For decades I have been trying to let go of my kinky self. I remember telling my therapist in my 20’s, the one who “cured” me of self-destructive, self-harming, and occasionally suicidal tendences, that I didn’t want to be kinky anymore…that I just wanted to be able to lie with a woman and be with her, totally present, totally attentive, and totally in the moment.
In conversation with my favourite therapist, we explored this very topic in depth. And I wonder, how many people with paraphilias of one kind or another spend years in therapy, or years with guilt and shame. How much horribly twisted and sad energy that is, to wish to carve out a piece of ourselves and trash it.
Losing shame
I just didn’t want it, wanted it to go away. In the end, it didn’t. What happened is that I stopped being ashamed. How? In my case, it wasn’t therapy. It was being with a sex worker (or two) who was totally okay with it, and played with me in those ways, and talked to me about the feelings associated, and this just kind of unblocked things.
Fetishism
I am a baby. I know that. I will always be a baby. That finds me in diapers from time to time. It finds me needing or wanting the comfort of being babied from time to time. It comes on strongest when I am under serious pressure. It used to crowd into my head at the most inopportune moments.
The number of times I was making a speech in my early career and just kept thinking of how badly I just wanted to be swaddled or to be in diapers. The number of difficult executive meetings I have been in, grilled by hostile or demanding bosses and just seeing these visions of myself diapered on the boardroom table, gurgling, and them laughing. Oh man. It was quite distracting.
But over time, such thoughts have crowded my mind less and less. In truth, over many years, this has been falling away…falling away to the point where I no longer “needed it”. And somehow, this has definitively gone with the indulgences of a dominatrix, who let it have its expression…and in so doing, she helped unblock what is happening with me now. I wrote about the bottle she fed me once, and how that seems to have changed the course of my life, leading ultimately to where I am now, in a state of physical and emotional transition from male to female.
And yet, while all other aspects of my sexuality have been in serious flux, especially the way I feel about submission, what I have noticed is that this part of me is still very much here. But what is different is that I don’t need it anymore. I like it. It is comforting to know it is there. I am also able to talk about it more freely and have opened up about it easily at least to some people—therapists, sex workers, true confidantes…and honestly, that is quite big, because I spent years in therapy dancing around it without really talking about it. Even with the first dominatrix I played with, it took me 6 months to have the “courage” to play in that way with her.
I don’t really understand why I didn’t want to ever go to see a dominatrix/mommy that specialises in this kind of play, and instead opted for a “generalist”. I guess that it was the purity of female power that I was looking for rather than the fulfilment of my own sexual desires. And something I don’t really fully understand, but now, during transition, I can imagine myself going to see such a mommy type and just having a darn good time. What’s different? I would be able for the first time to be out of my head and just inside the fantasy for that little while…and the difference? It would be “safe” to do so now, because I believe that I have mastered those aspects of me that cause it or derive from it.
Now you know why my favourite therapist is my favourite. She is piercingly effective despite being totally inappropriate.
Oestrogen is opening the door to what I always wanted
In the past two years, I realised that my primary love language is physical touch. I can thank sex workers for that, one of whom in particular was the first person in my life who had free and natural access to my body and whose touch was welcome on my skin.
Oestrogen has upped the ante. My skin is alive in ways that are totally new to me. I sleep naked for the first time in my life. I am not ashamed of my naked body for the first time in my life. I touch myself all over sensually for the first time in my life. And I can’t stop. My Queen has told me that she does the same. I crave touch. I crave to touch. I crave to twist my body and intertwine with another sensual soul and to get lost in the feeling of our skin gently grazing and caressing as we explore each other’s bodies. That, for me, is sex.
There is something else that oestrogen is doing which is the emotional equivalent of touch. I crave emotional connection. Intimacy. I believe that I was already like this quite a bit, more than is typical for a male-wired member of the human race. But this has kicked into overdrive.
These things sound stereotypically female. I hate uttering a sentence like that, but when I think of how we might interpret how so many women describe attraction, sex, and sexuality, it is very often founded on these things—emotional connection and physical touch. And what my limited experience thus far is showing me, is that women’s emotional range and sense of physical sensation is much deeper and broader.
Being a teenaged girl and experiencing second puberty
What is happening to my mind and my body is what is described in transgender circles as a “second puberty”. What differs between this puberty and the first one is the sense of trauma that accompanied it, which was unique to this “boy” in the sense that it dragged me firmly from a state of acceptable androgyny to one of masculinity. But also, what might be in common with any cis person experiencing puberty without dysphoria, there is awkwardness, self-consciousness that is present in first puberty, but absence in second puberty. Yes, I love being validated, but I don’t have any of the anxiety (or spots), that I had the first time around.
Instead, what I am feeling is a very different kind of being “sexed up”…”horny”…which in my case seems to be a desire to be caressed. The kitten/lioness/cat metaphor is hitting me hard. I just want to purr all day. Boy me just wanted to be a puppy.
The other thing that is going on is that my body is totally new to me. I’ve written about how sensation and skin are changing. So too are the ways in which I smell. For one, a lot less. And yes, it is true, that the male bits begin to smell like female bits on oestrogen. This stuff is some powerful magic juice.
And then there is the most obvious change of all. My breasts. They are very tender. When I bang into things, which seems like pretty often, I feel them shouting out loud and clear. They are so sensitive, however, that wearing a shirt without some kind of bra or camisole, can be slightly painful. The milk ducts are forming. The nipples are 2-3x larger than they used to be. They show darker, and through my shirt almost always. And, well, they are growing. One of my sons boasted that his male boobs (he lifts weights) were bigger than mine. No longer. Plus mine jiggle. And being a total exercise bunny, I am finding that running without a bra is painful.
What is my new sexuality?
Cuddling. Hugging. Holding someone. Being held. Touching. Gentle exploration.
I kissed someone intimately for the first time in 15 years a few days ago, and it was completely different. My lips did not seek hers in the same way as they might have in man-days. They were soft, more hesitant, gingerly exploring hers, with seemingly so much more motility. It was quite extraordinary—as if they had a life of their own.
Everything is new. Bliss.
Beyond Non-Binary 
8 thoughts