Transgender surprise and the changing nature of the erotic

Men and women are not the same.  In both small ways and large, we are quite different from one another.  I say this having been both man and trans-woman.  And these reflections on changes I am experiencing have brought me closer to women, but also on a path to finding a changed relationship with men.

I do have some wonderful legacy male friendships.  They will survive my transition even though the things we do together might change. Will I make new ones? Unlikely.  One takes for granted such simple things as going out to dinner.  I might not care, I don’t, about what it “looks like” to be a trans woman out for a dinner with a man.  Despite not a whiff of sexual attraction between us, the perception will be that we are on a “date”.  I can play with that, but I think many men would struggle.  Even old friends.  Others would struggle and not want to, so would go through with it anyway, but still feel slightly uncomfortable.  And there is a third bunch: men who would seek to make “tolerance” propaganda out of an evening out with me.  Curiously, these were the men that I was not really “friends” with even though we might have both mutually said so.  You know the type.  The non-friend, friend.

This is in contrast to women, where things done together as options have massively expanded.  There is little we can’t do together now, including peeing together.  A first for me.

I have been wildly horny of late.  Some of this is my natural cycle, yes, transwomen also cycle even if we don’t bleed.  Some of it is also the doubling of my oestrogen levels advocated by my new endocrinologist.  Apart from driving an increase in my energy levels, in my overtly performative femininity (it is affecting my “affect”, my behaviour).  It is also affecting quite dramatically my perception of my own body, how delicious it feels to live in it as it transforms.  And it is affecting what I look like.  It is as if the feminising powers of oestrogen have kicked into overdrive.  People are gendering me female more and more, and sometimes when I look at selfies now I cannot believe what I am seeing.

But the most powerful effect of all has been my libido.  It is not male hunger that I feel.  I feel it even without a genital response.  I feel instead a dull ache in my whole body.  That makes it sound unpleasant or painful.  It isn’t.  It is pleasurable.  It is a state of intense readiness.  It is the sex version of fight-or-flight.  What shall we call it?  Priming the pump?

The female gaze feels different to me than the male gaze.  My experience of it both as man and as trans woman is that it is an “open” look, a curious one, one that seems in an instant to conjure up deep curiosity, possibility, indulgence, and it nearly always ends with a sidewards glance and smile.

And that is what the new version of horny is.  I don’t want to fxxk or possess or have my kink needs met.  I want to be eaten alive, to be possessed, to be scratched, but also to be held, touched, caressed.  I have described life with a female brain as infinitely more complex and nuanced than life with a male brain.  In this aspect, desire, for example, a male brain reminds me of black and white, “I want what I want, and that’s what I want.”  The female brain is far more malleable, desire is more malleable, changing.  It seems to depend so much more on the situation, the partner, the ambience, the mood, the general feeling. 

This extends to all thought patterns.  If the male brain has the sophistication of a piano key board in its ability to express itself, shifting from this to the female brain has taught me that not only are there several additional octaves of keys above and below the standard piano, but that ever key has several keys between it and the next.  In other words, fluid, complex, much more nuanced.

On my morning run today around the Boboli gardens and up and down the Arno, through the deserted morning streets of Florence, I could feel the mist on my naked skin as if it were a caress on my legs, arms, face.  I could feel it.  As a boy, I would have never felt this, but now it was as if the air was fuelling my desire, and that the atmosphere was touching me.  It was bliss.

Last night I went to an event.  I used to never go to events on my own.  Same for meals.  I just didn’t like that kind of thing.  I prefer to be social in social environments.  But I am tired of not doing things.  That was life married to a stick in the mud.  And if I am going to meet new people I am not going to meet them staying at home or doom-scrolling on social media.  Nope, it is out I must go.  

Well, I am sure glad that I did.  It was a magnificent evening.  A sparky woman struck up conversation with me before I had even crossed the velvet rope—she was already inside and enjoying herself.  And we had a lovely chat.  She was very attractive and bubbly, quite friendly and forward.  But when we went inside we somehow got separated and she ended up at the far end of the bar and was talking with a good-looking man.

You’d think I was disappointed.  I wasn’t.  Right before I went in I noticed a woman on her own, tall like me, eyeing me, and then circling me.  And just after I dropped off my coat and stepped to the bar, she was there talking to me.  In the old days, “chatting up” a woman was something you did until you got a number and then who knows what might happen after.  But she was different.  I guess I’m different.

Part of me was conscious that she was one of the most beautiful women there, and certainly the most striking.  And that people were looking at us.  Men circled her, perhaps more urgently than they might have were I man.  But she flirted with nobody but me.  And indeed, she kept me by her side all night long.  And for once in my life, I wasn’t a butterfly.  I stayed.  I didn’t even look around.  Well, not really.  But when the most beautiful woman in the entire place has decided that she wants to talk you, dine with you, enjoy the evening with you, then you let it happen.

It was unreal the common things we found, the interests, the connections.  And at the end of the evening when she asked for my number, I have it gladly and she gave me hers.  She was mysterious and charming, and we had wonderful conversation and laughter all night long.

She also touched me all the time.  Stood close or sat close at the table so that her arms brushed against mine.  As a boy that used to mean intent.  As a trans woman I don’t know what it means.  It means comfort for one…and that is the most important thing.  And she understood that I don’t like boys, that I like women, and she like me is beginning to explore what it might mean to dominate men.  I was set for a wonderful evening, but sometimes the right company can make things feel epic.  The universe was smiling.