Cauldron Farm 12 Simonds Hill Road Hubbardston, MA 01452

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TransPersonal #8

(Part I of this series of three columns dealt with the sexuality of drag queens and kings, and Part II with male-to-female fetishistic cross-dressers. This next part will tackle the most controversial aspect of all, just to cap things off.)

Recently, a questionnaire for transsexuals was passed around on various transgender- oriented email lists. It had clearly been written by someone on the male-to-female spectrum who didn't know much about folks on the female-to-male spectrum, and a few of the questions were a bit problematic for the guys on the FTM list I was on. There were several complaints about that, but one particular complaint spurred a heated debate that split the list. The author of the questionnaire asked several questions about whether the transsexuals in question had started out as fetishistic transvestites - people who have eroticized dressing up as the opposite gender, and do it during partnered sex or masturbation. One FTM loudly announced that this was particularly inappropriate, as "FTMs don't do that sort of thing".

He was countered, equally loudly, by a few bold FTMs who declared that they did, indeed, do that sort of thing, and that they had started out as FTVs - female fetishistic transvestites. It was also pointed out that by declaring that no one in a certain group does a certain thing, the experiences of those who are actually doing it are devalued and silenced. Others joined in the debate, some recounting their FTV-like experiences, some recounting similar experiences but arguing desperately that they "weren't really transvestism" because that was something that "everyone knows only male-bodied people do". Still others angrily countered that if cross-dressing got you hard or wet, you weren't a "real transsexual" and shouldn't have been allowed to transition. As this was directed at some transmen who had been living comfortably as male for over a decade, it was not well received.

The background for this argument is fifty years of assumptions by sexual researchers that women don't have the kind of nasty, humiliating, ridiculous-looking sexual fetishes that men do. Women are above that sort of thing; their sexuality is healthy and normal-looking - or on the other end of the speculative spectrum, prudish and uptight. Getting a charge from tottering around in high heels or lacy panties is something that comes from too much testosterone, and if a woman puts on high heels or picks up a riding crop or straps on a dildo, she's doing it to please her partner. This myth has been swallowed whole not only by men but by many lesbians as well; thus the famed debate over the existence of leatherdykes. And if women don't have paraphilias, then they certainly don't cross-dress, or at least not for sexual purposes. If a woman puts on a suit and tie, she's doing it to break gender stereotypes, to take on butch masculine power, to perform drag....not to get herself hot and wet. And what goes for women, this argument continues, goes for people who started out women as well.

Except that it's not true. One example of this is the recent (as in the last decade) upwelling of daddy-boy play in the dyke community. In fact, it seems to be the most common and beloved way of sexually structuring a butch-on-butch relationship. This dynamic started among BDSM leatherdykes who were plundering leatherfag erotic structures in order to find something that wasn't riddled with the opposition scenario of heterosexuality. Over the past several years, however, it's spread to lesbian venues less concerned with power dynamics and more interested in hot queer sex. Some couples may even switch the roles back and forth, especially if they're only sexual and not part of their daily interactions.

Some of the daddy-boy play that I've seen was performed with such depth of gender- crossing that I didn't feel that the labels of "cross-dressing" or "transvestism" could be denied. However, when I talked to the girl-boys in question, they bridled at the words, although I wasn't able to get a good reason why those words weren't applicable except that "we're women!" I'm sorry, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....or, in other words, when Daddy wears a fake moustache, has bound breasts and refers to his boy's tits as "pecs"....or when the boy shaves male pattern baldness "points" into his hairline and gets wet over wearing a baseball cap......or when the hottest part of the scene for both is when the boy is on his knees sucking his daddy's huge realistic strap-on cock while rapidly jerking his own......I'm sorry, guys, but it's fetishistic cross-dressing.

Not all the people I spoke to denied this; in fact some outspokenly admitted their kink. Tannin, a bisexual woman who cross-dresses regularly as her male persona, says: "I identify as a transvestite, with all the ambiguities and sexual connotations and all that, but the thing I share with my transsexual brothers and sisters is the underriding demon of 'who will want me?' FTM TVs are invisible, beyond invisible, mythical creatures! I have to explain that TV stands for transvestite, not television. We aren't acknowledged."

Rob, an FTM transsexual who "very definitely started out as a fetishistic transvestite", ruefully sums up the problem: "Most people who want women in bed, don't like men in bed. That goes especially for men, since statistically fewer men are Kinsey threes in the middle. I've also found that most bi men want either men or women, not someone who's in between. The few exceptions are the ones who want she-males or chicks with dicks, which I'm not, or they want a femmy or lightly butch 'lesbian' with a strap-on, but they don't want to actively pretend that she's a guy. And that's what I needed, that's what I wanted.....and I had a terrible time finding it."

Some FTVs have specific personas that they become when the male clothing goes on; others simply see it as a way of being themselves. Michelle says that: "It's me with a body change. My feminine body has never been an issue for me, although in my head I feel masculine. There are certain aspects about my body that makes me feel masculine, like my hairy arms, and so I feel masculine until I see myself in the mirror, then I realize I'm a woman like any other woman." On the other hand, Tannin "has two personas that are definitely male. One is submissive, a sad and lonely boychild who very much wants to please and serve. One is dominant, a ringmaster or showman top to whom the lover is a darling pet to show off to others. It's difficult to find people who will play by the rules of this playground, where I could be a different gender any given night."

Sam, a bisexual FTV, says that "both my personas are guys. The male-looking one is my ordinary sexual persona. That's who I am when I'm not trying. I may not be wearing any guy clothes, even, but when I start to move and talk in a certain way, that's me being a sexual male. My femme persona is a drag queen. I sometimes go out in full high femme packing a cock in my panties. At one time I actually strapped down my real breasts and put fake ones in my bra, at a party where I was in a ballgown. I wanted to really get into that headspace. Even though I'm basically a guy all the time, I'd never get rid of the female body. It's the most realistic girl drag I could get."

Shannon, a "genderfuck boi in love with my own cock," notes the difference between her male and female sides. "As a guy, I walk down the street with my head up. I'm not afraid of guys looking at me in ways that make my skin crawl, and they don't. Something about my male energy short-circuits that, even when I'm not passing well. I tend to interrupt women more, and to be more touchy-grabby with my girlfriends. When I'm being female, I'm very respectful of their space, but my male self is impatient and doesn't like to be thwarted. I'm always the active initiator in bed, but as a woman I'm more nurturing, more comforting. As a guy I just want to hump something. Yeah, I kind of feel weird that all my selfish urges got stuck into that part of me. Maybe it's brainwashing, maybe it's some kind of strange hormonal programming, but that's the way it is. That's what turns me on. I get hard and wet from allowing myself to be that awful selfish guy that every woman hates....when I can find one who'll let me."

Tannin notes that her male self "loves the chase. My female side is not very romantic in the traditional sense. She wants to be appealed to, but she's lazy and just wants things to wander into her web like a spider. My male side is the player, who writes the poetry and buys the flowers and wants to spend all of the money. He's extravagant - 'Step away from the credit card, boy! That's not your name on it!' He loves to dress up for dinner, even if it's long-hair rocker drag, and take a date for dinner. Right now I have a partner who bends gender in the opposite direction, and it's fun to take her out and listen to her talk - my masculine side doesn't talk as much - and watch her be pretty for me, and return the favor of her company with the dinner and flowers and walking down the street hand in hand."

Sexually, they have very different styles: "My male side is very inexperienced at sex, largely because he doesn't get it much. He's had the 'fuck with the older man' experience with an FTM friend, and that was fun and affirming. His biggest vulnerability is the bedroom, because of lack of experience; it's an alien landscape. It only takes one reminder in the bedroom that the whole thing is smoke and mirrors, and it's gone - not only the hard-on, but the entire manifestation gets blown away. My female self is more of a complete person than my male self is. This isn't because of multiple personality disorder or something, it's just that because my male self is so much younger experientially, both physical and emotional sensations are more intense and hit much harder. He's still at the stage of falling in love with everyone I fuck."

If there's a single item that's most fetishized in the world of FTV's, it is, of course, the strap-on cock. "When I put it on, it's my cock," says Rob. "I masturbate with it - I'm lucky in that I can come from the friction - and I have sex with it. I've trained myself to transpose the sensation in my head - the rhythmic pressure of the harness against my clit becoming the friction of my cock against my hand or someone's enclosing flesh - and when it's on me, I can forget about the rest of my body." Michelle concurs: "Since my strap-on is double-headed, I can usually make myself cum by jerking it off, as if I were a man, and as if it were my own. I love for a man to wear lingerie; it makes it feel more fulfilling to my role. He is the woman, I'm the man. Also, 'taking' a man, or simply just caressing him in a more dominant position, makes me feel more masculine. And nothing makes me feel more like a man than to have him suck on my strap-on."

Tannin poignantly sums up the ambivalent dilemma: "The rubber cock - it's the vessel that your demon lives in. It's its prison, it's its definition, it's its body. I don't use one very often because it's linked up to such intimate things. It's also not something everybody wants, either."

Most female-bodied transvestites, unlike their male-bodied counterparts, did not start cross-dressing and masturbating as young children. They tended to come to it as adult women, or at least in their late teens, when their sexuality developed enough to gain depth and imagination. Whereas male transvestites seem to find their way to such things at an age where they admit they don't actually know much at all about sex, FTVs seem to see it almost as a side-effect of emotional and psychological maturity. "I couldn't find my boy side until I unbrainwashed myself," says Shannon. "I had to get past all those things that I'd been told I ought to want, and then I could do what I really wanted. That took until I was 25."

The exceptions, and there were a few, mostly seemed to be in the camp of female-to-male transsexuals who had been FTVs before transition. Joshua speaks of his first male sexual experience in this way: "When I was about eleven, I had a dream that I had a cock and I was jerking it off. I woke up in the middle of it, still, feeling my cock in my hand. I had masturbated to sexual fantasies many times by that age, but I rarely had such vivid dreams, and the exact sensations of velvet-smooth skin sliding over the shaft played over and over in my mind. I had no brothers, and I'd never seen a cock before then, outside of a few anatomy diagrams. A year later, when I first got the chance to play with a boy's cock, I was shocked and fascinated at how accurate those sensations were."

I personally started roleplaying with strap-ons at the age of 26, after the girlfriend who would later become my wife built me a strap-on and begged me to use it on her. Up until that time, I'd been pushing away all my gender issues. The presence of that rubber cock, the ambivalent psychological feelings that it raised in me, and the absolutely mind-altering arousal that came with it, forced me to deal with my own baggage. It was a slippery slope, taking me from dildoes to mascaraing my facial hair to taking testosterone to getting chest surgery. At no time did I identify entirely as male, and to this day I know that I'm somewhere in the middle. I simply feel more comfortable with a mostly-male body. Some FTM transsexuals that I know are uncomfortable with the idea that people who don't solidly identify as male should get to transition; after all, it's their defining reason. They are usually also the ones who are the most uncomfortable with my history as someone who got wet from dressing like a guy and fucking someone with a rubber cock.

Did I worry that I might not be a "real" transsexual? Of course. I knew that it was a risk, that there was a chance I wouldn't like being a man full-time.....although I couldn't imagine it. However, I figured that Life Is Risk, and I did it, and I have no regrets. I feel that the fetish was definitely my subconscious's way of getting my attention and breaking through the denial. Without it, I would never have gotten those important needs met.

Other FTMs who started out the same way agreed. Joshua admits that: "For a while I thought that I was clearly not 'really' a transsexual, because my identification as male was primarily sexual and fetishistic. Much of it was focused on having a dick, and the surgical options didn't appeal to me at all. Part of this was that I was almost exclusively attracted to very masculine guys, rough, muscular and hairy. I was thin and not the slightest bit athletic, and I could manage no sexual enthusiasm for being that sort of guy, especially if I didn't even have a cock."

Rob says, "Yeah, sure, I worried that I was just some chick trying to make my sexual fantasy come true. I'd also talked to a few MTF-TVs in the same boat who'd started hormones, and as soon as their libido dropped, they realized that they didn't really want to do this full-time, it just looked really appealing with a hard-on. But testosterone does the opposite; it jacks up your libido, and I just found more things to get hard over. I went from being a woman with a fetish to a guy with twenty fetishes, and being who I am now makes a lot more sense."

Some FTVs identify as lesbians, either of the butch-femme variety or of the daddy-boy variety, but either way, they prefer female-bodied lovers. "Being butch is about being masculine in a female body," says butch-dyke-identified Ali, one of the few butches who admits to being an FTV. "That includes my sexuality. I'm not stone - I can use my genitals - but it's hotter, much hotter, when I'm fucking like a man. Part of that is because it's forbidden to women, of course, but a bigger part is because it fits with who the rest of me is, and it just kind of clicks. If I'm a masculine female over breakfast, then I'm a masculine female in bed, too, and what does that look like? It means having a male sexuality that is sensitive to what women really want, that is geared to please women, more than a masculine male ever could. Male force and initiative, and female desire to please - that's what being butch is all about. You think that's pathetic? Ask all the satisfied customers who've left my bed."

Rob complains that: "Some women who like butches think that they want a masculine woman, but what they're really thinking is, this is a man substitute that I can control. If nothing else, he'll be so grateful that I'm willing to let him fuck me that he'll do anything I say. And then when he acts like a real guy in bed - or out of it - they complain that he's just like their last ten boyfriends....and they don't mean it in a complimentary way. The subtext is, If I wanted to interact with an actual male libido, I'd have gone out and got one with a real cock attached to it."

Other FTVs are bisexual, like Tannin, whose attraction to gender-crossing goes beyond her own appearance: "I do fetishize cross-dressing, I like to see a masculine ass in panties or a woman's figure in a masculine trenchcoat. I prefer genderfuck, the obvious clashing of strong masculine and feminine cues at once, to a genderless androgyne." Still others prefer men, and identify, as Michelle does, as "a gay man - because I'm not attracted to women - trapped in a female body, but it's not really trapped, as I don't mind my body."

Jessie, a heterosexual woman who was repeatedly sexually molested as a child, says that: "I can't have sex as a girl. If I allow myself to be female during sex, I have flashbacks and it gets ugly. Having sex as a boy is safer, and allows me to be more freely sexual. If I couldn't have sex as a boy, I wouldn't be able to have a sex life. Fortunately, I'm partners with an FTM transsexual who's a wonderful guy and who is just fine with me being his girl in public and his boy in the bedroom."

Others are not so lucky with finding male partners. Michelle mourns that her "husband is not into any of it, and although he knows I have my masculine side, he doesn't know how much I wish to be the man in bed. I've brought some issues up in a sort of a playful tone to see what he would say, and his reaction is usually negative." She has an extramarital partner that she meets for sexually indulging her male side, but even that is somewhat ambivalent: "He loves to wear women's lingerie, and loves to be caressed as a man would touch a woman. He also loves to feel like a lesbian, and I do make him feel that way, except that in my head I'm not being a lesbian, I'm being a man. But I can't say that, as he still needs to get the satisfaction of feeling like a lesbian."

Joshua's descriptions of his interactions with his first boyfriend are an example of somewhat more positive acceptance: "We would wrestle each other on his bed in his dorm room, wearing nothing but our blue jeans, pinning each other down and fondling each other. At the time I didn't consciously see it as feeling like gay sex, but looking back on it now, it was undeniably homoerotic. Over the years, our gender roles became more explicitly distorted. We would have sex with me on top, and our bodies positioned in a way that made it feel like I was penetrating him. We didn't discuss it at that point, but we were both clear on what was going on.....We did discuss it eventually, and he was very good with it. He and I would play with me being a guy, and he'd rough me up and mock me for not having a dick, and then fuck me. A few times I persuaded him to take a box cutter and scratch "FAGGOT" or "BOY SLUT" into my chest, just deep enough to leave a scab."

Unfortunately, as many transsexuals find (refer to the last column), transitioning to living every day in the role you've fantasized about often de-eroticizes the fantasy. When you're a guy taking out the garbage, when there's nothing special about it, sometimes there ceases to be anything sexy about it, either. Joshua found this to be true as well: "Once I decided to transition, my boyfriend was even more into the fetishistic elements, always wanting to kiss and touch me in public. He was a big guy and liked to fight, and I think he was excited by the idea that someone might have a problem with it and start something. He would ask to hang out with me in the gay part of town, and complain if I wasn't packing a cock. Although it was reassuring to know I wouldn't lose him over this, it was also difficult for me....because as I transitioned, the sexual aspect of it changed. I didn't get a thrill out of male roleplay any more, because I was functioning day-to-day in a male role."

One correspondent wrote about "an internet discussion group called 'GirlFags', for women who sexually identify in some way with gay men. They are really clear that they aren't 'fag hags', which they define as women who prefer the company of gay men because there is no sexual pressure, and they are not trying to sleep with gay men in order to turn them straight. Some of them write romantic gay erotica or 'slash' fiction, some prefer commercially available hardcore gay porn. Some of them have straight or bisexual boyfriends with whom they roleplay gay sex, often using strap-ons. Some sneak into gay movie theaters or bathhouses in order to watch gay sex, or they fantasize about doing that. Most of them share the fantasy of wanting to have sex with a gay man who isn't generally attracted to women, but will make an exception for them....It is hard to define the gender of these women. Certainly some of them are FTMs who are testing the water. Some of them say they feel like they really are gay men, or they wish they were, but they are too comfortable with their bodies and the female social role to transition. Some are clearly just women with a fetish."

Women with a fetish. Personally, I think that the image of women as being the keepers of moral purity (which generally always means that they are not allowed to be sexual, or at least not sexual to the degree and in the ways that men are) has got to go. First of all, it's not accurate, given the growing number of female-bodied people who are coming out of the closet about how wet they get over playing with male personas in bed. To deny that this is part of the female sexual demographic, even if it's a minority part, is to devalue and invalidate their experience. It's not worth doing just so that certain other women can feel morally superior to the men that they currently happen to be berating for being disgusting perverts.

Second, I personally think that gender-crossing behavior is good for you. It won't turn you into a member of the opposite sex if you aren't one; it doesn't work that way. But it might give you some insight as to how the opposite sex lives and works and feels. Not everyone can pass in public without the help of serious movie-quality makeup and prosthetics, but anyone with a sympathetic and imaginative partner can play with gender roles in bed, and get an orgasm as a reward for your psychological adventurousness. Sometimes, if you have hidden issues or anger about certain behaviors associated in your mind with another sex (perhaps because you've experienced members of that sex evidencing those behaviors in ways that affected you) it can be very healing to put on the clothing of your monster and be him for a while. Maybe he won't look nearly so scary from the inside, and will have less power over your psyche. Sometimes the greatest heat in fetishistic cross-dressing isn't only about being the forbidden opposite sex, it's about being a specific sort of guy...one who is everything you were taught you shouldn't be.

To walk through that door is an act of faith in your own ability to stretch your mind. As far as I'm concerned, one's sexual urges are sometimes not only your unconscious telling you that something needs attention, they can also be a nudge from the universe that you still have some lessons to learn in your particular path. From the lowest chakra comes the highest message. That's the secret of sex magic. Just ask the guy hiding inside you. He knows all about it.

Raven Kaldera
cauldronfarm@hotmail.com

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