This is a very interesting question because it confronts multiple areas—-Sex, Gender and Sexuality.
I wrote a fiction book, Tranny (available on Amazon) about a trans person because of years of working with LGBTQSGL youth (14–27 years old); several of them trans; and having several trans friends. I tried to do as much “interviewing” of them all as I could. Not immediately with the intention of writing the book, but first, for the years I was there to effectively run workshops and counsel them.
(I even went so far as to get a certification from THINY-Transsexual Health Initiative of New York and lots of research and such on a clinical level.)
I saw 10+ years ago from my youth group and friendships, that “trans” was going to become the next level around sexuality and education. I also had several trans friends of 5 to 20 years in length, from Middle School through post-grad/adulthood.
I offer all of that to give some background on my insight and thoughts.
There were folk who were trans—-now whether that is transgender or transsexual—-two different presenting states of Self-Identity—-Gender and Sexuality, is difficult to say. Not everyone who is trans is going to have sexual reassignment surgery. Some people are just transgender and choose to stay that way. Dressing, presenting and identifying as the opposite Sex from their biological birth identification/identifiers.
But, to the point of how gender dysmorphia effects the administration, exploration and presentation of Sexuality, I’ll offer that it varies and depends.
My youth charges and friends were 90% Black and Latino so some of my clinical observations of them were affected by race/social stigmas based upon culture in their lives. However growing up in NYC, an urban and cosmopolitan space, they were availed earlier and faster to night clubs, dating, attention, spaces (the Chelsea/Village piers) to congregate, even as young teens. So the transmission of information, including sexuality information, was at lightning speed. I spent a lot of my professional workshops clearing up misnomers, teaching about the bodies’ capacity and not. Also many trans youth—-teens and adults—-did soft, medium and hard prostitution, dancing and pornography. I delineate the three by degrees because:
Soft might include dating a skoliosexual man—-a man who preferred a trans appearing but physically non-sexually reassigned person. But he would have strict requirements on gendered appearance (usually female). This though might include chicken cutlets (silicone false breast implants to bras, clothing, tucking the penis and testicles with a string/thong contraption, wigs/weaves, make-up, etc..) But the skoliosexual male would not want there to have been any form of surgical or hormonal changes. He wanted a “male” dressed up as a female but the skoliosexual might still enjoy and want to not only penetrate but be penetrated by a penis…just wrapped in female clothing/lingerie.
Medium might include doing prostitution, escorting, live shows, even pornography and direct “sugar daddies” who were financially supportive of the individuals for sex; again demanding usually a feminine appearance but they might want artificial breasts through surgical/hormonal enhancement, etc.. This might still include a penis being present—-half and half very popular—-female breasts implants, fully functional male penis—-half up top, half down below, specifically.
High would be a person (doing prostitution, escorting, live shows, even pornography) who was a complete post-op transsexual. The question or the inclination of the skoliosexual would be whether or not they were “clockable” as having formerly been, generally, male. The differences might not be in the work/remuneration but in the physicality of the trans person.
Now, understanding this you can look at the individuals I’ll talk about, obscuring aspects of their identity.
Jay-From Middle School to 30s
One, a friend since middle school, came out to me in college at about 19 as a transsexual. Jay, formerly James, had presented up until then, to me and others, as asexual but of a slight delicate and feminine appearance as potentially homosexual.
Jay explained that she was trans and was slowly transitioning at university. She came back to the city, her parents kicked her out—-overwhelmed by the subtle changes of clothing, hair length, make-up and my mother took Jay in. I came out in the same phone call to Jay as omnisexual—-broader than bi or straight or gay—-and had met several trans folk in teen groups so I wasn’t shocked or upset.
Jay and I, 20–21 then started going to night clubs—-gay, straight, mixed and Jay attracted men who were interested in more effeminate gay men. In experimentation, sexual interest, Jay went to sex clubs, met guys, but wasn’t “satisfied”. She mainly performed oral on them and was anally penetrated.
At university, myself and other friends suggested to Jay that she would have to find a bisexual man, as she was pre-op. And eventually she did date one—-Paul. I know that he was bisexual because after he dated her, them fully consummating their relationships, he hit on me. However this wasn’t unusual as unusual as that seems to say. Jay had crushes on several young men, and they all to a number not only turned out to be gay but were also flirtatious/interested in me. Jay seemed to be the gateway for gay young men. And I, out, and in proximity, seemed to be a viable alternative or “fuller choice”.
But what shocked Jay during her relationship with Paul was he offered that she, still having a penis, could and should, anally penetrate him. Jay was surprised and freaked out by this for two reasons—-one, he’d related to her like she was woman in public and private for months—-their sex life including oral and anal penetrative sex of her, and two, she considered it, wanted to, wanted to experiment but that caused a massive dissonance—-wanting to penetrate a male with her male penis as someone who insisted we all regard, pre-op, as female. They broke up after only a few months of dating. Paul went on to have numerous male and female relationships, I don’t know if he had any more trans relationships though he told Jay, she wasn’t his first.
After college Jay and I were briefly and disastrously roommates in an apartment in NYC, my having to end it because Jay’s sexuality was out of control.
Jay was buying hormones illegally off of the black market—-not under a physician/psychiatrists care as one is supposed to be. Jay, unique among the Black trans folk I would meet and had been helped by me, my family and her family so she was comfortably making $40k a year and had full health insurance. Jay had all the requisite resources to do transitioning the “right and legal” way but chose not to. This was about 9 years after she came out to me on the phone. Illegal hormones, silicone cutlets in to pad bras and dressing female but no psychological aid or surgical plans.
Jay then went so far as to have silicone directly injected by some lady, at the lady’s apartment, as you see on news reports about injections for hips, ass, breasts. Directly under the muscle, by a non-medical professional—-who actually ordered the silicone off of the internet.
Socially/sexually Jay was out of control—-pursuing men at work, throughout the city and at one point even inviting vagrants up to the apartment for her to paint them nude. When she did have sex with men, she would perform orally on them and they would anally penetrate her.
Now I’ll throw out that we’re all wild and experimental and perhaps even a little slutty in our 20s. That’s normal. But in talking to Jay I asked about her pleasure in all of these sexual escapades and she admitted to the hormones making it laborious for her to get an erection and therefore there was no ejaculation nor orgasms' when she had sex with tens of men. Her anxieties, dysfunctions and such made sense then—-there was sensation but not what we equate to pleasure in Jay’s sex life.
Jay was having sex, as a male, with males—-skoliosexuals and homosexuals—-to perpetuate the image of female.
Jay had trans friends, even friends who had either done some level of home/black market surgeries (testicle removal for $500 in shady apartments) or silicone injected into the hips, face, chest to simulate breasts—-which eventually Jay started doing as well.
I give you these pieces because Jay had a crush or a pretty female friend and was overly involved and paid attention to by large White women who were somewhat homely and unattached but morbidly obese. When they got attached in heterosexual romantic relationships of durability, Jay’s friendships with them ended.
Before that though, they were almost like couples. Two of the three large girls got engaged and married at school while the third stayed single and had sexuality—-asexuality issues herself. It was like Jay wanted to be extremely desirous in comparison to the girls but at the same time inappropriately close to them in a odd hetero/lesbian kind of way.
To tie it all up, Jay had been sexually abused as a male child from 7 to 12 by a next door neighbor and had an extremely abusive parent who the other parent took then him out of the home and brought into the father’s new step family/with a stepmother and half sister. Jay described these sexual violations as the “best” sex she’d ever had in her lifetime. Yes, very disturbing.
Years and years later when the half sister had a baby I was sitting with the half sister and Jay’s stepmother holding the newborn baby, I happened to look up at Jay across the room. Staring at us, venomously. No, deep daggers of hatred at the baby. The baby represented the half sister being a woman, and the child was a girl, and of course now the apple of the family’s eye, taking away Jay’s positionality as the Dysfunctional Trans Star.
If you bundle the being attracted and repelled by gay sex, anger at men, sexual abuse, anger at a sister, anger at a niece, using black market means to achieve trans positionality when the money, resources and ability were abundantly present—-Jay’s dysmorphia corrupted her sexuality. There were dalliances with sugar daddies and some of Jay’s extreme trans friends were prostitutes'/escorts but Jay didn’t have the resilience to turn a trick, the grit, the fortitude. Jay would talk to men endless—-first in university dorm rooms—-no sexual contact——then on the phone, in offices, supervisors, train conductors, who were attracted to the trans of Jay—-skoliosexuals. And Jay resented them for that attraction/interest because they were often married or engaged to women who were biologically female. Jay was a kink, a fetish, an additive, and with the exception of Paul, never the full relationship.
And it collapsed with Paul because Jay couldn’t accept him accepting her and that demanding she accept his sexuality expansiveness. In many ways Jay had to be the broken sexuality star of any engagement.
Valencia-High End & Mutilation
Valencia was the trans woman who illegally had her testicles cut off by someone in an apartment. And sat for a week in a room she rented staring at a pilot light and eating codeine in bandages, willing to not kill herself.
She explained this to me, Jay and another friend in her room, months after the procedure and even had the brochures for how you do it properly, sex reassignment.
Valencia, like Jay had a middle class job—-earning $40k a year, health care, and a closet full of designers clothes and furs, from sugar daddies.
Valencia was a malignant narcissist. Refusing to walk with Jay and the other passable trans girl because they weren’t beautiful. Valencia was like a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Kim Kardashian, having had Botox and illegal silicone injections and wearing revealing cat suits and a four foot long hair weave.
But Valencia was honest about “the life”—-men, the world and the weakness she saw in Jay. Valencia admonished Jay to do it the right way, that she didn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with the aftermath of realizing you’d permanently mutilated yourself and essentially destroyed any possibility of having a complete sexuality in exchange for less testosterone being produced by the testicles.
Valencia’s sexuality was predatory, like a beast. She would hide and slink behind columns and tables in the night club——no, really—-so that she would appear and disappear to attract attention.
Bluntly, Valencia was batshit. And trans.
Valencia was also, as a close friend and influencer on Jay, one of the many reasons why I had to throw Jay out of the apartment. That and the constant thoroughfare of men, all kinds of men, any man, to satiate Jay’s need to be perceived as female.
Billy, A Client & Students
Because time-society progressed, for my youth, when I coordinated the program, into the 2000s, there were more options for them and society was slowly opening.
Billy was young, Black, disowned by his family and both goofy and hyper sexual. Like Samantha from Sex & The City, he had an incredibly positive view of himself and his sexuality. And was able to slowly admit, beyond Halloween dressing up in drag, that he enjoyed playing along the gay male-trans spectrum with clothing and wigs. He was able to express that he wasn’t completely sure about what it meant for him internally to be Billy. Male, female, both, play, just for sex, top or bottom. He was fluid in not just sexuality expression but also gender identity which gave him questions about his Sex identity.
The differentiation I noted from Jay to Billy is that Billy genuinely liked men and was even willing to experiment with women. Billy also worked hard to be independent, maintaining a full time, his own apartment and practiced safe sex religiously. All at 24. For someone so personality goofy—-he was serious about listening to me, learning, taking care of himself. It would be judgmental to call him a slut or a tramp, he was just a very sexual person who was exploring.
He came to another men’s workshop I was running where a non=profit that works exclusively with trans street walkers/prostitutes was presenting. I could see he was uncomfortable at some of the judgmental comments by other gay men. Billy was dressed completely as a male but even amongst gay men, there can be transphobia, misogyny. I made it a pointed act to shut it down, including the admonishment that they didn’t know who was in the room. Billy thanked me for it later. Because even I didn’t know what Billy’s chosen or still to be formed identity was but I would not allow even an invisible identity to be bashed in the room.
Jane-Another Student, But Mentally Ill
Unfortunately Jane, who went back and forth being Juan in appearance and badly dressed as a woman, had mental health issues. It was unclear because Jane was known around groups and the Piers in the Village but didn’t often stay long enough, for me to get a complete bead on. By that I mean Jane would come for meetings, knowing there would be food and MetroCards. I had a strict rule in the group that we allow people to self-identify and respect pronouns, even if they changed every day. And the trans person was responsible to tell us directly how to address them, even if that changed day by day.
Jane was often non-compliant to taking her medication, for schizophrenia and manic episodes, so it was difficult, amongst 80 other youth, to get a connection to Jane. To make steps of change, I could only chart Jane’s interactions and mitigate arguments and violence. In seeing Jane in passing over the years, Jane was still badly crossdressing, loud and erratic. A few years later someone told me Jane died of a drug overdose.
Jane’s sex life was chaotic and included a lot of semi-Soft prostitution. Jane’s situation with skoliosexuals was reversed in that she regularly received Social Security Disability and had an apartment so younger/older skoliosexuals who were poor, often took advantage of Jane for shelter. Jane’s sexuality, even in discussions in the workshop, was more towards pleasuring men for their continued attention and presence.
I’ll throw out that a lot of my trans clients and friends engaged skoliosexuals this way. The men were the prize and their behavior, resources, background, extra relationships, downlowness, even homosexuality, were downplayed or dismissed or ignored.
Seymour-An Older Trans Man
Seymour was in his late 50s when he started coming to the men’s group I ran for several years. He was nice, funny, slightly flamboyant but presented as a gay male. During the course of workshops he slowly revealed to us that he had lived 20 years of his life, from his late teens, as Danielle. He had played with cross-dressing in his teens and because of his slight frame and effeminate ways and his family’s permissiveness, it “stuck”. He then met a man who knew Seymour’s biological sex. The man then had Danielle move in with him and became Danielle’s Medium level pimp. But it wasn’t abusive in how we normally envision, it was simply exploitive. When it got to be too much after decades and was starting to inch towards abuse, Danielle reverted to Seymour and left.
We were all shocked.
But Seymour was calmly adamant that he saw that period of his life as a period—-he’d never deeply considered until the workshops—what he was then or now. Gay? Trans? He had always been the sexually receptive Bottom, never with a woman in his life and open and comfortable to being with men in the future. He had sort of tired of Danielle. Or Danielle was just for that one relationship and prostitution. He later tied reversion to Seymour to aging and discovering he was HIV+ but he didn’t speak of the time, only the relationship, with points of regret.
He casually told us that with the exception of hormones and surgery, he did all things feminine and domestic and in different parts of the country, in full female clothing and make-up, wasn’t sure who knew or suspected what about him aside from his lover and sexual clients.
Trans & Sexuality
So what makes of, becomes of, is the sexuality line of a trans person?
I can offer that it’s along the spectrum of hetero, bi, gay lesbian, etc. with the exception that trans folk have the challenge of their sexuality is non-static. The lack of it being static can mean that others—-male, female, skoliosexuals—-have difficulty committing in non-secret/transactional ways. Much as the secrecy and stigma around homosexuality allows men and women to take advantage of the homosexual and weaponize sexuality or vice versa, the trans person’s sexuality is often weaponized by either the trans person or the recipient.
The dysmorphia creates not a fluid sexuality in how we perceive it but a fluid expression and receptivity of it. To some skoliosexuals that’s intoxicating—-the in plain sight taboo. To trans people, some involved in things like prostitution sexuality becomes warped or baked into money and power. Sexuality is then distorted. Trans has always been an underground sex fetish commodity.
- Jay had chances at healthy sexual relationships but her gender dysmorphia got in the way.
- Billy had healthier sexual and romantic relationships but his mercurial explorations meant that he didn’t stay still long enough in one identity for connection.
- Jane was not completely cognizant enough from drugs, abuse, having been raped several times and mental illnesses, to express if trans was an identity choice, a repercussion from childhood abuse or a consequence of the sum total of traumas.
- Seymour though preferring to live and present as male now (and for the past 10 years) was the most normal. By normal I mean he maintained a long term relationship within a trans context. When the relationship ended, his desire to present as female did as well. Though his sexuality continued into the space of homosexual.
The overall answer to the question is that there are some trans folk who are static before and after gender or sex changes. I would say at least half. But others because of the trauma, the sexual trauma of society upon people who are fluidic or exploring or innocent, get messed up. The negative trans folk, and by negative I mean dysfunctional sexualities, are so because their Sex or Gender were already different, fluidic, covering a myriad, and the expression of Sexuality was either exploited, abused or not given the proper education to recognize and explore.
A proper education would include before late adulthood a youth program like mine that had someone sitting there constantly answering all manner of questions and thoughts in a non-judgmental way. Jay and Valencia never got that. Billy did and has gone on with his pixie, giggly, experimenting self. Jane was traumatized too deeply. And Seymour shifted from one phase, for his own reasons, to another and then to another. It was like Seymour had settled after 30 years into a synthesis of Seymour and Danielle; he had just decided, now, to explore being an open and out adult gay man.
In my book Tranny, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I tried to more deeply explore trans, sex, sexuality and race as an identity intersectionality. Check it out and tell me what you think.
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
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