How becoming a Sex Worker is one of the most empowering things in my life

Okay.  I am overwhelmed by Impostor Syndrome.  That’s when you feel a fraud.  I get that feeling all the time as a dominatrix.  Performance anxiety on hyper-drive.  The hardest part is the context—the moment when I have to come across all competent and cool is the moment when I am most scared of failing.

Apparently, this is more common amongst women.  So I can at least take the perverse pleasure of finding affirmation in the agony.  And agony it is.  I confessed this feeling to the dominatrix who I admire most and care most for.

Her words?  “It never goes away.  It’s what is going to make you good at this.  Just ride it.”

Sometimes I cry at “inappropriate” times.  With my voice coach the other day, it just came out.  You might ask why, but my voice coach teaches me much more than voice.  She is a specialist in working with trans women.  Learning the voice isn’t the hard part.  The hard part is grounding ourselves enough as women to feel comfortable in the identity that our new voice represents.

I think my voice has changed a bit.  Not as much as it does during vocal therapy.  The time when I most consciously use my female voice is when I am on the phone.  The other time is when I am working as a dominatrix.

A cherished SW planted a seed with me when she talked about her brand as something which is also aspirational for herself.  That she really likes being the person that she has created.  Another SW friend pointed out to me the prevalence with theatre/acting backgrounds who are drawn to the profession.  It makes sense.  Lot’s of sense.

The thought resonates with me enormously.  When I think of my “brand” as a dominatrix, how I wish to be with clients, the kind of work I would like to do, it centers around of the kind of woman I want to be.

The irony is that clients are under the mistaken impression that this persona is created for them.  The male gaze only ever considers the world in its own image.  Are all men solipsists?  Of course not, but you get it.  I create my persona for me.

Maybe some people create a persona for the client.  And there is most certainly a temptation to do so, if not a level of flirtation that creates the magic between an inhabited persona and the client—the space for the fantasy to take life.

In the end, if our persona is not true to who we are, I fear burnout is the result.  Toxicity is going to exist everywhere, but it will be a lot harder to deal with when it is in relation to something about me that I am not even genuine about.

My reality is that I am shy.  I am not particularly assertive.  I am gentle.  Sensuous.  Kind.  Some of these things are not an obvious fit with being a bad bitch.  Some are.  I am certainly bossier as a domme, assertive, outspoken, commanding.

Thank goodness I have been able to work with some very experienced ladies in this world.  It is incredibly helpful to watch them, be pushed by them, to see how they interact with subs, and how they course correct me, encourage me.  It is just a bit like getting pushed out of the nest over and over again.

Learning by doing.  It is the only way.  I don’t learn well any other way.

One of my first clients is a very talented and gorgeous woman.  Let us call her Angel.  By all accounts Angel is an enormously self-possessed and successful woman.  Why is she drawn to me?  Certainly not to be beaten up.  And she has no love interest in me.  I met her socially, and she was visibly disappointed that I am trans, for she likes men.  But she suffers with man after man.

Do I have any business working with her on the psychic plumbing that our relationship requires.  I asked her to be in therapy, because there are plenty of things I cannot address with her.  But what I can do is cultivate her own ability to discipline herself.  Never mind that this is delivered through rope and other forms of bondage, sensual touch, and caressing words.

She is with me because I am inside her, working with her, for her, helping her find her own feet, her own self-respect, seeing herself for the beautiful, accomplished, capable woman that she is.

I am a bit of a mommy.  And this is a persona I really love inhabiting.

When my therapist asked me to be the mother to me that I never had, I am learning how to do this with this woman.  And others.

The content of interaction with my male clients and female clients is very different.  With men, it is almost always sexual.  They have an urgency of desire, a fire that needs to be met with fire.  Most of my male clients like a good beating.  If they don’t like a good beating, I teach them to take it anyway.

I am drawn to the practice of chastity.  Working with men on a path of self-examination, self-denial, self-control.  These things are all things that my male self, and my current impulsive-shopping self, need.  I am amused that chastity has become one of my favourite practices with men.  It is so powerfully symbolic.  Amused by the irony, since I was never into that for myself—at least the physical aspects of it…but certainly the spiritual parts.

But there is an elephant in the room.  My voice coach asked me, “when do you feel you became a woman?  Were you already a woman?  Was it when your legal documents said you were a woman?  Or when you had surgery?”

My answer was one of ‘becoming’.  That womanhood was a process, one that I felt I had formally attainted once I came out of the operating theatre, but which required, for me, both the legal and physical changes.  “I wasn’t willing to use the women’s bathroom until I was post-op,” I said.  Becoming a woman is not something which keeps me from being a woman already now, but I also feel that it is something I will be discovering and experiencing for the rest of my life.

That’s a challenge.  I surround myself with women.  I always have.  But even more now.  Women are more likely to be nurturing towards me.  And this is something I know that I need.  I need.  The need to be nurtured.  Not a surprise to a regular reader.  But how vulnerable that makes me.  It is a form of external validation.

My voice teacher asked, “do you need all of those things because without them you won’t feel you are not validated as a woman?”  And I didn’t like the truth.

And this leads me to my quandary.  I seem to crave male desire.  As in, I want men to lust for me.  How messed up is that?  Here I am going through life with no physical or sexual attraction to men, and yet I want them to be attracted to me.  I don’t have enough lesbian friends yet to be able to explore this with question with friends.  Never mind that I will be at a party with several hundred lesbians tonight.  It isn’t the thing you just casually bring up in conversation, “oh, by the way, do you still, have you ever craved male validation to feel like a woman?”

The additional irony is that I can’t help but wonder whether some of my dyke sisters, the ones who end up attracted to me, are in part attracted to me because I still have enough of “man” about me to tick multiple boxes.  A man with a pussy.

At work in an orgy scene, I had this idea that I wanted a man to beg to smell my pussy.  My mentor was rubbing her ass on his face, and he was really up in there.  I admired her so much for that.  And it made me think, ‘I need to do that too, and I want him smell me, and smell how yummy it is.  I want him to crave it.’

For one, it shows definitively I have one, since you might not know if you see me clothed in anything other than a bikini.  For two, same.

In some ways Sex Work is one of the most benign environments to be seen as a woman.  Men drawn to us are generally kinkier, open-minded, than those who are not.  I am referring specifically to men who hire professional dominatrixes.  They are coming for something out of the ordinary anyway.

The trans community talks a lot about people, both male and female, who have a trans fetish.  I haven’t met any.  The community seems to hate that.  I don’t.  Maybe that’s because I don’t know it yet.  But why would I mind if someone thinks I’m hot?  Isn’t that the point?

And maybe I won’t be thinking about this so much as I settle more into myself.  Being misgendered constantly in England in particular, takes a toll on my self-confidence.  It contributes to the sense that ‘I.am a fraud’.

It strikes me as misguided to look for validation from men when I don’t even want to have men in my life in a real way.  This requires further examination.  I know what I’m going to talk about with my therapist.