lack of inclusion of a playable Chaos Marine army? Go for it.

(Umm...yes. That is a very specific thing there. I have no idea where it came from but I'm leaving this here because, you know, I heard it was a thing and thus probably bore mentioning.

*coughs nervously*)

The point is, kinks and fetishes are a great way to change up your ice cream flavour, or add something on top of what you already enjoy. And generally speaking, they are not a bad thing at all. How and ever, while not being a psychologist (I just play one on TV), there is one thing that crosses the line between totally OK and very much not OK....and that's when you fetishise a person because of 'what' they are. This includes things like fetishising black men, Asian women, Latinx women, cultures as role play costumes...and trans men and women.

I want to let you in on a little secret here...and I know I am violating every guideline in The Transgender Agenda, 2017 Edition...as a transgirl? I kinda like being treated intimately as a human being. Y'all know I'm active and open here...I'm also active and open on Tweeter. And while it happens so much less here on FB, it's a far from uncommon occurrence for me to get a mention or a DM from someone along the lines of 'I like ur feed want fuck?' or 'can I suck your girlcock?'

Yes, I get unsolicited dick pix too.

Newsflash: none of them are ever impressive.

I know some of this is due to the anonymity of the internet, which fits into the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (individual + anonymity = drooling reprobate). I know some of it is due to male expectation that any girl in the world will fall to her knees at the mere mention of possibly being gifted with such a virile example of masculinity. I know some of it is due to them thinking, since I'm trans, I'll take anything I can get because I'm a) hopeless and b) obviously a slut who'll fuck anything in a 30 mile radius.

Welp.

My overall desire for sex is such that a light breeze can blow it away. It is honestly not a huge deal for me. I enjoy it, but I don't sit here drooling at the idea of getting hot and sweaty. It doesn't mean that I don't on occasion, but it's not a driving factor in any way. When I'm down, I'm all in, but otherwise I'm much more into a couch, tubs of ice cream...or a pizza, of which I'll get like 2 or 3 slices while the remaining 2/3 of the 'za will get eaten by someone else cough cough not that I have ANY experience with that do I...and watching Doctor Who. Intimacy means more to me that being raw dogged to the point that I'm screaming to be filled up.

And that's what guys seem to think we're all about. That somehow we've got no inhibitions, that we have no filters, that all they have to do is say hi and you're gonna just lunge at their crotch and gobble it all down.

I know a wide range of people, and I have a few really good friends who work in the adult industry, and specifically in the trans end of the industry. And they are amazingly open about what they enjoy, and not at all shy in talking about it. And they STILL don't cross who they are on screen with who they are off screen. Wanna know what we talk about? We talk about Star Trek. And opera. And J-RPGs. And building model kits. We congratulate each other on tranniversaries and hormoneversaries and new housemates and everything else. They don't look at me askance because I don't cam or stuff...I'm just a friend. I love what they do, I support it where and when I can because they deserve it. But they're human beings...and pretty damned awesome ones.

And I see them post something, and 90% of the messages are...what you'd expect.

And I know they expect that...and honestly, I do too. Because on the rare occasions I've been gently coerced or nudged by them to post a recent selfie, I get it too. Because we're seen as a coveted fetish object, not a human being. Our emotions, thoughts, interests...all of those things are tossed aside in favour of our tits, asses, and cocks (if we still have them).

We're not fetishes, even if we like fetishy stuff.

Treating us like human beings will get you 'further' than begging us to plow you like the back 40. And by get you further, I mean we'll treat you like a human being too. Cautiously. Until we think we might understand what you're angling for. And trust me...we're all vicious when that's broken.

 Extremely so.

~~~//||\\~~~

This allows us to make a transition, albeit a rough one, to the 4th point on my list (since I think I kinda covered the first bunch in the above polemic)... “massive correlation dissonances dealing with hetero/homosexuality and fetishised transgender/transsexual men and women.”

Phew, that's a mouthful.

I'm a woman. You're a man. I deign to consent to allow you to become intimate with me on a one on one basis in a safe place where I feel secure and protected. And I nervously undress for you, knowing that you know that I'm trans. And I slide my skirt down, and expose myself to you, and you...

Don't look me in the eyes.

Instead, your eyes are focused hardcore on my dick. Or lack thereof. Because in this story, I am Schroedinger's transgirl...I may or may not have had GCS.

How does that make me feel?

It makes me feel like I do every day...that I am reduced to my organs. Just like trans exterminationary radical feminists deny me my essential identity and womanhood because I am not a 'womyn born womyn,' because I do not have a uterus, vagina, and ovaries, you've reduced me to the fetish of a 'chick with a dick.' A 'he/she.' A 'trap.' A 'shemale.' And you'll go home, and the next day at the office you'll tell your friends about the hot tranny you picked up and how you had me begging for your big 9” sledgehammer (hint: it was closer to 5.5...and that's HELLA generous...but who's counting?) while I'm at home in the shower for the third time in 12 hours wondering when or if anyone will see me and not my dick.

Or lack thereof.

(For reference, this story is not based on anything that has happened to me at all. For one, I don't do the pick up scene. For two, I'm with someone. For three, because I'm demisexual, I'm really only into the idea of intimacy with someone I already have a deep emotional bond with. For four, I'm really not into cocks in general. For five I'm, like, 95% a lesbian tho I accurately label myself queer.)

Do you know how many trans women, at any point in their transition, feel like all they're seen as is some kind of weird freak show...that guys only want to get with us because it'll let them notch up not only another conquest but that it gets like a gold star or something for taking one for the team and stuff? If you do know, tell me, because I can really only base it on how I feel...which is that generally I know how I'm seen and it sucks and I hate it and I'm still not gonna blow you and trust me there's no way on this world or the next that I'm gonna top you because hello hormones baby.

It wears on you.

Big time.

And I don't know how it is for any other marginalised group and the tropes that go along with them...I just know it sucks.

And additionally? For the record?

If you're a straight man, and you have sex with a trans woman, guess what?

You're still straight.

If you're a straight woman, and you have sex with a trans man?

You're still straight.

And if you're a trans woman, and you have a trans girlfriend?

You're a lesbian...and you're also pretty damned awesome.

This really isn't rocket surgery...unless you are routinely into the idea of dehumanising your partners and failing to respect their identities. You don't suddenly become the only gay in the village if you get to know the cute redhead that works a couple cubicles over, think she's pretty damned awesome, go on a few dates or more and the two of you decide to take things back to one of your bedrooms just because she's trans. It doesn't make her gay either. It makes her a straight woman who trusted you enough to share the biggest part of her with you and YOU SCREWED IT UP TIGER YOU SO FUCKED UP.

Ahem.

People, people.

We're people.

With feelings. And hearts. And all hearts break, and I think sometimes ours more than others because we have to deal with so much and it's really no wonder we don't let people in very much.

~~~//||\\~~~

Trans Panic is a thing. Or rather, they try to make it a thing, and in trying to make it a thing, they make it a thing, but it's not the thing they think they made it into.

Let me try to explain.

Trans Panic is the name given to the fallacy that it is justified to be violent toward, or murder, a trans man or woman because you didn't know they were trans and all of a sudden OOPS SURPRISE PENIS or OOPS SURPRISE VAGINA and suddenly you feel it's OK to beat us to death.

Even tho...shock horror...you just had consensual sex with us fifteen minutes before.

Because people conflate identity with orientation, sex with trans woman = OMG people will think I'm gay. What it >really< means is that people will be impressed with your firm grasp on your own masculinity, your healthy self image and keen ability to understand that a woman is a woman and damn she's cute and you two make a nice couple. And then I wake up, and realise that this is the real world, and people suck.

Trans Panic is NOT a thing that is real.

It's a false equivalence that is frighteningly accepted as a defense when a member of the US military decides that he has to hide the fact that he had totally heterosexual sex with a trans woman. It's an accepted defense when the guy suddenly freaks out that people will think he's gay for liking someone like us. It's accepted when the wife finds out that her husband has been cheating on her, and either he or she decides that it's the only way to get out of the situation.

Because we're seen as disposable. As not-people.

I've said it once before here, and I'll repeat it.

If you're a straight man, and you have sex with a trans woman, guess what? You're still straight.

If you're a straight woman, and you have sex with a trans man? You're still straight.

Corollary to that:


My orientation has nothing to do with my gender. I'm transitioning and I am, like I said above, like 95% interested in women (I may be over-egging it, but...let's just say mostly, OK?). That doesn't mean 'you should have just remained a guy and been straight. Is that so hard?'

Well, yeah. Yeah it fucking was. Multiple hospitalisations are the proof of that pudding.

Likewise, if I were into guys...being a gay man wouldn't make all this mysteriously go away.

Because the issue isn't who I'm attracted it...it's the fact that I was born with a woman's body and a few organs that don't exactly play well with my body. So I am doing the most hardcore thing you can do...I'm manually hacking my endocrine system to do what it's supposed to do. I'm rewiring my entire body. I am more hardcore than you can possibly imagine.

So there.

Sing it with me now:

Identity =/= orientation.

Identity =/= orientation.

Identity =/= orientation.

Identity =/= orientation.

And my being trans gives you no more right to murder me than if I weren't. Even if you think it does. And if you think murdering me for my being trans after you nutted is OK, you were never really a man in the first place.

~~~//||\\~~~

Let's finish up with names.

 Or perhaps more accurately, labels.

Up above, as much as it pained me to write them because I loathe those words unequivocally, there was a stream of what are essentially slurs used to label us and essentially reduce us to our peeners (or sometimes lack thereof).

I also mentioned that I'm friends with some people who work in the trans adult industry on screen.

The nice thing is that the trans end of the industry seems very heavily performer oriented, often performer produced, and doing a very good job of presenting a wide variety of content that only reduces us to fetishes when it's the concept of the video being produced...in other words, we're seen as people with all the complexity and wonder that makes us people. The producers care about their talent and make sure they are treated well and safely...most often because they're One Of us. The not so nice thing, at least from what I know on the outside, is that we're still basically looking at stuff that's labeled as shemale or tranny or whatever...at least when it's not coming from a full fledged creator owned indy studio/collective.

From talking to people, the general feeling I get is that they deal with those words as marketing phrases in order for people to find their work more easily, but outside of that world, calling them one of those is a quick trip to the block list...and those lists get shared about with good regularity. Hell, they don't even call each other that, so what makes you think you can do it and be OK? Hint...your having a penis is not a vote in your favour of being allowed to.

Some of us have no issues with certain words or labels. I know there's major issues for some women with the word transgirl or transwoman, as it asserts that the trans modifier keeps one from being seen as a woman full stop. I can understand that. But for me, I embrace it. I am a woman. No question. I have no doubts of my woman-ness. I am also trans, and I embrace my trans-ness as well. I accept that label with pride, and so for me, being called a transgirl is not at all a bad thing. But I respect people who have issues with it, and would never use it unless they said it was OK to use to identify them...and as time has gone on, I've found myself limiting my use of that label to private conversation out of respect for the fact that in public it tends to be polarising and separating in a way that only feeds into the perceived biases of the not-Trans community at large.

I know it seems complicated, but we reclaim words just like a lot of other marginalised groups...and much like those other marginalised groups, some of us reclaim some words and others reclaim others and sometimes the twain really doesn't meet. But basic decency and respect should allow us to meet in the middle and respect each others identities and work together toward our common goal...

...which is the complete destruction of the current white cishet patriarchal hegemony and a wholesale replacement with community based consideration, full human rights for all, and sharing according to ability and need.

Shit, I wasn't supposed to share that.

That's gonna be a demerit at next week's meeting for sure.

Really, I could have reduced this whole 3500 word essay to a few words...

Treat us with basic human respect.

But if I did that, where would you have gotten a chance to read Julie actually talk some about sex, huh?

~~~//||\\~~~

As always, I am indebted to you for taking the time to read my occasionally coherent ramblings. I realise this may have been a little saucier than normal, but it's stuff I've done a lot of thinking about and felt I needed to say something about.

I welcome your questions and comments.

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you back here next time!




 (NB: as always, this is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.) 

Interregnum redux

Good news: parts arrived yesterday, only one day later than scheduled, and the computer has been rebuilt. It's performing very nicely. The rebuild was timed with a thunderstorm, of course, so everything took just a smidge longer, but compy is looking very nice.

Not as good news: over the past several days, a lot of very serious personal things have come up. I'm dealing with what may be some significantly life-changing health news for one of my family members, and it has me in a very unsteady and unstable place emotionally.

I have written.

I'm not sure how good it is.

I can's easily address it lucidly right now.

All this to say I am still still here, just give me some time to process, parse, and figure out what is coming and how to deal with it.

Merci, cher amis.