After a particularly flirtatious evening at the pub we end up in her hotel room. She knows I’m trans (one of the perks of being an openly trans performer and public persona: it reduces the need to come out each time), and has made it clear that she’s into me. Some months after reading Walkaway I end up having sex with a woman who does not know me from my past life. Or, as the Vatican claimed in a statement published in 2019, we ”annihilate the concept of nature.” Then we are accused of rubbing our ”lifestyle” on people’s faces, corrupting children, and demolishing the nuclear family system. But god forbid we reclaim our sexuality and our bodies. Our job is to give cis people something to gawk, gasp and/or wank at. The sex life of trans people is practically invisible in mainstream media, but at the same time transness – whenever it briefly appears – is reduced to genitals and surgeries that might be done to them. I have never before, in any media, seen a person with a body like mine treated with respect, as an equal, independent, and sexually desirable being. After reading that short scene I cry my eyes out. She’s one of the women, she just happens to have a penis. Doctorow doesn’t fetishize her, or depict her as a disgusting or exotic curiosity, but neither does he give her any special treatment. One of them is trans, and she has the same kind of body that I have.
In one scene in the book three women are having sex. In early 2018 I borrow Cory Doctorow’s book Walkaway from the local library. I was concerned about my mismatched body,īut after that first kiss I felt that we could undo our shared riddle. Would anyone – let alone myself – ever see me as desirable? How on earth would I approach, process, and let go of my internalised transphobia? Paradoxically, in my case the answer was to have more sex. How is a trans person supposed to develop any kind of a healthy relationship with their body and sexuality when all of the surrounding world treats our kind as jokes, threats, sexual criminals, pedophiles, perversions, disgusting and mentally unstable non-humans, or at best embarassing fetishes?īefore I came out and during the early steps of my transition I often thought whether my sex life was going to die off completely. For this essay I read the script of the film and found this bit which I think very accurately depicts the filmmakers’ attitude towards transgender people: Only years later did I understand why those scenes stuck in my mind so sharply. This results in nausea (in the film) and laughter (in the classroom).
To prove his allegation Ace rips off Einhorn’s skirt, revealing ”a healthy set of male genitalia” for everyone around to see. In the climax of the film Ace reveals Einhorn’s ”secret” to a bunch of police officers.
When Ace figures out that not only is Einhorn the villain, but that she is also a transgender woman – or, as the movie depicts her, a deranged and vengeful man – his reaction is to ”furiously brush his teeth” and to ”slowly curl up into a ball under the steaming water with an expression of horror on his face.” One of the characters in the film is Lois Einhorn, a feisty redhead with whom Ace shares a passionate kiss. In that classic 90s ”comedy” Jim Carrey plays Ace Ventura, an oddball detective investigating a murder and a dolphin theft. I first encountered transness on fifth grade, when a substitute teacher showed our class the film Ace Ventura – Pet Detective. This I had internalised early in my life, way before I had words for my identity. And besides, who would even desire a body like mine? They would need to be sick or perverted, at best desperate or cruel. I wondered if I would ever enjoy sex again. Every old and familiar thing just brought back the wrong me, wrong role, wrong thoughts.
Neither of us really knew how to be and what to do with my body and my various and gradually intensifying dysphorias. About 1,5 years later, in fall 2016, I came out to myself and the world as a transgender woman.Īfter I came out, my sex life with my girlfriend withered away.
Maybe it was because of that trust that I dared to say, surprised by the impulse myself: I wish I had a cunt so you could lick it. We had been dating for several years, and the trust between us was strong. I vividly remember a particular time I was having sex with my then-girlfriend. (from ’How To Make Love To a Trans Person’ by Gabe Moses)įor a long time I thought I was a straight man. Bodies have been learning each other forever.Īll the different ways we can fit them together Īll the different uses for hipbones and hands,Īll the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.