When it comes to conversations about gender identity, sometimes it feels like adding sex into the dialogue is a recipe for disaster.
The narrative gets confusing, fractured, sometimes even hostile. Something that comes naturally to almost all other people can quickly chalk up dividing lines and shifting glances when you factor in people who were assigned an incorrect sex or gender at birth. A lot of trans or gender nonconforming people can be afraid to broach the topic of sex at all, myself included.
It has been used so often in our lives as a weapon against us, either to demonize us or to deny us our identities all together.
These attacks are constant, they’re vigilant, and sometimes they even come from within our own communities, or own selves. Most reliable and repeated of the sexual weapons used against trans or GNC (gender non-conforming) people is a narrative of oversexualization. This can either come from accusing us of being hypsersexual, or from playing up our sexual identities as a way to discredit us.
Trans sex workers tend to be a go-to target these days when attempting to insult a woman’s appearance, blending shaming and cisnormativity under the mask of life choice judgement. When someone makes a joke about “tr*nnies” they’re usually using the term as a shorthand for transgender sex workers. Even representative cinema chooses this as the go-to archetype of a trans female character, from the pity-porn shudder that was Dallas Buyers Club to the much more sincere portrayal in the indie darling Tangerine. It’s a solid weapon for critics to chose—trans and GNC folks and our advocates need to then sidestep a figurative mine field of potential unchecked privilege and sex-shaming to respond to it.
Even when this type of representation seems endearing or innocuous it can still carry an air of judgement to it. The slang term “trap” has developed over the last decade or so to refer to a cross-dresser or trans woman who the viewer might believe is a cis woman until they’re alone in the bedroom. There are whole Tumblr pages dedicated to ‘trap appreciation.’ Yet at the very core of this lies one of the most destructive myths about trans people: that we’re predators who seek to trick people into wanting to have sex with us.
As sincere as these admirers might be, it stops being cute when you realize this exact position has been used time and time again to justify our murders.
The closest I’ve ever come to sex work is a very short-lived attempt to sell some tasteful, fully-clothed but erotic photos of myself online a year or so after I came out. The ten dollars I made from these photos is still somewhat impressive, because I’m probably the most prudish and vanilla out of all my friends, regardless of gender or sexuality. Frankly I’d love to have the energy and drive for all the sexual shenanigans that I’m assumed to be up to, but I’m the type of gal who thought we were literally gonna watch some Netflix and chill and had a panic when you started taking off your pants.
Despite this, I’ve still heard my fair share of attacks accusing me of being oversexualized. As a self-identified lesbian, I hear often, from people who don't even know me, that I’m colonizing or appropriating lesbianism. This charge is so prevalent that it even popped in a small subplot on the Netlfix series Sense 8. The basic thesis there is that we're committed fetishists who are also just awesome at sticking to our story.
I’ve known how I felt about myself since I was a child–my earliest conscious memories of it date back to around three or four years old. This desire to hypersexualize the trans experience actually requires a person to retroactively sexualize me as a child—if you think people don’t do this, read the comments on any post about transgender student bathroom rights and count how many times that grown adults imagine children gawking at genitals all while denouncing perverts.
I remember my excitement that you could play as the Princess in Super Mario Bros. 2, because she was a girl and she could fly—out there right now is someone trying to retcon it so that I was imagining myself fucking another woman as her.
I didn’t even know what a lesbian was at that age. I grew up in suburban Central Ohio, we didn’t find out being gay was a thing you could do until Ellen told us. Until then, it had actually been a huge concern of mine; the conflict of developing crushes on girls my age but also feeling like I was supposed to be one.
Now, don’t get it twisted. I’m not trying to suggest that sex doesn’t have a role in any of this stuff. Yes, many trans and GNC people do actually have sex. I’ve heard rumors that even I’ve done it. And some of us have used sex or sexuality on at least one or more occasions to express our gender identity.
One of the first people I ever let a person see me in women’s clothes was an ex-girlfriend who I shared a hotel room with for a friend’s wedding in Las Vegas in 2006. I had come out to her after we’d briefly dated a few months earlier, and the concept had intrigued her enough that she encouraged me to explore it with her.
That last detail is an important one to me. Often critics of trans or GNC people’s sexuality can disregard the desires of our partners, painting them as long-suffering or at best tolerating or indulging us. But I’ve discussed this night with my ex a few times since then and we both look back upon it fondly. She began dating women shortly after that, and she told me years later that it was that night in Vegas that made her realize it was what she wanted, and that perhaps that had been the subconscious appeal of dating me to begin with.
It took three more years after that night for me to finally come out publicly, but I thought about it a lot in the immediate aftermath. I worried for a while that the sexual nature of play that night did indeed mean that this was all a fetish after all. But now with almost a decade of distance and a perspective from the other side of the closet door, I see now that I had taken an important step out into the light that night. I had manifested in a sexual way something that I had buried and hidden from all other aspects of my life.
Affirmation is sexy. Having someone see you and acknowledge you for who you truly are, for one of the first times ever in your life, is deeply intimate. It was something I needed desperately in my life. Since coming out, the more and more I’ve openly lived as myself, the less and less intense those sexual feelings became; they eventually disappeared. I don’t need them anymore, but I don’t believe that makes them any less valid when I did. No less valid than a cis man wanting to be called “daddy” at least.
Eventually though, I did come out. I came out six and a half years ago, first as a cross-dresser, and when that didn’t ring true to me, I then began to identify as genderfluid, and eventually even identified openly as transgender for well over a year before I made my first appointment to see about getting hormones. It’s not that I didn’t know how I felt about myself—all of the narratives about trans and gender nonconforming identities led me to believe that I wasn’t allowed to transition. That I didn’t fit the exact perfect mold that gatekeepers had established for trans women, and so I hesitated in a battle between brain and heart.
Maybe for this reason, I still have a great amount of sympathy for those who have taken a foothold in other spots on the spectrum. I remember once talking with someone about whether we need to be more or less accepting of self-identified cross-dressers, and she responded that she tried to be compassionate because some trans women will identify that way before eventually transitioning. I suggested that maybe instead we should be compassionate regardless of if they eventually transition. I was told I’d feel differently about that once I’d been on hormones for a few months myself.
I don’t.
With the higher levels of scrutiny being put on trans and GNC identities the past couple of years, there seems to be an instinct to try to sweep the more ‘undesirable’ elements under the rug. For many, there’s no malicious intent involved–some simply don’t see that they have anything in common with those whose gender expression seems more sexual, or even just more casual. But by drawing a line the sand, all we’re doing is playing by the same rules that we have been oppressed by for so long. We’re dividing into “us” and “them” so we can line up to be conquered.
One of the most common responses to prejudice against the queer community is that it isn’t a choice. It’s not a choice to be gay, to be bi, to be trans. I’ve never been a giant fan of that argument, not because I think being queer is a choice; I just think it’s irrelevant. It’s not okay to discriminate against us.
As useful as that ‘not a choice’ response has been politically, it has also had the side-effect of generating a subgenre of critics who have made it their goal to prove that it is a choice in order to justify hate.
When we divide up gender identities in order to establish who is legitimate and who is not, we leave little cracks in the rocks for the poisonous waters of bigotry to come in and begin to erode away our foundations. They begin to find ways to delegitimize our siblings in genders identities, using the weapons we’ve armed them with, and with no real long-term benefits to ourselves. Make no mistake, if we let them win these battles, they will come for us all too.
No amount of debate or infighting between transgender folk, crossdressers, and gender fluid people over definitions and authenticity repels the way transphobia, homophobia, misogny, or racism hypersexualizes and reduces us all to wretches and perverts.
My experiences aren’t universal; they aren’t even the standard. But they happened, I lived them. And that likely means at least a few other people have been through something similar or are going through it right now. Or maybe they’re going through something completely different but equally maligned for other reasons.
I worry that telling them that how they express themselves is wrong could be a devastating criticism of something they’ve spent years trying to feel safe and secure about.
I hope the more light we shine on our identities, the less our young will have to feel like they need to bury it.