Seeing inside the gender divide as a trans person…and a story of hot s@x

The topic of feminism comes up often enough on this blog.  In a way, if there is an underlying theme that connects everything here, it is one of female empowerment.  On the face of it, totally uncontroversial.  Yet, the reality is that there are few things which are more difficult and fundamental to human society and the modern world.

Indeed, if I were to distil the biggest issues facing humanity today, alongside environmental devastation, income inequality I would class the issue of emancipation, equity, freedom of women as equal to those.  It is a touchstone for all marginalized people and the discriminated against.  But the irony is that the perpetrators are committing an act of self-harm.  In fact, that it is a common thread to all three of these issues.

Ask the Kings and Queens of France after they have lost their heads whether inequality was an issue.  The transgender debate is just one facet of a ‘let them eat cake’ moment we are experiencing, a kind of pressure cooker build-up that sweeps along with it all forms of bigotry and hatred of the other.  They are not acceptable under any circumstances, but things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better.

Okay.  That’s my rant.

Feminism for someone who was assigned male at birth (AMAB) can be as big an issue for a male as a female or for anyone inbetween.  Many feminists, so-called TERFs, don’t accept that non-uterine women or the allies of all women might be on the same page…perhaps for different reasons, but still on the same page—ie. not worth kicking out.  I suspect they will come around eventually…the LGBTQIA movement in its various guises had something similar going on until each letter was added and the rainbow was established.

I railed against being male as I grew up.  I hated it.  I hated what was expected of me, how I had to be, what I had to do, the interpretation of how those outward signifiers had anything to do with my inner landscape.

They did not.

In the end, I studied an obscure branch of philosophy which was all about gender representation, sexism, feminism, power.  It was a way of dealing with and processing my unhappy place in the puzzle.  On a practical level, despite being outwardly attractive (a male model gives off the right signifiers), I was hopelessly shy around women.  Part of that was that “informed consent” was part of my DNA before we talked about stuff like that.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss her, it was that making a move was like being a guy, and I didn’t want to be like a guy.  I wanted her to jump me, to pin me down, and fxxk my brains out.

I was a party in NYC once, and speaking to my best friend and flatmate.  I was perhaps 21 years old then.  There was a stunning woman across the room from us.  It was a crowded place, but as I turned to my friend and uttered these words, somehow she read my lips…

“I bet she fxxks like a banshee,” I said to him.  I think he just said uh-oh, as this woman turned her attention to me and fixed me with her gaze.  It was as if she was an eagle perched on the edge of her nest, tearing some little rabbit apart, when she looked up, looked at me, and the room disappeared.

Without looking at her friend, she said, “hang on, I’m on a mission.”  She walked across the room, grabbed me by the throat and said, “you’re coming with me.”

It was a 3^rd floor walk-up in one of those industrial buildings in lower Manhattan that had one long stairwell with metal-capped stairs.  Before we had gone more than 5 steps, she was on top of me, her leather trench coat billowing around us, and I was on my back, sliding, in my own leather and jeans, as she rode me slowly down the stairs, pulling my hair, clawing at my chest, and biting at my lips.

“Where do you live?”

“Brooklyn,” I said.

We piled into a cab.  “Brooklyn,” she said.  I was scratched and bleeding, half naked by the time we got to my place and piled out.  I lived on the top floor with the friend I had left at the party.  I had one side of the floor through, he had the other.  Our clothes were soon on the floor and she had my face pinned down to the bed with her hand on my neck.  She was physical and dominant and exultant as she took total possession of my body.

The next day as she gathered her things and looked on me with benign amusement, I asked, “what’s your name?”

“I’m getting married tomorrow.  This was a one-off,” she said.

“Oh my,” I said, “you’re beautiful,” and then she slipped away forever.

“Well?” my friend asked over breakfast.  It was complicated.  A woman like that made it okay for me to be a man.  She was an animal, and it made me an animal.  I could be fully in my male self, both predator and prey, because she was so fully in her own sexual power.  There are very few women in my life I have encountered quite like that.

I wonder if more women would be like that, actually feel like that, but it gets strangled out of them by society.

And it touches on a conundrum I felt acutely in my teen and college years, early years dating.  Times are changing now, but then, I certainly felt that by being a submissive man, and by being unwilling to play the aggressive male in a courtship dance, that I was missing out.  And it bothered me that alongside the political narrative of feminism wasn’t a consequent (or at least my perception of it) narrative of liberated female sexuality.

What kicked this off for me?

Last night, I went on a date with a beautiful woman.  We have been getting to know each other gradually, and last night she invited me over to her house to cook for me and then managed to get me to cook for her.  It was pretty easy.  She knows I’m a slave.  “I think this dominatrix stuff sounds kind of fun,” she said at one point.

We were talking about gender politics.  She had asked what led to my transition, and had also asked about what drew me to BDSM.  Without going into the details and repeating posts that have covered that topic ad nauseum, I referenced hating men and the reasons why.  And she had the most unexpected and enlightening response.

“I hate women,” she said.  “I don’t trust them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, men have never hurt me in the way that women have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Female rage is insidious, nasty, unprovoked, often found on jealousy.  It exists to tear you down,” she said.  I wrote about this recently.  “Women compete with other women.  They’re nastiness is born out of negativity.”

“But men are pretty rotten too.”

“Not in the same way.  Men are straightforward.  They will commiserate with me when some woman has gotten into a jealous rage and stabbed me in the back.”

“They just want to get into your knickers.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s based on desire.  On a positive energy.  Yes, men are dogs, in that they are like simple animals.  You can count on that.  But it is done out of love, or desire, and those are positive energies.  Yes, sometimes they get carried away, but it is very different than female rage which is about destruction not desire.”

I’d never heard such words before, but it was immensely soothing to me, even if it came decades too late.

It certainly explained my own behaviour, with my regulation focussed on making sure I was not the one to initiate no matter how I felt.  But it also made me think a little less ill of the men who transmit this energy and the women who receive it and accept it.  It was an eye-opener.

Is any of this novel to you?