Writing Healthy Relationships

I love written pornography. From the time I first discovered the written pornography in magazines when I was young, the written word has always been my favourite way to get off. And perhaps that should have been a clue to me, because I found out later that supposedly boys and men prefer visual material, but at the time I didn't much care. I only cared that reading about sex was far more exciting to me than looking at it. I like a good movie as much as the next girl, but the fact of the matter is that when you make visual media, you necessarily fix a character's appearance in a concrete fashion, and since I'm a child of multiple heritages, I don't get very many opportunities to see characters on screen who resemble me, characters in whom I can invest my emotions, with whom I can identify. And too, there's other things elsewise unusual about me. I'm trans. I'm also lesbian.

You see, when you're trans, when you're a trans woman, when you're a trans lesbian, the probability that you're going to see anything resembling a character anything like you in any way on the screen in anything even remotely resembling a dignified, non-dehumanising role approaches zero. If you're looking at pornography, if it features a trans woman, she's almost certainly going to be a fetish object, not a person, and if you're looking at lesbian pornography, you're not very likely to see a trans woman, at all.

Even in the forms of pornography that do regularly feature trans women, it's very rare that you're going to see a trans woman whose body is representative of the reality of most trans women's bodies. There is a preference is our culture for women's bodies to conform to certain standards of shape that only a very small proportion of women have any genetic hope of attaining. These standards are set by men for their own enjoyment, for their own reward, and have very little to do with the reality of most women's bodies, much less the pleasure or even satisfaction of the women they objectify. This is why, for instance, Bailey Jay is a trans porn star, and I am decidedly not so much. I doubt anyone would pay money to look at me, and believe me, I've had so much trouble finding someone to hire me even for jobs well below my qualifications that I'd gladly take money from people who want to look at me naked and laugh all the way to the bank, did I only believe that scenario was likely to prove lucrative. I am told that people do actually find me attractive, and I've had no dearth of men propositioning me even when I'm wearing clearly lesbian regalia, but it's difficult for me to see.

Discovering online written pornography was a revelation for me, as I'm sure it was for a lot of people, because it meant that I never had to contemplate buying pornographic reading material in public. It's also probably no accident that with the rise of the Internet has occurred a concomitant increase in the visibility of transsexual and/or transgender people, because information about transsexuality was so difficult to acquire in the days before the Internet. The voices of actual trans people about our experiences of ourselves and our lives was virtually unknown, save perhaps for a handful of highly public trans women, such as Renée Richards, the first trans woman of whom I had ever heard, and who was the only trans woman of whom I heard anything at all, until I learned that the musician Wendy Carlos, whose work I so deeply admired, had once been Walter Carlos. But although I knew by my late teens that I was probably trans and definitely wanted to be a woman, because I didn't have access to accurate and compassionate information about being trans and about transition, it wouldn't be until years later that I actually fully realised my need and ability to successfully transition, and did so.

The vast majority of pornography is generated by men for their own gratification, not for the pleasure of the women, cis or trans, upon whom they bestow their objectification. Even purportedly lesbian pornography and pornography written from the point of view of a woman is nearly always written by men. It is so utterly obvious in the vast majority of cases where a man is pretending to be a woman, because their writing betrays them. Most men simply do not understand what it is that women find interesting to note. Women, for one thing, do not particularly care to read precise details of a woman's body, because things like bra size simply aren't that important to us, much less do we go about comparing our bust, waist, and hip measurements as a matter of pointed interest. This is not to say that women do not have criteria about what they do and do not prefer in their own bodies and in the bodies of their sexual partners, only that women's criteria are not the same as men's. It should also be recognised that a large part of what attracts men to pornography in the first place is a feeling of impotence in their own lives, whether literal or metaphorical. Pornography often represents something that make a man feel powerful when in his life he feels, or even is, powerless. For women, pornography is more likely to fulfill an absence of excitement or intimacy in our lives.

Women do not for the most part really care how big your cock is, we care about whether or not you have any skill employing what you do have. While I would not go so far as to say that size doesn't matter, at all, the fact is that most penises simply aren't that big or that interesting. In pornography, the smallest penis most men will admit to having is 7" long, but the truth is that the average penis is more like 5-5.5" long, and a 7" long penis is quite rare, statistically speaking. But again, that's by-the-by; women are far more concerned with the person attached to the penis than the penis, in and of itself. There is a certain amount of truth to the old saw that men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love.

Talking about bra size is a dead giveaway that what you're reading was written by a man. I read one story recently where the author, writing from the point of view of a woman, described a character's height, weight, and bra size in numerical terms, and described her 30C breasts as "large". Now, aside from the fact that women simply don't think like that in the vast majority of cases, if you know anything about bra sizes, then you know that a 30C bra cup is approximately the same volume as a 34A bra cup, which I doubt very many people would describe as "large". I ought to know, since I usually wear a 34A bra, and my breasts are barely even noticeable, unless I'm wearing something very close-fitting. A woman is far more likely to concern herself with the shape of her lover's breasts, their colour, and the texture, smell, and taste of her lover's skin, rather than some arbitrary numerical size.

The sad fact is that men simply do not particularly bother themselves with the facts of female anatomy, even when they believe they have had extensive first-hand experience of many women's bodies, and as a result, the things which they choose to write about are too often implausible in the extreme, if not extremely dangerous for a woman. Partly, this is because men have a tendency, as I have said, to objectify women and to degrade women, so we get things like anal sex without a condom immediately followed by oral or vaginal contact without thorough cleaning of the penis in-between, when men are writing. You would be hard-pressed to find a woman in real life who would admit to having willingly engaged in such activity, because it results in an extremely high probability of infection and illness. What happens in a pornography film is not real life, and film editing hides a multitude of sins, as it were.

I am reminded of the infamous video, "Two Girls, One Cup". To any person with even a modicum of film experience, such a scene would be extremely simply to reconstruct without putting any of the performers in any danger of oral contact with fecal matter, and yet, it is obvious from people's reactions that they honestly believe that the women in the video are partaking in behaviour so disgusting as to be actually titillating. I assure you, it's not real, any more than professional wrestling is real or "mixed martial arts" has anything to do with what happens in a real-life fight.

In any case, when one is a lesbian trans woman, it is very rare indeed to find any pornography to which you can relate. Firstly, the vast majority of the stories in the "Transsexuals & Crossdressers" category is utterly demeaning to trans woman, portraying us as if we are "sissies" or submissive/subservient creatures, just dying to be humiliated. This happens because most men believe deep down that being a woman, being female, being feminine, is degrading, weak, and inferior, and some women are so well indoctrinated by our patriarchal culture that they adopt the same attitude. People in our culture commonly use feminine terminology to refer disparagingly to anyone perceived to be male who fails for whatever reason to meet our culture's ideals of masculinity. We use words like "pussy" and phrases in the vein of "like a girl" to put people down, while we glorify things as "having balls" and we tell people to "man up".

Almost all pornography written by men that involves trans women is rife with terminology that we trans women find objectionable, demeaning, degrading, disrespectful, and dehumanising. While the life experiences of trans women run the same gamut as the life experiences of all people, for the most part, we simply do not refer to each other seriously as "trannies" or "shemales", we do not say "he-she", do not refer to ourselves as "it" or as "him", much less "chicks with dicks". These are, in fact, considered extremely offensive terms to trans women, and we just don't use them. Now, whenever a trans women dares to say this, inevitably, she is met with a chorus of denial, and a plethora of anecdotal evidence that she is wrong, that in fact, many trans women do use these terms and others.

What you should know is first of all that, to a large extent, such terminology may have been common in the past among a subset of trans people, particularly those who "came up" through gay men's nightclubs and the drag and ballroom scenes, but it is deprecated in the modern era and disappearing from progressive usage, if not already entirely disappeared. It is not considered respectful discourse, and should be discontinued immediately. Second of all, like some people of colour using words that would in the mouths of white people be racist epithets, there is a world of difference between a trans woman referring to herself and her friends in an ironic fashion as a means of reclaiming these words in order to lessen the pain we feel when others use them, and people who are not trans women using those terms, even when they do so in an attempt to display solidarity. The lives of trans people in our world, particularly those of trans women, are in large part unimaginably awful, even in 2015, and no one who has not walked in our shoes has any right at all to claim kinship.

If you have any objection to my words here, I invite you to fuck right off and go find something else to jerk off to, because you clearly have no interest in according to an actual woman, an actual trans woman, an actual lesbian, the dignity and earned wisdom of her lived experience. But, if you want to know what trans women's lives are really like, and how to write respectfully about women of all kinds, I encourage you to stick around, because you just might learn something that will make you a better lover, more desirable to women, a better parent, a better writer, and a better person, overall.

Rules for Writing Healthy Sex (and a Healthy Life, too):

Don't use numerical measurements to describe people's bodies. Ever. Avoid in all ways being overly descriptive, particularly about people's bodies. Part of the joy of the written word is that it allows each person to visualise in a way which suits their personal preference. Be realistic! Yes, some of us fantasise about huge cocks or huge tits or huge asses, or just huge bodies overall—perhaps all of us fantasise about these things *some* of the time—and some of us fantastise about the diminutive, but most people fall within a fairly narrow range of sizes, and when the unusual becomes the usual, it loses its ability to amaze.

If you ever find yourself just dying to write into your story a character's exact height, weight, bust size, waist size, bra size, shoe size, hip size or penis size, stop what you are doing, put down your pen, close your laptop, and go make yourself a cocktail. Relax. Watch some TV. Go for a walk. Come back to your writing when the urge passes, and not until. There are so many more and better ways of describing bodies than numbers, and so many more and better ways of describing people than by their appearance.

Don't use degrading and objectifying terminology, much less degrade and objectify any of your characters. Treat all characters as fully-formed, dignified human beings in their own right, with their own motivations and allow them fulfillment from *their* perspective. Healthy relationships aren't based on unbalanced power dynamics. Consent is sexy, and consent can *only* happen when people are equal in dignity and free to choose! Women cis and trans alike enjoy sex, too, but our enjoyment is based on different, equally valid and not necessarily competing or contradictory criteria than men.

The importance of proper, and perhaps more importantly, self-consistent, spelling and grammar cannot be overstated. When authors decide to change the name of a character, and don't change all the references in their story, so that partway through the story, the reader is jolted out of the story world back into the real world in confusion about whom the author is writing. I have seen this occur several times in the same story.

Learn about women's anatomy and psychology before you write about it, by listening to women speak in their own words about their lived experiences of their own bodies. If you insist on pretending to be a woman in your writing when you are not a woman in real life—and I am not saying that you should not in any circumstances try to write from a different perspective—at least do women the service of learning from them what interests them about their own bodies and lives and those of others. Trans women don't really get turned on by wearing lacy lingerie. It's just underwear that's pretty. Much less do we get off on being infantilised merely because we happen not to be men. Sorry to disappoint.

Practice safe(r) sex. Ass to mouth isn't realistic. Ass to vagina isn't realistic. Yes, there are people in this world who can and do engage in extremely risky behaviours, including the ones I've mentioned, but again, be realistic. Trans women with penises spraying gobs of cum like a fountain isn't realistic.

You should be aware that undergoing gender transition related hormone replacement therapy dramatically reduces ejaculatory output in most cases, often to zero, not to mention changing color, texture, and taste. For most American trans women, transition related hormone replacement therapy involves two drugs, an anti-androgen, to block the production and effects of testosterone, and an estrogen, typically estradiol. The most common anti-androgen used in the US is spironolactone, which is primarily an antihypertensive drug, but which has the side effect of being an anti-androgen.

Many trans women have undergone orchiectomy (removal of the testes) or vaginoplasty (construction of a neovagina, usually from the flesh of the penis and scrotum); in both of these cases, a trans woman's body will produce zero testosterone, since testosterone is only secreted by the testes, in which case she will no longer need an anti-androgen. For those receiving anti-androgen therapy, testosterone levels are typically so low as to be undetectable, while cis women will have low but significant levels of testosterone, and this plays a very big role in libido.

As a result, most trans women have less testosterone in their blood than most cis women, have a generally very low libido, and have very low semen production, if any at all. Trans women's ejaculatory fluid, if any, generally does not contain sperm, and is often entirely clear, being similar in composition to what most people might describe as "pre-cum". It feels different, it smells difference, and it tastes different. After about six months on spironolactone, it is not uncommon for trans women to be infertile, perhaps even permanently, though this is not always the case. The testicles shrink quite a lot, the penis shrinks a bit, and spontaneous erections simply don't happen, because if they do, it's a sure sign that you need to up your dosage of anti-androgen. Most trans women who have undergone vaginoplasty do not self-lubricate, but some do.

Trans women aren't always visibly detectable as trans. Human bodies vary widely, and in the modern era, trans girls are able to access transition-realted medical therapy at younger ages. If medical intervention commences prior to puberty, a trans woman's body will develop nearly identically to a cis woman's body, skeletal structure and all. Even without transition-related medical or surgical therapies, many young trans women are sufficiently able to conform to patriarchal ideals that they do not appear remarkably different from cis women. That being said, under no circumstances should the dignity of a trans woman character be conditional or dependent upon her "passing". "Passing" is a fucked up and broken concept that should be disposed of by all people immediately. Trans women are women, real women, not impostors or impersonators or drag queens (even if some trans women perform drag or were drag performers in the past), not pretenders, not "really men", not mentally ill, not pathetic, not "failed men", not weak, not ridiculous, not ugly—just a little different. The penis is not a magic wand, even if it is treated as such in our patriarchal culture.

I know it's difficult for a lot of people to accept, but sex and gender are far more complicated than the best of medical science understood even ten years ago. Sex and gender aren't absolutely determined by chromosomes, genes, genitals, fertility, internal organs, socialisation, or any other single criteria. There are people born with an otherwise normal 46, XY genetic karyotype that develop unremarkably female due to a condition known as "androgen insensitivity syndrome", which has many forms from mild to complete. Women who exhibit complete androgen insensitivity are often unusually tall and unusually pretty, with fashion supermodel-like proportions, and their condition isn't usually detected until their late teens, when they start wondering why they haven't gotten their period, yet, and go to a gynaecologist.

There are 46, XX women who exhibit congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who have testosterone levels so high during fetal development that they grow penises. These are just two of the types of situations that can occur. There are people out there who are walking around with 47,XXY chromosomes and are perfectly healthy. Are they men or women, simply because of this one fact? Don't be ridiculous, you'd have to know a whole lot more about their lives to know the answer to that, and the only reliable answers come from asking people who they perceive themselves to be. Nature is an amazing thing, and the natural variation of humanity is astounding. Medicine and Science and Psychiatry all agree on these points. Just because most people are "male or female", "men or women", doesn't mean that there's only two distinct alternatives. Reality is a continuous curve.

Trans women weren't "born men" or even "born male". We didn't "used to be men". We're women, we're female, we were girls, even if we didn't understand ourselves that way, and we always were. We *do* become women, just like every other girl, it's just that our path to womanhood is slightly different.