The Erotic path to God

Sex, gender and the two types of sexuality.

Few people would objectively state that Shame is a healthy feeling.  After they endorsed the concept that shame was unhealthy, they might go on to say, ‘but in certain circumstances, it is healthy’.  Depending on their world view those might include doing harm, stealing, having bad thoughts.  You name it.

But many would also include sexuality.  All aspects.  Our bodies, especially the intimate parts.  Buth the last I checked, we all have bodies.  We all have intimate parts.  In Feminist theory, one hypothesis is that body shame and sexual shame exist to control women.  All of us really.  This stems from a religious moral code that is afraid of the ferocity of female sexuality.

This is not a rant about feminism or morality.  What it is is an exploration of what sexuality is, and how important it is to liberate ourselves from shame.  More importantly, what is the purpose of sexuality in life?

Let us separate sexuality from procreation.  Some may believe that copulation is the highest form of procreation, and that procreation is the purpose of life, but they are sad souls who live in a mechanistic-deterministic paradox.  Pleasure is the essence of life, especially in the Lacanian sense of jouissance.

If the purpose of sexuality was simply procreation, then there would only be heteronormative-copulative sexuality.  It ain’t so.  Sexuality comes in every colour of the rainbow, every shape and size, for a big reason.  To connect us to each other.  For us to find love, for us to find a partner, partners, with whom we can experience ecstasy.  For the purpose of the procreators, a child must be the product of ecstasy.  Spiritual and physical.  And there is no shame in experiencing ecstasy.

Sexual ecstasy and sexuality are the most powerful energetic forces we have as humans.  To experience it is to know it.  Everything else is a faint signal in comparison.  Even hunger is mild in comparison.  Telepathy, very faint for most.  Feeling energy fields, reading rooms, reading minds, feeling the energy of those around us.  All of these things are beautiful, spiritual, or delicious bodily sensations.

Sexual desire, however, is of another order.  It has the power to bend our minds.  It has the power to shape our lives and destinies.  It totally and utterly shapes who we choose as partners, who we are attracted to, who we like to be around.  And that is for everyone.  But only a few have learned, either consciously or unconsciously, that sexuality is put in our hands with the intensity that it has for one true purpose, to connect us with the Divine.  Sex feelings are the portal to God, in whatever shape or form you believe.

I spend my mornings in silent contemplation.  Writing, exercising, living in the quiet of my home.  I rise before dawn and enjoy the silence and a delicious concoction which sets me for the day.  Chaos reigns in my house at the moment.  Magical human helped me push the boat out some time ago when she asked me to write down my life goals, and then worked with me on them over a period of 6 months.  Some of you will know who that is.

But what is happening in my life for many different reasons—connecting to my truth, divorce which is liberating me to pursue it, my increasing openness to the world and its energies…these things are all now taking shape and growing.  The immediate manifestation of this is the glorious and joyful energy in my house.  I will never understand why my wife chose to abandon the family home and move into a little runt of a house.  In doing so, she lost a critical connection to our children, who like to come home.  And it is the greatest gift I have had in the past two years, that home for them is where Trans Daddy lives.

Being a domestic Goddess is my Dharma.  For those of you who don’t truck with such phrases, or don’t know what they are, I don’t really know so much either.  But I do know that I am living my purpose, following my path.  And that is why life is coming into alignment.

What’s happening in my house?  Lot’s of people.  They keep strange hours, so do I, and it seems that we ration each other.  Everyone does their own thing, but we coalesce around the table once a day to break bread together and discuss whatever.  Star Child and I have been taking walks and exploring many topics, mostly related to spiritual or creative endeavours.  She is helping me think through something I have in mind which brings these interests together around wellness, a theme which I am increasingly drawn to.

Star Child and I are not intimate, and yet that there is a growing understanding between us about our respective desires and sexualities that make us able to understand and engage with one another more effectively.  It is very comforting to be seen and interacted with as a slave, and to have that be perfectly normal, even if, and especially if, I am not a slave to her.  It is being seen, and being seen without shame.

Sex and Gender and the Two Types of Sexuality

For the sake of clarity, I define sex as our biological bodies, which we all know do not come is just male and female forms, but also intersex (1.5% of the populace).  What we also know is that there are many male and female bodies which don’t “work” in the sense that the deterministic-mechanistic evangelists would have us believe: there are many men who are infertile and many women as well.  There can also be structural issues with our respective plumbing which puts paid to the possibility of successful reproduction.  This can be devastating.

Gender is about identity.  Sense of self.  How we feel in our bodies.  Many conflate sex and gender.  We do have two words, however, for this reason.  They are not the same.  Perhaps having sex and sexuality coming from the same root is problematic, confusing.  Our sexuality is our source of desire.  That is not necessarily rooted in biological sex.  It may be more rooted in gender.

There are two kinds of sexuality: structural and relational.  Structural sexuality speaks of orientation and is innate.  We are born attracted to women, to men, to both.  This is not learned behaviour.  It is a kind of playing field, setting the bounds within which one can find sexual joy and comfort.  The other kind of sexuality is relational and is a learned form of attraction based on our life experiences.  We get turned on by things because of what happens in our lives.

I wasn’t born wanting to be a baby, wanting to wear diapers.  This was a trauma response.  As I grew up and recognised that, I was able to strip away those aspects of that which held me back, to let go of the trauma.  I had help, knew that I couldn’t do that on my own.

Kink, as an orientation, has both structural and relational elements to it.  In my own life, being submissive, being a slave, is a by-product of being born male in a society that is fundamentally discriminatory towards the female.  For me, submission was an apology.  I could not be with a woman unless she knew that I rejected the manosphere.  And indeed, I didn’t want to be with a woman who inhabited it.  [Star Child is one who inhabits the manosphere, and this has been a wonderfully enlightening part of our relationship].

Sticking with the personal.  I was born with an innate attraction to women.  As a trans woman this does not change.  So many people don’t understand that, assume that this journey is about preparing my body and my mind for men.  I do know that many trans women post transition switch to male partners.  The stigma of shame kept them from being gay men, and when they change their bodies they feel it is okay.  I don’t know whether this is enough of a force to drive someone to change sex, but it is a fairly common narrative.

I also know trans women who have not begun their journeys, whose “eggs have not cracked” and others who are further along, but who are resolutely attracted to men.  With one, I had an enlightening conversation.

“I hesitated to meet you because I am not so comfortable around gay men,” I said.

“I’m not a gay man,” they said.  This gorgeous person sitting next to me, however, is an ex-soldier, body still rippling with military discipline.  Beautiful, unquestionably male.  But I have also seen her, when she is transformed, and few people have the same extraordinary androgynous beauty.

They explained to me what I already know, that dysphoria, the disconnect between gender and sex, which is the definition of being transgender, has nothing to do with sexuality.

This is also why there is a sometimes-strong oil-vinegar reaction between transvestites and transgender people.  Transvestitism is a sexual fetish—a person who finds a sexual thrill, is turned on, by the clothes that are associated with the opposite sex.  Interestingly, most transvestites are straight.  Also interestingly, some transgender people “discover” their gender identity through dress-up.  Sometimes our subconscious helps us find our way.

This was not my path, which began with an all-consuming existential ache to be female, to be the ultimate expression of female to my child mind, a ballerina, and led me into wearing ballerina’s clothes and shutting my eyes, drifting off to sleep, and hoping to wake up as a ballerina.  That this ‘secret’ which was sacred and private to me should become a tool that my mother used to wound me is a pity.  But thankfully, the ballerina is finally born.  No amount of suffering will keep me from my ballet classes.  They have become so important to me that I won’t even move from where I live in part because of them.

Structural sexuality is therefore the container one likes—boys, girls, both…and relational sexuality is about how one is turned on by relating to them.  Do I just like to connect?  Do I want a power exchange?  Do I want to engage with a Mommy or Daddy figure?  Do I want a spanking?  Do I want the sexual-playful dynamic of our relationship to exist in the bedroom only or do I want it to be central to our lives?

Sexuality as spiritual path

So far, so good.  As described above, our sexuality helps us to connect to others for mutual joy and ecstasy.  Its force is so powerful that it can also just as easily totally mess up our relations.  Its force is so powerful that it amplifies feelings of betrayal and anger and even disgust when we are rejected by a partner.  

But there is more.  Sexual ecstasy is the closest we come to bliss on earth.  And I am not talking about orgasmic joy.  We can masturbate our way to that, but that brings us no closer to the divine.  What brings us closer to the divine is when we are able to tap into our sexual energy and to use it as a force to guide our lives, our interactions with others, at once grounding us in our humanity, and also leading us to our purpose in life.  

Our Dharma, our path, the meaning of our lives lies in our sexual energy.

First, we have a duty to heal.  To ourselves.  Sexuality is the greatest tool we have to both identify what has hurt us and what it takes to get rid of it.  It is a system of both trauma identification and resolution.  Being embodied is a form of trauma for our souls.  Coming to earth to live, to be as we are, is at its very root, a traumatic experience.  Many believe that our souls chose a particular manifestation because however we became embodied was related to the experiences our soul felt it should have, wanted…to learn, to grow.  On top of how we manifest physically is what happens when we interact with other embodied souls.

This process leads to an accumulation of challenges, which can be trauma or not, and they can overwhelm us, or we can learn to cope with or even overcome them.  What turns us on is the roadmap to salvation.  A rape victim who is turned on by rape fantasies does not want to be raped, but is being shown the path out.  Rape fantasy as a common response among women to living in a patriarchal society, itself a form of rape, is completely understandable in this context.  A woman’s desire to wear sexy clothes, or to be in a skimpy bikini is not an advertisement (which is why the whole “she was asking for it” is so deeply misguided), it is a manifestation of her desire to assert control, to demand bodily autonomy.

Why did I become a baby?  Because the attachment and attunement so necessary for child development didn’t happen in my life.  The fetish of diapers and the smell of baby powder became signposts for me into a feeling that I needed.  They were signposts towards the powerful healing I needed in life.  And indeed, when I look at my friendships, the people I have loved, the people who I surround myself with, they are all gentle people.  And they are in my life because they are gentle to me, as I to them.  Anyone who is mean or cruel is discarded…and you know what?  That goes for family, it goes for Dommes, it goes for colleagues.  It included my mother.

I have talked about being poor at managing my own boundaries.  I continue to work on this.  But this particular manifestation of throwing out the bad apples, was a coping mechanism without nuance that had to be in place because I couldn’t figure out how else to deal with mean people.  And unfortunately, this also included people who were a little bit mean.  And there’s no going back for me.  While everyone has a default positive starting place of trust, once you’re out, you’re out.  I have one friend who does have a mean and cruel streak, and who has had opportunity to hurt me.  He knows.  And yet he also knows that our friendship would die in an instant if he turned his sharp tongue to me.  And we have managed to stay very close for over 30 years, through all kinds of ups and downs, because he knows how vulnerable I am.

What does all of this mean?  It is possible to get through life and to enjoy life without ever questioning the self, questioning our desire, our sexuality, the meaning which lies behind it.  And there is perhaps nothing wrong with that.  But it also feels like an opportunity not taken.  A gift ignored.  Isn’t that a shame?  Shouldn’t we use our gifts?

We can wallow in the tape of our sexual fantasy, watching it over and over again, going back to visit the same themes.  But this feels stuck.  What if we use it instead to pry ourselves open, to show others who we are, to use it to understand what we need, what we really need, and how we relate to others.

I am a baby.  I don’t mean it in the sense of childish behaviour or an inability to take care of myself.  I don’t mean it in the sense of a fetish which needs fulfilment in order for me to get off.  I mean it in the sense of wonder on life and people.  I mean it in taking innocent joy from what happens, about how food tastes, about laughter.  And most of all I mean it in how I wish to be with someone sexually.  To see them as they are, beyond their skin, beyond their shape, to feel their energy, their aura, and to play.

As I become more open about this aspect of my life and find that I can strip away the noise of fetishism and go to the root, it is that in intimacy, I want that harmonic thrumming that comes when two people are aligned in love-sex feeling.  But this also applies to how I interact with my friends, wanting this same innocent joy.  Doing things for them, caring for them, and feeling it flow towards me.

This is a path to enlightenment.  Sexuality is a great way to talk to God.