Author: RhaegarTiberius

I'm a quirky queer relationship anarchist with a propensity for putting words together in odd ways that occasionally even make sense, usually with a moderate to heavy sprinkling of vulgarity and a heavy portion of blunt honesty. I put up a new post every day that relates to relationship anarchy, polyamory, lgbt+ experiences, or life lessons learned as a genderqueer trans man trying to practice relationship anarchy and community living with a diverse network of amazing humans while not getting eaten by my plethora of dogs and cats.

When kink coincides with trauma

I’ve been into kink for as long as I can remember.  Thinking back, I was writing erotic dungeon stories involving seduction and torture before I even understood how to get myself off.  I drew terrible kinky sketches long before I had considered exploring another human’s body on my own.  I’ve had people say that my interest in kink must be related to trauma, and I won’t deny, I’m a person who has been through rape, sexual assault, abusive relationships, and violence fueled of bigotry.  The funny thing though, is my love of kink and the seeds of interest in engaging in bdsm, began long before any of that trauma.  And no, I did not have a traumatic childhood, I was raised in a stable middle class home, never disciplined with physical violence, did well in school, and so on and so forth.  So for years I was so proud of being able to declare that kink and my trauma were unrelated, after all I had definitive proof in the terrible scrawled pages of werewolf sex stories, woven together with a good many of the fetishes I maintained later in life.  Those happened first, so nope, trauma and kink have no intersection for me!

Well, a funny thing happened in the more recent years, I realized there was a connection.  Yes, I was kinky first, but then I went through some rough shit.  I was cheated on, I dealt with codependency and abandonment issues, I suffered through emotional abuse and some physical abuse, I was raped and sexually assaulted, I was treated as less than human for being a queer trans man and dealt with violence and threats of violence.  And in the past few years, I’ve developed some new kinks, or gone farther down the rabbit hole with others.  I noticed it first when a partner cheated on me, not the first time I was cheated, but I had just gotten out of the dynamic with my ex-fiance where cheating played a part in his departure, and that was a particularly brutal emotional roller coaster.  Then a very stable partner broke relationship agreements, and while the whole incident was something of a miscommunication, it was momentarily very painful before we sorted it all out, and it brought up the larger betrayal I had just experienced. Suddenly I found myself fantasizing about catching a partner cheating and the sting of that betrayal, or of cuckolding, being made to watch a partner with someone else in something of a negotiated consent but feigned nonconsent and hurt scenario.  After the incident with miscommunication, I struggled a little with insecurity and jealousy.  Once the fantasies squeezed their way into my brain’s meat space, that disappeared.  I didn’t think much of it quite yet.

Then I noticed a humiliation fantasy popping up.  Now in real life, I’m a strict Dom, and I do not like to be humiliated or play a submissive role in any way.  Suddenly though, there was a fantasy in my mind related to humiliation and cuckolding, that revolved around me lacking a specific body part (psst…it’s a penis).  I don’t have a lot of bottom dysphoria, but there is certainly some, and I was confused as why the hell my brain would present me with a fantasy that seemed hell bent on triggering worse dysphoria, and more importantly, why the hell I enjoyed it?

One of the times I was almost sexually assaulted but managed to escape the situation before the assault occurred, was when I was sleeping.  A few years later I was assaulted while sleeping by a partner.  Well what do you know, my brain decided the next in the series of fucked up fantasies I would develop, was of someone having sex with me while I slept or was unconscious.  At this point I noticed a trend, though I had already been wondering what in the ever living fuck was going on with my brain???  Then it clicked.  I realized that after my brain turned the trauma I experienced into fantasy, I actually felt better.  Now I had no desire to really explore these things in real life, and certainly I knew that any of these without very explicit negotiated consent would be beyond fucked up.  But letting them rattle around in my brain and zing right to my sex drive, was somehow cathartic.  Not a by the books way of dealing with trauma, but it was working.

Then I remembered a conversation I had many years prior with a partner.  He was heavily into impact play, but he had also been abused as a child.  I tried to carefully negotiate our scenes, worried especially about triggering that trauma.  And I asked him one time why someone who experienced that and had been profoundly fucked up by it, now found enjoyment in being beat.  He explained to me that being able to consent to a scene, having the control to say “yes, I want this” or “no, you need to stop” was empowering.  And in a scene he had the knowledge that there was a close trusting relationship between himself and me, that I cared for him and was doing what I was doing out of mutual enjoyment and love.  At the end of the scene he knew I would hold him and tell him how well he had done, how proud I was, and how much I cared for him.  It didn’t heal all that trauma completely, but it was cathartic.  It helped rewrite the script of something that had destroyed him, into one of something he was choosing with love, one where he was embraced at the end after holding the reins of power the entire time and being able to say stop the moment he didn’t want it.

So, I’ve realized that I don’t need to wave a flag of pride that I’m a “normal” kinkster, one of the undamaged and unbroken ones.  I don’t need to be proud that my kink came long before my trauma and try and justify no connection between the two.  Kink is normal yes, and it isn’t something that is born of us being damaged people, but it is okay if the two are connected.  When my trauma and my kink finally coincided what happened was I began to heal.  We are allowed to heal in whatever ways are most comfortable, and if consensual exploration into bdsm is a way that works for you, that is completely valid.  My brain decided to show me that it was a way that worked for me, whether I liked it or not, and I’m grateful for the cathartic release.  It did what years of therapy couldn’t manage to, it made me feel better and it helped me move on.

The time I tried hierarchical polyamory

My first adult experience with polyamory started when I met my ex-fiance when I was seventeen and had just started college.  Now a lot of folks venture in to the polya life as a couple with a hierarchical model of polya, and I wasn’t all too much different.  Ex-fiance was a monogamous fellow, and I freaked out a little when I started falling in love with him, cue a few instances of pushing him away because I thought I would end up hurting him.  It was all very melodramatic really, but I eventually had a conversation with him about making our relationship “official” and all.  My two questions for him, before I agree to it were A) Would he have any problem with the idea of me getting gender reassignment surgery later in life (and I didn’t realize I was trans until seven years later how???) and B) Was he completely and totally certain he was alright with a polyamorous relationship.  He said yes to both, and so we became a couple.

We didn’t negotiate a strict hierarchy that I remember, but we fell into one easily as though it was the “right thing to do”.  As I ventured into dating other people, I always reassured him that he came first, he was always my priority.  I would check in with him constantly, “are you sure you’re okay with this? But are you really sure? No, are you really really sure that you’re sure?”  I don’t recall him every really asking for hierarchy, though I believe there was some assumption of that, since he seemed to assume a relationship escalator style relationship that ended in marriage and potential podlings and all.  I thought hierarchy was the way to go though, even though I did feel some vague discomfort with it, because after all, I was making a huge ask of being polya at all from someone who self identified as mono, so I better toss in some concessions to make him feel okay about it.  That my friends, was a mistake.

There is no story here of how eventually hierarchy didn’t work for me and it resulted in things blowing up terrifically, because there was a web of complex issues that I can guess caused him to cheat six years later and then walk away.  I won’t even know all the reasons, because we didn’t communicate well.  I don’t think he ever fully explained them, and if he did, I wasn’t about to grasp it at the time between the betrayal, the drinking, and the bipolar swings I hadn’t yet gotten under any semblance of control.  I would say though, that while I do remember him giving a half reason here or there, it was something we never did fully unpack, because we both had different flaws in our abilities to communicate in healthy ways.

Here’s what happened with the hierarchy though.  I shut people out in a lot of ways.  In elevating ex-fiance above everyone else, I made an effort to keep other people at arms length.  There was other trauma mixed in there, I was sexually assaulted my first year of college as well, which led to some persistent trauma that evolved into me being pretty touch averse, something I’m only now just starting to heal.  The way I shut people out though was definitely a harmful factor in that. I denied myself resources that may have helped in healing from that, and created an island of myself and ex-fiance, which grew into an intense co-dependency. In fact, having a hierarchical dynamic at all was a huge player in me becoming so codependent.  Structures and titles matter, they can shape out expectations in ways we aren’t aware of, and the ones I put in place caused my to depend on him as my sole source of support.  That codependency was one of the most unhealthy addictions I’ve ever had, it rivaled my alcoholism in things that nearly destroyed my life.

Finally a few years down the line we had transitioned from strict hierarchy to more of a descriptive hierarchy.  “Well two primaries could totally be a thing” could have been my catch phrase.  I was at that time still reassuring ex-fiance that he would always be -one of- the most important people in my life, and I refused to call any relationship secondary, but I still used the word primary for the ones that tended to have the extreme life integration we did, I just also accepted that other folks might join him in having that place in my life.  It wasn’t until he was gone for a while, taking a semester off school, working down at his mother’s workplace, and never around, that it happened though.  I met Cat, and I don’t know if ex-fiance being gone allowed me to let Cat in to that extent, but once I did, he became one of the greatest loves of my life, and my intensity with him on a romantic level could not compare to any dynamic I had ever had before, or at that time.  That opened the floodgates, once it was real to me, that was when the hierarchy truly started to crumble.  After that I went on to meet Kelev, and not too many years after ex-fiance left (and Cat was gone as well by that time), and by that point I was firmly on egalitarian polya/solo polya ground and running full force towards relationship anarchy.

Looking back I wonder often why I ever tried hierarchical polyamory.  It really isn’t in my nature, and from day one the idea of some people being “secondary” galled me.  I am not even sure how I didn’t recognize a more relationship anarchist mindset early on, why I spent time idealizing romantic relationships above all others when I even at the same talked about how my best friend and sibling growing up, River, was as close to me as any partner ever was.  Hell, I had written long rambling tomes that read like a teenage description of a Utopian society combined with the relationship anarchist manifesto back when I was a young teen, so you know, it was all right there from the start.

What I did learn from hierarchy is that it just plain didn’t make sense.  It does not work to decide that life is going to be a certain way, it just doesn’t.  To say that your relationship with one person fits in this shiny special box, and all other relationships are in smaller different boxes, and that is just how things are and will always be.  Think of it in terms of jobs, or kids.  You can expect a certain thing, you can work towards a certain thing, but life is gunna throw you a curveball and fuck up all your neat little plans and you’ll end up with something entirely different, but also potentially even better.  There are very very rare people who truly choose to single-mindedly stick to one path in life and follow it, and manage to do so completely, still coming out in the same place on the other side after every bump in the road.  Hierarchy is like that, it works, until you realize how much it hurts a secondary you love deeply, or until you find that with the billions of people in the world there actually is one you may love and be more compatible with then your husband, or you get tired of fucking rules.  I don’t want to choose one single-minded path and come out in the same place after every bump in the road.  I want my life adventure to be a free roving journey where the bumps deposit me in new and unexpected places, and where I may have a few destinations in mind, but if I end up somewhere else entirely I’m going to dust off my trench coat and forge ahead with a grin, ready for something new.

Breaking cohabitation – transitioning from living together to living apart

Major changes can make or break a relationship, and often the choice to live together is one of the big changes that can really show you if you can make a dynamic work with a person. But what about deciding not to cohabitate after having lived together?  That is a decision you rarely hear talked about, because it does not follow the traditional relationship escalator.  Can a relationship survive that sort of decision?  Does it mean the relationship is failing in some way?  Or is it possible it can even be a good thing? This is my story with that transition and what I learned from it.

A stable partnership

I’ve talked before about Kelev, the partner I have been with for eight years now.  We’ve been a central focus in each others lives basically since the start of the relationship.  He moved in about a year after we met, although I really count it happening even before that, since he pretty much started living with me about four months in to the relationship, it just took a little longer before a room opened up in my house and he moved his stuff over.  He was there through the house hunting six years ago, and the purchase of our home, the repairs, the experiment with urban farming, and all the ups and downs.  He supported me through me ex-fiance’s departure, through two years of school to become a certified vet tech, though alcoholism and overcoming it, through a job that felt like hell for a year as I worked to support us with my new career.  We share a bank account, four cats and three dogs, and eight years of amazing memories.

The unexpected announcement

This August Kelev approached me and told me he would be moving back to his Dad’s place, a couple miles across town.  My first reaction, after a bit of shock, because we had frequently confirmed a desire for the cohabitation to be a life long thing, was to try and understand why.  His reasons made sense to me, a mixture of needing to help his family, and a need for some sort of radical change in his life.  Especially with the monotony of daily life now that he couldn’t work, and often couldn’t move around well, I understood why it was so overbearing to be stuck in the same place day in and day out with no change.  To me, that wouldn’t be living, I thrive on radical change for my own growth.  On top of that, he was someone who had spent his lifetime moving every few years, I couldn’t relate to that personally since my childhood was largely stable and my own period of moving a lot was the first time in college.  Still, even without a personal reference, I could empathize with how it wasn’t easy after a life fueled by transitions and new beginnings, to settle down and have that feeling stagnate until you craved it. I also completely understood wanting to help his family, and to be able to spend time renewing his closeness with them.  It wasn’t that we didn’t see them on occasion at our home, but it was short visits that lacked the real depth you have when you are around someone every day.  I confirmed that there wasn’t a dysfunction in our relationship, and he was able to reassure me of that, along with the reassurance that he had every intention to move back within a year or two, and certainly was still 100% on board with our dreams to build a community together in the coming years and move there.  Still, it was terrifying.  I imagine when relationship dysfunction is the cause, it is even more uncertain and nerve wracking, but as is, this was a huge unexpected shift in how our relationship had been shaped almost from the beginning.

Adapting to change

Kelev moved out in August.  Through a series of other events living up, my need for more space, other housemates needs for more independence, or housemates moving to live with other partners, I ended up with the house completely to myself when he left.  I had largely worked through my codependency issues after my ex-fiance left, but it was my first time living completely alone.  That was both exhilarating and terrifying. It was lovely not having to worry to close the bathroom door (although that did increase the rate of cats-on-lap while using the toilet), but it was a bit uncomfortable at night knowing that no one else was home if someone broke in, or I somehow injured myself in my profound clumsiness.  The first couple weeks I kept very busy, I filled the emptiness in my life with action, mostly around the house to keep it functional.  Another big part of this change was that since I had been the one who attended school or worked, Kelev was the one who took care of our home, so suddenly I was figuring out how obnoxious it was to take out the trash, or scrambling around to get home by five to feed the critters in the evening. It’s strange how loading the dishwasher and then unloading it in the morning, or cleaning the cat boxes daily, made me feel more like an adult then bringing home a paycheck ever had.  It was the consistency, if I did not do every task, it just did not get done, so I made checklists and reminders and tried my best to keep on top of it all. After the first few weeks, when the new routine became, well, routine, I began to do a lot of introspection.  I worked a lot on myself, fostering greater independence and self confidence, and trying to really see what areas of my brain meats could use some improving. I also after a time began to discover both a great love of quiet and aloneness, a relaxation into it that I hadn’t experienced since I really began having adult relationships and always having someone around.  I enjoyed sitting with those moments, and also with the loneliness that sometimes came with them.  It was a relief to not have an easy access point to fill my loneliness with, and to instead have to become comfortable with being silent with my own self by necessity.  I did then in October have more housemates move in, other founders of the community who had traveled back to this side of the country so we could begin further working on that dream.  But the short period I had of living on my own is something I think I will cherish for the rest of my life, even if I may not pursue doing so again.

The effect, what our relationship has become

If you’re facing a recent split in cohabitation with a partner, or it’s on the table, this might be the part you really have been wondering about, how did it effect our relationship?  It was such a huge change.  We have gone through many times where we tweaked our dynamic, added a title here, took off all titles there, removed a bdsm component, got involved with other partners, added a bdsm component, stopped sharing a bed every night, experimented with sharing a bedroom, and so on.  Most of those changes had some effect on our interactions, but none permeated our daily lives so completely as this change.

There was a lot that I really learned to love about this.  I found that the time we spent together was often more exciting, more filled with laughter and emotional intensity, because suddenly it was a commodity that wasn’t always readily available.  Visiting his place at Dad’s felt like an adventure, lounging on his bed with his stereo blasting Alice Cooper or Hailstorm while while he fiddled with his wrestling figures and I read a book, reminded me so much of my teenage years visiting a friend or boyfriend’s house, and I felt younger and more alive.  Talking on the phone was a fun new treat, now we had hilarious conversations, sometimes with his sister or niece joining in from his side of the phone, where before phone conversations were mostly limited to checking if I needed to pick up groceries on the way home from work.  The whole experience really had a very youthful feel.  I also found a lot of joy in the separation of  time-to-social and time-to-alone.  I savored the drives home from Dad’s, as I could lose myself in music and appreciate the transition from the warm loved feeling of their home and being near my partner, to the clear peaceful emptiness of being alone again.  And something kind of magical happened, we started really doing things that we hadn’t before.  Our relationship was always so saturated with the every day, we were comfortable in spending hours relaxing while he watched tv and I played on my phone or read a book, and going out seemed like a difficult task, a departure from the comfortable and usual.  Once he moved it, it suddenly opened up a door for all sorts of new experiences.  We went to a concert together for the first time, the aquarium, tried new restaurants, and began going out to community events that we usually would have just been too tired and too low on spoons for.  I also began going to things on my own, without the guilt that I was leaving him home alone (though he never minded and would encourage me to go), I was able to have my own adventures and feel like I could really decided to spend my time however I chose in any moment.  I still choose to spend a good bit of that time with him, our emotional intensity is on an upswing and I’m loving the increased connection that has come of this venture, but I also am nurturing myself as a separate person more, so I bring more stories and experience to the table of our dynamic each day.

There are downsides though.  Sometimes the cats do something hilarious, or I manage to make a spectacular mistake in my clumsiness or absent mindedness, and while I try and remember it to tell him when we talk later, I know many moments are lost in the day and never get shared.  It’s sad, those little things, relatively unimportant, but also the fabric that makes up the majority of the day, are not longer all a shared part of our tapestry.  I wish that every surprised laugh as the cat falls off the counter or I drop my phone in the litter box, could be followed by looking up and meeting his eyes and seeing the laugh lines crinkle as he laughs with me (or at me).  I miss his snores at night.  I never have trouble falling asleep, but I wake early and often with panic attacks, and that noise was my comfort for many years.  Though, the nights he is here each week I just savor it more, my gruff lullaby that says everything is okay.  I worry about his health, it has been getting worse over the years and often I’ve taken the role of remembering the doctor’s instructions and making sure they are applied.  I still go to every appointment and try to remind him of what he needs to do when we get back, but I have a nervous inkling always in the back of my mind that things are slipping through the cracks and one day it will be something important.  My health is also not as good as it was.  I love to cook, but I have much more trouble motivating myself to do so just for myself.  My new housemates are wonderful, but they can cook, so while I do make family meals at times, I’m not -needed- to.  Having Kelev to take care of and cook healthy food for, really helped me stick to eating better as well.  Mostly though, I just miss the endless opportunity.  When someone is there almost every moment, there are no barriers to making each day a love affair or an adventure with them.  I didn’t take advantage of that very often when we lived together and I’ve learned to cherish now what I once took for granted.  That lesson though is something I am every grateful for, because when he does move back in, I will strive not to take those opportunities for granted again and will make every day a wonder.

 

Moving forward towards a new year

So yesterday was the first day since I started this that I didn’t publish a post.  I kept to my challenge for myself of writing daily, but my writing yesterday was just half formed thoughts and notes.

The past few days have been a ride of ups and downs, a lot more turmoil then my typical holiday season, and I’m trying to recover.  I’ve been thinking about things I need to work on this year and one of my new years resolutions will be to get into better shape.  I have long since dismissed the notion of their being one most attractive type of body, that bullshit society feeds us about is has no use to me. Losing weight is something that appeals, not because the number on the scale indicates self worth, but because it may assist in taking the strain off my knees. What I do know is, as I am now my stamina and strength are in the shitter, and my joints ache.  I feel like I’ve aged more in the last year, than in all my other years combined.  Pain is becoming a daily background noise, and if I can treat my body better and reduce or eliminate that noise, I will be a much more functional human.

After the past couple days I realized getting back into a state of good health is a bit more complex then my half formed plan to do more yoga, cut out the foods that my nutritionist told me were causing my digestive issues, and work on eating a more healthy options as a whole. One thing I really need to work on is self care.  I tend to push myself until I hit such a low energy point that I don’t take care of the basic things I need to feel okay.  And that’s how I end up sometimes with my room a mess, trying to count the last time I swept or cleaned the counters, looking in the fridge and having a snack of pickle juice because I pushed to the point where I was too hungry and tired to cook and that’s the only easy thing to grab.  I feel some times that I have a put together facade made of cardboard boxes and duct tape, and it’s all about to topple down.

On the other hard, life isn’t just about failures.  While I’m currently perilously low on spoons, and high on desire to make some changes so I can make sure I don’t push myself to this point in the future, I also see that I have great support in my life.  I have spent the past few days trying to help others through some hard times, and I could see the way people in my life really reach out and care for each other and go the extra distance for that.  I also know I could count on those communities if I were the one needing help, if I could get my head out of my ass far enough to ask, since I struggle with pride.  There is a lot of hope though, this time of year is high tension, high stress, but also a time of new beginnings.  And I’m going to do what I need to, to feel renewed and go into it on a good note.

Writing from the heart

Today is just a bit of a ramble really, since the holiday season is busy and I don’t know that I have time this morning for a well thought out piece of writing.  This assumes of course that the rest of my writing is well thought out, a debatable assertion.  Today I’m thinking about communication, and methods of communication.  I’m doing a lot of research into non-violent communication, decision making methods, and facilitation, as part of my work to found an intentional community.  I also have been thinking about writing styles.

One of my partners, Kelev, frequently gets many positive comments on his writing that he publishes on fetlife, a sort of kinky version of facebook.  When we go to munches, he is often told how much his writing was enjoyed and really touched people.  Kelev is sometime with very little high school education, who doesn’t read, and who has a vocabulary that is expanding because he loves learning new words, but is limited at least in his writing because more verbose wordage does not come to him at those times.  I sometimes find myself contrasting that with my own writing style, which can get a bit verbose at times, although not by intention.  I have always been a reader of ALL the things, and so when I sit down to write, large words that are often uncommon in my daily conversation, manifest in my brain as my sentences materialize.  They come unbidden because my writing center must be quite buddy-buddy with my reading center, so the wordage I’ve absorbed in book just translates itself into my writing.  In fact, since I have learned much of my vocabulary from context, when I am writing I often find myself typing out a word unbidden because it feels like it should fit next, and then having to look up the definition just to check that I am sure of it’s correct meaning.  I don’t force in big words, but they just lend themselves to how my mind likes to write, they come naturally.  And I’ve noticed in this writing venture, the way I speak has also begun to incorporate itself, something I have not found previously when I write.  My writing sounds like a mix of the product an affluent childhood filled with many books, and the speech patterns of a pissed off punk-rock millennial.  Kelev on the other hand does not write so eloquently.  His writing is simple, but conveys great enthusiasm.  While in life, his speech mannerisms are mostly wry sarcasm, movie quotes, and puns, his writing is very much exuberant yet simple.  In thinking about it, I realize why it appeals to people so much.  It isn’t the simplicity of it that makes it easy to read.  It is that his ability to really convey an intensity of emotion makes his writing truly embody what he was feeling at the time.  He writes from the heart where as I write from the mind.

I know that I could possibly work to change my writing style, though I love the feel of big dusty words that sit on shelves without frequent daily use, as they shake themselves off and meander from my brain through my fingers and onto the screen. I wish I could convey the same intensity of emotion and such a pure intense openness as he does.  I do try to create an emotional atmosphere when writing about meaningful events, but I can see how it is often cluttered up by the long running sentences that loop in and out of ideas a few times before ever reaching a point.  I am not a great writer, and by all accounts of most measurement, neither is he.  But he makes people feel, and I admire that.  Rather then change myself, I simply want to absorb all I learn from that.  Sometimes greatness does not come of education, or well honed communication skills, or the miles of research you do for a project.  Sometimes greatness is not the objective at all. When you write from the heart, all that really matters is that you set your feelings free out into the world in their truest most simple form, and sometimes on their way out there, they will touch someone else.

A trans Christmas story

I haven’t seen my family on Christmas for four years, they wouldn’t recognize me anymore.  Christmas is a big deal on my father’s side of the family.  While my parents raised me in a Jewish home, my father converted to Judaism, so his said of the family is Christian and they sure do go all out for Christmas.  My Aunt completely transforms her house into a Christmas wonderland, there are two full size trees, one in the living room and one downstairs in the den, both lavishly decorated.  The pile of gifts around the tree in the den usually extends outward four or more feet and often towers so high that it obscures the tree itself.  We would all gather, usually twenty or so members of the family, and there were all manner of snacks and pies and food.  Over two dozen nutcrackers lined the shelves, and every surface in the living room has miniature villages, or extraordinarily crafted wooden Santas. It was a lot, truly, I cannot begin to understand the energy and dedication my Aunt has to create such a scene of beautiful Christmas abundance.  The consumerism of the extensive gifts is a tad overwhelming, but at the same time appreciated, especially by the children.  And despite being the goth sheep of the family, too shy to socialize much, never quite fitting in, my Aunt always seemed to get me something that was just perfect.

I stopped going down for Christmas when I started transitioning.  I wasn’t ready for being misgendered and deadnamed.  I didn’t know if they would make an effort, but even if they did I knew accidents happen.  I was a fragile baby trans and I couldn’t handle it.  Honestly, just having to handle my parents slipping up was too much, how do you tell someone who loves you and is trying, that their accidental word slip-ups make you want to die?  Actually, I’m pretty loud about advocating for myself with them, so I’m sure I probably told them just that, and to get with the program and stop fucking up. I am not loud and outspoken with my father’s family, I’m more the grungy mouse in the corner type, and I knew I wasn’t ready to be my own advocate with them if I needed to.  I honestly wasn’t sure how they would react to finding out their oddball niece was actually their nephew.  I’d like to think they weren’t surprised, but I don’t have any idea how they felt, or how they reacted when my parents (with my permission) told them.

That first year was a bad year for many other reasons, but what I do remember is that my Aunt still sent me a gift.  She was always perfect at choosing things for me that fit her pretty feminine aesthetic tastes, but also captured my edgy goth style.  My favorite for years was a suede and knit sweater with four giant buckles down the front to close it.  It reminded me a bit of a straight jacket and was definitely punk chic. I dreaded opening her gift.  I knew I never quite fit in and my family barely knew me, but the way she had always managed to find something that I would really love and appreciate had made me feel like she saw me and I was accepted.  I also knew how most of my trans siblings had been treated by their Christian families, I knew my chances of being welcomed in as my self and having my identity respected were pretty damn low.  I hoped my family was different, but doesn’t everyone?  I opened the gift, knowing that in all likelyhood it would be some beautiful feminine scarf or lovely tight fighting top, something all together perfect for someone who wasn’t me anymore.  I was filled with dread as I unwrapped the package of what felt like it was surely some kind of clothing, hesitating like I was waiting for a slap in the face. It was a wonderfully thick and warm red plaid flannel men’s button up work shirt.  I almost cried, with how grateful and loved I felt.

My Uncle always sends me a card on my birthday. The first few years after I began transitioning, he just began addressing it to R.  It meant a lot that he didn’t use my deadname, but I wondered if discomfort with who I was, was preventing him from using my actual name.  My first initial hadn’t changed, so maybe it was a way to appease his comfort levels while also respecting mine in a way.  Or maybe he just didn’t remember what I had changed my name to, just because he had always been my favorite Uncle didn’t mean that I was important to him in the same way.  This year my card was addressed to Rhaegar.  That meant more then any other message written in it.  When I opened it, I knew that, while I already had plans for this years Christmas, next year I would try and return home.

I’m a different person now, I don’t know if they’ll recognize me.  I’m missing a few pounds from my chest, my voice has dropped a couple octaves, and I have a scraggly patchy beard these days.  My hair is actually longer then it ever was for years. Finally being assumed to be a man by strangers in public all the time regardless of hairstyle allowed me to grow it out, because it was no longer an enemy that would get me misgendered at a longer length. I have a confidence that comes of being comfortable in my own skin.  I still have the same garbage fire goth aesthetic, but I no longer am that grungy mouse in the corner.  I’m the sort of person that strikes up conversations with complete strangers with ease.  They may not know me anymore, although back then I wondered if they ever did.  But I am starting to believe that whether they really know me well or not, they are willing to love me regardless and they will see me for who I am.

Building community is coming home

Sometimes I’m thinking so hard about something that my brain feels a bit too big to fit in my head.  If I’m going to have a headache though, I suppose that is the sort I’d like to have, because at least it nets good results in the long run.  I’ve been thinking about community for a long time.  As a kid I went to a socialist Jewish camp modeled after Israeli Kibutzim, which are intentional communities focused on farming and living with the land, and mutual support among members.  They involve an integrated group living style and camp was much like that.

At camp we got up every morning and all met to check in at the flag pole before breakfast, any important announcements were shared and then we ate together as a group.  Following breakfast we had work groups, each choosing what group we wanted to be in at the beginning of the camp session.  Not surprisingly, I always gravitated to the group responsible for the garden and taking care of the animals.  Through all my childhood, if being near animals or in the dirt was an option, I jumped on it.  Throughout the rest of the day we had meals as a whole community, and some activities were structured that was as well, where others were split up by age group, skill level, or interests.  Song was an ever-present reality of life, one thing I miss the most about being there was living a life where song and dance were a constant part of daily existence.  The landscape as well absolutely haunts my dreams and my soul sometimes cries out for it.  The summer skies were perfection, no matter the clouds or the endless blue, or the deep violets at night with an endless amount of clearly visible stars.  They had a quality to them that was so intense, they felt so close, that it made every other sky I had seen before seem fake.  The camp was nestled by a serpentine, so we hiked through meadows where the mineral composition of the soil caused the grass to grow in beautiful shades of blue and purple intermixed with green and teal.  It felt like another world, and it felt like home.

The sense of community there was so palpable, it was everything you’ve dreamed of when you think of coming home.  It was the last place I remember being entirely comfortable with touch, where I could just curl up in a pile of warm bodies and not cringe or tense up.  There was always a feeling of safety, everyone had the best intentions of others at heart, or it certainly seemed so.  It wasn’t that we were too young for malice and selfishness, but as a community even of young folk, we actively discussed ways we could create a more kind and generous world, fight bigotry, and tear down the walls that divided us.  I’ve never met so many driven passionate people in one place, so many artists with a vision straining to burst out of them, so many healers with a desire to absorb all the ills of the heart and mind and make everyone around them feel whole.  When I ever wonder if with my rational logic driven mind, focused on figures and arguable facts, if I could possibly believe with my whole being in magic, I only have to think back to that place to say yes.

I didn’t know that my last year there would be my last, I always intended to return as a counselor and stay for many years onward, but that didn’t happen.  I did spend every summer there from around when I was ten to when I was fifteen, and I knew after the first one that I would create something that felt that way, when I grew up.  I talked for years incessantly and with passion about my dream for a community, not a summer camp, but a place where as an adult I could live my life constantly in that feeling of comfort and home and magic summer skies.   I have lived most of my adult life in communal living environments, usually with my polycule, partners and metamours.  There has been sometimes a glimpse of community, it is a shadow that flits around our home, but there were barriers in truly creating that in full.  After incessant talk of community for the past almost twenty years though, I have found others with a shared dream and we’ve begun the discussion process towards truly building that.  In discovering the term, intentional community, and then beginning to explore ecovillages, co-housing, communal living, and other IC models, we opened the door to the knowledge we needed to move forward.  I’ve done a lot with my life thus far, I have two college degrees and working on a third, I’ve run a craft business briefly, raised my own meat, had many partnerships and loves, descended into and back out of alcoholism, dealt with and societal and emotional impact of being trans and queer in today’s society, and shoved a fuck ton of adventures under my belt in the process.  Nothing I have done resonates with me as much as this though, I’ve known since childhood that this was my driving passion.  So, as I work on so much other personal growth and have begun several other new life journeys, I also look to move forward with this.  I know with the other amazing people I’ve found who share this dream that it will succeed, and I look forward to coming home.

Magical moments

The sky is a deep gray, almost black, with a hint of deep violet peaking through underneath.  The ambient light from the city is too persistent for the sky to ever hit a pure black note.  I drive across town at night more often these days, and there is this perfect moment that I capture almost every time.  Music has a certain quality when played in the car, it fills up the whole space with no apologies and you can lose yourself in it.  Usually when I feel as though I am losing myself in a sensation, I dissolve, which is what makes these moments so special.  With the sultry violins and deep drum tempos of viking metal, or Alice Cooper wailing out a song of heartbreak, or a bagpipe helping tell a story of a war once lost in Ireland, the music takes hold and gently guides my thoughts, and then I hit this magic point where the city around me crystallizes.  Suddenly everything is starkly clear. The colonial buildings with their discordant Victorian touches, some neglected and left to crumble after standing a hundred years, they are beautiful to me in this moment.  The city is trapped between buildings of rich living history, new cold modern growth, and the constant decay that permeates the low income neighborhoods of every town.  It feels raw, each person in the street with their own story, each brick laid by human hands, and driving through the puddles that muddy up the streets I feel a connection to everything around me.  I belong in the country, but the haunting quality of the city at night captures me in those moments every time.  There is an endless feeling of loneliness and connection in those moments.  Every time I lose myself in the feeling of realness, of a world with such clarity where the sights and smells and emotions overwhelm, I feel alive with a vibrating intensity.  It is a specific moment that I only seem able to capture in the city alone, with the music blaring, as humanity unfolds around me.  Somehow despite my life being filled with so many brilliant people who bring me joy and love, and so many exciting adventures and new growth, I cherish these moments just as highly.  They feel like magic.

There are other magical moments in my life.  Ones where the whole world seems perfectly in place, everything gains that shiny extra-real character, and being alive is the most wonderful thing.  I want to freeze the moment I felt when I found the perfect coffee cup, when I held it and knew it was just right.  I was bent on minimalism at the time, still am in my way, but that perfectly crafted material object that was completely the opposite of every style I normally like, fit into my hand perfectly and just gave me such profound joy.  A fucking coffee cup.  Every time I use it, I get a shadow of that moment replayed, and it enhances my day, subtly lifting it a bit above ordinary.

Once when walking I saw a patch of daylilies growing over someones garden fence.  I stopped and just stared while people walked by, I had forgotten the color orange could be so beautiful and intense.  I suppose depression plays a factor, maybe most people live in a world that is bright all the time, but I know that mine won’t always be and hasn’t always been.  The precious jewel of a moment where a flower becomes the center of the world and can take my breath away, I cherish that.

Lately I’ve recognized there magical moments more and more.  It started with driving home across town at night more often.  My life changed radically when a partnership that had centered around cohabitation suddenly became one of distance.  It was a good change, one that strengthened that relationship, and also pushed me into a focus on my own personal growth, but it was a hard change.  And nightly drives alone became a familiar trend, after I spent the day laughing with him at his father’s home where he now lived, or dropped him off after a day at our home where he still spends near half his time. Those magical moments when driving back happened more, and it clicked in my head that this was not something that had to be an infrequent gift of chance.  I could learn to cultivate these moments, but really immersing myself in my experiences and welcoming the world in.  I could learn to live in moments of beautiful clarity, feeling vibrantly alive wasn’t a passing fancy anymore.

Five things to know before dating a trans man

So you want to date a trans guy

So you want to date a trans guy, who could blame you, most of us are really hecking awesome!  When you get involved with someone in a dynamic that in some way doesn’t fit societal scripts though, you may feel somewhat at a loss.  That is why there is so much communication before folks enter polyamorous dynamics, society doesn’t tell you what the rules are, so you make up your own.  When dating trans folk it might feel equally daunting, you don’t want to make any assumptions and bungle this up, but you don’t know if the usual societal script in a relationship will fit.  So here are a few things to remember if you are looking to start a relationship with a trans man.

Examine your motives

Why do you want to date a trans guy?  If you are interested in a trans man because you are sure your sexuality is one way, but want to experiment with a person who you see as kind of the other binary gender but not quite, you should fuck off with that noise.  People don’t like being used as an experiment.  If you fetishize trans folk in particular, you should also probably fuck off with that.  There are a few rare trans folk who really like chasers, but for the most part, that is a hard nope.  Most people want to get into a relationship with someone who likes them for who they are as an individual person, not because they are an interchangeable fetish object with any other of the million plus trans men in the world. If you met someone that gives you warm chest fuzzies or makes you feel tingles in your pants and it just so happens that they’re also trans, you’ve got the green light to move on to the next step.

Don’t be afraid to discuss how sex will work…but only if you’ve gotten to that point

So when I start talking to someone and one of the first things they ask me is what I like in bed, I’m probably going to tell them to fuck off, or eat their soul and leave their corpse for the ravens, who knows.  Most people don’t like that. If you haven’t both specified that you’re just in it for a hookup, this conversation comes later in the game. But when you do get to the point where sex is on the table, and you both have said you want to do the funky tango under the sheets, you need to discuss what you want out of that.  Now this is good in any dynamic, never assume what your sexual partners are and aren’t okay with, consent is key.  When dating a trans guy though, some important things to cover.  Firstly, what parts are they willing or not willing to use for sex?  Some trans guys have vaginas, some have had bottom surgery, which can mean that they have a penis or in some cases have a penis and a vagina (yup, you can keep your vagina with some types of bottom surgery, that is a thing). Some trans guys don’t have bottom surgery, but get enough clitoral growth from testosterone that they can use their clit/dick for penetration. Some don’t like the touchies of their genitals at all and prefer to use a prosthetic.  Some just like to bottom, but only for anal sex.  There is no assumption you could make about what kind of sex a trans guy wants that is going to be correct with all of us, so ask!  Also, ask what to call various parts.  Some words can be triggering, and you don’t want to be all revved up for sexy time and then refer to his vagina as a pussy, when the only word he’s comfortable with is bonus hole, and suddenly instead of sex you’re dealing with helping him through intense dysphoria when you could have just asked first!

Do not ever out someone without their permission

This shouldn’t need explaining but it so often does.  Being trans can put someones life at risk.  Being trans is for some, a huge part of their identity, but for others just a part of their medical history that they don’t discuss unless absolutely necessary.  Being trans often comes with dysphoria, a never ending feeling of discomfort day in and day out that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin, and sometimes a trans person may want to just exist in the world without constantly wondering who knows and what they think of them if they do.  It’s exhausting wondering who secretly hates you and wants you dead or judges you as a freak, every time you leave the house.  And when you decide that your amazing man is coming home with you for Christmas dinner and then he gets hit with a barrage of questions about his genitals and surgeries from Aunt Muriel when he just wants to be enjoying some fucking ham, that ranges from uncomfortable to excruciatingly painful and rage inducing.  Don’t put your guy through that.  If you are ever wondering if you should mention to your friends or family or coworkers that he’s trans without asking him, the answer is always NO.  If you have a reason to want to tell someone, you can ask him if it is okay, but honestly, if he wanted someone to know he could almost always tell them himself.

Consider gender in regards to your sexual orientation

As a trans guy who usually dates other guys, I’ve been with some gay guys that have questioned if they were actually gay because of being with me.  Yes you fucking are.  Trans men are men plain and simple. You can totally question if you’re gay because maybe you’re finding you aren’t just into men, but dating a man with the limited edition genital package at birth instead of the stock version, is still dating a dude.  I’ve also seen in the lesbian community that a lot of lesbians will date trans men but not trans women.  Not liking penis is okay, I encourage unpacking those kind of feels because often time there is a hidden societal influence to them, but if you find you just prefer a hole to a pole that is perfectly fine.  But if you are dating a man and you are a woman, that is not a lesbian relationship.  You can identify as a lesbian because that might be your overarching orientation and you just happened to find a rare exception, but make sure to also validate your partner’s gender and reassure them that you do in fact see them as a man and recognize that you are in a relationship with a guy. As a whole, sexuality can be a complex fluid thing.  Labels are very useful for explaining it in shorthand, but sexuality can be a lot more complex and is sometimes filled with “I’m only attracted to xyz, except when a…and maybe sometimes when b….and that one weird time with c but I’m not sure I’d do that again, who knows?” So definitely figure out what labels are comfortable for you, but do not invalidate your partner’s gender with that label by insisting they fit in that box if they don’t.  If there is a conflict there, make sure they understand that you see them for who they are and maybe your sexuality is just a little more variable then you expected.

Respect pronouns (duh) and respect triggers

I shouldn’t need to have respect pronouns on here, but just in case it somehow didn’t occur to you, use the pronouns a person is okay with.  If you don’t you’re a shitbird, and hopefully they aren’t going to actually date you anyway.  If you’re a trans person reading this and your partner is not willing to respect your pronouns, you can do better I promise you.  Less often thought of, respect triggers.  When I say triggers, I am not referring to things that get your jimmies in a bunch, a trigger is something that causes a significant effect on the mental state of a person and often inhibits their ability to function.  Think an army vet with ptsd who can’t leave the house for three days after the fourth of July because of fireworks, that is a trigger.  If you downplay the triggers that other marginalized folks face but can understand that one, you need to think about it for a bit, and learn to cultivate some compassion for anyone’s experience of trauma. When you get involved with a trans guy, you are most likely getting involved with someone who has experienced some amount of dysphoria and discrimination.  I’ve had one of the smoothest and easiest experiences of all the trans folk I’ve known, and I’ve gotten death threats, been shoved around in bathrooms, lost friends when I came out, and faced legal discrimination.  When death threats and physical assault are an easy time, you can imagine what some of us have been through.  Also dysphoria, the feeling that your own body is betraying you to the point that existing in your skin is excruciatingly painful and you just want to tear yourself apart and disappear, not a fun time.  Find out what triggers these things in your partner and don’t do them.  If you do them by accident, offer comfort in the way your partner prefers.  DO NOT self flagellate and make it all about how sorry you are.  If you fuck up and refer to them by the wrong pronoun and now they’re in tears, your response should be a quick “I’m sorry” and then focus on helping them. When you spend five minutes apologizing and center yourself after being the one who did the fucking up, that’s shitty. They’re now struggling to function and have to worry about assuaging your guilt on top of it.  So learn triggers, be respectful of them, and when they happen, react in a way that actually helps to comfort and heal the pain you caused and does not center yourself.

In conclusion

So those are my top five things to remember if you find yourself feeling those good old wibbly wobbly feels for a trans man.  Remember, every relationship is unique, and you should always communicate in depth before jumping in because different people need different things.  Hopefully this at least gives you some good ground to start on.  Let me know if y’all have any others you think are important to add to this list, and when you find a shiny wonderful trans guy has stumbled into your life, enjoy your luck and don’t be a shitbird!

 

Redefining boundaries and raising expectations

Sometimes people surprise you.  I’ve been polyamorous for just about my entire life, and a relationship anarchist as well for the last few years.  I don’t think I’ve ever been without a few partners or loves, though I only recently connected with my local polya community.  As such, I’ve been involved with a lot of people who had been monogamous before and tried polyamory for the first time when getting involved with me.  I’ve also been with a lot of people who had few relationships before me at all, but since we are raised in a society that normalizes monogamy, that is how they imagined their first relationships would be structured.  There are a lot of pitfalls when getting involved with someone who has absorbed institutionalized monogamous ideals and has not done the work to unpack those.  I was one of those people once, despite being polya from pretty much my first dynamics, and only experimenting with a couple mono relationships for a short time in my teenage years.  There was a shit ton of work to do and societal brainwashing to unpack, work that took me many years and a lot of heartbreaks to get through.  I hit a point where after I had done a lot of that work, I was understanding of what it took and tried to help a number of partners through that as well. I was new once after all, now I could work with others going through similar things and take on a sort of mentor role.

Several shit shows later, maybe a bit more then several, I was ready to wash my hands of all that.  I found a boundary, I did not want to get involved with people who had not already gotten to at least somewhere near the point I was at.  I would not get involved with monogamous people, or people who had no prior experience with polyamory or relationship anarchy. If someone was monogamous but willing to try polyamory or relationship anarchy, I fully supported that, but I wasn’t the test subject for that experiment because I did not have the energy for another dynamic in which they would find they couldn’t manage it after we’d done a year or more worth of emotional labor trying to make it work.  It probably didn’t help the divide that most of the polya people I knew had also studied non-violent communication and developed good emotional intelligence and self-awareness as a necessary part of making polyamory work for them, and most of the monogamous-want-to-try-polya folks I knew were learning those skills along-side with also exploring a whole new way to relationship.

So I made that boundary for myself, and my next couple dynamics were really very smooth in comparison to the ones before.  Instead of fighting and yelling and pushing away attempts at control, or getting drawn in and engaging in screaming matches I was later ashamed of, there were a couple years of calm conversations when problems arose, and good beginning talks about what agreements we would have that encouraged a respect for autonomy of all of those involved.  It was fucking lovely! In a previous dynamic with a my ex fiancé (a mono oriented person who was willing to “allow” me to be polya but didn’t have interest in being so himself, and never learned to communicate well or unpack a lot of societal mono baggage), when he cheated I found out after months of dishonesty, and couldn’t grok why he had not just told me that he had wanted to see someone else as well.  I mean to be honest, I had not created the best environment for honesty, we had a whole bucket full of other problems in our dynamic, but the cheating was a bad situation that exploded and he never communicated well through that, or through the eventual dissolution of our relationship that followed.  In contrast, I got involved with Witty, a person who had been looking at and trying polyamory for a while before we got involved, and had spent years figuring it out, along with learning effective communication and interpersonal skills to make it work.  He cheated as well, but it was a case of miscommunication, there was no attempt at deception at all following the fact.  We discussed it quite calmly, redefined our relationship agreements to prevent future mishaps, and the word was fairly hunky dory after that.  I could see pretty clearly the benefits of dating people who understood relationshipping in ways that suited what I was looking for, and had put in time an energy to be effective at it, same as I had after years of mistakes.

I was a happy little polya panda a couple years in to my new easy life, assured that this boundary had significantly lowered the drama level in my relationships and that it was the –right choice-.  Then I met Hoffy, who from almost the first conversation, showed me a level of openness and vulnerability I rarely see even from my dearest friends. He was inquisitive, forthright, and asked me a lot about the way I relationship in a frank and non-judgmental way that made it easy to open up.  I decided fairly quickly that every rule has an exception.  I often feel an extreme amount of hesitancy getting in any new relationship, which I’ve talked about here, but I was more certain I wanted to explore things with him than I had been about any life decision in over a decade.  I suppose sometimes you just know, because I am continually amazed at how that dynamic has progressed.  The level of openness and honesty has only deepened over time, and thus far there hasn’t been a single roadblock we couldn’t overcome, relating to polyamory or otherwise.  Since I’ve begun writing here we’ve often discussed our thoughts on the topics I’ve covered, and I again find myself even more amazed that someone raised in the same culture as me with mononormative structures, who hadn’t had any experience of polya relationships beforehand, could be so functionally excellent at making it work.  Thinking about it in more depth, I realize that the things that were lacking in my previous relationships with new-to-polya folks were often not their relationship experience in particular, but the communication skills, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness that often developed after more experience.  I fought tooth and nail against myself, against other partners, against societal ideas I had absorbed, to develop those.  I told myself that it was okay that I was a work in progress and that it took many years of brutal fuck ups to reach where I was now, and it was also okay to expect a certain standard from others because I no longer had the spoons to teach someone who was starting at the beginning when I was miles along the journey.  So what did it mean to find someone who was jogging along right beside me but hadn’t gotten there with a trail of messy broken relationships behind?  It raised my standards.  I suddenly realized that you know what, it actually is possible for someone to be compassionate, understanding, a gentle communicator, devoted to honesty and openness, from the very beginning.  There are people like that, or at least I had found one, and maybe that meant I hadn’t deserved all the shit and abuse heaped on from previous people who didn’t measure up to that.  Conversely that meant that I had no excuses for my previous behavior.  Being inexperienced wasn’t an excuse, and while I am admittedly very frank about how shitty I used to be, I needed to take even more responsibility for that.  I could have gone about everything very differently from the start, and I didn’t, but I knew now that it was possible.

So sometimes people surprise you.  I still have that boundary for myself, although I have tweaked it some. I am only willing to get involved with people who show they can express themselves with honesty and in a non-violent way, who are aware of their wants and needs and aren’t smuggling in secret expectations under them, and who are self-aware and emotionally intelligent in ways that fit with the complex nature of the way I relationship.  People who also question society and its more harmful messages, who are willing to think outside of the box, those are people who I feel may be able to relationship well with my unconventional way of doing things.  I hold myself to higher and higher standards, and I recognize that I deserve to be treated just as well.  I can be compassionate to what I went through and why I was a grade A shitbird, and have that compassion for my previous partners, while still living up to higher ideals today and seeing that mirrored in the people in my life now.  I’m glad I took the chance that I did, sometimes it is good for even the most important stands you take to have the possibility for exceptions, a little fluidity and wiggle room can lead to the greatest growth.