Determination

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’ve said this not infrequently, but I am very happy to be trans. Like, given the option to be some cis take on who I am, whatever that could possibly mean, I would say no. I wouldn’t ever want that. What I would want is to have understood myself and received necessary care some 30 years ago. But that’s different.

I am exactly the person I want to be, aside from the damage from the neglect and other people’s problems, right. I don’t want some other body in order to fit someone else’s ideas of propriety. Self-determination is more important than fitting into a broken, wrong-headed world.

I genuinely don’t understand cisness. For decades I played along with what other people told me about myself, because I didn’t know I had another option. But I didn’t like it. I did the bare minimum. I knew they were wrong. I just didn’t have the language to piece together how. I’ve never had a situation where people have known what’s right for me or acted in my best interest. Everything those with control over my life has told me has been wrong, often maliciously. I’m the only person who knows me. Why should I trust their judgment about my very being?

I want to be who I am, not who someone tells me I am. I don’t want to change any part of me so that my idea of who I am matches the ideas of someone who doesn’t give a shit about me. Why would I do that? What purpose would that serve? The only problem with my body again is the years of neglect, that I’m doing my best to mitigate now. Otherwise, it’s a part of who I am. And I like it. What’s wrong with it? Why should I give up what I have just to make other people feel better with who I correctly say that I am?

I just don’t get this narrative one hears, of wishing one were born in another body or whatever. It sounds like some kind of a confused cis fairy tale. Why the hell would i want that? What would it even mean, to a non-binary chick? What I want is love. I want acceptance. I want respect. On my own terms. I’m not going to apologize for my existence. I’ve already done that since as young as i can remember speaking.

I’m great. Being trans is a part of that. If I were to start over with a blank slate, the only thing I’d adjust is knowledge—not having to live in ignorance for all those years. To know that I deserve care.

The Wrong Kind of Right

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I used to get so upset when people complimented my appearance, unless they did it in a super weird way. For one thing I just didn’t want to be seen. For another it was such confusing dissonance from what I was told the rest of the time. And then the terms they used were all wrong.

There was that one guy who went up to me on the upper east side, and told me I looked like the lord of darkness. That was kind of interesting. Random shit like that, yeah. Sure. Baffling, but I’d take it.

Otherwise it’s like, either you’re wrong or everyone else is wrong—and if they’re wrong, then oh no, because I don’t want you to be right like that. The things everyone else said, they sucked but at least they reflected how I actually felt about myself at that time, drowning in dysphoria.

Getting an insult almost felt neutral. Yeah, it was no good but at least it was true. Getting that kind of a compliment—I’ve never been suicidal exactly, but if I’ve ever been close, those moments would have edged me in that direction. At times I remember melting down entirely.

It never made any sense to me, why I reacted like this. Which just added another layer of fuckery to the whole thing.

I mean. Makes sense now. I didn’t want to be that person; I wanted to be me.

And now I am.

Disentanglement

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Okay, so for a while now I’ve been unfolding and rewiring and figuring out how my sexuality fits together. The major focus has been on dudes with penises, and on how that whole business works with my understanding of who and what I am. What’s my deal with cis women, though?

Well again I’m aroace, so anything with the “big two” attractions is gonna exist mostly in the hypothetical inner space of my imagination rather than something I experience in regard to real people in real life, though I do feel all the tertiary things—and do so without gender. Right now that head zone where sex and romance can exist regardless of any tie to reality is chock full o’ cock, in part I think just from the opening of the floodgates and allowing myself access to this whole aspect of humanity without shame. I’m just me, right. Just a person. But I can and have and do and very probably will continue to feel attraction to binary cis women, same as anyone else—without any real regard to gender I presume, once things iron out and I frickin’ catch up to my own self and decades of repression here.

In all the earlier rambling though, despite these assertions of panness, there’s been this sort of a reluctant quality that seems like it goes beyond my current fixations and freedoms. And yeah, I guess it’s kind of complicated how all of this works with me. Given my history.

I’m going to say this this is less an innate aspect of me than it is just… crap, absorbed from the life that another version of me happened to live, that I have inherited and have yet to sort through and deal with entirely. There are a few things that go into that, that all work together. A super-duper big one is the misapprehensions that I lived under for most of my life—misapprehensions of others, placed onto me, that I never knew how to question or push back against, even as I knew they were wrong from a very young age (as I am rediscovering and remembering).

I say often that my aroaceness is the key to me, and it really is, before anything else. It’s the root of most of the trauma I’ve faced, most of the confusion about every other element of myself, most of the misunderstandings I’ve been caught up in, most of the bad situations. I think this reservation I have toward cis women—well, it’s a sense of caution, with a few sources. The most foundational one comes from the intersection of my assumed gender and my assumed sexuality, and the assumed behavior that would result in from one of my assumed neurology.

There’s a lot here. But most of my life, starting from early childhood, people told me I was a boy; they told me boys were supposed to be interested in girls; and they got very strange and suspicious and accusatory toward me when I didn’t demonstrate this the way they wanted. Which isn’t to say that I had no interest in girls, in theory. But, aroace, right? I didn’t have interest in anyone, in practice. Not romantically, sexually, anyway. Which is the next part of the problem: the lack of nuance to the narrative of allo attraction as it was fed to me.

I’ve messed up a lot of things, confused myself about so much including my basic understanding of who I am, on the basis of what I was told I was feeling, as compared to what I actually felt. I’m a girl, yo. A girl with the genderweirds. And I am drawn to people I respect. I didn’t understand “role models” as they were described to me, but it turns out I did have them. I had all the strange, quirky, smart, pretty women that I deeply wanted to be like, or wanted to be buds with, but had no way of framing my feelings, which didn’t fit the narrative.

So there’s a fuckery in here, right. It’s already getting wound up and complicated, my being encouraged to misread my feelings of commonality as feelings of sexual or romantic attraction, even as I knew there was something deeply wrong about all of this. One consequence there was how it only further walled me off from understanding my gender or my basic attitudes toward myself. Another is that it meant I never really got the benefit of that admiration or modeling, and that I messed up every one of those personal relationships.

So I’m stuck with some garbage wiring here that I have not yet had the patience or motivation to untangle, knowing for a fact that (again in theory if not in practice) I do have access to these feelings for binary cis women. But I don’t want to make those mistakes ever again. Sorting out the nuances of one kind of attraction from another, it’s difficult and sort of beyond what I want to bother with right now. And much of the reason for that burnout is my other big problem: the trauma.

For all the reasons, every romantically, sexually intimate relationship I’ve had has been with a cis girl. Which is fine, sure. But every one of them has been bad, and misjudged, and based substantially on factors outside my own wishes or interests. Each has messed me up more. How much of this is fair to blame directly on my past partners, I don’t know and I’m sure it varies. In some cases the violations have been unambiguous enough. In response to my unpacking the other day, I had someone encourage me to embrace a certain four-letter word. I don’t know.

Part of this is a lack of understanding of myself and why certain things make me feel so very bad, and my tendency to just… do what’s expected of me, not want to make waves, because I know how wrong I am. To just do what people tell me is correct, and to try not to hurt their feelings. And mostly to fail stupendously. But, like. A good person would respect boundaries. Would care if they were coercing people into things they didn’t want to do. Would care if people were hurt, expressing obvious dismay. Which speaks to the circumstances under which I have wound up in these sorts of relationships.

My entire basis for sexually, romantically intimate relationships has been as the object of someone else’s desire and lack of concern for my basic humanity. The more that they realized I was in fact a real person with wants and needs of my own, the more disgust; the more control. And as unfair as this association is more broadly and as limiting as it is to me internally until such a time as I figure out how to deal with it, every one my my abusers has been a cis girl or cis woman with no regard to my autonomy. Who actively tried to erase what self I had. So after a few decades of that, close to non-stop, there’s this extreme caution and fear and aversion that’s kind of etched in at this point. It’s not a part of me, and it’s not useful, but there it is. And it makes it hard to appreciate the full range of my feelings for others.

I mean. This is probably a thing for me to actively work on at some point. It’s not a big priority in the sense that of course I’m never going to be in a romantic, sexual situation with anyone again. And also in that, I just need a rest here. I’ve spent so much on that.

So that I think is a big factor that feeds into what’s going on with me lately. I’ve been there, and it’s been messed-up and it’s messed me up. And I could clear the mess and figure things out on my own terms, and maybe I will eventually. I imagine I will. But, not now. Because, jeez. And at the same time as I’m able to set that all aside and just kind of go, “no,” for the moment, I’ve got this explosion of hormones and newly unlocked emotional ranges and newly unrepressed interests and desires and fixations in relation to who I now more correctly understand myself to be.

So. Yeah. That makes sense. I guess I understand why cis girls would be on the back burner for now while the masculine dick parade explodes in my new zone of endless potential—and while all the trans enby GNC warm fuzzy unthreatening comfort range continues its normal pattern somewhere under this new noise. The fact that I can, and now fully accept that I do, feel what I do for dudes, and that this is perfectly okay and normal and nothing for me to be ashamed of in the least, is just such a goddamned novelty that it will probably occupy me for a while before it becomes everyday.

It’s going to be hard to go through and work out how to relate to, how to feel about the narrow segment of people I’ve been basically forced to demonstrate a kind of feeling toward, that wasn’t in many cases what I genuinely felt, resulting in most of the abuse I’ve suffered. Which was, like. That was just specific people who deeply sucked, obviously. I’m not about to tar anyone by someone else’s brush. I’m just broken here, right. And I get to make my priorities for how I’m going to recover, where I place my interests. And that’s way down the list right now.

Again, this is in regard to my own capacity to entertain certain kinds of hypothetical attraction. In practical terms I’m still aroace, right. I’m as able to be fond of anyone as much as another—platonically, aesthetically, sensually. The stuff I had so little access to before. I’m just too tired and messed-up to entertain “big two” thoughts toward this particular segment of my full available range. But, I think that may be healthy for better exploring more general forms of affection and fondness, that I was led to misunderstand for so long.

And again, I’m uh. I’m all set in that playtime zone right now. Got my current set of distractions. And whee, they are making me feel good about myself in a way that I did not have access to before. It’s so interesting!

I’ll be whole one of these days. It’s just coming back in pieces.

Single-Player Games

  • Reading time:11 mins read

So okay, after the last several weeks of unfolding, following months of buildup, following years of roiling pressure and repression, I think I’m at a place where I can talk about this more confidently, put the thoughts into an order here.

Anyway, masturbation, right. Whee.

This whole discussion is gonna tie into that business about my attitude toward my body and my sexual role, and the way my attraction works. Like, my views toward my genitals and my bodily processes and my engagement with them and with other people, and how those reflect on my ideas about myself, who and what I am, how I feel about myself as a human being and as a person in relation to everything else.

I’ve gone into this divide I have here in regard to my body. Physically, cosmetically, anatomically, I love what I have going on downstairs and would not change it. There’s zero dysphoria toward my genitals, in part because I don’t gender genitals; in part because they’re great. What does make me feel absolutely awful, though, is sexually engaging with them. It’s worse when, as in past relationships, I’m expected to be the assertive, penetrative party, right. But even for my own alone-time purposes, there’s never not been an essential problem here.

I have not been shy lately about my extreme fondness for cock, right. (At least hypothetically. As pertains to the land of dreams where all pronounced sexuality rests, for this girl.) I’m not going to dwell on that, but suffice my issue is not the concept or behavior of a penis in itself. Like, yeah, I am all about everything to do with that… when it’s attached to a hypothetical other. Super-duper, yeah. Good. But in regard to my own body and processes, it freaks me out. It feels dirty and wrong and uncomfortable and there’s this inescapable shame associated.

This isn’t a thing I really want to “get over,” as it’s not—like, I don’t think of it as an external problem that I’ve taken on and I’m carrying around for no reason. It’s maybe not the most constructive response, but I’m coming to realize its origin is in me, actually. It’s my own signal. It’s not even a hang-up as such. This is hard to disentangle, but it’s wrapped up in my gender and my core ideas about how to relate to myself and others and the world. The wiring, it’s like it sends me this wordless jolt to say, “No, dummy, you’re doing it wrong. Figure it out.”

Historically it has been this uncomfortable thing, having these masculine physiological responses to things that don’t align with my emotional responses, or really anything I want or that matters to me, and feeling this almost coercive compulsion to address it. There was an indignity to my body’s demands upon me and its behavior through the whole process. I never went eagerly into masturbation; it was a matter of relenting—like okay, if I maintain this stupid thing, it’ll go away and I can think about something else, god. And there’s this kind of, every single time it almost felt like I was being tricked by this promise that it’ll be fast and simple and no problem—only to be left with this mortifying mess, that could be hard to contain, was hard to clean entirely. It left me feeling disgusting.

Like, all of this just reinforced all of these negative feelings I already had toward myself. It’s not the penis that was the problem; it was the masculinity, right. It was the behavior everything down to my own physiology seemed to demand from me, that left me distraught. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as, like. Me being prudish or any of the other things my exes have labeled me. But, no? That’s not the problem at all—the fact of sex, the fact of masturbation. Or, I mean, that’s not at the root of it. (One does have a bit of delicacy. I am a girl of some taste and refinement and dignity after all. Goodness gracious. Ahem.)

Coming to understand myself as so unambiguously a bottom, as I have done recently, clarifies so many dynamics at the center of my being, as a person. The way I react, the kinds of dissonance I feel, the things I prefer, the things that scream out as wrong for me personally. And the way my body works now, it feels like one of the missing pieces—my physical reality finally aligning and clarifying everything else about me as a person. It makes so much more sense, and it feels right, and there’s no innate sense of shame attached (beyond social decorum).

So, just gonna leap into the whee zone here. Butt play, right? You’re this deep in the topic, you’re not gonna get too many vapors from this discussion. It’s not like it’s new territory historically, but until lately the focus and significance were unclear to me. There’d always been this interest, circling the drain, but my predecessor never quite knew what to do about those thoughts and feelings and images and impulses. And again, all the roles seemed to demand attention where it was least wanted, so the issue was always sidelined.

Now I get it. As a girl, as a bottom, as this aroace creature with no active drive but this volcano of feelings on the inside, and in my pansexuality—with an aggressive current fixation on men and a lifelong, hitherto confusing, interest in cock. It all, uh. Fits. To to speak. I’m not the one who asserts unto others. I’m the one who entertains and accepts and embraces and nurtures and appreciates, who doesn’t insist on her singular way in the world but takes the world in to make herself more whole. Ideally, hypothetically. Constitutionally.

As far as hormones and impulses and self-maintenance go, the thing about butt play is that though it takes a bit more prep work, it is for me at least substantially less soul-destroying. And weirdly, managing it feels more honest and straightforward than just masculine wanking.

The main concern here obviously is going to be cleanliness, because. Well. There are certain things about a butt, right. But in a way, that concern is so incredibly obvious and immediate and top-of-mind that it feels less insidious than the mess of a promised quick, simple wank. One has to think ahead a bit, plan one’s actions, book some specific time with the understanding of how it’s going to be used. Make an appointment with one’s self, right, with the knowledge that one is going to be exploring and appreciating one’s body. There’s a humanity already. One needs to lay out some tools, make some space. Prepare one’s body. It’s not a quick, easy impulse. There is a deliberation here. An earnestness and transparency of intent. A need for existential consent with one’s self. So just the emotional groundwork is so much healthier.

Also in regard to cleanliness, it’s mostly up-front here, as opposed to being held off as a final insult after this hollow yet physiologically overwhelming and unpleasant experience—Now you feel like garbage, and here’s this awful situation to clean up. Go to hell. See you next time, on my clock. Won’t call ahead. With butt play, cleanup—on the one hand it’s again kind of baked in as an understanding, what issues may exist here and how one may need to deal with them. But overall it’s way less of a problem. Everything’s water-soluble in a way that a masculine ejaculate is aggressively not.

With all the changes to my body, semen’s no longer a thing, right. And good riddance (again specifically in regard to me; it’s fine, from other origins). My body’s working on girl logic, which extends from the fluids I produce to the way I feel arousal, to the mechanics of orgasm, to the wiring of my senses.

None of it is a fully automatic process. Like, I have to engage with my emotions and notice and study the way that arousal comes to me now—not with this petulant screaming flush of blood to one area, but an overall heightened sense of interest and receptiveness. This tingle and warm pressure from my upper limbs, up my torso, to my lips and cheeks. This depth to my breath. This mental clarity. This wryness, fondness, playfulness. And when I’m lying there, every time it’s like the next chapter in an ongoing conversation as my mind gets wired a little closer, those synapses get strengthened, and everything is a little more intense than the last time. My lips feel numb, with the prickle of a foot that’s waking up from a long sleep. The rub of my face on the pillow has this jolt as strong as the rub of my genitals as a teenager.

And—we all have the same anatomy; it just gets specialized late in development, some even after birth. For masculine anatomy, we call it the prostate. Feminine bodies, if we address it at all, it’s usually in terms of its sexual function, and we say “g-spot.” (Skene’s gland, if you want to get nerdy.) It’s the same organ. As one goes on and rewires one’s senses away from one unwanted nexus to one more in line with one’s understanding of the world, everything just becomes so much more wholesome and joyous and holistic and meaningful.

As the connection strengthens and the body responds all the more intensely, one feels so complete and at one with one’s self. It’s about the entirety of me, appreciating my humanity, appreciating my body, my femininity. Strengthening the link between my mind and my body as inextricable parts of a whole person. About feeling human in a way that has always been unavailable, and that runs completely counter to the mode of engagement that my body used to demand of me.

And much like the thoughts that go through my head and the way I engage with my current emotional fixations, none of it feels lurid in the way that I tend to associate with sex and masturbation and the modes of attraction that had I felt been assigned to me. It just feels honest and right and warm and good. It’s very clearly constructive, at least to my relationship with myself and my humanity. But also just, at the essence of my being I think it helps to reinforce this essential love for the world, this compassion for the other. It makes me stronger as a person, gets me in touch with what it means to be alive. As opposed to making me want to die.

This isn’t subtle. It is so deeply etched to my grain, to the way I engage with the world, to my political ideology, my ideas about art and communication. Before anyone else, before any outside projections or assumptions, every piece that I lock into place reinforces who I am. I am in fact a human being. I am a real person. I am a girl. I am full of so much love. These are the ways I see myself and I feel about others. This is what it means for me to be alive. And it’s all important.

Like my aversion to exercise, it’s easy to strip out these things that never made sense to me, or that made me feel awful, because of the frame they came with. Because of the way that other people engage with them as if the things, the actions are important in and of themselves. As if they’re all somehow correct and expected from me to achieve some kind of end, an end often rooted in some kind of supremacy or status, in demonstrating one’s value over others according to some system that makes no sense to me and that I want nothing to do with. But, I am my own universe, and I get to make my own terms of engagement. The fact is, I am human. When I deny whole hunks of that from the weight of someone else’s garbage, I’m chopping off essential pieces of myself and crippling my understanding and acceptance of what’s left.

So yeah, this is a piece of me I’m reclaiming. And gee whiz, does it make more sense now. Things can in fact be good. I have nothing to be ashamed of, when I am true to myself. I just need to follow the signals and ask what they’re actually trying to tell me.

Guard and Regard

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Anyway, yeah, I am starting to disentangle the ways that the things I feel and the way I feel reflect my basic principles about how to relate to myself and others and the world—how it’s all part of a whole human, each strut supporting the rest. (Including the horniness, yes.) There’s some greater thesis of self behind all of this, and I’m getting closer.

My voice class last night, in the full group the professor briefly went over cursory elements of body language again, then dumped us into smaller rooms. It struck me then, as I gabbed about my difficulty with eye contact and the way that neurotypicals tend to misexplain social expectations in terms of their apprehensions of the behaviors themselves rather than the meaning that they serve to communicate in context—gender, to the extent that it’s a social construct, is all about relationships. It’s a bundled set of signals that serve to demonstrate your basic attitude toward yourself and others, and the world around you; your expectations, your considerations. A lot of that, both the signalling itself and the relationships it serves to affirm, is based in stupid power structures, yes; modes of control or deference. More concretely, it’s emotional.

Much of the basic behavior we code as feminine serves to signal recognition of, regard or care for the other; making connection, making room. Touching base. (To my mind, it’s basically about not being an asshole.) Masculine-coded behavior is mostly about the self: commanding space, showing basic disregard. Showing that no one can tell you what to do. It’s mostly subconscious, right, but all these signals add up to this intangible sense of genderliness that indicates presuppositions toward the way the other will treat you, and will expect to be treated. This basic perspective on life, right.

There are a few other components, of course. Some of it is subconscious signals about, say, anatomy and its implied social, sexual, biological implications. The way that people move, e.g., their gait, suggests some things about their musculoskeletal structure, right. That’s also essentially relational, if a bit more concrete. But really, the interesting thing for me here is the philosophical element; to what extent that gender as a cultural construct (specifically) reflects at least a performance of one’s anticipated core principles and attitudes. Whether or not that performance is genuine comes down to the individual and to circumstance; one can blunder around through space and be the kindest person on Earth, or spend all one’s energy connecting with others only to control them.

Me, of course, I can’t carry enough weight to pretend about anything or play games with people, so I am basically unable to force myself to think or behave in any way that feels unnatural to me. When pressed so my natural responses are closed off to me, the best I generally do is to freeze up and panic out of the stress and confusion. So these basic considerations behind gender coding as we understand it, in my case what they reflect is in fact my genuine expectations and principles about so many modes of relation—which in turn reflects on all these recent ruminations about my sexuality, my sexual role, and so on; on the way that all these pieces of me conceptually fit together and reinforce each other, the more that I dig down and strip out other people’s garbage and figure out the basic truths of me. It’s all surprisingly coherent. There’s a basic underpinning of philosophy here.

I need to mull this all over more, but there are all these synapses, right? I’m getting closer to assembling this puzzle of me.

Function and Role

  • Reading time:14 mins read

So all this business about how the different aspects of my sexuality inform each other, and they all inform my gender, which reflects back on my sexuality, and how aspects of all of these play into my interests and fixations and feelings about myself and others, real and abstract—it’s a lot, right? It’s all connected in these ways that I’m struggling to entirely navigate. It’s easy to just say, forget it; I am who I am, and I don’t need to define everything. And: sure. But, the better I understand, the better of a grip I have on myself on my own terms. And I have to understand what my terms are, to be able to be true to them with full confidence and be in full possession of myself as a person.

Likewise, I’ve got all this toxic code planted in my routines by outside agents, that one needs a fine comb to strip out and patch. Part of that external stuff comes from possibly a better-meaning place, and it’s all this concern I have built up about the problematic implications of this or that conclusion or association I’ve made on my own terms, as if they serve to comment on anything or anybody else. Part of it’s just pure disease.

So I guess part of this whole project here lately, in regard to my sexuality, is de-heebing my jeebs by really taking a look at the why behind the connections I’m making; how they hold the meaning that they do to me, where that comes from, and what its real implications are.

One of the big things I’ve been chewing over is, so what does my interest in dudes have to do with my femininity? It’s a question that feels obvious in some ways, but in turn anything obvious about it feels highly questionable once one steps back to think for more than a moment. What does it mean when I say I felt I was “allowed” to be attracted to guys once I came to understand and accept myself as a girl? What can we unpack from this on a granular level, apart from and in contrast with any kind of presumptions one might carry into the discussion?

Well, broadly, one’s understanding of one’s identity colors the nature of one’s relationships to others. I relate to so many things differently through a correct understanding of my gender than I did with that misaligned filter. My own words sound so different to me. This plays out on so many simple, visible levels. I’ve found a need to exercise a kind of caution in some situations, some kinds of conversation, that wasn’t even on the radar before. I’ve noticed that people are just nicer to me in some situations than they ever were before.

Our dynamics from person to person aren’t neutral. There’s a lot that plays into the psychology and the associated emotions based on our understanding of who we are and how we expect to be perceived. And those are weird and complicated, based on all these micro-power spikes. Even my close friends, even people I’ve known for years, I don’t talk to them exactly the way I used to—or I should say, the way that my predecessor did. And that’s not entirely a function of my changing emotional or chemical landscape, though those certainly are universes.

So just in the most unspecific possible terms, when I take a step back and look at myself as a rebuilt person, the way I feel about this person is going to be different. When I judge how this person will relate to others, I have different expectations than I did for the old me.

More to the point, there are a couple of obvious components. A lot of it is just self-possession, right? It’s just that recognition of who and what I really am, regardless of what that may be, gives me a solid foundation to start to build connections to other people and concepts. Being able to nail down, okay, Azure—non-binary girl; aroace; pan-whatever; neurodivergent along these dimensions; this is all inarguable and fundamental and has always been, will always be essentially true, some wiggles and nuance aside—it takes a load off. Sets natural guides.

Another thing I really don’t want to downplay is my changing body. Like, my chemistry is totally different now. I’ve had my intervention, things are quickly repairing themselves. I have access to all these emotions I didn’t have before. All my tastes and preferences are changing. There is an inarguable link between the feminization of my body and this abrupt shift toward intense new ways of thinking. I feel like a teenage girl in so many ways here. I never really had a dramatic natal puberty, so this is a first for me and it’s kind of overwhelming. Again without wanting to get too crass about it, there is a measurable association between the amount of estrogen in my system and the degree to which my fixation with cock has reached absurd levels, as well as just… the feelings I get from certain kinds of healthy masculinity.

So those two factors are kind of accessible and clear and simple for me. I don’t feel the need to labor them too much. What I want to unpack is more to do with the puzzle dynamics of gender specifically as it pertains to sexuality and vice-versa, and how they pertain to my wiring.

As a social construct, gender is this made-up dumb thing but it’s also got these real internal components that really go beyond assumed models or whatever. Like, sometimes your body is just gonna respond a certain way, you’re gonna have a certain emotional response, and so on. Certain things are going to feel inherently right, and make you feel good about yourself and like a functional human being even as you would never dream of asserting them on another person, and some of those are going to I guess inevitably align with this prescriptive garbage.

With me, I’ve got all these… gender feelings, that are complicated and that I am tempted to wind up with guilt over things that have nothing to do with me, no matter how I come at them. I’m an enby through-and-through, right. But I’m also obviously a girl. Which is fine, right. But one is tempted to read in this innate conflict, especially as the more comfortable I get with myself, the more I dig around, the more frickin’ femme I turn out to be, to a degree I’d not have anticipated. But this is what makes me feel like a real person. It’s clearly right.

I like makeup. I’m no good at it yet, but this really plays to my sense of self to a degree that surprises me. I have never felt more comfortable in my body than in delicate, lacy feminine-coded dress. I feel more human with smooth, shaved legs—even as I think hairy girls rock. I’m an individual, and as an individual I just… seem to be put together in such a way that all of this makes me feel well and right in myself in a way I didn’t know was possible. I didn’t know I could own myself, like myself, in this way—to not find myself revolting. Turns out, I’m great!

None of that is in any way prescriptive or indicative of broader thoughts or expectations toward femininity or what it means to be a girl or non-binary or trans or to hold any kind of attraction or lack of attraction to others. It’s just the status quo of Azure. Nothing more. It’s about putting the pieces together to make a whole person, whom I like and respect and want to be—exactly because of the innate, verifiable, undeniable truth of every atom of what makes her who she is. It’s about asserting the reality that I’m finding, that was denied me.

So it’s into all of that that we play this concept of, now that I understand myself as a girl—but more specifically as this girl named Azure—I have this availability and this certainty and this confidence to access these feelings, at the same time as my body is going nuts with its hormones and sensations.

Okay then, we’ve got this basic stage for why it would make practical sense for this to be a juncture where, if these feelings were gonna get un-repressed and we’d work to accept and own them on our own terms, this would be a reasonable time for that to happen. It makes sense. But, why “allowed”? Why do I feel permitted to house these feelings as a girl, when they were all out-of-bounds before I understood myself?

I think there are two aspects to that. One is just, I’ve put this work into disassembling and stripping all that external garbage. These feelings were always here; I know they were. That’s not the issue. To a large extent what kept them in check was the internalized homophobia [sic], combined with my basic disgust for myself as a person, to the degree that I was led to understand my identity. I’ve put a lot of work into dealing with this junk that was put onto me, that had nothing to do with who or what I am, and just scraping off a critical mass of that was enough to send this impulse bursting through the crust to assert itself.

Another part is, uh, a portal to another land of weirdness, and it scrapes right up on this area that I really don’t want to get into right now, but I guess I’ve talked about it a little bit already—so here we go. It’s to do with sexual roles, right. This topic has all of these complicated dynamics of its own, to some of which we can apply all the above discussion about Azure just being Azure. But the more that I unpick this topic the more it helps me to understand my feelings toward myself as a girl, and vice-versa.

The better I understand the dynamics of my pretty darned innate, hard-coded sexual role as it applies to my gender, the better I understand a lot of practical elements of the trauma that I’ve experienced in my sexual relationships, from the perceptions and expectations set on me. Obviously to be a girl doesn’t mean to be passive, it doesn’t mean to be a bottom, any more than to wear skirts and pantyhose. Azure is just Azure. But to understand the components of me as they add up to a whole person and color and are colored by my own personal femininity…

So here’s a thing. I of course have a penis, as girls will do sometimes. I have absolutely zero dysphoria in regard to my penis as a part of my body. It’s marvelous. It’s almost a shame I’ll never have opportunity to share it. It’s so pretty, seriously. I love it. What I very much do have however is role dysphoria. And this has taken a very long time to unpick, despite indicators going back literal decades. It’s still strange for me to talk about, as is anything to do with sex. And I’m getting really close to some danger zones for trauma. In brief, though, the act of using my genitals for a sex act does not make me feel good, along several axes at once. I just… am going to stop with that, because I can feel the panic rising. But of course there are certain coded expectations that one will carry around based upon anatomy—and I think it’s really taken me a long, long time to fully work around to detaching from those associations and expectations.

One of the things that has helped a whole bunch is the physiological changes brought about by HRT. Stuff works differently now, right. The anatomy works differently. Emotions are different. Physical sensations are different. Arousal is just this completely different narrative now, one that is… better. That actually kind of, makes me feel affection toward myself and the world rather than just shame and horror. My feminized body does not respond the way that my predecessor’s did, all of which supports my feelings toward myself as a girl and comes as an enormous existential relief. It’s just another development like my tits, right, which emphasizes the reality of what I know to be true. And you know, anyone can be anything. There are plenty of girls of any genital situation who are all about being the assertive or penetrative party or whatever. And that’s rad. But, my body cooperating with my mind and my emotions, putting me all on the same page for once? Phew.

So as a girl, this is one component of my understanding of myself; of how my gender functions in relation to me as a person; of how all these elements of me feed into and communicate and support each other in a healthy way that allows me to feel well and respect and love myself.

I break out all of this to say, that—the relationship of my sexual role to my gender—is the other part of what I think I mean when I talk about being “allowed” to feel this attraction as a girl. Or that’s a non-trivial ingredient of a larger picture. That’s the internal part, not to do with other people’s baggage. What I think is accessible to me now, it also has a logistical, even uh geometric, component that I was not fully able to process before, that has to do with my understanding of my sexual role, wound up as it is in my understanding of my gender.

In terms of my own personal dynamics with masculinity, I have zero interest with the role others have projected onto me. But now that I have largely broken away from my body even being able to respond like that—I, uh, have come to better appreciate alternative modes of engagement. Which isn’t just to make attraction all about what parts go where, right. That’s just one component, even to the subject of sexual role as pertains to gender. What it is, is indicative of a critical shift in perspective toward my personal and emotional role in respect to dudes. To understand myself as a girl, and for my body to work as it now does, is for a certain amount of logic to go click. Suddenly—oh! I get it now. If I’m over here and they’re over there, it looks like this now. I get how this works. It makes sense from this angle. Okay, vroom vroom.

Again much of this presupposes cisness on the point of the masculine party, because this all exists in the aroace magic hypothetical zone. And I already have long wrapped my head around how I feel about those of us in the weird zone, right. That’s relatively easy to understand.

So basically, a big part of it is just a matter of unlocking this modality of feeling in relation to my body and my role, that didn’t even exist until I was in a place to embrace my girlhood. It was not “allowed” in that I could not reconcile it with my prior understanding of me. That attraction was always there, but even absent of other people’s garbage, until I understood who and what I was, I had no idea what to do with it. Even if (misplaced) homophobia weren’t a thing, 20 years ago the thoughts and feelings would have felt divorced from reality.

But seeing as a girl, I get it. I have the perspective that I could not have had, in terms of the dynamics of how I fit together as a human being. Now it has become, for lack of a better term, logical. Which basically triggers a green light. Thus do my dreams become a dick parade.

I mean.

Again, I’m sure things will calm down eventually. Even with my hormones being as they are. But well. This is where we are at the moment.

So. Fine, okay. This is part of what it means for me to be human. This is part of who Azure is. So might as well bask in it, I guess.

Hickory Dickory Dock

  • Reading time:21 mins read

Okay, so we’ve gestured at how as I’ve regained possession of my self and my body and gained a level of comfort with who and what I am, I’ve begun to shed all these layers of other people’s shame—and how that informs my developing understanding of my thoughts and feelings. How as I’ve explored and strengthened my relationship with myself, I’ve grown more confident in similarly reexamining my relationships to others and to the world around me—all of which is the realm where a sexuality is going to rest, right, ergo these newly freed aspects thereof. In a foundational sense then, it’s clear why (as I put it earlier) the dam is breaking after all those years of cracks and trickles, and I now am able to consciously embrace these previously unavailable feelings—and also why that novelty would become a fixation, at least for the moment. But that sketch kind of skirts what feels like a blink-tag question:

But why cis dudes, tho? Specifically?

Well. Okay. There are several dimensions here, as there would be. Nothing becomes real for me without eighty citations and empirical proof of inevitability. As before and ever, I’m going to try to chip at this without being too problematic about gender roles and biology and societal assumptions and things, and try to couch everything I say in terms of my own wiring. But this is new, and I’m going to be clumsy. I use the words I got.

So this sudden fixation on cis dudes is an intersection of a bunch of things that assemble in a logical way that’s basically only able to lock together now. It’s absolutely not an exclusive thing, or indicative of much beyond my own wiring and the dynamics of the moment. The first thing I guess we need to unpack is the broad ability to observe, admit, and embrace an attraction to men—alongside the better-documented attraction to women and enbies, which is complicated in its own garbage ways—which again isn’t new. It’s always been there. It’s been there, but any time my mind has gone anywhere near the topic, there’s been this learned sort of magnetic repulsion; this immediate sense of nope. “That is not an alley to walk down,” my reflex tells me. “Turn away, now. Think of anything else.” It became an automatic process almost the moment my head began to form these thoughts.

That repression itself isn’t just one thing. Absolutely yes, there was a (misplaced haha) internalized homophobia going on—homophobia in the sense of, not hatred as the word is often used, but existential dread. Because I knew the dangers; they’d been drilled into me. I knew what would happen if I let on even a hint of the things flitting around under the surface, allowed myself to consciously entertain any of them. I’ve already had my head bashed into a bleacher once, I’ve been put through youth therapy, gotten lectures from authority figures. It was the kind of fear of, say, someone who’s been through AA, when they walk into a bar—that whole one-drop mentality. It’ll all be over. You’ll be forever tarnished. (Even removed from the moralism, of course in reality things are more nuanced than that.) I’d feel like, if I don’t block out these pictures from my head, if I don’t look away, if I don’t think of literally anything else—well, I already knew everything about me was awful and wrong and gross, and was never to be expressed. This was just one of a million shames. One for the list. But boy is it a headliner. There would be no going back from here.

And that there, that speaks to the other big problem: me. My utter learned revulsion for myself, combined with my more understandable revulsion for the person I was wrongly expected and coerced and compelled to be, whom I never successfully could and never wanted to be. Every day of my life for so many years, I was just… well, I’d long since given up hope or dream or desire. I knew I didn’t belong to myself. I knew my body didn’t belong to me. I had no choice, no power of decision about anything—about who I was, what I was, how to be. This shell that I built up in order to survive, this previous person who wasn’t really a person—this rudely hacked-together series of automatic processes with no animating soul, that guided this body for at least three decades—for what there was of me breathing inside that husk, it was a horror to me. And for that, there was I think an element of association—this horror over the hateful thing that I did not want to be yet was trapped inside, and the reflections of that unwanted ideal, out there in the world, that mocked this point of abject misery and disgust for me.

This trauma is kind of a warped mirror of my other attraction issues. I don’t want to say that my attraction to men is any innately stronger than my attraction to women or to enbies—again innately I don’t think I really gender my attraction to people. What we’re unpacking here is a current fixation, now that I’m allowed full liberty of emotion. The thing about the way I was nonetheless socially guided by gender, though, it also fucked up and confused any attractions I felt toward women in ways that have really damaged me over the years, again on several levels, for several reasons, at once.

I’ve explored this a little in isolation, but—the aroace thing? It’s so important to me. Everything about my feelings toward and relationships with others goes through there before it goes through anything else, and it’s the only healthy, honest filter to understand me. Likewise it’s the main thing and the basic key that set off and permitted this sense of self-possession and body autonomy that I never knew, was never allowed, at any point in my life before about two and a half years ago. I belong to no one but myself, and that includes my heart well, so to speak. Attraction is a weirdness, ergo this whole discussion. But the goddammed cis-allo-heteronormative presumption that goes into every fucking message one will receive from culture and from the controlling figures in one’s life, it infests one’s read on every possible relationship one could develop. Even where it’s clearly obviously undeniably wrong, you’re made to question and override your own intimations and go with what you’re told, because there is no conversation, no vocabulary for asexuality—a scant one for any non-straight sexuality, even from a cis perspective. So when you feel a thing, you’re told what it means—and if you’re uncertain, you’re fucking wrong and stupid, and just scared and told to stop doubting yourself (by way of listening to yourself and doubting them) and listen to the people who know more about what’s really going on.

So, I’m a girl, right. And I’m ace before anything. So when I’m young, and I’m looking at rad and smart and strong and weird and interesting and pretty women, what my head is doing, though I don’t know how to read the feeling, is saying, whoa, I want to be like that. She’s great! 95% of my attraction that I was allowed to express to the point where it could be misinterpreted, it amounted to a kind of affinity: a recognition of myself, or my potential self, in the other. An admiration, a respect, a fascination. A sense of inspired commonality. But that didn’t make sense with the tools I was given, and that kind of a read opened up all these worrisome notions about my possibly not being the person I was told I had to be or else there would be very very deep trouble for me—the person who so disgusted me to pretend to be. So I wound up being encouraged to ignore my understandings and forcibly misread every feeling I ever had toward another girl or a woman. And gee whiz, has that ruined my life repeatedly over and over and destroyed so many things about my relationship with myself over the years.

What I was feeling toward men, then—toward “other” boys—it was corrupted by other people’s ideas of gender and attraction in exactly the same way as my feelings toward women. Just, the other way around. Because, whoops, genitals guide every dimension of our lives, right?

Which leads into the next thing. To allow myself to actually feel these attractions toward men—equal as they may be to my attractions to anyone else—to a large extent it’s just a product of this recent sudden release of pressure. So that makes a sort of functional sense. It’s just—it’s one thing to finally embrace this part of the puzzle, but why do I keep saying cis dudes? What’s that about? That feels deeply strange and possibly a bit dodgy in some ways, especially with this whole context in TERfy circles about “genital preferences” as a set of dogwhistles for biological essentialism, transmedicalism, whatever.

So, okay. I’ve really tried to avoid going too hard on this topic (so to speak), but I really have a lot to say about dicks. And it’s just—it’s been hard to contain for my entire life, and I’ve never taken the opportunity to properly unpack it, so just bear with me on this for a minute.

Now obviously genitals aren’t gendered, right. That’s, like, day-one absolute duh material. Anyone can have anything. All bodies are basically the same; all the parts are equivalent and only diverge at basically the last minute, and even then hardly at all in a meaningful way. And your body says absolutely zero about who or what you are, except for what you personally want to project onto it. I really shouldn’t have to say any of this, but I feel like it’s important to establish it before I go all cock-hungry in this discussion.

To skip back a minute first, the binary fuckery that I’ve been taught to apply to every thought and feeling I experience toward myself or others may start to indicate why I’ve felt an unusual freeness and safety in my attraction to enbies, trans, and GNC folx. Once the concept of people outside the binary landed on my radar, they immediately glitched out the toxic framework that otherwise saturated every element of my life. They didn’t fit the system. I didn’t have any preset rules to warp my responses. And yes, to follow an earlier thread, of course I felt an intense (if super confusing) affinity as well. So I think the feelings that developed were more pure and honest and available to me, easier to understand, than my feelings toward people of either binary gender. This room outside the binary was my safe area that had escaped the existential normative, self-loathing, life-denying blitzkrieg.

At some point I’m going to have to reckon with my feelings toward cis women, which for the above reasons are messed-up in all of these unfortunate ways. Right now that’s not where the novelty is, though. I’ve always been not only allowed but actively forcibly compelled with that. So it’s nothing inherent about cis women, or even my innate attractions to them, that I feel my own sort of trauma about anything to do with entertaining attraction to them at this point. It’s just, all the abuse. I’ll get to that in time. It’s down the road a bit.

I bring all this up now because it informs a really important element in the larger question we’re asking here. I’m already sort of chill with my attraction to the genderly peculiar. I always have been, except to what extent it took me a while to strip out and isolate these notions of romantic and sexual attractions that do not exist in my system the way that I’ve been told that of course they must. So when we’re going to start asking the question, okay, but what’s the deal with attraction to cis people, of either binary—on some level I’ve already reconciled those feelings, or never had an issue with non-cis people. By its nature, that range of emotion managed to sidestep the basic problem here. Mostly. But more to the point, more starkly and energetically, as a boundless topic of discussion in and of itself: cocks.

Being aroace is a weirdness for so many reasons. It’s hard enough to fully understand or to communicate what that means. It’s even harder when you start to observe tertiary attractions and cross it with other sexualities, and try to unpick the dynamics of how and why. I feel like I have to assert forever and with the strongest emphasis that to be aromantic and asexual means that I don’t experience or understand these attractions to real people—like, it doesn’t happen; I don’t view people that way, and it weirds me out a little to be honest— but that not only are there a million other kinds of attraction one can experience, a million other ways to feel and express one’s love or fondness or interest in another, a million kinds of intimacy that don’t involve bodily fluids; that people also have an internal dimension. There is a difference between fantasy and reality. I can deeply appreciate things in my own head, dream about whole scenarios and dynamics that make sense to me and hold great emotional power—yet have no desire or indeed ability to see that replicated in this external body zone. That doesn’t make either side more real or important than the other. They all make up who a person is, and their relationships to and understanding of themselves and of others.

What goes on inside me is its own universe and of critical, fundamental importance to my life. The barest, dumbest example here: I am not going to fuck. (Well, not another person anyway.) It will not happen. Doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter when. I have no interest. I don’t experience or understand the basic attractions that would lead to such an event. That’s not the way I’m wired, and I never will be. That doesn’t stop me from having the raunchiest things bouncing around in my dreams, or from finding sex-that-doesn’t-involve-me-specifically a hilarious discussion topic, or from easing up in my own personal fantasies and in what I’m allowed to appreciate and entertain without triggering this deep shame and aversion. And the thing about fantasy is, it doesn’t always necessarily play by the codes and principles and linear emotional logic of life. It picks and chooses and fixates as it’s going to, on all the meatiest bits (as it were) that attract the most particular fascination in isolation.

If we were talking about real relationships, genitals are the last and least important possible consideration. They have nothing to do with who a person is, and the love one individually holds for a person as a person is the only important motivating factor for a meaningful and healthy attraction, right. In real life once you get to the point where someone else’s genitals become anything like your business at all, if they hold any relevance at all to your attraction to that person beyond in their role as another part of them to love by virtue of being a part of them, then what are you even doing? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to yourself, and why are you subjecting that poor other person to you?

So at last when we ask the question, “Why cis men in particular?” we’ve got the start of a roadmap, and then we’ve got the big thing. It’s because of the novelty of feeling allowed to like men now. It’s because attraction to cis people of either gender has always had its specific problems, that again are only now beginning to defrost. It’s because, fantasy! It doesn’t apply to anyone real. And its because—and I can’t possibly stress this enough—I really, really, really, really, really like dick. Not exclusively. And not in a gendered sense. But, particularly—and with the gendered inflection of thirty years of restrained pressure unleashed all at once.

Though one is publicly coy about these things, yeah obviously I’ve been all about the girldick for ages. As with everything about me, it took me an age to realize that this was actually way less about desire than affinity; recognizing myself, and putting myself in the shoes of the figures I saw. But again, the gender strangeness, it’s made that easy. It’s this zone where my head was free of bias and allowed to get a little weird with its own ideas, albeit without an understanding as to what or how or why. One doesn’t talk about it, but. Internally? A-OK over here. And vaginas are good too! Sure. As traumatic as my past relationships have been for so many reasons outside the purview of this discussion, all my partners have possessed vaginas, and I found deep fascination and enjoyment and appreciation there—even when attached to utter monsters.

But again, genitals aren’t gendered and for all the equanimity may feel in one’s attractions to others, within any given field one will have one’s particular interests and favorites, and gee whiz in isolation is there ever a strong, strong, overwhelming preference for penis. This one option looms ever so large—which, due to the way society likes to gender things that aren’t gendered, has of course been… difficult to really embrace in a meaningful way beyond fantasy for most of my life, and even within my fantasy there have been all these walls of caution, to do with gender. So in this moment where I’m feeling more free to permit myself attraction to men, and I’m feeling more able to deal with attraction to cis people, I also am feeling more free to admit specific fondness for cock. What we have then is this conflation of a few things, all at once. Ergo: cis men.

Now, a significant detail that plays into all of this, that feels kind of… uh, extra super duper strange for me to focus on, is my recent and abrupt understanding of my innate sexual role as a bottom. I very much do not want to go deep (as it were) into that topic at the moment, but—again without wanting to get icky about gender prescription because we’re just talking about me here, understanding this in the context of my gender has been a revelation for my acceptance of and relationship to myself; my whole conceptualization of myself as a girl. And one should perhaps note that following a long series of cracks (e.g., after correcting my body chemistry) this recognition almost directly precedes the breakdown of inhibitions toward cis men.

Like, there’s a lot going on here, a lot to unpack that on the surface is kinda… strange. But there are some, uh, distinct bits of physical logic that cascade in terms of what goes where, and—look, this discussion isn’t about sex, it’s about my sexuality. But the detail of my sexual role ties into this breakthrough in my acceptance of various attractions and dynamics that were hard to entirely resolve before. There’s a certain logic that clicked in terms of how I see myself as a person and as a girl, that made everything else line up and go, “Ah. Yes, that makes sense now. Track is clear at last. Full speed ahead.”

I feel so hesitant about this framing for all the reasons, not the least that, to the extent that I have attractions to other people, they are not gendered and that I really don’t care about genitals and seriously guys, I can appreciate anyone and anything. It’s all cool. But… there are impulses. There are specific very real and important and unavoidable feelings, and they bear a close association with specific very real and very valid preferences. And whereas in a real relationship with a living person none of this would really be important in my appreciation for them, when it comes to the life of the mind… well, one can prefer. And just, holy cow. The intensity and innateness of my specific preference for that specific dynamic, and the physical elements that logically go into that dynamic, it’s overwhelming, in a way that illuminates so much that has always felt wrong in the past and affirms so much.

It’s not to comment on anyone but me here to say that I never felt more secure and correct and unambiguous in my role as a girl than I did the moment all these pieces clicked for me, and I understood how everything is meant to, uh, fit together, for me, emotionally—and I absolutely get how weird it is that not only am I associating my innate sexual role with my understanding of my gender, but conflating all of this with a sudden attraction to men. In a sense it’s like. Just. What are you doing, Azure. It feels so problematic to me, out of context. Again, though, people are messy. And I really don’t know how better to talk about these things. And as I will forever emphasize: the dude thing at least is a fixation. March 2021, this is where my focus is. That’s clear enough. It’s just that my brain has this whole new thing to play with now, and it’s gotta run its course.

Now that I’m able to feel these things and admit to what and who I am and how all of this works, I know I’m going to chill out eventually and my feelings will get less, uh, specific than they happen to be at this moment. At least, in regard to other people’s gender. The specific interest in dicks, well, that’s kind of innate. It’s not budged in 30 years. It’s a part of me that ain’t going anywhere. But now we see that there are procedural, dynamic, logistical reasons that play into that attraction, which relate to who I am and how I see myself as a person.

And holy Hannah, I sure did spend a lot of a Saturday afternoon talking about why I love me some penis. This is not a thing I imagined I would be discussing in public only a few months ago. But here we are. If you will, I just couldn’t hold back anymore. There’s so much more to this topic, but I… think I’ve scraped around this barrel as much as I can bear at the moment. This is so weird for me to unfold like this, and I honestly don’t know what to do with myself at this juncture. I’m kind of twitching. But I had to work through it, so. Okay. Breathe. Azure is going to do… Anything else than this, now, and just try to figure out what the fuck is happening with my day.

But we’ve got a sketch down. This is important. This is how I’m managing to structure my thoughts these days. This is how we get better.

We’ll let it stew for now.

TL;DR: the fact I am a girl informs the fact I like to get it; the fact I like to get it informs the fact I am a girl; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it informs my long historical fixation on the anatomical structure involved in giving it; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it from that structure informs my long-suppressed non-exclusive attraction to men, resulting in a sudden rush of confusing, overwhelming interest in cis men, seemingly out of nowhere; and the fact that this is all hypothetical, given the whole aroace thing, informs the peculiar specificity of these fixations, since it’s all internal and removed from the concerns of any real relationship I will ever entertain—which doesn’t make it less important to understanding myself as a person!

But no, it’s not out of nowhere. It adds up, it makes sense. I’m just healing here. Continuing to become a real person, despite it all.

And hey, got a new interest I guess. So that’s nice.

Connective Tissue

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, a curious thing. Now that I have tits, it makes me feel way less weird to look at tits. There are a few things going on here, with my recognition of my gender and my sexuality and all the physical, psychological, emotional changes that I’ve experienced in a fairly short time.

It used to be that naked forms would just make me deeply uncomfortable. I’d avert my eyes, try not to think about it. It felt lurid to engage, like some kind of a boundary issue. In the event that I did, I felt ashamed of myself, which just built up and kept getting weirder. Now that I better understand what’s going on inside me, that I have a better relationship with myself and trust my feelings and reasons, a lot of that has fallen away and it’s easier to appreciate form for what it is. Now that I can look clearly, I see beauty and commonality.

There’s a universality to us, right, for the brief period we’ve been around to record our experience and what we think about it. Now that I understand that I’m looking for connection, that’s what I’m finding—a common humanity, a common femininity. A piece of everyone in everyone else—but more significantly, me. I wasn’t part of the equation until now. I was outside. None of this was for me, about me. I had no right to it, just as I had no right to myself. Except of course I do, as much as anyone. (And I am the only one with a right to myself, goddamn.)

Now when faced with a nude female form, at least in representation, I don’t get much more than a residual embarrassment. I get the relationship now. And it’s a meaningful one, to at least some extent, that helps to shed light on my relationship to my own body.

Glibness aside it’s not really as easy as, hey I’ve got breasts; it’s no big deal, whaddayamean. There’s a lot more going on here. It’s more that I’m starting to understand what it is to be human. As I lose shame over my own body, so I lose shame over the concept of bodies. And as I lose that shame I’m afforded the room to connect and appreciate and embrace a beauty that kind of feeds a cycle. It’s an acceptance of my place, now that I know what that is. Now that I understand how I fit in with just… Everything. Everyone. In a way I never did.

Bully Pulpit

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Sometimes I think about how 80% of what I post about now is trans stuff and I wonder if I really want to make my frickin’ gender the dominant force in my life, as if being trans is a personality trait somehow. Then I remember, I’m going through some shit. And I’m neurodivergent. It’s actually a good thing that I’m making myself my own special interest for the first time in my life. This means I actually am paying attention to, am interested in and care about myself. Which has never ever been the case at all. There will be an adjustment period.

I think it’s kinda like that thing where, like, there’s this recovery period after a breakup, right; sometimes people roughly calculate it as the time you were in that relationship, halved. One’s basic sense of self seems a bit deeper than even a close romantic relationship. And I’ve got… a lot of recovery to do here. From all these different angles at the same time. It’s too much to even handle on a day-to-day basis. But, I am slowly chipping away at last. And the progress is tangible, even for the relatively short time I’ve been at it.

I sure hope to hell it won’t take 20 years to fully get me to a point where I’m able to move on from all of this, but if so, uh, I guess that’s only about 17.5 left to go at this point. Hell, I’ve been obsessing over the Dreamcast way longer than that. If not consistently.

So of all the things for me to be obsessing over, my recovery, realigning my sense of self, seems like one of the better things I could prioritize—as strange and tiresome as these discussions might be for people who are not me. I would find it deeply strange and a bit scary to hang around a cis person who spent all day obsessing about their gender. I know I get creeped out by straight people who only ever talk about sex. It’s like, I dunno. Having a neighbor who’s very aggressively proud to be white.

When you’re not trying to move and develop and understand the dynamics that make you who you are and how they relate to the past and the future and the world around you and everyone you know and everything you’ve ever learned, but just to declare a fucking self-evident identity, it becomes this strange assertion of turf and status and power. This show of dominance and declaration of what you imagine normal.

I am very blatantly trying to piece together who and what I am despite everything, and I’m very much not working from a position of strength in nearly any aspect here. I’ve just been fucking shattered by life. So I think it’s okay that I spend some time to marvel over my findings. I’m sure in the end it’s all part of the same meta-essay that incorporates every other special interest of the last four decades and what they have to say about the way we relate to each other as a people. This is just a bit more visceral than most of the chapters.

Inner Voice

  • Reading time:7 mins read

These voice lessons are really starting to click lately. And based on the feedback, that doesn’t seem to just be in my head. Beyond the voice stuff as such, I got what was I guess meant as incidental feedback tonight about my body language, and—well. That’s kind of significant actually, for a lot of reasons which I made an effort to explain to her.

So, there was a lot that happened around last August, right. Six months of HRT, and the changes were starting to go nuts. People were starting to respond to me differently. This was where that hand-over happened, and this body passed from my predecessor to me.

One key element that I didn’t recognize until months later is that my first semester of voice classes ended on July 27. Early on I caught a comment about all these kinds of communication beyond spoken language, curiously including dress and makeup. Which, yeah, makes sense. But, that was a new angle for me at the time.

A thing I seized and asked about not-infrequently through the semester was body language—a topic we touched on only at the very end of that final class. We barely had time to skim it, really, but I soaked it up all the same.

There were these columns of culturally masculine or feminine mannerisms, for the purpose of illustration, right. A thing that cut pretty deeply was for me to see that something like 80% of the behaviors described as feminine are things that I had been compelled my whole life to stop doing at risk of punishment. Like, I would get in so much trouble—from my parents, from teachers, from my ex-partners, from random people—if I failed to control this shit, most of which I only understood as inappropriate; that it was considered offensive, and would ultimately lead me into big trouble. Most of it was so hard for me to beat out of myself. I kept slipping, and getting so down on myself, over and over.

So much of my time not just around other people but on my own, a big partition of my mind was devoted to basically this constant running process: be good, don’t do any of that weird shit. In fact, just don’t do anything at all, ever. Just sit there. There’s no telling what’s even wrong anymore.

Then one day, for about fifteen minutes, I had a document in front of me that explained, oh, all that shit that you’re a terrible person for doing? The reason that everybody will always hate you if you let your guard down for a second? It’s all “girl stuff.” It took maybe a couple of weeks to sink in fully, but I think that put the last cracks in the shell who had been lumbering around the past four decades. And it just began to crumble.

To adopt feminine body language was simply a matter of letting go—of being myself for once. It was really that simple. I was who I was. Deeply, fundamentally, unarguably, I was me. All this torture that I’d been put through, that I’d been coached into performing on myself every day of my life because I was just that bad, it was all to hide and deny the fact of who and what I am.

Like, this gender transition business, it wasn’t a matter of changing my mind about how I wanted to live my life, learning some new shit, performing some new behaviors according to someone else’s ideas, to fit into some other category. It was about dropping everything that had been put on me, deprogramming myself of this self-abuse, and permitting myself to just fucking live.

That’s when it really hit me that there was a real person under that numb facade, fighting to come out. To make the next move was just a matter of stepping aside and allowing it. This wasn’t about becoming anything, about transitioning to anything. It was about letting go, finally.

So, they let go. They never wanted to be alive in the first place. Their job was done. They got me to where I needed to be.

And then there I was.

Tits and everything.

So when my grad student today just kind of nonchalantly commented on my body language, how never mind the voice or dress or anything else, that it struck her how clearly feminine I read to her just from the way I moved and gestured and sat—it meant a thing, to me. I’ve pretty much not put any effort into “feminizing” my behavior beyond working on my posture and finally figuring out how to walk properly after spending my whole life awkwardly jerking around while trying to avoid doing the things I was told I must never ever do, or else.

I’m not really—I don’t want to perform, right. Not in the sense of putting on an act for other people’s benefit. Everything I’ve been doing, it’s about stripping away layers and figuring out what the truth is that has been buried for so very long, then building out from there.

What then she was saying to me was that, after just fucking letting myself go, allowing myself to live, the mere way that I fill up and use space clearly communicated to her that I was a girl. She picked out several examples of things I was “doing well” or whatever, but they weren’t things I was doing. They were just a consequence of my being.

From what I heard tonight, the fact of my being, in and of itself, communicates who and what I am, when freed and allowed to just exist on my own terms.

And, like. That’s kinda—

It wasn’t even a thing that dwelled on in particular. We were talking about how visual information makes a difference in communication, and how that makes phones suck so much. How the more channels you’re using to communicate at once, the clearer the picture will be. She told me that when she looked at me, my voice automatically sounded feminine to her from the context of all the other cues. They colored the impression of what she was hearing, informed what it meant. Mine was obviously a woman’s voice, on the basis of my behavior.

What she’s saying then is that it’s obvious that I am who and what I am, on the basis of my simply fucking existing. I am self-evidently me, by virtue of nothing more than letting go.

This is just who and what I fucking am, and always have been. And it’s so hard for me not to be.

So well, another hearty fuck-you to all the dummies who turned their noses up at this, who spent so many years trying to prevent me from existing. But more to the point, it is just a basic fact that I’m a girl. I cannot hide it, I can’t pretend to not be. I’m terrible at it, and it fucking kills me to try.

This is my natural state, right here. Like this. Without anyone else’s bullshit on me, this is what I will always spring back to because it’s just the fucking truth. And that’s how the truth works, in the end.

Anyway. So that was kind of mind-bogglingly affirmative.

The rest of the class went pretty well too. Starting to really get a hold of things, and I seemed to really startle a few people from how much had developed since last class. But more than anything, I’m kind of dizzy right now with my own inevitability. And… weirdly, for all my gaping wounds, my innate resilience.

The truth is always gonna come out, if you just give it long enough.

Diagnostic Culture

  • Reading time:3 mins read

In some ways it feels like transness is a thing for Other People, to explain to them why I’m not behaving the way they expect me to. For my part it’s more like I’m finally getting care for a condition that was negligently misdiagnosed and so has gone untreated all my life.

It kinda feels like… making a transition from, say, an assumed free-breather who keeps coughing all the time, goddamn, to an asthmatic. Like, this was probably always the case, right? Or more close-to-home, a transition from a neurotypical to an autistic with ADHD issues. I was obviously never neurotypical; that doesn’t even make sense. Pinpointing my neurological situation is about correcting for a previous set of false assumptions and lack of care and support.

By the same reasoning, at no point did I ever agree to my gender assessment. I just… didn’t want to argue. It’s neither here nor there that as a result of that misdiagnosis it took me 40 years to work out what was wrong with my situation. It happens all the time medically. I’m not changing anything. This is a diagnostic process. All I’m doing is correcting for other people’s mistakes.

The sense where I am obviously gloriously correctly trans is the cultural, ideological aspect. There’s a way of thinking, of relating to one’s self and the world—a sort of shared understanding of how things work—that is very different from those who don’t have to deal with this. And that is very much a part of who I am and who I want to be.

In an ideal society we wouldn’t dump these gendered assumptions on people the moment they’re born, and even before. Before roughly the 20th century, kids in western culture were treated as more or less androgynous until they hit puberty, at which point they adopted gendered roles. The past sucks and shouldn’t be taken as a model for the future, obviously. But point is, this is arbitrary that we project this garbage on our frickin’ caterpillars, way before it’s relevant to their lives or their self-concepts.

If our culture actually made sense, then… well, gender as we know it probably wouldn’t so much be a thing even—but more to the point, it would be pretty meaningless to be trans, as people would make up their own minds who they were and wanted to be at the right time—except in the occasional case someone realized whoops, they got it wrong before, or something in their life really changed the way they felt, which, of course, valid. But then, like, it still wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with assigned gender, right.

Assigned gender has nothing to do with me. It’s never played into my self-concept except for the fucking trauma that it’s caused me and the way it’s forced me to react and sublimate myself to keep safe all these years.

To make a very cautious parallel that one shouldn’t look at too deeply, just as race doesn’t really have a biological basis yet it’s still meaningful due to cultural identity and history, I absolutely am socially trans. 100%. There’s too much wrapped up in that concept. As for me, though, the way that I see myself? I’m just… me.

People got things wrong, and I listened to them. And it hurt me. Then I worked out the truth, and I’m getting better. That’s… really nothing to do with me. Who I really am has no relation to what others expect.

I’m just Azure. I’m some weird kind of a girl. I always have been. People are just dumb.

Changing the Frame

  • Reading time:8 mins read

As I’ve approached and have since passed my one-year anniversary of HRT, I’ve found an increasing ambiguity to my attitude toward my genitals. What makes this strange to talk about, beyond the topic itself not being one I love to discuss, is that I don’t actually have a problem here.

I have zero dysphoria in regard to my genitals. None. I am way more concerned about, oh, the shape of my hips and butt. I don’t really gender genitals, right? Anyone can have whatever; who cares. It’s their own business. But I am partial toward a penis, and mine is very pretty. I don’t think about my genitals, hardly at all ever—it’s not very interesting to me—but in the event that I do, I am fond of what I have. It’s kind of an ideal situation, really: I got all the parts I want off the à la carte menu—and all the best models at that.

Really, I’m just starting to like my body a lot. Which is so novel to me. And such a frickin’ relief.

With that established, a lot has happened over the last year. my body has changed so much, both in appearance and function. My relationship toward and concept of myself have transformed entirely. I am not the same person I was last spring, at all; that person’s time is well over. All of this has thrown what seemed like a fairly straightforward and boring relationship—this girl and her dick—into this great fog of uncertainty, and I’m not really sure where this is leading, if anywhere in particular. Ergo, I guess, finding words to think it through here.

Even that description, it indicates a thing that I guess I’ll get to in a minute, but first I feel like I need to set up the more practical elements.

Again, I really don’t… care, much, about this, beyond thinking that dicks are neat and liking mine in particular. I don’t and won’t have sex. Ever, under any circumstances. I barely ever masturbate anymore, which also comes to me as a tremendous relief! (Because, ew, fluids (except… not so much anymore).)

Which is to say, I sure do have full-on girldick going on at this point. In form and behavior, there’s been a big feminine shift. It feels different, responds differently; big change in character all around. All of which for me is somewhere between a shrug and a thumbs-up, right. It’s not doing those annoying things that I always wished it wouldn’t. It’s very polite. Still as pretty as ever. More so, even: better texture; no longer have to worry about semen—which I very do not miss! But again, I’m not really using it for anything, so ih, Whatever? Sure.

As incidental as this is to my life, it is emblematic of the way my body and mind are finally on the same page these days, agreeing on principle and acting more or less as one unit. There’s no longer this detached robot effect thing happening. What I am and who I am are intertwined. So on the one hand my genitals aren’t what they used to be; on the other, again neither am I. Beyond that hard existential hand-off that happened last August or so, there’s the much more current understanding that I am in fact a girl—a non-binary girl, yes, but there is no doubt.

Which is to say, I always have been of course. A girl, I mean. I just took a very long time to get to a place where I could wrap my head around the idea. Even after recognizing I was clearly not cisgender, I didn’t dare make this leap, as much as I wanted it to be true. It felt… preumptuous? Well, that’s my own neurosis. Point being, the psychodynamics here are very different from what they used to be—and what this thread is, is me trying to chip away at what the hell they may be angling toward.

In the past I’d sort of… not fully understood, even as I sympathized with, trans women who adopted other, often gendered, terminology toward their genitals. Again, lacking that dysphoria and actively liking the parts I had kinda made it not… land, for me personally. But there’s been this shift recently, and I feel like I recognize the pattern from my earlier slide into acknowledging my actual full-on gender.

For months before it clicked that I am and always have been a girl, I kept applying the term playfully, descriptively—in half-jest. Here it’s harder to grasp what i’m doing or why, But I have realized I’ve begun to feminize my anatomical terms. It’s one of those things where until I heard myself begin to verbalize them I didn’t notice that I had been using them internally. I’m searching back, and I don’t even know when it began.

It’s not consistent, either, as even this thread will show—and indeed will my reticence to actually write the things I’ve been thinking and saying to myself, without knowing quite why or how I got here. (Because… well. that’s my own business. And it’s confusing, and doesn’t matter in substance.)

Dancing around that little point, where we are is that I’m still in a situation where I am actively very fond of the genitals I have, right, to the extent that I care at all, but everything about the situation from the tangible to the emotional has become increasingly feminized.

So what’s going on here? Am I just being cute, the way I thought I was being cute in calling myself a girl—until I realized, oh wait, there’s a reason I keep asserting that, huh? The parts I’m referring to are very different from how they used to be, as is my working relationship with them. But, I don’t want anything different from them; that much is 100% definite. If anything, I only like them more than I did before. We’re certainly on better, uh, social terms, as these things go. They’re gorgeous; they’re a part of me. There’s no desire for an intervention whatsoever.

I guess what’s happening is I’m reinterpreting their meaning and purpose as I reinterpret my own. I think this may be related to the reclaiming—or I guess i should say claiming—of my body as my own; as an inextricable element of what it experientially is and means to be me. It feels arbitrary and peculiar to me that I would just start to think and use these terms in relation to myself. It’s unclear to me how or why i made this leap. It’s like… seriously, where did I pick that up, and why is my mind wanting to assert it? It feels a bit silly to me. But I think it’s to do with this ever-gathering holism to my relationship to myself. I guess now that it’s begun to click for me that I’m a girl, my perspective to a whole lot of things is just realigning, subconsciously—maybe experimentally, before I get to be aware of it. My subconscious presents me these experiments it’s been running, to test its ideas against the reality I’m living, and is like, okay, so what do we think about this, then? Does this make sense? And I’m all, huh?? Why are you handing me this? And my subconscious shrugs, and melts back into the shadows with a chuckle.

So I guess that may be what’s happening. I think I’m probably just quietly realigning a whole mess of things without actively trying to here, with the new information about who and what I always have been—and there are some… artifacts as a result, which will pop up. Every day I’m crunching through decades of misalignment, incorrect framing, misapprehension, that I’m whizzing through an effort to rebuild with the knowledge that I now have—with the understanding that I have always been a girl—which carries all of these major implications.

Alongside that, every day I’m growing closer to myself, more wholly integrated as a real person who actually exists in the world—so I guess subconsciously, there are some implications to my understanding of and relationship to some practical aspects of myself. Which doesn’t mean I’d materially want them to be any different—which I very much don’t. Especially now, after all these upgrades. It just means, I guess… I’m settling into myself? Starting to resolve my history and reality? Solving mysteries, rewriting history?

So. Okay. I’m not sure that this is the last word, but I think I’m a little clearer on what the hell my head is doing now.

And there’s your daily dose of awkward content. Enjoy.

Filling the Void

  • Reading time:4 mins read

To own myself is to unlock so much that had been inaccessible to me. So many thoughts and ideas, so much of my understanding of the world and my relationships to others. And it all started with my aroaceness. Through that came enough of a sense of bodily autonomy and self-possession to permit me access to my gender, some aspects of my neurology, and everything else that defines me as a person.

It’s funny. I didn’t really want to be in the romantic or sexual relationships I have been; I just felt like I didn’t have a choice, right? That it was what was wanted from me, was the trade-off I had to make for retaining those… what-I-thought-were friendships.

I didn’t so much consent as relent. I gave myself up—or I suppose just handed myself over, from where the last owner left me. I didn’t feel like I had any real agency over myself. I knew I was always wrong about everything, and I didn’t want to upset anyone because of my hang-ups or preferences, which I knew didn’t matter.

And it sucked. A lot. I hated the expectations. I hated being objectified. I hated the constant criticism and judgment. I hated having no control over my body or my mind or my life. I hated having everything I cared about diminished and demeaned, all my principles dismissed.

Sex was upsetting on so many levels. I couldn’t manage spending every waking moment worrying about someone else’s actions and feelings and well-being, and getting nothing but contempt in return; that raw disgust and fury at my just… being a real person, and not some fantasy idol.

In hindsight, somewhere in the deep recesses of my subconscious, I think beyond the toxic decayed friendship that offered me nothing in the end, the thing I wound up clinging to in each case, that intoxicated me enough to freak me out over losing, was their femininity—being in its aura, right? I was too meek to engage with it much, but there were all their girl things all around me. There they were, as a point of study; something I could never be, never have for myself, in a way that felt almost unfair. But I could do osmosis.

(Though sex and physicality freaked me out, I also did find boobs hilarious and fun—another thing to low-key envy.)

And yes, all my past partners—all those I will ever have—were cis women, though they needn’t have been. That they were is largely due to the circumstance of they being the ones to have pursued me; in part because of internalized homophobia; in part because I just… I think had all that unsettled business, existentially. I saw in them some part of what it hurt so much that I was not.

I guess it’s probably no accident that embracing my own femininity led almost directly into realizing all my tertiary attractions were pretty much regardless of gender. Once I had filled that void in my life, it was easier to step back and take measure.

Now that I understand I am my own girl, I’ve got no special need to live vicariously—so that weirdness is cleared up. I am the person I want to be now, or am on my way at least—so what narrow confused longing there was is gone, and what attraction I do feel, it’s free to be all about individual appreciation of the other, on merit.

People are just people, right? There’s so little that separates or distinguishes us except for who we are, and how we choose to behave—and that’s the power, the energy that generates beauty. Now that I’m on my way to being a complete person, it’s harder to discriminate—except in the sense that romance is dumb and sex is gross, and I have no desire for either. We really love to brand and package love in this culture. There are so many other, more interesting, more constructive ways to appreciate people. To show and receive affection.

I feel like I have missed out on a lot of meaningful connection, a lot of mutual support and fondness and care and joy, from playing other people’s games for so long. I want to learn how to love in my own way—a way without conditions or performance or… bodily fluids.

I feel like the world kind of needs it too.

A Cultural Divide

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I genuinely have never known what it’s like to be male. I was never raised as “culturally male,” as the TERfs would have it. I have never had any interest in masculinity. I have my whole life shied away from thinking of myself or being classed as a dude. I just never quite understood why it bothered me.

I had no connection with any gender, really. I tolerated other people’s assumptions about me, though it made me feel gross—but I had none of my own. The start of my transition was me, recognizing and accepting and exploring this lack of a relationship and what it might mean for me.

My gender is a bit weird and wibbly still, but I do have one now. That’s the thing, though—in every way that matters to me, this is my first gender; my only one. The one that’s always been latent, and that I’ve spent the last couple years grasping toward. It’s still a work in progress to define it and understand how it applies to my life. but it’s not a moving target. It’s always been pretty stable, even when I’ve had no active connection with it.

In a sense it feels funny I’m considered trans, as I’m not really transitioning from anything that I think of as real. It’s more a matter of finally paying attention and growing into myself, after putting it off for my whole life.

This is the only me there has been. Yeah there was this protective husk, stumbling around for decades. but that wasn’t me. It was the parcel post shipping container. It had no awareness, no sense of self. It didn’t feel anything, want anything. It was just layers of swaddling, to get me through the long exchange.

I don’t know anything about my assigned gender beyond what I can read in a book or see on a screen. Experientially I can’t tell you how it feels any more than I can describe what microwaves look like. It’s an alien concept. It has nothing to do with me.

Rounding the Curve

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On one of the many occasions I had to drag myself out of bed last night to pee, I glanced at the mirror and—heck, my side-boob is looking really nice. There are all these artful curves now that I didn’t notice before. That whole arc from the armpit, down and under, is all filling out in this neat way. Gee whiz.

I’ve talked a little of the stages, where first all this mass builds up—this rough heap of tissue—then more recently that tissue has started to take more definite shape. Where there had been lumps, we’re starting to sculpt all that same stuff into more confident curves. It’s this slow process, hard to really notice day-to-day; hard to measure. Then one morning at 3 am you look at your tits from a new angle and realize, whoa. How long has that been a thing? It’s so fascinating!

And for that matter, since when did my butt look like this? The heck? That kinda came out of nowhere. Even when I stretch into a more masculine posture—which is starting to feel a little awkward now—there it is. It’s just, there are these curves now. All over the darned place.

Then, it’s a work in progress, but—I’ve always worn tights or stockings under my skirts, right. Beyond the whole issue of cold, I’ve just been deeply insecure about my legs my whole life. Like, it really really bothers me. And now, it’s… not terrible?? I yanked my tights off, and I was like: huh!

I’m not gonna say they’re rocking my, uh, socks off… aside from… my… just… doing that. But, it’s not making me want to die, to look at them! They’re just sort of there, and fine, and whatever.

So. That’s… something. I guess?

The birthmarks still make me feel weird, and there’s no real doing anything about them. But again, better. I’m starting to look almost look human!

I guess it has been a year, huh. A year and a day.

Happy birthday to me.