(via queersecrets)
To the writer of this secret: Thank you for your honesty and earnestness, but thank you most of all for speaking into the silence about how attractive FTM bodies are. SOFFA’s (significant other, friends, family, ally) are hyper-conscious of how to legitimize the gender of trans people and many times that means respecting boundaries about the parts of our bodies that we don’t want touched or looked at. But does there have to be a division between respecting gender and connecting to a trans person’s physical body? What if we WANT our bodies to have attention paid to them so they can be seen differently, touched differently, and loved?
Sometimes the silence around trans embodiment, though it comes from respect, seems to imply that our bodies are shameful- the Achilles heel of our gender. We talk about our individual relationship to our body, but don’t talk about the pain that comes from being in a body that we are increasingly sure can never be desired.
You can be attracted to a trans guy’s body without feminizing him. Saying that trans men “have female body parts,” implies that paying attention to our bodies reveals the “ruse” of our gender. But you can appreciate a trans man’s body, not as a female body, but as a sexy embodiment of masculinity. Maybe we hate parts of our body because we’ve always been told that they mark us as women. Maybe SOFFA’s who know and love our masculinity can re-read our bodies and show us the maleness that is there.
