flexibeast.space - gemlog - 2024-09-09
The ‘sissy’ community displacing the voices of trans women
[ This was a very difficult piece to write, as it involves very personal issues for me - issues associated with many years of personal trauma, in several contexts. However, i know i'm not alone in my feelings on this topic; i've seen a few FetLife posts by other trans women expressing similar concerns and distress. ]
Privileged people playing subversivism can often end up drowning out the voices of the less privileged.
There's a widespread kink involving being a ‘sissy’, or being made/forced to be a ‘sissy’ via ‘sissification’. In this context, a ‘sissy’ is an amab person who is insufficiently ‘masculine’, and therefore not a Real Man™; to be ‘sissified’ is to be ‘emasculated’ - such as being made to wear ‘women's‘ clothes - and thus made into a ‘feminine’ being - a woman - which is an regarded as an act of degradation, because a ‘feminine’ being is inherently a ‘lesser’ being.
To say this is Not My Kink[a] - as someone who's a domme/top, and who basically doesn't switch - is an understatement. i regularly and explicitly emphasise that ‘sissy’/‘sissification’ stuff is a hard limit for me, for various reasons. i have to do so because (a) it's a very widespread kink, and (b) there seems to be an assumption that being trans means i'll be into such play. Well, no.
As a kid, i was verbally and physically attacked as a ‘sissy’. Not because i was ‘effeminate’ in the usual sense of the word; i've never been an ‘effeminate’ person, even though i've been told on several occasions that i have a ‘feminine energy’ about me[b]. Instead, it was because of the toxic brand of masculinity that says that not being into rough contact sports, and not demonstrating physical strength via violence towards others, and being too intellectual / ‘bookish’, is sufficient to ‘prove’ that one isn't ‘manly’.
These are, of course, the wages of binarism and dualism regarding gender, which i've written about previously:
“Dualism, polarities and cishetnormativity”
“The ‘feminine’/‘masculine’ division”
From what i've seen of sissy kink, it leans hard into reactionary ideas about gender, gender roles, and gender presentation. i don't have an inherent problem with that; kink often involves leaning into certain power dynamics and activities that are - to say the least - problematic when they're done outside of a RACK[c] context. The problem for me is that:
- My experiences of the sissy community are of regular and significant blurring of the lines between kink play politics and non-kink real-world politics. ‘Sissification’ is often presented as though it rests on things that are ‘objectively’ true, such as the notion that a man wearing ‘women's’ clothes is inherently degrading, in a way that a woman wearing ‘men's’ clothes isn't.
- The sissy community overwhelmingly feels like a culture dominated by cis men (even if some of the people involved are actually trans woman at the start of their trans journey). Unfortunately, the more cis men are involved in a particular community, the more their voices become the voices people pay attention to - for example, gay men often dominate the voices and narratives of queer communities. And in this context, it feels to me like sissy culture pervasively involves cis men behaving as though they're trans women who can speak for trans women as a whole.
The end result is that it feels like a bunch of cis men saying “Oh look, I'm not a Real Man™, so I'm really a woman, which means I'm passive and submissive, and being submissive only involves weakness, never strength” - not as kink play, but for real. And the notion that being a woman inherently, necessarily, involves being “weak and passive and submissive” makes me furious.
i'm not at all impressed that, having spent so many years fighting patriarchal politics and beliefs, alongside so many years fighting radfem[d] claims that trans women are 'really' just men who won't accept their 'feminine side'[e] and/or their homosexuality[f], i now have to deal with various amab people saying that they're a 'trans woman' because they're not Real Men but weak passive submissive creatures who need control and direction from Real Men. As i like to note:
Being trans isn't about whether you fit the sexist gender roles and gender presentations that patriarchal society expects of the gender you were assigned at birth. Otherwise, cis women who are truck drivers, or who hate wearing dresses, would be ‘trans’. Being trans is about what gender you know yourself to be regardless of any other factors.
It's been said to me that this sort of blurring - if not active conflation - of play politics and real-world politics is not what sissy kink is about. Okay; that certainly sounds perfectly plausible. But because i'm not part of the sissy community, i don't feel i have any basis on which to challenge this stuff - to say "Oh sissies don't actually agree with patriarchal sexist bullshit” - and i have to take the sissy community's culture at face value. And although i'm constantly encountering strongly-worded pieces by kinksters decrying people using ‘bdsm’ as an attempted cover for patriarchal bullshit, intimate partner abuse and violence, etc. i've rarely, if ever, encountered pieces from members of the sissy community saying “Oh ffs, no, this bullshit isn't what our culture is about.”
i don't expect others to not engage in sissy play, or to not identify as a sissy. But i would like to suggest that the cis men engaging in sissy play be much more mindful of the impact that the sissy community's narratives might have on understandings of what it is to be trans, and on the lives of trans women who have to deal with misunderstanding, marginalisation and violence every day.
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[a] There's a phrase in the kink communities, “Your kink is not my kink, and that's okay”; a related phrase is “Don't yuck someone else's yum”. The basic idea is that things some people find hot are found by other people to at best provoke a ‘squick’ response, and in other cases a literal trauma response.
[b] Cf. this recent post:
[c] “Risk-Aware Consensual Kink”.
[d] As a side note, i loathe ‘my X side’ language, primarily because the conceptualisations involved have been an active barrier to people understanding my sense of self. For example, people will assume that, if i'm wearing a dress, i'm “expressing my feminine side”. No, that's not how things work for me. Cf. this poem of mine:
[e] A couple of years ago i wrote a post about why i use the word ‘radfem’ instead of ‘TERF’:
“Why i don't use the terms ‘TERF’ or ‘SWERF’”
[f] The overwhelming majority of trans women in my social circles identify as queer / pan / bi / lesbian / non-het, which would be a rather strange way of trying to avoid queerphobia / homophobia.