Boy-pussy power: De-gendering pleasure

Written by Ruairí Mac

Photo of Chiyo taken by Corinne Cumming

Since coming out as trans there have been a handful of instances where I have felt the need to explain or justify my gender. I have caught myself performing masculinity in ways that would make it make sense to the outside eye, be it in general laddish lewdness, an obsession with power tools, or a relatively newfound faux loyalty to West Ham United. For the most part, I have grown out of the need to overcompensate when it comes to acting out cultural standards of masculinity, but it takes time to shake off the need to validate your gender to yourself, on the site of your own body.

In amongst my masculine performativity was the stereotype of the cis-male tendency to pay little attention to the pleasure capacities of the vulva. The vulva in question, was of course my own. My understanding of my body, in part learnt from media representation of transness, was that it was a problem to be solved where possible, but otherwise ignored. The best I could hope for from my relationship with my genitals was that I wouldn’t bother them, and they wouldn’t bother me. They kept up their end of the bargain when the wonders of hormone replacement therapy put an end to my periods and I no longer had to fish around adjusting a menstrual cup. From then on, my vagina and I were simpatico in our indifference to each other. The nether regions contributed to the long list of things I had trained myself to ignore. Ignorance, I figured, was maybe not quite bliss, but it was the best if not the only option for me in that department. I was used to feeling disconnected from my body, so the concept of enjoying it was completely foreign to me, if not a bit scary. How could I enjoy my body when I had spent so long needing the people around me to understand that it was the “wrong” body? And what would it mean if I did enjoy my body?

The narrative that I had been sold by mainstream accounts of transness, was that if I didn’t hate every inch and aspect of my “female” body, then I couldn’t possibly be trans. At best I was confused, at worst I was breathing life into a deep internalised misogyny/homophobia parading as the spectre of transgenderism. But I was trans, and I carried this interpretation of transness with me into the bedroom. Our culture of misogyny and patriarchy does its best to tell men that to enjoy bottoming, or being on the receiving end of penetration, invalidates their masculinity. In an attempt to squeeze queer relationships into hetero-centric moulds, a lasting and ignorant notion of cisgender same-sex relationships between men is that the bottom is “the girl” in the relationship, and this kind of bottom shaming exists even within LGBTQ communities. As much as I knew that there was no “man” in a relationship explicitly between two women, I was a man in relationships that to myself and everyone around me appeared to be between two women. In spite of my intellectual understanding of the ways in which our culture will try to interpret queer relationships through the lens of straightness, my lived experience told me that I felt validated by being perceived as “the man” in my relationships with women. Being a top, being a giver rather than a receiver, was one of the ways in which I tried to disassociate what I understood as feminine experiences of pleasure, from my own body.

I did everything I could to ensure that sex was something that happened outside of myself. Pleasure was always about the other person, a way for me to direct my attention away from the discomfort of existing in my body. I was harbouring some kind of internal belief that I was underserving of the kind of attention and affection that I would lavish upon my partner, but that suited me just fine. As an external participant in sex, I never had to wonder what felt good for me. Transness, depicted in media but also within trans discourse, has a tendency to focus on what feels bad, or uncomfortable rather than what feels good. Our lives and experiences amount to accounts of the processes of removing what felt wrong, like my breasts, or “she”, but to focus in this way on all that is “wrong” with us, is to negate the ways in which our bodies in their various forms are sites for exploration, creativity, and play.

To find pleasure in my anatomy doesn’t make me in any way less of a man, nor does it make me somehow less trans, but rather to enjoy the nuances of one’s body is the very nature of transness, a transgression of gender norms and binary restrictions. I didn’t learn to enjoy my body so much as I unlearned the social conditioning that taught me to associate my maleness with a set of restrictions that dictated the ways in which I could experience pleasure, excitement, and euphoria. Now, I can invite my partner inside of my body and feel empowered by my capacity to feel vulnerable but safe, to feel deep trust and intimacy. It has taken a long time to feel secure enough to hand over power to someone in that way; to reconcile my masculinity with the idea that I am allowed to enjoy the stimulation of my body in ways that feel good, and to understand that pleasure isn’t gendered. Enjoyment of one’s body has no gender, only power. There is power in your pleasure. Disconnecting the idea that to pay attention to and enjoy my vulva from the assumption that doing so made me less of a man has made me more able to combat my own gender dysphoria by criticising cultural notions of what a man is limited to. I won’t pretend to never suffer from bottom dysphoria. I feel the absence of a phallus like a phantom limb daily in upsetting ways, but dysphoria isn’t binary either. I can mourn the absence of a penis and find pleasure in the body that I have without invalidating the craving for a body that I often feel I was supposed to have.

Coming to a place where I feel able to make a deeper exploration of my body with my partner has allowed me to feel closer to her, but also to be reunited with myself in the ways that I knew my body before any kind of cultural narrative was planted into my psyche. Empowering myself by way of owning my bodily pleasures reminds me that my body is my own business, and systems that rely on my continued hatred of myself have no place telling me how to operate, maintain, and love it.

Ruairí is a writer and critical theorist currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. Specialising in queer theory, he writes around the topics of gender, sexuality, bodies and affects. You can find him on instagram @morningruairi