Sex
There's this part in one of the Star Trek movies where the android Data is restrained and sort of dommed by the Borg Queen who’s the cyborg matriarch of the hive-minded Borg species. She’s designed consciously to look like a dominatrix. She’s hacked into Data’s emotion chip and grafted a patch of real, organic skin onto his synthetic endoskeleton, allowing him, for the first time, to experience touch. As the Queen blows on this new patch of skin, Data gasps, convulsing in ecstacy, his eyes rolling back into his head, truly emoting for the first time in the entire series. After Datas performed orgasmic reaction, he is no longer able to maintain his robotic, detached affect.
For most of the show Data is pursuing different avenues for achieving greater personhood, internally and in his self presentation to the crew. Practicing how to smile, installing a cybernetic modification allowing him to experience emotion, learning how to tell jokes, and pursuing legal recognition of his status as a sentient being and the associated rights and protections therein. Data’s internal desires and identity are at odds with his ostensible bodily reality. Data’s struggle, though not based in gender, is essentially a trans one. Like all trans people he wishes for his ontological, apparent reality to align with his interior metaphysical desires.
Data is alienated from personhood, requiring prosthetic intervention to have a sensual response. Yet in this moment of synthetic orgasm, he is the closest he has ever been to a human. More than anything else, the most intense and fulfilling moment of self actualization for Data is a sexual one. His ‘first contact’ is when he became human.
Stark Trek: First Contact, Jonathan Frakes, Paramount Pictures
A lot of trans people describe their sense of personhood as having only emerged after undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Oliver said he wasn’t a real person till he started taking T. This is a common narrative framing trans journeys of self discovery, the idea that the moment of prosthetic/chemical intervention is one of rebirth, a hormonal christening, the point at which one becomes fully human (a real boy!).
This is a big part of the process of self actualization but it isn’t the only one.
I think sometimes it is not coming out, hormonal intervention, or even a change in presentation or affect which is the climatic moment of trans actualization, but rather, like Data, our physiological catharsis is not when we are augmented, but when we cum.
We are the most sexed when we are fucking, intercourse is an inherently sexed act, where awareness of ones somatic reality is impossible to avoid. The necessary sexing of sex is something felt by everyone, cis and trans; Cis men feel the most like men when they’re fucking, women feel the most like women when getting fucked etc etc. And trans people feel the most unlike themselves in every position. It is when we feel the most trans, the most alienated from our bodies, the most at odds with our apparent reality. As such, the possibility for a trans person to feel like they can truly embody themselves in this moment is the ultimate metaphysical victory over ontological reality. If you can be you while having sex, you can be you anywhere.
But it’s complicated. Again, Like Data, trans people require a degree of external prosthetic intervention in order to achieve the embodiment of selfhood in sex. A conspicuously kept on piece of gendered clothing, a strapon, lipstick, etc. Trans sex requires a kind of mutual fantasy, a shared voluntary delusion. To see one as truly themselves, a certain disregard for apparent reality must be adopted. Just as people must adapt to new pronouns, re-wriring our processes of perception, sexual intuition takes a backseat to complex coordination of movement and adoption of a new physical affect; Ignoring parts of anatomy, emphasizing others, exaggerating the caress of a leg or the chest, etc. When Oliver and I first had sex he ran his hands over my chest and told me that he “loved my tits” which didn't yet exist.
These acts of pantomime and adopted sexual affect are not simply a foundational compromise to facilitate the sex act, but rather arguably themselves the point of queer sex.
My point here is that trans sex (and thus by extension, trans identity, and transness itself) is necessarily tied to prosthesis and secondary conscious intervention. To further complicate things, in cases of trans partners undergoing hormonal therapies, the accompanying physiological side effects necessitate the use of already codified products of pharmacopornographic physiological intervention (viagra, lubrication, etc.). The necessary tools of affection and self realization have themselves been transformed into pharmacopornographic products.
At every level, transness operates on a principle of augmentation. To be transexual is to be technosexual.
Judith Butler's notion that gender only exists in it’s moment of performance as a “constituted social temporality” produced by adherence to a system of gestures and affects(1) is a kind of basis for the process of trans-sexual self realization which I have described, but the roles are reversed; It is through the performative acts of the partner that allow for the embodiment of the self. Performing gender, disciplinary control through rigid structures of behavior, and the Lacanian Symbolic Order, all mechanisms of enforcing apparent sex, are themselves the foundation for mutual trans sexual liberation; applying these mechanisms to the inverse of their intended targets. Hacked systems of control become instead stagehands for the theater of the mind.
To return for a moment to Mr. Data, an essential component of his actualization, is the fact that it is non-consensual. It required the control of a cyborgian biopunk technodomme to restrain him and give him what he really wanted, against his will. Data had to be dommed into his humanity.
Every aspect of transness, and sex in general, is dependent on a degree of non consensuality. Even when embodying our metaphysical gender, it remains not a gender we chose, we choose our sexual partners in so far as we pursue those we desire, but this desire is never elective. Andrea Long Chu describes this phenomenon as the non consensuality of desire; She writes: “Too often, we imagine powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force (maybe someone else’s desire), and we forget that desire, in itself, is often, if not always, an experience of powerlessness. Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired.” (2)
Essentially what Chu is saying is that a voluntary submission to involuntary impulses and enforced conditions is itself the foundation of sexuality, trans or not.
This is the essential paradox of transness; simultaneously it is a rejection of our ontological subjugation, societal expectation, and heteronormative dominance, but also dependent on a submission to these same mechanisms of control, indulgence in bioeconomics, subscription to pharmacoporngraphic products, and the already codified systems of sexual dominance and submission. But it is in these paradoxes where the beauty of transness lies. Transness is cyborgian to the max, a contrived mixture of the organic and the technological. In a sense these complexities are not in fact paradoxes at all, but rather socio-biopunk hacks of the established order (albeit with the aid of consumer ‘hardware’).
To again quote Butler, “To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.”(1)
November
It’s my first time at Oliver’s house since I first had sex with him 3 years ago before he came out as trans. He called me as his girlfriend was leaving for the train station and asked if I wanted to come over tonight. I said yes and rushed home to get ready.
Oliver lives in an old victorian in the part of East Providence where it’s all families. I got there at sundown and there were kids from the apartment below his playing in his front yard. On our first date he told me that he worked in early childhood education and was perpetually afraid that people would think he was a pedophile because he’s trans and works with kids.
I had heard from some of my friend Anja that Oliver and his girlfriend were stalking her on Lex (lesbian dating app) and that his girlfriend, a 36 year old trans woman was always getting banned because she would make insane posts about collecting tgirl cum.
Oliver made us dinner, but I had eaten already. He offered me whisky instead. We talked for a bit, I laughed more than he did. After dinner we kissed and went into his bedroom. Him and his girlfriend don’t share a bed. His room has a bookshelf with tao lin and kafka, faerie lights, dildos, a fainting couch from fort thunder. Her room has red painted walls, endless supplement and CVS bottles, a cock pump and an inclined bed. Oliver’s girlfriend has chronic pain and he’s researching acupuncturists in San Francisco. He told me to never listen to doctors, espcially about estrogen and that I should get in contact with his drug dealer who also illegally grows and sells their own tobacco.
Once in bed we kissed and held each other and my heart fluttered and pulsed the way it had when we first met. We talked about people we knew from Providence and he mentioned Jack. I said rest in peace and he gasped. He didn’t know that Jack killed himself. I felt strange and uncomfortable being the person to tell him because I only met Jack a handful of times, but as it turned out Oliver diddn’t know him either; Jack was just his weed guy. We lay for a while and he pressed himself into me. He held my head to his tightly as he slid his tongue back and forth into my mouth, making me take it. I felt like I was made of air.
Eventually he paused and told me he didn't really feel like having sex but we could just sit and cuddle naked. I was honestly relieved, sex is really hard and I had been anxious anyway.
We decided to watch a movie and he torrented Heaven Knows What. We watched it in his girlfriend's chronic pain bed.
Halfway through he told me he wanted to go to bed. I thought this was an invitation but it was followed by “you can sleep in my room”. I pretended not to mind. I feel like I had arrived at Shangri La only to trip on the stairs and bust my head open. I don’t really want to spend the night now but there's a blizzard outside. It’s cold in here too.
Oliver’s Bookshelf
Feburary
I haven’t heard from Oliver in so long. I called him last week and he told me that he and his girlfriend were moving the next day, but that he still needed help packing and he would like to see me again. I immedately said yes although I felt strange knowing I would be in the same room as his girlfriend, the one with the broken back.
April
I have dysphoria again. The full body shuddering tingle I get from it feels strangely close to the overwhelming sensation of joy and love I get when Oliver touches me. A few years ago I felt it really bad and wept and the sound of my own cries, deep and mannish made me weep more and the more I heard it the worse it got. I also used to obsess over my inner monologue, which spoke in a male voice. I started trying to voice train inside my own head. Right now I’m staring at my gollum-boy-man-wrists and crying. This sucks so fucking much why can’t I just be a girl, or at least be chill.
I’m thinking about voice training, laser and surgery for the first time since high school.
March
I’ve been thinking about Lana a lot over the past couple of days. I texted her asking if she wanted to get coffee and catch up before we graduate She didn't respond. I’ve been walking around brown again hoping to catch a glimpse of her. I’m thinking a lot about how I was so, so lost before E. I didn't even know how gone I was, it's like I was retarded and I suddenly became baseline. You don’t realise how fucked you are and you cant understand or appreciate the world when you’re under a cloak of dysphoria, unable to inhabit your own subjectivity. It kind of feels like the way I would try to let mental fictions in is suddenly a lot easier, that those fictions were not falsehoods but just different versions of reality, equally as real as being a hateful atheist-brained reactionary anti-SJW repressor.
I wish that Lana hadn’t seen me that way, that she would have met me as I am now rather than then. But then again I wouldn’t be the way I am now without having met her. Maybe that's why I’m so hung up, I want to see her to tell her this, to show her that that wasn’t me, that I’m better now. I hate who I was so much, who I was a week ago, even
I’m trying to talk to others about my feelings. My tranny feelings. The ones I felt like could never come out of my mouth because they were SJW enby nonsense words, because I thought about things that way, because I was repressing. This is the most important thing in my life. Being able to admit it and realize it feels unbelievably freeing. But it’s also making me think about being trans way more than I used to, which is mostly good. It feels very spiritual, but the painful feelings manifest themselves much more often as well. But it’s good, it’s like those dysphoric shakes are the puke when you’re hungover; expelling all the poison that’s stopping you from being able to sit up.
I want to move to Brooklyn because I want a life where I’m around other trans people all the time.The only trans person in my life atm is Oliver. He came over last night. I was making dinner and he called me and said he was right by my apartment. I remembered how he named me, how much I wasn’t myself when I met him. I used to fuck him from behind and lay on top of him. Last night he held me while I curled into a little ball in the crook of his body. I love having sex with Oliver. He knows how to touch me in ways I didn't know were possible, he likes to slide his hand between my legs and run his fingers over my asshole and press into my taint while caressing my dick. Sometimes it feels so foreign and so amazing that I recoil, it’s like I feel ticklish because no one has touched me like that before. He makes me feel like a woman when it should be impossible. I cried realizing for the first time that I’m leaving him in Rhode Island. I’m going to miss him so much.