Getting creative with sex

Content warning: Description of sex and genitalia

This is a first for me. I don’t usually write so publicly about the actual details of how I have sex. But I had a moment I am really proud of this weekend that I thought other people mind find helpful.

So here goes.

Are you ready?

Lately I have been having difficulty having sex that involves my penis. Partly it is dysphoria but mostly with the estrogen and the low libido it is causing I am just having a difficult time getting and staying hard. I’ve used generic viagra for awhile now for ED because I had so many issues around sex anxiety that I was working through because of how my ex messed me up. But before I started E I was using less and less. Now I need to take any time I want to use that part of my body.

But this weekend I had a date with my spouse and I was feeling more sexy than usually and decided to take the viagra. Predictably as we were getting ready to have PIV intercourse my dysphoria kicked in which usually would have put a quick end to it. As I touched myself to put lube on, it literally felt like my penis wasn’t my own and wasn’t part of my body. But this time I found a way to work with that feeling.

Without even thinking too hard about it my brain decided to make that a part of the sex. I conceptualized my penis as the best strap-on dildo ever. It was both attached to me and not part of me at the same time in a really hot way instead of a disturbing one. I could feel what was happening but it felt like I was feeling that through something else instead of directly. The part that I’m most proud of is that I was able to make that switch so smoothly that it didn’t interrupt the flow and we had great sex and I told my partner about how I had done it afterwards.

I’m not sure if I can always do that but hopefully the memory and success of that moment is transferable. How do you find ways to use your body through dysphoria?

Realization of the day

I think I’m a transwoman in a nonbinary body.

I’ve talked about this before but when I think about the steps required to bring my body into alignment with my internal gender I get extremely overwhelmed, not only by the amount of work but the realization that I wouldn’t be doing it as much for myself as I would to change how people see me. I have no problem with my beard or 80%+ of my body. I don’t want to spend years trying to learn how to change my voice so that I can pass. And I don’t want to give up a perfectly functional penis to gain a vagina that I don’t even know if I would like as much.

What I do want are breasts (working on it), less body hair (need to get back on that), and a more feminine distribution of fat (hopefully that will start soon). I also want access to motherhood which seems like the far more challenging thing to achieve since I can’t/won’t do that alone. I want to be treated like the woman I am without needing to jump through the unattainable hoops of passing.

But the more I think about it, the less I think my internal gender is actually nonbinary. As in I don’t know of any masculine traits that I identify with. I have the gender of a lesbian woman and the gender blurriness that comes packaged with perceptions queer femmeness. I am just as much a woman internally as any lesbian and probably more feminine than most. I just happened to not be born with a cis woman’s body and I can never attain that no matter how hard I try.

In other news, I am toying with the idea of trying out she/her pronouns but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to make that switch yet. So many complex feelings where I’m torn between what I feel I deserve and what I feel I can reasonably fight for.

HRT Week 8 update

I just got the results back from my first checkup post-hormones. My estrogen is twice the maximum for recommended male range and on the low end for women (90.5 pg/mL). My testosterone is almost nonexistent (21 ng/dL). I’ve been swinging pretty radically between extremely depressed to extremely euphoric throughout the course of the week and my breasts continue to grow. I talked to my doc about the mood and she said that there is a 50/50 chance that more estrogen will make that either better or worse. So tomorrow I start with 4 mg in the morning and 2 mg at night (currently 2 twice a day). We’ll see what happens!

PS – I’m not taking spiro to suppress my testosterone because my T levels were already below the male range before I started and clearly I don’t need them now.

Affirming selfie

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It’s been too long since I’ve shared a photo. Here’s the one that’s giving me joy lately from my first attempt to put on my own eye makeup.

Not a man

How do I know I’m nonbinary? Well the truth is I don’t. All I know for sure is that I’m not a man. I tried to fit that role for 26 years and I have plenty of experience to show me that it didn’t work for me. I tried being a masculine man, I tried being a gender non-conforming man, I tried being a sensitive man, I tried being an emotionless man. And it just doesn’t fit. So am I a woman or am I nonbinary? I don’t really know but what I do know is that binary gender expectations and the idea of “opposite sexes” harms all of us regardless of how we identify so I’m perfectly content to fight for nonbinary representation even if that’s not where I end up someday.

If you’re trying to figure out if you’re nonbinary, I recommend starting with Sam Dylan Finch’s articles on Everyday Feminism like Help! I Think I Might Be Non-Binary, But How Can I Know? 

Libido changes – HRT week 6

Content Warning: Discussion of sex ahead

I’m now past the 6 week mark of starting estrogen and the changes are coming quite quickly now. My breasts are continuing to grow noticeably every week and my nipples are at least 50% larger and much more prominent. Whereas before my nipples used to lay flat about half the time, now they are pretty much always erect which means I have to cover them when I go out. Yesterday I almost had a very embarrassing moment where I arrived a professional conference I was helping host only to realize I had forgotten my nipple covers. Luckily I always keep band aids in my bag so I had to go and strap them down.

Some of the other changes have been less pleasant. Last week I was extremely moody, irritable, and depressed. There were times I wanted to strangle people who annoyed me and moments where I wished I could not exist (not the same as suicidal but close). Luckily I have an amazing chosen family who talked me down during my emotional breakdown where I felt like life wasn’t worth living if I couldn’t make a difference in the fight against greed and evil. Right now I’m taking a break from the news and some of my social justice communities until I can better handle the demoralizing parts.

This week has been more stable in terms of mood but I am really becoming aware of just how much my libido has changed. I was never a “think about sex all the time” kind of person. But I did have an active sex drive and sex life. Now I’ve realized that I haven’t masturbated in weeks and don’t even really miss it. And I haven’t been able to have sex without viagra in a very long time either.

What I’m not sure of is if this is truly a drop in libido or just me not being used to how that looks different. I am still very interested in other people’s bodies but I have almost no interest or even enjoyment in using my own. And whereas before I use to have more bisexual interests, I am definitely becoming more and more focused on just queer women and nonbinary femmes. Some of this started before estrogen but has continued to be more pronounced.

So the short version is that I’m not sure what sex looks like right now or how to relate to it. I am extremely lucky to have people in my life who don’t have expectations of exactly what that looks like either and the benefit of being polyamorous is that nobody is relying solely on me to have their sexual needs met. Having that pressure taken off is a huge relief while I am in this phase where I am essentially becoming a demisexual or gray ace.

Right now it is mostly confusing for me as I try to navigate this new feeling (or rather lack of feeling) and it is a lot less frustrating than I expected. But I know I will be sad if my libido doesn’t come back so I’m hoping this isn’t permanent or that my relationship to sex improves as I adjust.

Dysphoria and depression

I’ve been experiencing a lot more dysphoria lately, mostly about the shape and hairiness of my body. I’m very self conscious of my masculine fat-distributed belly and how hairy my chest in particular is. I think the changes in my body and brain are bringing that into sharper relief.

Partly because of that and partly because I see people and communities I care about dying and suffering all over the world, I have been experiencing a lot more depression this week as well. And between the two I’ve been feeling very unsexy which is contributing to my already lowered libido.

I’ve been longing a lot lately for the simpler times in my life when it was easier to ignore who I was and what was going on in the world around me. Sometimes it does feel like ignorance is bliss or at least less painful. But now that I’ve woken up to those facts I can’t go back. And I feel powerless to change most of it so I feel stuck in this terrible place.

There are definitely days I wish I wasn’t an empath or trans. But then I wouldn’t be me. And I’d probably be contributing to the problems instead of trying to make things better in the little ways I can. I hope that my actions do some good to make this worth it.

Hormone update – week 5

Potential TMI warning ahead!

I’ve been taking estrogen orally for 5 weeks now and last week I definitely started to see some changes. Last Wednesday I noticed one breast was tender and even though I couldn’t really perceive it, others agreed that it was getting bigger. What I did notice last week is that there were a couple times I was talking about emotional topics that I found myself on the verge of tears far more easily than before.

This week I can definitely see a change in the shape and size of both breasts and the areas under the areolas have been tender on and off. I really didn’t expect to see this much change so quickly but I’m very excited! Some friends have already mentioned being able to see the changes through my clothes. I guess it’s nearly time to go bra shopping.

In the meantime, I highly recommend silicon nipple covers for anyone with prominent nipples. Even before hormones I needed them with femme clothes since they are often made of thinner material. I’ve found the Nippies brand works great for months of use.

Trans Day of Visibility

I know I’m late on this one since Trans Day of Visibility was Saturday, but since it was a big weekend for my interfaith household (Passover and Easter) you’ll have to forgive me. I was busy cooking up a storm and cleaning house; basically all the wifely duties involved in Seder. But I did want to talk about why visibility is both important for me and complicated.

Diverse visibility is what allowed me to discover who I am and the lack of visibility is what held me back. As I’ve discussed before, there were many signs as a kid that I didn’t fit the masculinity mold. But the biggest reason I never figured out who I was back then was because I knew absolutely nothing about trans people or nonbinary identity. I grew up in a subculture so isolated from the diversity of the real world that I didn’t even know any out gay people much less terminology around gender. And even as I started to enter queer spaces in college, I didn’t see how I fit into that picture since the only trans people I saw at that point were more binary focused in a way I didn’t think I could access. So I just called myself a gender-nonconforming ally for a long time.

And as I started to re-explore my identity again in my mid-20s, I knew then that there was some level of queerness because of my affinity for queer and trans people but I couldn’t see myself in the people around me who were mostly either assigned female at birth androgynous or transmasculine. Eventually someone who I was dating gave me the push I needed to consider how broad a term genderqueer can be and how that could apply to me. And as I began to look harder for representation of assigned male at birth genderqueer people, I discovered people that I finally felt like I fit in with like Jacob Tobia, Alok Vaid-Menon, and Jeffrey Marsh.

And that’s why I started this blog. So that people on a similar path to me can see themselves represented and some of the steps I’ve taken, the fears I have, and the reality of nonbinary life. I don’t want anyone to assume that I can speak as a representative for any demographic but for my voice to add to the diversity of identity and opinion out there online.

And that brings me to the downside of transgender visibility. Too often the voices of people with the most privilege like Caitlyn Jenner are the ones that get boosted. And believe me when I say that Caitlyn DOES NOT speak for the majority of trans people. And when cisgender people write about trans people, they often twist the narrative to fit preconceived notions of transition. So if you really want visibility, boost the unfiltered voices of a diverse spectrum of trans and nonbinary voices.

I am visible every day. It is impossible to escape the hypervisibility of being me in a very cisnormative world. But visibility only does me good if people are actually listening to what trans people say and not just telling the same old misinterpretations of our actions and intentions. So if you are reading this blog and listening to the stories told by my trans siblings, thank you. I appreciate that you are seeking the source and learning along with us.

What’s in a name?

For a lot of trans people, changing their name is a really big and meaningful step. But for me, I have a hard time figuring out exactly how I feel about the idea of changing my name. Some days I feel apathetic about it and others I feel conflicted. Never once have I felt strongly that I should either keep my name or change it. So for now I take the easiest path which is keeping my first name, although I did change my middle and last names when I got married which was a much bigger paperwork ordeal than I thought. I changed my middle name to something gender neutral so that if I decide to change, I can just go by that name.

The part of me that wants to change it is driven by the idea that people would make less assumptions about me if I didn’t have a male-gendered name. But realistically I know that people make those assumptions regardless based on my voice and appearance. The other reason to change is because of the religious baggage associated with my name. The cult I grew up in treated your name like it was your destiny and when you met the leader, he would tell you the meaning in a very creepy way. All the children in our family had biblical names because of that background. And this month I had a difficult conversation with my dad where he made it clear he would never use a different name for me because this one was “god ordained” and that’s always who I’ll be. And while I had no plans to change my name before that, my first instinct is to say “well if you’re going to shove your “gift” down my throat, then I will reject it.”

The reason I haven’t done that yet is because I have seen how difficult it is for my trans friends to have their new name respected outside our own community. Trying to get coworkers and old acquaintances to switch sounds overwhelming to me and I know it would just increase tensions with my parents when I am still just trying to get them to use my pronouns. I wish I had the courage to be more assertive about these things but right now I am so tired of fighting.

As much as I want to start using my gender neutral middle name with my chosen family and friends, I am also afraid of getting used to it. And more importantly, I don’t feel any stronger a connection with my new name than my old one. To some degree, the name isn’t important to me, at least relative to my pronouns. Is it normal to never feel an emotional connection to your name?