flexibeast.space - gemlog - 2024-09-26
Play spaces vs trans women
[ Based on a post and comment in another space, 2024-09-19 and 2024-09-23; edited for coherence. ]
i feel sad and depressed that, having transitioned more than two decades ago to publicly living as a trans woman, and:
- gone through the medical gatekeeping process in the early 00s, with a psychiatrist attached to the Monash Gender Clinic;
- legally changed my name;
- regularly engaged in trans activism, both online and off, including at public fora;
- thereby having made myself vulnerable in the public sphere, including being read as “a guy in a dress” (e.g. on pt),
i still feel i can't just “be myself” in play spaces for people who aren't cis men - because one part of my sexuality is that i have a bio-cock which i like to use. It's certainly not the only part of my sexuality - i adore fisting people, for example, as well as e.g. power dynamics and impact play - but at the same time, it's part of my identity as a woman, just as my ‘female’ breasts are part of my identity as a man. As i like to remind people: women's bodies are diverse.
i find it disturbing that the same sort of people who would claim to oppose “reducing people to their genitals” and to support “diversity in sexuality and gender” will at the same time only ‘allow’ trans women's sexuality to take certain forms. It would be fine if i were to use a strap-on, but i can't use my bio-cock the same way? “Accept your body”, as long as it's the Right kind of body used in the Right kind of ways?
Trans women struggle with accepting our bodies enough as it is (particularly those who of us who will probably never ‘pass’ according to conservative ideas about gender presentation, and who can't afford the surgery we want). Is this yet another case of my needs being an “acceptable collateral loss” in trying to look after “the needs of the majority“?
“i am an acceptable collateral loss”
There are still many queer and/or tgd people with a strong belief that a bio-cock is inherently and inevitably representative of ‘cis male’, such that people in ‘sapphic’ spaces shouldn't have to deal with seeing one (in general, but particularly if it's hard) because it's potentially triggering for a number of the attendees. Yet although various types of kink play can be (and is) triggering for various people, there's also typically an expectation that one is expected to manage one's own triggers (e.g. seeing impact play), rather than expecting kink spaces to be obligated to manage one's triggers by not allowing other people to engage in the triggering kinks.
Why, after having been living as a trans woman and engaging in trans activism for more than two decades, do i have to keep ‘proving’ myself, via problematic criteria, to the very communities that i've been fighting for (including during periods when acceptance of trans people was much lower, and trans-hostility was the standard feminist/left position)? Is sacrificing a part of myself the only way i can participate in “not for cis men” play spaces? Are play spaces that include cis men the only spaces in which i can play and also “be myself”?
☙