Last week at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference I went to a workshop led by Papi Coxxx called “Genderqueering Your Sex.” Amid the cruising and broadly-directed seduction attempts masked as “story sharing,” there was a great discussion about verbal and non-verbal negotiation, the terms we use for bodies and sex, and how to think creatively about the form and style of sex so that all partners feel comfortable. Papi mentioned doing a yes/no/maybe list with partners to spark discussion and expand your own mind, so after leaving the conference I did a little research. Click on the die for a link to a webpage talking more about Yes/No/Maybe lists and providing a PDF sample.
There are lots of Y/N/M lists on the internet and the activities and fantasies they suggest vary. After years of doing bridge-building work and explaining things to straight people like, “sex doesn’t have to involve a penis,” it was a refreshing, if disconcerting experience to feel like a vanilla queer. Let me just say that I was very grateful to Google and have a new appreciation for what one can create with an electrical engineering degree. The list is great for noting where your tastes may be changing, discovering proclivities you didn’t know you had until you got the image in your head, and communicating that with a partner or partners.
Hooray for expanding sexual imagination and vocabulary! When I came out as trans, I felt like fidelity to my gender required certain sexual roles/acts/embodiments and foreclosed others. I couldn’t be more thrilled than to see an approach to sexuality that encourages people of all genders to examine their limits and desires, for goodness knows that trans people are not the only ones with complicated relationships to their bodies. But, then what do you do when you’re been eagerly galloping through the list, drifting into fantasies of bondage or butt plugs or chastity belts and you get to “cross-dressing?”
At first, I didn’t know how to apply this to myself. As a trans guy, I wouldn’t consider male presentation cross-dressing, so would that mean digging up my old girly clothes and playing as female? Trans folk are offered a chilly welcome into the erotics of gender play. If we’re too turned on by the thought of our bodies post-transition, we’re slapped with a diagnosis of autogynephilia and our gendered desire is recast as a masturbatory sexual fantasy. I won’t go too far off on this tangent, but let’s just reflect on what a large percentage of people have sexual fantasies that center around their bodies being interacted with in certain ways, but which may not have an explicitly imagined object. Having done a little informal research, I can report that a number of straight men think about receiving oral sex from a faceless woman and a smattering of straight and queer women also reported fantasizing about certain partnered acts, though the specific partner wasn’t as delineated. If a trans person’s gender identity is accompanied by fantasies about having sex in a different body, this body-centered fantasizing is not pathological— it’s similar to how many cisgender people create sexual fantasies. But I digress…
Trans people are also not supposed to fantasize about themselves in any body other than their desired gender-identity body, because this might indicate that your trans-identity “isn’t real” (what a gross phrase). If you want to transition to male, but have fantasies about yourself having sex as a woman, this fantasy is likely to be read, not as a cross-dressing fantasy, but as an indication that you are really a cis woman. This oversimplification frustrates me because it does not recognize the significance of where your point of origin is. As my love letter to Katya, drag queen extraordinaire, mentions, I’m very interested in female drag performance. As a girly boy with a proclivity for glitter and finely honed talent for walking in stilettos, I think I’d be a great drag queen and would have a lot of fun with expressing my femininity that way. I see that sort of gender play as affirming my male identity, while giving it space to explore the feminine aspects of it. So while I’m still unsure how I feel about ranking this on my Y/N/M list, I think it’s important to affirm cross-dressing and gender play as experiences that trans folk may seek out, without inferring that such an interest negates gender identity. After all, if we can recognize that John Wayne and Ru Paul may have different relationships to the idea of playing around with the femininity in their maleness, why should we deny that variability to trans men?
