Trans 101 With Julie: Let's Talk About...Sex (Again)

Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 With Julie.

If I learned anything, it's that including the word SEX in the header of one of these essays is (not necessarily) a sure way to drive views and responses (I don't actually know because I'm writing this installment before I post the previous one) (I love random access essay writing) (it's like the random access myth of Imaginos) (which was only random access cos Columbia screwed up the track order).

Last time around I talked about sex as a means of addressing some of the common misconceptions and false narratives that surround the trans community...gender vs. sex vs. orientation, 'trans panic,' et cetera. This time, like so many of my more recent pieces, I'm going to be exceptionally personal...and honestly, perhaps uncomfortably so. I'd apologise, but...I really don't much feel like it. The plain and simple fact of the matter here is this: I am a human being. I may not be exceptionally sexually driven, but being human, feeling good is something that I'd actually like to experience. And as such, having good, fulfilling sex, even if it's just with me, is something that is worth it.

As I change due to HRT, that changes.

And as candor and honesty are two things I have worked very hard to exemplify in these (plus, in like a billion years, I'd like to be able to look back at this point in my life and laugh at my stupidity and childishness), I need to be honest and open about this too.

So, like...buckle in, I guess?

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

Sex is weird.

Like, you have no idea how weird it is.

You think you're going along, as vanilla and bog standard average as possible, and then suddenly life tosses you a giant eephus pitch and you sit there frozen in the box wondering if you should hold and look like a fool or swing and offer no doubt that you are.

And that's sex.

Sex is that big huge curving eephus pitch. Fight me.

We go through life thinking we know ourselves, that we understand ourselves, and then we're suddenly introduced to something we've never experienced before, and suddenly up is down, left is right, cats and dogs are living together in perfect harmony, and we realise that we're not the 'normal' person we think we are. Better yet, hopefully we realise that there's no bloody such thing as normal. It may be a picture, it may be a scene in a movie, it may be one of so many disparate things, and we gain some internal realisation that can be mind expanding...and a little scary.

I've had a lot of those events in my life...things like realising when I tied my hands together I really enjoyed it...like realising that certain parts of the body make me tingle (ankles and calves, I am looking at you. No, I am really looking at you)...like realising that certain smells and tastes make me want to engage in unspeakable acts of desperate passion on the parlour floor. I will admit fully that there are dozens of these, and they have ranged the gamut from 'oh that's neat' to 'my god what is wrong with me' in intensity.

Now, take those realisations and look at them through the prism of someone with a fluxing gender identity (only it wasn't really fluxing but you know at this point what I hopefully mean).

Hitting first puberty was a horrific experience for me. Instead of my hair growing I had to get it cut. Instead of breasts I got body hair. I started to smell bad. I woke up one night with something standing at full attention, and when I touched it to see what was going on I shot stuff out of it and I was sure I was dying. Loads of y'all had your first period and freaked...I had my first orgasm and was sure I'd be dead before morning.

I'm not the least bit exaggerating.

This wasn't how this was supposed to go.

By this point in my life I was already hiding a lot of things...like the knickers in my night stand, the little sample sized lipsticks I'd snuck...I'd tried to convince myself that this was all part of an act, that I was trying to pretend I'd been with someone and the lipstick was from their lips when we'd kissed (which obviously shows just how well I understood kissing at that point) (and by how well I obviously mean not well at all)...but I knew it was something else.

I lost my virginity to a guy.

Because I figured, despite KNOWING what was going on, that it all had to mean I was really actually gay. Gay at least made some kind of sense, I hoped...and maybe it'd hurt less when I got beat up, I don't know. I lived in Nowhere, Middle of and it's not like anyone had any language for what any of this meant.

So I KNEW I was gay...and sex with a guy was horrific.

But I was gay.

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

My sexuality has always been a complicated thing.

I've never exactly been good at the whole sex thing in general, and I'll expand on that by saying that I enjoy sex, I enjoy how it feels, but the mechanics are wickedly difficult and it takes a great deal for me to actually get to a place where sex is something I would consider as an option for me with someone. I can't say that I look at people who can have casual sex in any bad way, but I can't personally understand it because I'm not programmed like that. Maybe that's why I'd basically had absolutely ZERO satisfying fulfilling sexual experiences for most of the first...oh...35 years of my life? And I had sex. Not a lot, but I had sex.

And there was a spouse, but that is not a story for these essays.

In high school I developed a first crush. She was nice, and pretty, and blonde, and I thought she was pretty damned nifty. I went to my first prom with her. And everyone knew I had a mad crush on her. But I don't know if anything would have come of it. And yes, I know I'm saying this through the 20/20 vision of hindsight, but what had always been complicated (ref., my sexuality and my ability to consider physical intimacy as viewed through the prism of knowing my identity but rejecting it) was becoming more so. I had my first realisation that not only did I want to be a girl, I wanted to be with a girl. And that meant that I was straight...or was I? Guys were already making the 'but I'm a lesbian trapped in a straight man's body!' joke, and do you have any idea how that fucked me up in the head?

I was already stealthing certain things under the premise that obviously this was just a fetish type thing (yes at 16 I understood fetishes and the like) and how would I explain that if I ever even got to bat let alone actually touched a base? But girls were...like, they were pretty and smelled nice and I envied how they dressed and god in heaven what is wrong with me.

But hey...I can just call myself bi. And totally totally a guy.

Even tho...umm...I have to explain to you why you found a bottle of your nail polish in my room, parental unit of mine.

But that's OK cos I can bring up the guys in Aerosmith or Lou Reed and that makes it totally OK cos I'm emulating rock stars that's totally it!

Just...don't ask me to explain why those ankle straps are not the way they were, OK?

I still barely tolerated my penis, tossed off basically so it'd just shut up and go away, and I'd toss and turn at night hoping that if I just through strong enough all of this would just straighten out and I'd wake up fixed.

And I wasn't even remotely sure what that'd mean for me.

But at least I liked girls, and that meant I wasn't gay.

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

After I graduated high school, I went to my first performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Any illusions I had that I'd eventually grow out of things were exploded into so much particulate.

I saw and met women who were confident in their sexuality, and who terrified me because I wanted to BE them so badly, and wanted to be who they were kissing.

I saw and met men who were assured in their presence, who blurred or obliterated binary gender roles so fully that I had a moment of realisation that there never was a 0-1 system, but rather a gradient that shifted fluidly and imperceptibly subtly from point to point. I already had extreme difficulty reconciling who I was and how I presented and how I defined and described myself and now any possible clue I had that I knew anything was gone.

I went to 100 performances.

I ended up joining the cast as the Criminologist.

Understudied Rocky.

And on one memorable night, got to play Janet.

And that last one is the one I remember most of all.

I still had no idea who I was or what I was...or rather, despite all of this I had no way to accept that who I was was who I was because of upbringing and my life to this point and so on.

And when someone ended up crossing paths, the conservative staid side of me leaped for what I figured people wanted/needed/accepted, and entered into my first real relationship.

We had sex.

It wasn't great.

I found the voice to say there were certain things about me...'Listen I like cross dressing but I am totally a guy and totally like you know I just like it, so ok?'...in the hopes that the lie would be enough to allow me to go on.

And maybe for a while it was.

Only it never is for long.

And you...I...need to be honest. And you...I...need to come to grips with the truth you've been fighting all your life, because even though you've known yourself you've rejected yourself for so long that you're not even sure what the truth is anymore. You just know that it hurts like fire and ice and it burns and chills and if you don't say something soon it'll continue to rot you from the inside out until you can't do it anymore.

So you say it, finally.

You explain that you're a woman. You explain that you're submissive, that you like handing over control. You explain that there's no sexual thrill in wearing those clothes, they're just right.

And you get silence.

Uncomfortable silence.

Had I been honest...had I been strong...I'd have done the right thing and found a way to stop things sooner than they ended up exploding. But I got sick, got diagnosed with cancer, and that has a way of drawing people together at first. And we did draw together...even when there was obvious discomfort in the fact that as weight kept melting off me (I lost close to 75 pounds in a month thanks to chemo and vomiting) the only clothes I could wear that stayed on were dresses. The truth came out in little ways...the sigh as I cried over my hair coming out, even after cropping it...the looks when I'd be sitting cross legged and my toe nail polish was visible...and by truth I obviously mean for more than one person.

I tried going out once or twice as me.

That didn't go well at all.

And it carried along...Julie straight...and by straight I obviously mean totally a lesbian but considering I was still feeling forced to be a man...well, you get the picture, doing all the house stuff (cooking/cleaning/dishes/vacuuming/laundry/etc.) and trying to muddle through, with each day hurting more than the one before.

Sex became infrequent.

I didn't care.

It, like so many things, came to an explosive end as I laid in a hospital bed, having had a heart attack several days before, when I was told she'd be moving back in with her mother as soon as I was discharged. And with no way to handle rent on my own for a 2 bedroom apartment, nor any ability to find a room mate on such short notice, let alone one who would potentially even understand my situation...I moved home too.

And I had no idea what was next...

TO BE CONTINUED...