Storytime Sunday: The Red Light District

Rachel apparently has threesomes all the time.

This is not a happy memory, you guys. It's humiliating and degrading and full of bad feels and I wish it never happened. However, I hope this doesn't detract from the humor in its absurdity.

It was 2003. I was 20. I was perpetually miserable what with the constant pain and hopelessness and all. Dad thought a trip to Europe would be fun and might cheer me up. So it was just me and him, father and *retch*, well, you know.

First stop was Paris. My legs were fucking killing me from all the walking and I was burning through 3-4 battery packs a day for my spinal cord stimulator. At least the Louvre was pretty awesome and Moulin Rouge was entertaining. And the food was good. Dad was cringeworthy, though. Try as he might, he can't shake certain "ugly American" stereotypes like JUST TALKING LOUDER and being atrocious with pronunciation to the point of no one being able to understand him (even in London, natch).

I guess it was alright. I can see how it could have been a lot of fun if I wasn't in constant pain (and away from my as needed medical weed).

Next stop: Amsterdam! No more need to worry about a weed shortage there. One of the first things we did once we got checked into the hotel was go to a coffee shop. I got a couple grams of this crystalline white widow type shit. My dad got a couple of grams of just about the weakest brown bammer I've smoked, because apparently that was marijuana to him (poor bastard). It certainly eased my leg pain and made me generally happy.

The next morning I got all stoned and we went to the Anne Frank house. That was... far out. I mostly spent my day with relaxed legs and a pleasant buzz while we checked out various attractions, only in moderate pain.

That night, well, we were in Amsterdam. So dad was going to take me to the red light district. If I wanted to, but I didn't see saying no as an option. He might think there's something wrong with me, I thought. I was supposed to want that. I even convinced myself I wanted that. "Okay."

We almost got mugged on the way there. That was fun.

Window shopping was interesting. There was a very wide assortment of... goods on display. A lot didn't conform to mainstream standards of beauty but seemed to be doing plenty good business. #BodyPositiveProstitution But window shopping was hard. I felt ashamed and embarrassed looking at these girls. Still, I liked them and kept looking.

I saw two beautiful women standing in one window. I thought maybe a threesome might cure my inability to perform. They were both smokin' hot, after all.

So I went inside and got my pants off, still clutching my SCS controller. One girl laid down on her back and the other pressed against me from behind. I set the controller down on the bed, about at the limit of its reach from the cord attaching it to my ass. I slipped on a condom and in I went.

It was meh. And stressful - a lot of pressure to perform. But it just wasn't doing it for me. I didn't want to be inside a vagina, I wanted a strap-on to be inside my vagina. I wanted to go down on these girls. These were the only things I knew to get off on. But I tried. I pumped and thrust with my SCS controller flopping around on the bed, tugged by my ass. It started to peel off and the stimulation sensation started to pulsate and waver, further distracting me.

They started to get impatient. How fucking long was this going to take, they wondered. So... I pretended to orgasm. Yes, it's sad and pathetic and they clearly talked about and mocked me in another language (Dutch?) as I took the condom off and put my pants back on, rubbing the adhesive strip on my ass to stick the controller wire back down.

I stepped outside. I had to put on a smile and pretend to be delighted. "How was it?" "Awesome!" Meanwhile, inside I was curled into a ball of shame.

We went back to the hotel room and I smoked pot. I then lay there in bed, numb. I wanted to cry. But I couldn't. Eventually, after a couple hours, I finally slept.

Years later, in college, this threesome would become "a thing." Like, in Never Have I Ever, people would call me out for "never have I ever had a threesome in Europe." Because I would brag about it. Because I was supposed to brag about something like that. I'd smile and laugh, but inside I was hurting.

In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Of course I don't like PIV. I want my vag fucked by a strap-on, not my penis inside someone. I only ever got off to fantasies of being a woman. I eventually, a decade later, came once from PIV, imagining myself as a futanari. I felt guilty about that.

So that's your bloghostess' story about her first threesome.

Operational Exhaustion

You've seen pictures of the most beautiful glacial lake in the most beautiful valley you can imagine. No, more beautiful than your imagination was capable of. You've talked to people who have been there and they've said the experience changed them forever. So you decide to go. You make the choice to buy and gather up supplies, pack it all up, and strap it to your back. And you go.

The hike is easy enough at first and you're excited to go. There are minor annoyances - you get a rock in your shoe, you get some mosquito bites - but you know it's oh so worth it. Your excitement builds as you climb into the crisp mountain air. You see stunning waterfalls that take your breath away.

But the annoyances keep coming. You get blisters on your feet and every step starts to hurt. You get more and more mosquito bites. Then you encounter a rattlesnake. You get past it, but it reminds you that people warned you about dangers along the way - mountain lions and spiders and bears. You knew about those, but it didn't really register. Now you worry that every step into the unknown could be your last.

Your backpack seems to get heavier and heavier. The sights and smells are incredible, but it's getting harder and harder to take each step. You have to stop and take a break. You have to tend to your blisters and put on bug spray. You have to catch your breath and eat a good meal. You can't keep hiking non-stop.

That's where I feel I am right now. I need to take a breather. Not a long one, just this weekend, but I'm exhausted. All the little irritations have accumulated, all the exertion has gotten to be too much.

So fuck it. I'm not bothering with makeup, I'm not bothering to look good, I'm not trying to pass, and I'm not interacting with people in real life, I'm not practicing my voice. I need to sit by the side of the trail and catch my breath.

I can still see the beautiful sights where I sit, smell the smells, hear the sounds. I can still play with my boobs. I still got called ma'am while wearing a T-shirt, shorts, no bra, and no makeup. But I need a breather from time to time.

The "sir"s, the looks, the goddamn shaving, the straining my voice, the personal care, they're all little things, but they build up. I just need time to de-stress.

At times like this, I wonder why I inflicted the journey on myself. I wonder why I decided to strap that backpack on and do this climb. And here's where the analogy fails. I was miserable and despairing before I took this journey. As much work as it is, it's less terrible than sitting stagnant, denying who I am, and dying with terrible regret. I have to take this journey. That lake is where I belong and I can't be whole until I reach it.

I just get exhausted sometimes.

In Defense of Slurs

Nigger. Faggot. Tranny. Kike. Gook. Slant. Chink. Jap. Wog. Sand nigger.

These words have power, terrible power. That power needs to be respected and appreciated for what it is. Sanitizing it with censorship (viz. "The N-word") downplays the impact they have. Saying "someone called me a t****y" lightens the experience and denies the full power it has over me. No, if that happened, you bet your ass I'd say "someone called me a tranny," because that's what they fucking called me. That accurately conveys the experience of being called that.

Racist-ass teabaggers don't call Obama "an N-word," they call him a nigger. Sanitizing it lets them off the hook. It denies the full force of it. A lot of people think of my friend as "a gay man," but some consider him a faggot - not "a f****t." Again, sanitizing lets them off the hook. You don't feel the impact when you read that. It becomes dry and detached and loses all emotion. If I say "someone called my friend a nigger," you'd better feel the emotional impact of that word. It had better make you mad. If it doesn't, I'm not accurately communicating the experience.

Think of it like this. I could dance around it and be like, "you know that word, that slur, that's used against people like me? Someone used that word." You'll figure it out. But it's purely logical. You go through your vocabulary and look it up in your internal dictionary. You don't have the jarring effect of actually reading the word. When it's thrust on you like that, you can't help but be affected. Which you should be. The slurs have real effect; removing that denies their seriousness.

I'm not endorsing using these words against people. What I am saying is that mentioning these words, and quoting them, should not be off-limits. Policing discourse like that treats us all like children who don't understand how language works and must be insulated from others' experiences. It cuts off the ability to convey the experience of hearing them, reducing it to a dry, emotionless denotation. It negates the seriousness of people thinking in those terms. I don't think people consider me "a t****y," I think they consider me a dirty fucking tranny. See the difference?

The obvious objection would be that a censored word is still identifiable, so it should make no difference. But if it makes no difference, why are you censoring it in the first place? By censoring it you acknowledge that it has power, you just don't want that to be able to be communicated. You're shutting down discourse, not protecting people from having slurs hurled at them.

So, slurs. Let's have them. Let's not use them against people, but when they are used against people, let's not sanitize it. When people think that way, let's not sanitize their scumminess. Let's be honest.

Mommy Issues

A question came up recently, about something I considered a moot point. But maybe it isn't so moot. The answer seems fairly obvious, at least to my rational mind, but my feels taunt me with doubts. 

This is the question: Do I come out to my mother?

This would be through a proxy, naturally. Either my father or brother. My rational thinking and all my feels are on the same page about doing it directly: I'm never speaking to her again. Well, there is a tiny part of me that wants to directly tell her off about how she interfered with my discovery of myself. Tell her off about a lot of things, actually.

I have a lot of history with my mother. Most people do, but by history I mean history. She has many guises, she's had many more, and I have dramatic history with all of them.

Sex Drive, Orgasms, and Playing on Nightmare Difficulty

Everyone loves the Orgasm Game. You win, you get an orgasm. Usually it's one or two player, though it can be however damn many you can cram into a bed. It's a great game, but there are two snags: not everyone plays on the same difficulty, and not everyone gets the same prize.

My Whole Goddamn Life Story (or: What the Fuck is Your Damage, Sis?), Part 4

I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 4: ages 30-32. (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

Though I stabilized, and with medication the night terrors went away and my startle reflex subsided (something that had been overactive since high school), I still had an abundance of existential despair. It became most of what I talked about with my doctor. She had me draw up a list: "What I Want In Life." What would satisfy me? I broke it up into parts, realistic and impossible, desires and wishlists. Under the "totally unrealistic desires" section, it read: "I want to be a lesbian." My doctor picked that one out, she could see how it pained me when I talked about it. We spent months discussing it. I slowly began to admit to myself that I had "transsexual ideation." as I called it. But I wouldn't say I was trans, nuh-uh, it was just ideation.

My Whole Goddamn Life Story (or: What the Fuck is Your Damage, Sis?), Part 3

I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 3: ages 23-29. (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 4)

I was able to resume my life. Well, except I couldn't ever fly a plane now. So I reverted to astrophysics. I got into a place called Whitman College and started there that January, at age 23. I was a model student at first, except my C++ class (fuck that class). I made friends, more friends than I'd ever had in my entire life. I had jobs for once, as a physics tutor and astronomy lab assistant. It was wonderful.

My Whole Goddamn Life Story (or: What the Fuck is Your Damage, Sis?), Part 2

I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 2: ages 14-22. (Part 1) (Part 3) (Part 4)

I moved to public school in 8th grade and just plain didn't make friends there. Not until high school, and even then not many. Over the summer between 7th and 8th grade, my dad sent me to Aviation Challenge, like the Air Force-oriented Space Camp. I got a chance to be at the controls of a plane for a minute and I was instantly hooked. I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to fly planes.

My Whole Goddamn Life Story (or: What the Fuck is Your Damage, Sis?), Part 1

I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 1: ages 0-13. (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

I was born in San Francisco in December 1982. My early life was spent in Marin, doing Marin things. My little brother was born in 1986. I went to Hebrew school for kindergarten and first grade, which was alright I guess. One good thing my mom did was introduce me to the Carl Sagan Cosmos series. I watched the whole thing intently, then rented it on video to watch it again. I was hooked. When people asked me in kindergarten what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said an astrophysicist.

The Metaphysics of Sex

Not really about metaphysics. I just wanted a pretentious title that would get your attention. Did it work? Good.

tl;dr: Defining sex is actually a really thorny topic, and there is no single definition of it you can use that will exclude transsexuals from their sex without excluding some cisgender individuals.

What makes a man a man? What makes a woman a woman? As a species we seem geared toward this kind of essentialist categorization. Brushing it aside won't work then. Instead, it has to be addressed head on.

This isn't purely theoretical for me. As a transsexual woman, questions of the validity of my gender (at this point) and my sex (in the future) directly impact my life. It's something cisgender people can take for granted. They never have to justify themselves. But I do and that makes this acutely relevant.

So what makes someone a particular sex? It's often simplistically thought of as chromosomal: XX is female and XY is male. But this is mistaken. What's relevant isn't chromosomes but genes, primarily the SRY (Sex-determining Region Y-chromosome) gene. This can be turned off sometimes, resulting in cisgender women with XY karyotype. It can be erroneously transcribed to an X chromosome. And this isn't even getting into deviations from the simple XX and XY, such as X and XXY. So we can't use chromosomes as the basis or we'd insist that fertile women are really men.

What about genotype, then? Well, this gets fuzzy. The actual expression of the gene (phenotype) can change over time. Additionally, not all cells may have the same gene expression or even the same chromosomes. Some people are chimerical, meaning some cells have one set of genes and other cells have a different set of genes. A chimera may be both SRY+ and SRY-; they can also be a blend of, e.g., XX and XY. Furthermore, SRY and other genes aren't strictly binary - they can be expressed more or less strongly. This is one of many reasons Gerald Callahan says "we're all intersex" - no one absolutely, 100% expresses one sex's characteristics, even on the molecular level. There is always some variation from the ideal expression and forms of male and female. Defining sex in these terms requires some arbitrary cutoffs. Finally, there can be XY women, even fertile XY women, with normal male coding of all known sex-linked genes. So let's toss out genes because they're a muddled mess full of exceptions that's subject to change.

Well, what about hormones, then? (Incidentally, this is what determines the type of orgasms you have.) It turns out there are all manner of hormonal disorders that can cause high testosterone and/or low estrogen in women, or high estrogen and/or low testosterone in men. There are also adrenal disorders that affect sex expression. These are people you would likely identify as women or men, respectively, due to other factors. Like, where do the hormones come from?

Okay, so we have gonads to tell us. Or not. There are people born with no gonads or with both varieties. You can have men with an ovary on one side and a testicle on the other. You can have women who have no ovaries whatsoever. The sexual development of these people is going to be different, but do we just declare them to have no sex despite primary sex characteristics, i.e., genitals? And there are medical interventions, such as hormonal pills or injections, or in some cases surgery, that match their primary sex characteristics. (But is making this match primary sex characteristics any more 'corrective' than the same interventions to match neurological sex? See below.)

Genitals - that's the one everyone focuses on. It's what's used to assign sex at birth, without any regard for the other criteria. Well, to exclude transsexuals from consideration as their actual (target) sex requires a questionable assumption: that all that matters is the primary sex characteristics at birth, not currently. If you go with this assumption, you're in a very strange place ontologically, where nothing is dynamic, nothing changes - the categories are fixed and rigid and you're going full-on Plato. You're one step from arguing that everyone is still a newborn, since no change is allowed from whatever category it's been pigeonholed into. This isn't even getting into people whose genitals don't fit the binary dichotomy of male and female - they're both, in between or something else. (And boy howdy have those people been fucked over by simplistic, slipshod reasoning on this topic.)

There are other factors that can be used to identify sex. Secondary sex characteristics, like breasts or facial hair, or facial structure, are the markers we use in day to day life to identify the sex of the people we see. We also use social cues like hair and clothing, but those are ephemeral. But even these secondary characteristics run into problems, such as women with facial hair or men with gynecomastia. (Your bloghostess takes an antipsychotic that can cause men to grow milk-producing breasts as a side effect.)

Finally, there is neurological sex. Certain brain structures have different neuron densities in men and women. In some clusters of white matter, this difference is drastic. So you could, if you wanted to, define sex based on the brain, not the gonads or genitals. And what is more fundamentally "you" than your neurology? This is what determines your thoughts and feelings. It is who you are to you. As you might expect, then, in autopsy studies, transgender people have been found to neurologically be their identified sex, not their sex assigned at birth.

Basically, defining sex is a muddled mess of at least a half dozen factors. It's complicated. (Some would even argue it can't be reduced to a binary, that there are at least 5 sexes and possibly more.) And without some weird assumptions, no criteria listed above can exclude transsexuals without excluding plenty of cisgender people from their sex. Invalidating our sex requires you to invalidate the sex of people who you'd never think to do that to.

To review: Chromosomes can go either way (e.g., XY can be male or female). Genes can go either way. Hormones can go every which way. Gonads need not match genitals, or even exist. Secondary sex characteristics need not always agree. Genitals are the standard and can be surgically changed from one to another. And neurology need not agree with birth genitals.

None of this touches on gender, which is how people perceive themselves and how we actually interact with them in the world - how we address them, how we treat them, how we perceive them. It's the psycho-social counterpart to sex. And whatever the "psycho" is, one should strive to make the "social" match up. There's a reason the AP and most other style books dictate that a person is to be identified by their self-identified name and gender (e.g., her and she for someone who identifies as female, like Chelsea Manning). But defining and delineating gender is even messier than doing so with sex - for starters, you have to grapple with non-binary genders, while here I only briefly touched on non-binary sexes (intersexed people).

Now I am Going to Get Into That Weird Ambivalence

I'm referring, of course, to "the weird interplay between physical stimulation, gender dysphoria, intrusive thoughts, and intoxication" referenced in Public Indecency. Because it was weird.

One thing that's critical to know about this is that my genitals have always felt somewhat alien to me. Either dissociated or like they had to be something they weren't. So I never fapped imagining something happening with my dick; I fapped imagining it was a vagina and the stroking was the feeling of being penetrated.

I'd tried sex with prostitutes twice, and I failed miserably both times. The feeling of penetrating felt wrong, just wrong. And it didn't do anything for me. I knew these women were beautiful. I wanted to kiss them and play with their nipples and go down on them, but penetrating... I just couldn't do it.

So this is what I was going into the blowjob with in terms of relationship with my dick. 

On top of that, I had terrible intrusive sexual thoughts at the time. Violent, horrific stuff. My faplife revolved around these. It was downright compulsive. And it created a dynamic where that's all I was used to getting off to. But I couldn't think that about a real person other than myself - the very notion of that repulsed and disgusted me. 

So on top of the dysphoria, I had this hangup about arousal being coupled to revulsion.

However, physical stimulation goes a long way, especially with male arousal. (It's a bit trickier now that my arousal and orgasms are estrogen-based.) The kissing and the nipples put my mind at ease, but it was the physical stimulation that got the actual it's-40-degrees-out boner going. It didn't matter how I felt about my dick or what I was thinking, that physical touch got it going on its own.

So a little dick licking woke it up regardless of anything else.

Finally, there was the booze. Normally, booze inhibits performance by making erections more difficult. This was far outweighed by making it too hard to think any of the intrusive thoughts. And it was outweighed even further by numbing my dysphoria. I was crosseyed and painless, so I managed to become dissociated from the dissociation of my dysphoria, if that makes any sense. It's like I was too out of it to feel the wrongness anymore.

So I was numb to most of those bad feels.

Ultimately, it was a pleasant experience in the moment, although an anxiety-wracked one. But that pleasure was mostly the kissing and nipple play in the end. The raw physical pleasure was like a base reptilian reflex - I reacted to it with pleasure, but it was on the level of tapping my knee with one of those doctor's mallets. 

But afterward, I felt... off. I couldn't get the feeling of the sucking off and it was... not completely wrong, but certainly not right. The shaft was all wrong but the head was pretty good I guess (big surprise there - the head is what becomes the clit in SRS), But still, the overall feeling - things felt extra alien.

In the end, I wanted - wished for - more, since the kissing and nipple sucking was so good. But I really didn't want to have to use by dick for anything real and an orgasm with someone else was a terrifying prospect, and probably would have required just as much booze at that point in my life.

Harassment

This is what online harassment looks like. Based on the choice of photo to spuriously report for "graphic violence," I suspect I'm being harassed for being trans.

Facebook actively encourages this kind of harassment. Someone can report the same image over, and over, and over, ad infinitum, in the hopes that eventually, just once, the censors will ban it. There is no accountability for bogus reports. You can make a dozen bogus reports and there is no consequence - they don't even give a time-out from reporting, apparently. You are not permitted to comment on the report, such as to point out that the image has already passed muster (something they could easily check automatically), or to report the reporter for obvious harassment, as above.

I have tried, and failed, to find some way of contacting Facebook directly - they appear to make that deliberately impossible.

So there is nothing I can do. At this point I can only assume that I will be harassed until my harasser gets bored, which may be quite a while. And as I said above, Facebook encourages this sort of behavior with their reckless reporting policies.

I think this relates in a non-trivial way to the harassment transgender people and drag performers face over the name policy. Like I said, the fact that my ancient picture of hormone pills, and not the more recent mountain of pills, was reported for graphic violence tells me they have something against teh trans. And they have nothing better to do than to be a pain in my ass for it.

I guess achievement unlocked, guys. bleep-bloop Face Trans Hate 75G

Tits and GTFO

In at least five cases, these very nipples have been deemed safe for work by Facebook's censors. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the decisions. My nipples at 2 months of HRT, when they were clearly masculine (and, in fact, I was legally male) were removed for nudity. Male nipples. Conversely, my nipples at 8 months of HRT, barely 2 months ago, were allowed to stay. Apparently the A cup boobs of someone legally female are okay, but only in some arbitrary cases. Other times the same nipples have gotten me outright banned.

Is it the lighting? Just a different boob inspector examining with comparison photos? What is it, Facebook?

It's incoherent nonsense meant to enforce a societal double standard. Men's nips? Even moobs? Even pinching it and making a sexy face? A-OK. Completely tasteful display or rendition of feminine beauty? A documentary about experiencing female puberty late in life? Breastfeeding? Naughty, naughty.

So let me ask you: does this picture turn you on so much you just *have* to fap? Will it scar children for life if they see it? Is there a single offensive thing about this picture (other than the fact that I appear in it)? Is there anything not PG in this entire post?

Or is it just a picture of me, honestly showing myself as I am?

Facebook doesn't care what it is. They have their muddled policies. But it makes absolutely zero sense for the same nipples to both be offensive and inoffensive. This double standard has to end.

#FreeTheNipple