Tag: ftm

Refusing to be erased – on being seen as a trans man

“You can’t be a man, you didn’t play with trucks as a kid!”

“Are you sure you aren’t just a butch lesbian instead?”

“Thank you ma’am” “Uh, I’m not a ma’am” “Oh don’t worry, you don’t look manly” “No, I mean I am a man”  “Don’t say that honey, don’t worry, you’re pretty I’m sure.”

This is just a small cross section of reactions I got when coming out as a trans man.  It is not an easy thing to live your whole life feeling like there is something deeply wrong, or to know that the way everyone sees you is a lie.  It is not an easy thing to wake up one day and realize it after years of not acknowledging it, you have the agony of so many years gone by where your expression of self was mysteriously discomforting or feels false.  Once you finally feel that click, if you aren’t someone who was well aware that you were trans from a very young age, it is liberating for a moment.  The acknowledgement of yourself is sweet freedom on silver wings, it fills you up with golden bubbles of giddy hope.  That moment is often heartbreakingly short before the icy cold dread sets in. You start to wonder who you will lose, who will leave your life, who may hurt you, if you will become another murder statistic if you start trying to present yourself as you are in a cruel bigoted society.  I was extremely lucky, I’ve only been assaulted once (for being trans at least), I lost very few friends, and my family struggled but have managed to come to some degree of acceptance.  I had to fight for recognition for a few years before I developed the infamous “passing privilege” though.  Now when I go out, people see my face even with my new long hair, they hear my voice, and to them it all speaks of man.  The years before that were true, were a hell though.  Once you have felt incredibly whole and at home with yourself when you acknowledge your gender, you have something precious that society can tear pieces out of with every misuse of pronouns or deadnames, with every slur, with every unfeeling comment.

I did play with trucks as a kid.  My favorite toy for the first seven years of my life was a big yellow dumptruck and I played with it outside incessantly.  I hated dolls and teddy bears, though realistic plush animals were something I adored since I had always loved animals.  I loved my StreetShark action figures. I hated going to a school where skirts were mandatory, and insisted if I must wear them that they be patterned with lizards or frogs and have hefty pockets built in for collecting rocks.  These things mean nothing to determining my gender, gender isn’t built by your toys or your hobbies or your interests.  But when I came out, my father cited my lack of interest in trucks to explain his surprise.  The fact that he’d apparently blocked out such a large portion of my childhood to get that facts wrong was irrelevant.  The message was the same, he would rather forget the markers that could have clued him in if we’re buying into binary gender rolls, and he needed me to justify the core of myself with childhood toy preferences to be valid in his eyes.

My father was the same person who asked me why I couldn’t be a butch lesbian when I came out as a trans man.  As the man who reacted with homophobia when I first had a girlfriend, it was clear what this meant.  He had come to accept I was something he didn’t understand, something he had prejudices against, but good god at least that something wasn’t transgender, and now that it was, he wished for the good old days where I was just a “mild normal queer”.  I tried to explain to him that I could no more be a butch lesbian than he could, since neither of us was a woman.  In fact, I was farther from such then he was, because at least he was interested only in women, whereas I had realized by that time that I was mostly gay.  I spelled out how in being a man who likes men, I was pretty much the opposite of a lesbian by binary gender and sexuality standards.  His response was to protest, “but if you were a lesbian you could still wear flannel”.  Yes father, because I would like to undergo societal prejudice, risk my life by being myself, inject my muscle with a big ass needle every two weeks, subject myself to extensive surgeries, and have to fight to even be seen by the people closest to me….because I want to wear flannel.  If this was about flannel I would have just bought out a fucking L.L.Bean.

A nice woman at school was selling cookies.  She “ma’amed” me, and I was tired of not standing up for myself, so I tried to correct her.  Instead of hearing me when I said I was a man, she tried to reassure me, thinking I was talking down about myself.  It didn’t occur to her that I might actually just speaking my truth, that my words might mean exactly what I had said.  It was easier for her to interpret some imagined hidden message and apply it to me than it was for her to just see me as I said I was.  I spent a week replaying the moment in my mind, formulating the perfect responses for next time to be more clear.  The only thing that usually works is outing myself.  If someone doesn’t want to see you as a man because they don’t fit their notion of it, no matter of insisting on it seems to help.  You have to explain you are a trans man, another breed of human in their eyes so they can justify why you don’t fit inside the boxes they can’t look beyond. So for the few years it took for me to develop a deeper voice and some facial scruff I was faced with a series of choices.  Either I could try and insist I was a man and not be believed, I could crumple inside with every “ma’am” or “miss” and have the words repeat at night until I wanted to disappear or die; or I could out myself, usually in public in the hearing of multiple strangers.  I didn’t know which of those were accepting, supportive, indifferent, or deeply prejudiced.  I saw trans friends dying every year of violence, killed by partners, acquaintances, family, and strangers.  I couldn’t know which passerby might hear me and be so offended by my very existence that I would be the next funeral in an endless procession of trans deaths.

These days my existence is happier, I am safer existing as I am.  I don’t have to make choices between my mental health or physical safety multiple times a day, I don’t have to justify my childhood toys or clothing choices to prove myself.  That spark of joy that shone so bright when I finally acknowledged this aspect of me has been fanned into a bright flame.  There are still shadows though.  My safety is contingent still on not being seen.  I am acknowledged now as a man, that is far more affirming then before.  My identity is respected and seen.  But my experience is not, because I am not just a man, I am a trans man.  I have a lived experience in fighting for manhood that a cis man will never have.  And my safety and comfort on a daily basis is contingent on my lived experience being a carefully guarded secret.  None of this can change until society does, and I fear for my new baby trans friends who are just beginning to come out.  My heart aches for what they might face, especially knowing the road I barely survived was one of the easiest paths to this end.  All I can hope for is those moments of joy and acknowledgment, that exhilarating feeling of freedom and truth on it’s vast silver wings, will be enough to carry them through.  Or society can change, one leap at a time we can stop with the assumptions and the stereotypes and the enforced gender rolls and the bigotry, until this life path is just as much a challenging but engaging climb as any other, and not a harrowing trip through the valley of death.  I still out myself when it might help, when it might change someones thoughts, when there is a chance it might pave the way for the trans folk of the future.  That choice is worthwhile for me, there is still something worth risking my life for, and it is a better world.

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.

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.

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!