A Machine for Gender Fantasies of extreme BDSM and the making of the trans feminine
A Machine for Gender is a series of essays written in an attempt to tease out a particular trans femme style out of fantasies of sexual cruelty, violence, and enslavement. The subject matter is both sensitive and speculative, and as such I can only ask for a degree of reader's goodwill. If needed, remember that this is a work of projection and—as Jeanne Thornton warns us—"any projection is fundamentally false—fundamentally about the projector, not the vessel of projection—and any claims made in the name of such projection are therefore also fundamentally false, even if one hopes those claims are correctly understood as flattery".
Please, be also advised that all the entries in this cycle should be expected to contain direct discussion of sexual violence and abuse, of transphobia, and sadomasochism. Their language will be, at times, graphic, and some texts I draw from purposefully revolting.
As always, if you find my work interesting and wish to support me, I have a ko-fi, the proceeds from which help me to expand my library and continue with research necessary for such writing projects.
In the early 2000s, Sekstrety, a Polish magazine devoted entirely to personal advertisements, published the following:
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A MtF transvestite with a dump-truck ass and the mentality of a whore is looking for her master. I like to be brutally raped. I prefer sewer-mouthed men who understand that my ass exists only to bring them joy. I accept bondage, gagging, golden showers, and group sex.
When I first read it, I felt revolted and disturbed. Its violent, misogynistic imagery summoned up in a plain and vulgar language is stomach-churning is made even worse by the fact that it seems to be aimed at the self. In that, it comes across like inviting disaster, like courting suicide, like trying to get others to destroy you. It's scary.
But once that initial shock had passed, I was left with something that's perhaps even more troubling: a gnawing realization that I found this anonymous woman's desire relatable. Of course, I would never put mine in words that sharp—but in my fantasies, I am many things she wishes to be, only the imagery is contoured with a gentler hand. I dream myself bound and gagged, and offered to men I don't know, so that they may use me. I don't get any say in that; I am treated not as a person, but rather as an object, to be freely exchanged, traded, or borrowed. In those arrangements, my feelings are not a factor, so it doesn't matter that I am afraid, or emotionally shut in, or afraid of men. It doesn't even matter that I am closeted, because in my fantasies, I'm little more than an object, and so indisputably a female.
It is the last part that is pivotal. Fantasies of submission and violation are nothing new— plenty of women have them. But most girls I know who share this particular taste for violent objectification verging on self-annihilation, and for the twinned undoing of a personhood that makes a female have something in common: they tend to be trans.
This statement alone is enough to throw up a whole May parade of red flags. The sexuality of trans women is routinely villified, and so closely associated with the most pathologizing registers of both sexual abuse and sexual perversion, that any discussion of it which pays attention to what is twisted in it can be taken for an implicit assault. On the whole, we are discouraged from admitting that our desires can be distinct from those of cis women, that they can be fucked up the point of feeling irredeemable.
Instead, we are offered a kind of flat psychologizing meant to exercise the demons that our sexuality summons. It is comforting to think—and hardly misguided, either—that dreaming about being unconditionally desired is perfectly understandable for people who have to routinely deal with the sense of being freakish and unlovable. Such interpretative alchemy promises to take something barbed and sharp-edged, and sands it down until it rests easily in the palm of the hand. It makes the fantasy of being shamed and objectificatied, of being enslaved and sexually possessed, into little more than an outre metaphor for wishing to be cared for and appreciated.
I don't know about others, but personally, it makes me uneasy. It rests a bit too close to comfort to the patronizing pity of psychiatry. After all, there is no guarantee that this distillation will stop there; all too easily, it can transition into something far more nefarious. The distance between saying "you fantasize about being owned because you can't imagine taking care of yourself" and "you fantasize about being a woman because you can't imagine being a successful man" is deceptively short.
So instead, I think I want to do something else with those troubling fantasies, and that is to stick with them. With, and not through—I am not interested here in trying to determine what such desires mean or say about people who have them. My focus is rather on what they promise to do, which is to say on the suspicion that wanting to be seen as a thing, and to be seen as a girl, is the same thing, and that there can be something very femme about wanting to be made into a mute and dumb object of someone else's desire.
Cell Feed 912
The point of departure is another revolting image.
On a grainy, dark film, a person sits bolted to a metal scaffold in the shape of a chair, grimy manacles keeping her legs spread wide. A copper dildo impales her, and a number of electrodes are attached to her chest, running to a desk stacked with laptops. On the wall opposite of her, over stained concrete, a chatroom window is displayed, green lines of text against a black backdrop. There is something sinister about this image, something that brings to mind our cultural notion of torture chambers or sexual violence—not to mince words, there is something about it that makes it hard not to think of a serial killer's basement.
And then, there is of course the man, the one with the laptop, and hands on the electroshock device. He's jovial, chatting gladly with his internet audience, who keeps asking the woman questions. When their faceless hive doesn't like her answers, she is given shocks; she shouts and cries. Somewhere midway through the scene, the man quips: "We are not interested in her lactating for us, but suffering for us."
This image comes from a video titled simply Cell Feed 912, and produced in 2004 by the notorious American porn studio Insex. Insex, for those of you unaware, pioneered an entirely new style in BDSM pornography, one focused not on the use of cuffs or gags as a prop to a simple fuck, but rather on a veristic, perversely cinéma vérité-alike depictions of "real" pain, "real" torture, of women's bodies bound, stretched, and tormented in increasingly elaborate bondage and with increasingly sophisticated tools. To quote from one of Insex's cooperators: "What preceded Insex was pretty standard: red ball gag and white clothesline wrapped around [the women] in a haphazard fashion. These images were totally different. There was something serial-killer-esque about them. They were bound in really uncomfortable positions. It was hot. Even if these girls were consenting, which I learned afterwards of course that they all were, they were not 'acting.' Once a scene was underway these girls were taking full part in it."
It should come as no surprise that allegations of abuse—of breach of consent, of mistreatment of the amateur performers that Insex tended to hire to buttress its specific appeal to authenticity—have surfaced since the studio shuttered in 2005. I am not going to recount them here, only note the title of the documentary film devoted to Insex's story: Graphic Sexual Horror. After all, what sticks with me in this image I have described is not only the sexual appeal of the situation depicted, but also its ugly shadow: that air of casual misogyny and of patriarchal violence present on the set. Before anyone get a wrong idea, this is not me saying that pornography is violence, or necessarily patriarchal—I am far from those positions. But it is hard to argue that there isn't anything sinister about Cell Feed 912.
Part of the appeal of that video, by the way, is that it was supposedly a compilation of clips taken during a marathon 48 hours BDSM scene, livestreamed and featuring the eponymous 912. A number, not a name—it was a standard practice at Insex that performers were credited as nothing but numbers, three digits replacing a human name. That too was a part of a brand, that too featured in the core fantasy that Insex was selling: one of extreme, authentic, sexual objectification. Objectification of women, of course, because only those got to be subjected to those graphic sexual horrors.
Or, to put it tersely: as electric shocks were being administered to 912's breasts over her failure to satisfy the internet chatroom about her sexual history, she was being made indisputably a female, too.
Let's put a pin in that.
Dressed Up To Humiliate
It's hard to think of a more quintessentially trans femme kinky sexual practice than forced feminisation fetishism. In the stories we tell about it, it can take an almost salvatory role—it is how eggs are cracked, how people find help in expressing their innermost selves and taking first steps on a road to living a trans life. Trans forced feminisation is a gesture of care, an offering of gender in a safe, bounded space of the bedroom.
Through all of this, it becomes easy to forget that while forced feminisation has an indisputable place of privilege in the repertoire of trans sex, it also remains widely popular outside of the world of early transition trans women and clueless eggs. Many cis men get off on it too; only for them, it has a tendency for taking on a far going in a direction that is far less reparative. That is to say: it functions as a type of humiliation play.
This is also the reason why some find it distasteful and problematic. I vividly recall a conversation with a close friend and a sex worker, who was surprised to find out that there are people who are into forced feminisation for reasons other than rampant misogyny. All of her exposure to it before had been in the context of using the trapping of femininity to induce shame and humiliation in a male submissive. In fact, she couldn't help but to see people into that sort of thing as sexist, consciously or not. After all, they perceived becoming a woman—being made a woman—as a masochistic source of humiliation.
In my years researching BDSM communities in Poland, I have encountered similar forms of discomfort around forced feminisation many times. In the discussions I've had with dominant women, the practice tended to come in the context of anti-feminism, and not transness. This is also why a number of them expressed feeling deeply troubled, if not outright repulsed, by men who were into this particular kink.
So, here is a tricky question. When they were saying that, were they being transphobic?
The question is surprisingly complicated. On the face of it, it shouldn't be difficult to draw a line between gender-affirming forms of forced feminisation, and ones that use the concept of "being made a woman" as an implement of shame and degradation. Clearly, then, the sexism of the latter can be addressed without even touching the restorative power of the former. The ostensible similarity of the two would then become purely accidental, nothing more than a trick of light played on our senses by the flickering flights of desire.
There are good reasons to claim that, and to make such a distinction. There is also a good amount of precedent, because it is an approach that is broadly aligned with the most common form of apologia for the more unsettling styles of BDSM practice. Long before our current gender wars, there have been the feminist sex wars, and arguments about how lesbian sadomasochism has nothing in common with the misogynistic objectification found within straight SM pornography—the same kind of it that is so plainly visible in Cell Feed 912.
The idea that "lesbian", "feminist", or "queer" BDSM stands a breed apart from what's troubling in kink had been a staple in those debates. It allowed to bracket away the histories of violence seemingly summoned in the language and practice of kink. It allowed the claim that a woman calling her lover a "slut" in bed as she prepares to ride her with a strap means something radically different from the same word coming from the mouth of a man insisting on doing anal with his girlfriend. And, obviously, such a claim is not entirely unfounded. Violence isn't a thing. It is not an evil object that can be used or sealed away. Violence is what people do to other people—it is relational, which is another way of saying that it arises within specific relationships. Obviously, then, a patriarchal, heterosexual relationship ought to be more prone to reproducing its own kinds of abuse than a lesbian one. Obviously, then, a cisgendered humiliating forced feminisation is sexist in a way that a reparative transgendered one cannot be.
Or so it is comforting to believe. But what if the line between the two is blurry? When your lover calls you a "slut", even if the word is offered as a token of care and admiration, it still carries in itself a history of violence, without which the word could never land so well, and never fulfill its promise of a harsh validation. It is an uncomfortable admission that easily leads to suspicions of complicity.
What if what is appealing about being sissified against your own will is precisely the fact that you imagine becoming a woman of your own volition as too humiliating to ever attempt? Would that mean that you are not really trans, only perverted? That's a common fear for many baby transes, but it goes deeper than that. Does overcoming it, however, necessitate ditching that shame, and finding putting on a maid's dress empowering? But that remains ever a fraught proposal. After all, a maid's dress is a potent signifier of sexual submission and availibity. It is a token of sexual subjection and hierarchy: it is precisely why we are culturally taught to recognize it as sexy. Putting it on willingly can be read as empowering in the sense of seizing control over one's sexual agency, but being put in it by force? It sounds less empowering, and more like a loss of status – which is, incidentally, part of the point. Under the conditions of patriarchy, being a woman is being less than a man – and being made a woman means being made lesser. The question of whether we can even want to be women without wanting at least a bit of that remains frustratingly open.
The point here is not to condemn forced feminisation, or further shame people who are into it (for whatever reason, really). However, I am worried that the apologetic position we find time after time in discussions of minority sexual practices – and forced feminisation is nothing but that – has a tendency for effacing nuance and complication. This, too, is interpretative alchemy. It's a procedure that promises to take on the crude matter of sexual desire and fantasy—shot through with histories of violence and subjugation—and distill it into something clean and untroublingly empowering.
Hence the challenge posed by the trans theorist Cameron Awkward-Rich:
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What would it mean to do minoritarian studies without being driven by the desire to rehabilitate the subjects/objects of our knowledge? What kind of theories would we produce if we noticed pain and, rather than automatically seeking out its source in order to alleviate it, or mining it for resources for perverse or resistant pleasures, we instead took it as a fact of being embodied that is not necessarily loaded with moral weight?
Applied to forced feminisation, this question is a way of attempting to reckon with what is especially troubling about its conceptual basis which—as I hope to shortly demonstrate—extends far past just being put in a dress, or having your egg cracked. And much of it is not necessarily pleasant, or uplifting. Because a dress can make a body feminine, but so can a copper dildo, and electrodes wired to one's breasts.
The Radical Feminist Lesson
Here is an idea: there is something fucked up about wanting to be made feminine, and we keep avoiding the subject.
This is, of course, the radical feminist argument, the original one. It's the claim that gender is neither an essential quality of human bodies, nor fully a matter of individual choice and identity, but rather a particular social position within a sex caste system known as "the patriarchy". Wanting to be made feminine is, therefore, an example of false consciousness, an identity investment in the apparatus of one's own oppression.
Radical feminism gets a little bit of a bad rap nowadays, especially since its name stuck to people gone well and truly rabid over the existance of trans people in the world. This should not distract us from the fact that there is something to its ideas that continues to resonate. They provide a set of tools for criticizing oppression of women where the very culturally established ideas of what makes a woman a female turn out to be complicit in that oppression. It's not an insight to be dismissed out of hand.
Due to its persistent appeal and critical utility, there has been much marvellous work done over the years to reconcile the positions of radical feminism with the possibility of trans womanhood (and trans manhood, too). Still, for all of those attempts at bridge-building and reconciliation, there are some hitches and cracks, and places where pieces do not fit and an alignment is hard to find. This is the case of the kind of desire I am talking about here, one which finds in the politically suspect pleasure of sexual disempowerment a possibility of becoming a woman. The problem with it isn't just that there is no radical trans feminist perspective on it, but rather that there is one, and accepting it must feel like a kind of a defeat.
To explain, allow me a digression.
In the 1970s, during the height of radical feminism's fortunes, a robust body of feminist film theory was developing, one concerned with the ways of seeing built into the structure of Western cinema. The most famous of all those concepts is Laura Mulvey's formulation of the "male gaze", of the idea that the American movies are fundamentally built around the presumed male spectator and his gaze. Those theories, heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, became hugely influential in the criticisms of the porn industry that were so very important to so many radical feminists. And to those criticisms, one notion was absolutely vital, namely that pornography fuelled real life sexual violence. Quoth Robin Morgan: "porn is the theory, rape is the practice". The mechanism of this translation from theory to practice was one of identification. The radical feminist attacks on porn hinged on the notion that a man who watches pornography does so out of the ultimately masculine, sadistic pleasure of identifying with the gaze of the camera, and so with the masculine approach to possessing and fucking women, rendered in this perspective out of their humanity. Pornography was supposed to epitomize Cathrine MacKinnon's quippy definition of patriarchy: "man fucks woman; subject verb object".
Note that this formulation is more than just a diagnosis of a systemic injustice. It provides a basic script for how people are made into women: through objectification. Man (subject) fucks (verb) woman (object), which elaborates on the old proposition that no one is born a woman, only becomes one. In this case, it would be more appropriate to say that one is objectified into one—a human gets fucked into womanhood. And this is, radical feminists would argue, the real purpose of sexual violence (including pornography): it maintains a system of sex-caste oppression under which certain individuals are sorted into the subaltern category of "women" through the use sexual violence, be it in theory, or in practice. To use a more modern formulation: rape is the original forced feminisation.
Evidence to back this claim up can be easily found outside of the circuits of feminist critique. History provides. I am thinking here of examples like David Wyatt's moving account of early medieval slavery, where he notes how rape of male captives was used by Viking raiders as a way of stripping those men of their honour and humanity. Or of how the word ragr, loosely translatable as "sissy" was one of those insults which under medieval Icelandic legal codes could be—had to be—responded to with lethal force. As William Ian Miller notes: "to translate it as 'coward,' as is often done, understates the constellation of values comprised in the term. To be ragr was to be effeminate, it was to be a man who was sodomized by other men". And let us not be mistaken that those examples, belonging to the cold and harsh world of the early medieval North Atlantic, are somehow behind us. One of the filthiest insults that the Polish language is capable of, the word cwel, means after all the same thing: "the prison wife", which is another way of saying "a rape victim".
The idea that there is something femme about getting fucked, and something demeaning about being femme, therefore, is hardly limited to radical feminism, which only provides a compelling, if overly sweeping, critique of the social phenomenon of being gendered female through sexual objectification. There is, of course, a purpose behind it: it's consciousness-raising. If women can learn to recognize that there is nothing natural or given about their status, and the atmosphere of sexual violence they live under, then they will become capable of contesting it and overcoming it: they'll realize their chains and learn how to shake free from them. Only then will they be able to flourish.
Crucially, this doesn't necessarily entail a rejection of trans women's claim to womanhood. After all, femininity is not anyone's essence, but a condition, and one inflicted precisely with the goal of keeping women down. The bondage of a corset, of a high-heeled shoe, and a tight dress metonymizes the bondage of patriarchy. High femininity is a prison, and being made aware of it is being subjected to the political demand of combatting patriarchy, including on the level of its sartorial microaggressions. Trans women do not get to be exempt from that.
But lurking beneath the surface of trans–inclusive radical feminism, there is something else, an altogether more satanic temptation. Remember that pin we've put through Cell Feed 912?
In the radical feminist perspective of pornography, especially in its original form, there is no provision for identification with the woman being fucked on screen. Gazing is supposed to be a one-way road, and the aperture of the camera is supposed to be a man's eye. Whoever looks through it must, therefore, see as a man would. A woman cannot enjoy pornography as a a woman. Any kind of pleasure she draws from watching it is a masculine one—and is a kind of a false consciousness. This is an obvious weak point of this entire outlook, and it has produced decades of critique. I am less interested in that, however, and more in the somewhat less-discussed corollary to this position, namely that a man watching pornography is likewise incapable of finding pleasure in anything but the male gaze of it: it's impossible for him to see himself in the woman. This claim is a safety valve, because as long as its accepted, there is no need to confront the terrifying idea that sexual subjugation may be desirable not only from the position of the oppressor.
In 1975, the distinguished and notoriously reclusive American sci-fi writer John Tiptree Jr. wrote to one of his many pen-pals—a fellow writer named Jessica Amanda Salmonson. The letter dealt with Salmonson's recent coming out as a trans woman. Tiptree commended her for "stepping across the sex-role barriers", and followed up with a number of questions. He marvelled—if confusedly so—at finding a "man who will exchange all the social advantages of the male role (...) for being what [Salmonson] correctly calls 'a game animal.' A target. A member of an oppressed class." This clearly troubled him, and so he asked directly: "The hassles of sexism my female friends tell me of, which I'm just beginning to see in their full extent. Why? What makes it worth it?"
The question exposes a paradox, and one that I believe to be responsible for the badly bifurcated development of the radical feminism's response to the presence of trans women in the world. Namely: it is a framework that can easily account for how one becomes a woman, and just as readily provide a reason for why being a woman isn't determined by some caricatural form of biological essentialism. However—and that's a pretty big "however"—when those two cross, we enter a crisis point, because it is not hard to reach the conclusion that no one in their right mind would ever want to be made a member of the fundamentally subaltern class.
Now, let's not imply that Tiptree Jr. was some kind of an exemplar of radical feminist thought—he was not. The questions he asked, however, were deeply seeped in its logic (with the concept of "sex-role barriers" being front and centre) and in the experiences which gave rise to it in the first place. The name written on his birth certificate, after all, was Alice B. Sheldon. Contrary to the suggestion in his letter, the status of a "game animal" was more than just an abstract idea to him.
A "game animal" is also not a bad way to describe the body strapped to a metal chair in Insex's theatre of cruelty. We recognize it at once as a feminine, and it is not just a matter of bare breasts and exposed genitals. As I have already suggested, the body is also being feminized by the dildo piercing it, by the electrodes glued to it, and by the heterosexual eye of the pornographer's camera trained onto it. It is being feminized when it is informed that it will suffer for the pleasure of the viewers, and made to confess – through its moans, screams, and forced orgasms—that it is wanton to please them. Without a dress or a bit of lace in sight, radical feminism teaches us that Cell Feed 912 represents a kind of forced feminisation and, worse yet, an effective one at that.
Unconditionally Surrendering A Sex War
The threat of forced feminisation haunts the radical feminist critiques of lesbian sadomasochism, dating back all the way to the early 80s. The stakes of those sex wars were not only just about what lesbians should get off on in bed, but also what their very relationship to the social impositions of gender should be. It seemed like the future of femininity was being fought over in real time—which is why the language used could get so downright apocalyptic. As one contemporary writer put it, SM was a "cancerous growth that has taken a firm root in most wimmin".
This growth was especially visible in the bodies of lesbian bottoms. For many anti-SM feminists of the day, the only way a woman could willingly be a sexual submissive—especially in a lesbian relationship—was if she was fundamentally mentally ill and/or traumatized by the patriarchy: the very fact of her apparent desire to be subjugated served as a proof of her functional insanity. At best, a submissive woman's pleasure could be understood as a "a conditioned response to the sexual imagery that barrages women in this society".
What is worse, the instrument of her subjugation was the butch—the lesbian playing a sadist, and so, also kind of a man. She, too, could be seen as a victim of the patriarchy, conditioned to believe that fulfilment could only be found in becoming like the oppressing classes. And so, the critique of lesbian sadomasochism very easily became a critique of sadomasochistic butch/femme relationships, understood as the engine that, through whips and cuffs, produced gendered sexual subjectivities—produced men and women, their genitals be damned. In the late 80s, a new term emerged under which such activities could be bundled: the politics of transgenderism.
Around that same time, one of the key early queer theorists, Leo Bersani, wrote a scathing takedown of gay machismo, memorably titled Is the Rectum a Grave? In it, he speculated on the tormented relationship gay sadomasochists had with what was femme in their sex life. It's a dense bit of theory, but worthy of quoting at length:
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The gay-macho style simultaneously invents the oxymoronic expression "leather queen" and denies its oxymoronic status; for the macho straight man, leather queen is intelligible, indeed tolerable, only as an oxymoron—which is of course to say that it must remain unintelligible. Leather and muscles are defiled by a sexually feminized body, although – and this is where I have trouble with Week's contention that the gay–macho style "gnaws at the roots of a male heterosexual identity"—the macho male's rejection of his representation by leather queen can also be accompanied by the secret satisfaction of knowing that the leather queen, for all his despicable blasphemy, at least intends to pay worshipful tribute to the style and behavior he defiles. The very real potential for subversive confusion in the joining of female sexuality and the signifiers of machismo is dissipated once the heterosexual recognizes in the gay–macho style a yearning toward machismo, a yearning that, very conveniently for the heterosexual, makes of the leather queen's forbidding armor and warlike manners a perversion rather than a subversion of real maleness.
Bersani arrives at conclusions that are not that far from what the authors of Against Sadomasochism had in mind, although obviously his goals are radically different. He has no interest in trying to save the women's movement from the threat posed by cuffs and dildoes. What concerns him—beyond explicating his theories on the self-shattering character of sexual desire—is taking a swing against the budding politics of gay normativity. He is reminding his fellow leather queens that no matter how much they butch it up, to straights they'll always be freaks—and that this freakishness will not just stick to their sexual orientation, but to their very status as men. He says so explicitly in a different part of the essay, writing about the "the infinitely seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman".
This is, obviously, a metaphor. But also not really. It can be taken literally.
Man (subject) fucks (verb) woman (object). Therefore: being a woman means being an object; it's a condition of political oppression. Substitute "being" for "becoming" and something curious starts to happen. Becoming a woman means becoming an object. So becoming an object—say, through extreme sexual objectification—means becoming a woman? This can be employed as a keystone allegory in theorizing gay sexuality beyond normative masculinity, or as a proof of why forced feminisation poses an existential threat to the radical feminist project.
(The fact that Sheila Jeffreys, in her rant against SM, also insinuated that it was gay sadomasochists who put up the Third Reich is, in this light, no less ludicurous, but at least more understandable.)
Crucially, even if you accept those premises, you don't necessarily have to end up with a trans-exclusionary position. Sure, Janice Raymonds was just as keen to condemn trans women as to write screeds against sadomasochism, but the same cannot be said of Andrea Dworkin or, famously, MacKinnon herself, who have both spoken in support of trans lives. However, this acceptance of trans women tends to be undergirded by the assumption that they, too, should only want to be women as women will be after liberation, and not as they are right now. Gender abolitionist tendency at the heart of radical feminism has always been about trying to dismantle the mechanisms by which the society is being sorted out into sex-classes, including any and all systems of forced feminisation. In other words, a trans woman may be a subject of radical feminism. But the MtF transvestite that arrives at femininity through offering her dump truck-ass to a master who sees it only as a source of his gratification—well, she can only ever be the subject of its intervention. Sex is a war, and surrender is not an option—because living a feminist life means living a fight.
And so here is found that satanic temptation I have mentioned earlier. Patriarchy takes prisoners—in fact, it is exceedingly good at housing its captives. The demand that "surrender is not an option" is only ever an imploration that it should not be considered one. But the entire radical feminist analysis of forced feminisation points not just to its grave political dangers, but also to its efficacy. Read backwards, it makes for a decent instruction manual on how to become a woman through capitulating to the enemy sexual powers. Radical feminist's bad education is getting that there is a way to get feminized, but not that you shouldn't want it. It's falling for the brutal efficiency of the machine for gender that is 912's metal chair, instead of wanting to dismantle it for good.
In a bleakly humorous way, this observation is actually catastrophic for any radical feminist positions that also want to be trans exclusionary, and which are serious about the "radical feminist" part, instead of just being a rebranded cultural feminism serving as an infiltration vector for the forces of white women's fascism. Radical feminism offers a solid critique of social mechanisms of forced feminisation—which encompass beauty industry and pornography, sex work and sadomasochism, wanting to wear a dress and wanting to be impaled on a copper dildo. This, then, makes it easy to castigate trans women for harming the feminist cause for being into any of that. But! But there is no grounds in this theory to deny them femininity. If trans women are guilty of something—and plainly, they are—then it is excess of femininity, not the usurpation of it. This is the sad consequence of being forced feminized—through whatever means.
For this reason, trans-exclusionary feminism had to ultimately give up on radical feminism and rebrand as "gender critical", drawing more from cultural feminism's fascination with the uniqueness of "the woman" rather than radical feminist takedown of gender as a sex-class system. After all, under its logic, gender essentialism is also a form of forced feminisation. To quote a somewhat recent interview with MacKinnon herself, "male dominant society has defined women as a discrete biological group forever. If this was going to produce liberation, we'd be free". In this light, anchoring womanhood to any kind of chromosomal or reproductive status is bound only to reproduce subjugation, and not lead to emancipation.
Sadly, this is bitter comfort to a trans girl wishing to be speared by an electrified dildo or called a worthless slut by her partner. She seems to be a woman—but more like a collaborator than a revolutionary. She needs a solid session of consciousness-raising, but may well be too far gone. And until then, there seems to be no redeeming of her pleasures.
But can they still be used?
The question that Cameron Awkward-Rich arrives at in his essay is of similar thrust:
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What might be made possible by regarding the explicitly annihilatory portrayals of trans people in trans-exclusionary lesbian feminism and by saying, yes, that is me – so what?
Surprisingly, the answer he ultimately gives is love. And this is why in the next part of this essay, I will look at Allison Rumfitt's magisterial work of trans horror, indicatively titled Tell Me I'm Worthless.
I don't know about others, but personally, it makes me uneasy. It rests a bit too close to comfort to the patronizing pity of psychiatry. After all, there is no guarantee that this distillation will stop there; all too easily, it can transition into something far more nefarious. The distance between saying "you fantasize about being owned because you can't imagine taking care of yourself" and "you fantasize about being a woman because you can't imagine being a successful man" is deceptively short.
I suppose my reaction here, as yours is, is pretty banal -- "yes, and so what?"
Once we come to the conclusion that some degree of degradation is inevitable to the subaltern, or even bound up in that experience as a matter of definition, is it any more problematic to accept the patronization and pity that comes with it?
I agree, but I also find that this strategy has severe shortcomings. I am reminded of a criticism of Andrea Long Chu (whose fingerprints are all over this entire project, even if I am working towards quoting her less) by Jules Joane Gleeson:
Article:
Like many trans women I know, I was discomforted by how much ground Chu's breakout N+1 essay "On Liking Women" (2018d) conceded to transphobic feminists. If there ever was correct timing for this lightweight approach, it was certainly not 2018. Since its publication, so-called gender-critical feminists have frustrated reforms to Britain's Gender Recognition Act and have worked up ties to the Heritage Foundation's campaigns supporting President Donald Trump's federal moves against trans people. In this context, Chu's acceptance of all the primary arguments of transphobic feminists before replying "And so what?" seems too clever by half.
I tend to agree, or at least I tend to find the "so what?" unsatisfying in itself. It is, after all, a question, not an answer, and this entire cycle is supposed to be me working towards one, however provisional. Which is why Cameron Awkward-Rich takes Chu's place as my main source of incisive quotes I could never compose myself. I believe that there is value in working through the complexities of this "what", even if it is done without a hope of returning a morally uplifting message.
So what exactly would be the logical conclusion of this essay regarding trans men who enjoy forced feminization, bottoming, submission and some such; for whom the assertion that this is at it's core feminity and womanhood is a wildly transphobic statement?
I don't want this to come off as a personal critique, the following is just the only way I know how to write.
This is gonna be kind of hard to explain properly but this essay feels like it practices transmisogyny against itself in an unhelpful way. There's a missing piece to its formulation which is perhaps best exposed by this sentence:
But most girls I know who share this particular taste for violent objectification verging on self-annihilation, and for the twinned undoing of a personhood that makes a female have something in common: they tend to be trans.
This is a statement this is both rhetorically suspect (if this were a debate we would call it an anecdote) but also deeply revealing. What I mean is that it's misaligned to reality. The supposition or even merely the implication that there is something inherently 'transy' about subbing in sex is a notion that in my opinion only really makes sense to someone who is trans and who lives and works and breathes in trans spaces. The 'trend' to be trans among people whom the author knows and who share this sexual fantasy with the author could be a trend among people whom the author knows full stop (or else whom the author knows well enough to be comfortable discussing kinks with).
This is the inherent danger of trying to build a coherent worldview out of anecdotes. As an audience, we don't actually have any way of further interrogating the truth of the matter, and in actuality, the demographic stats on your friend circle are not relevant. What matters is that it's adopting an almost definitionally exclusionary position. Not in the sense of excluding transwomen from womanhood as an abstract, but in the more primal sense of physically excluding transwomen from the spaces of women. The thing is that it seems to do this voluntarily with the purpose of trying to examine something internal to itself.
It cloaks itself in voluntary exile from women so that it can then, once sufficiently distant, turn around and look upon the city on the hill in its complete glory. However, the idea that you cannot view the complete construct from within only makes sense if you agree that there even is a complete construct. If you believe that there is no one construct of gender then this is going to end up as a very tough sell to you. There are maybe certain foundational precepts that most of us would agree on but everything built on top of that renders the city an increasingly non-euclidean manifold. A nightmare of fractal space where stepping from one street to another is walking through wholly different and unique universes of feminine experience.
...This line especially is going to stick with me. As a trans woman who very much engages in hard kink, this essay has already done a lot to help sort out my feelings on a lot of the kink content I consumed as an uncracked egg. I appreciate seeing theory put to feelings that I've only ever really explained privately to a select few people.
The supposition or even merely the implication that there is something inherently 'transy' about subbing in sex is a notion that in my opinion only really makes sense to someone who is trans and who lives and works and breathes in trans spaces.
I don't think this essay is particularly perscriptive of all trans women? Trans women like the essay describes, who find gender affirmation in submission, very much exist. Admittedly I know a lot of them because I am one and therefore gravitate to spaces where other women like this would be. I feel like the absolute percentage of transwomen who experience kink in this way does not matter to the validity of this essay. There are more then zero and they are not hard to find, I think it's a worthwhile exercise to explore what's up with these specific women.
I don't think this essay is particularly perscriptive of all trans women exactly? Trans women like the essay describes, who find gender affirmation in submission, very much exist. Admittedly I know a lot of them because I am one and therefore gravitate to spaces where other women like this would be. I feel like the absolute percentage of transwomen who experience kink in this way does not matter to the validity of this essay. There are more then zero and they are not hard to find, I think it's a worthwhile exercise to explore what's up with these specific women.
Why is it worthwhile to explore specific women? No seriously. Is it intrinsically worthwhile to identify some grouping of individuals and then attempt to pathologise them? Or is it something about this specific group that makes it so? What is that thing?
Why is it worthwhile to explore specific women? No seriously. Is it intrinsically worthwhile to identify some grouping of individuals and then attempt to pathologise them? Or is it something about this specific group that makes it so? What is that thing?
I mean for my purposes I consider it worthwhile because the essay is applicable to me and I'm curious if I can get any insight for myself out of it.
But beyond that...you do need an amount of specificity in order to make an essay? The authors essays on Dreadnaught are not applicable to every book written about a transfem protagonis but they were still essays that I'm glad were written because there turned out to be a lot of interesting things the author had to say.
What I'm getting at is more so the pathologising part. Like why is it necessary to grab a bucket of people and then be like 'okay so why are they like this and also what does it mean that they're like this and how is it different to other people?' I guess what I mean is that I don't see any distinction at all between the transwoman desire to be submissive and the ciswoman desire to be submissive. It's actually just not at all special that sexually submissive transwomen exist, not for any trans specific reasons but for the exact opposite. All women have fantasies because all women are people.
I think transwomen struggle with this (I think that because I am one and I struggle with this) but femininity is not a mythical construct that can either be understood or can't be. It's just a thing. There's nothing secret or sacred that goes on inside the brain of a woman but this is the secret fear of not only transwomen but ciswomen too. At a certain point we need to take people at face value when they give an account of their own experiences. If many ciswomen have bdsm fantasies and many transwomen have bdsm fantasies what that says to me is that many women have bdsm fantasies. We shouldn't be like 'well hold up now let's pretend that someone here is lying about themselves, now what would THAT mean?' because I don't know if it's useful. It feels like devil's advocacy for the sake of devil's advocacy rather than to productively test the sturdiness of the central idea.
This is a statement this is both rhetorically suspect (if this were a debate we would call it an anecdote) but also deeply revealing. What I mean is that it's misaligned to reality. The supposition or even merely the implication that there is something inherently 'transy' about subbing in sex is a notion that in my opinion only really makes sense to someone who is trans and who lives and works and breathes in trans spaces. The 'trend' to be trans among people whom the author knows and who share this sexual fantasy with the author could be a trend among people whom the author knows full stop (or else whom the author knows well enough to be comfortable discussing kinks with).
I think you conflate two distinct critiques here. Namely you make an argument about generalizability, but also object to the use of a trans analytic lens.
The first, that this is anecdotal or subjective is pretty trivial tbh. Like, there are distinctly trans genres of kink that are pretty well known in a great many trans spaces. But also, sure, garg doesn't establish that or showcase the prevalence. But ethnography is often built on anecdotes and there's great value to case studies in critical theory and more reflective works that aren't consumed with quantitative issues of generalization. Speaking as a quantitative social scientist who is consumed with quantitative issues of generalization, this kind of work is tremendously valuable in that the kind of statistical situating you want in more quant work almost always comes at the expense of depth and insight. The conventional party line is simply that both approaches have value and the best social theory is often built out of triangulating across methods. So anecdotes are great actually even if it's the author's local community.
That said, the more substantial objection is to making transness a distinct object of analysis in something that doesn't clearly have an exclusively trans appeal. That said I do think there is a very wide trans recognition of these things and they have a particular place that is uniqueish in trans culture. A pretty substantial trans kink community exists that's well known and pretty widely discussed in theory and media by transfemmes everywhere. There's a history of well-known websites and stories and narrative. It's not a coincidence that everyone from Imogen Binnie (oft cited as the founder of modern trans lit) to Daniel Lavery (a trans theorist), to ALC (mentioned upthread) to random Scribblehub authors writing sacharine trans webnovels almost certainly know a lot about force fem is and are cheerful to recommend Fictionmania in public or to contrast the widespread forced-feminization genre with the presumptive absence of forced masc in the popular consciousness. This, I think, would suffice to justify the inquiry.
But, also, just because a thing (and garg repeatedly notes cis practices that are interpreted through the particular theoretical lens developed here, not just trans people) is or isn't popular in trans spaces doesn't intrinsically limit the ability to apply trans theory as an analytic perspective to the relevant sexual politics. Transness here functions, afaict, not just as a personal lens from which the author is speaking (and you may want to step more cautiously there in assigning pathology) but also as a toolkit and an approach to interpreting the broader topic. Indeed, the essay is full of discussion of cis people engaging in these practices.
I guess what I mean is that I don't see any distinction at all between the transwoman desire to be submissive and the ciswoman desire to be submissive.
I kind of disagree...Like yes our two theoretical subs are both women but the transwoman has had the very complicated experience of transition while the ciswoman hasn't. I don't think its unreasonable to say that two people who have different life experiences might arrive at the same action for different reasons.
So the thing for me, about this essay and a previous one, is that there's a very strong tendancy in them to use trans womanhood/trans femme to mean transgender. The author then proceedes to make interesting points that nevertheless form a subtext of "All transness is trans women." Being that I'm a trans man who has spent years creating very nerdy and very BDSM involving porn on a semi professional level, alongside other trans men and trans masculine non-binary people, the essays this come off as incomplete at best and possibly generalizing/erasing on purpose at worse. This particular one actually mentioned trans men. In a single line.
Being a sub in hardcore BDSM porn is hardly unique to women. Very few of the things written here were unique to trans women either once you nudge away the author's insistence. A copper dildo inside a hole is not inherently gendering, unless you really want it to be, and just how far are you going to extend that into a lopsided conception of femalehood/womanhood/transness?
Does the lukewarm kink I have for cervical penetration detract from my manhood? Or the eggpreg, or switching while being verse, dating another man and an enbie in a poly relationship... Does SM and erotic fantasy of an unwanted transgender-male-masculine-uterus getting fucked only make me a woman if I want to receive rather than give? Does the hysterectomy I was supposed to get tomorrow provide enough to counterweight my woman points? What if I want to Dom and roleplay as roughly engulfing someone's penis while not using any terminology like pussy or cunt for myself? If I sub while super hairy sans male pattern baldness, having been on testosterone for multiple years with removed breasts, and having my boyfriend stick needles in my testosterone enhanced dick, do I get to remain a man because no copper dildo is in either of my holes?
Where does the other sort of trans person and their extremely rich, varied, and transformative sexual experiences land in any sort of radical feminist theory?
I think I was unclear here. There's a difference between 'that's an anecdote so it's bad data' and 'that's an anecdote so it's rhetorically deficient framing.' It's not about data set generalisation so much as it's about it being a false positive reading into of hypothetical distinction. 'Lots of my transfemale friends have submissive fantasies' is data or whatever but it's missing the accompanying analysis to show that this is, e.g. unexpected and therefore actually worth examining in the way that it's being examined. There's a lot that's unique about the trans experience but 'I have politically problematic sexual fantasies' is perhaps not so.
And I don't mean that in the sense of 'so therefore exclude all analysis of transfemale sexual fantasies' I mean that in the sense of 'maybe don't try to study transfemale sexual fantasies in exclusionary isolation and then try to extrapolate out what that says about them internally.' Like I said at the outset, the essay seems to be in a rush to exclude its own author from womanhood. I deeply understand this impulse but I don't think it's per se useful to the rhetorical aim. It's an essay that got me to think, just not about what it seems it wanted me to think about. As is I spent most of my time going 'and? so? and? what does this suggest? and why is that relevant? etc.' I kept wanting it to say more, to arrive at some kind of conclusion.
Not every essay needs to have an explicit point but I think this is the kind of essay that did need one or at least seemed to want to have one.
I kind of disagree...Like yes our two theoretical subs are both women but the transwoman has had the very complicated experience of transition while the ciswoman hasn't. I don't think its unreasonable to say that two people who have different life experiences might arrive at the same action for different reasons.
But the essay directly asserts that they're the same reasons (the patriarchy, to put it frivolously). What's different (per the essay) isn't the reasons but what the reactions to the reasons mean and that's what I think is worth unpacking. Like my reading of the essay is that it's very, very shyly attempting to imply that transwomen experience a masculine reaction and ciswomen experience a feminine reaction. e.g. that the transwoman's experience of male gaze in media is different to the ciswoman's.
I don't think it's helpful that the essay is also trying to dance around the whole 'is porn inherently derogatory' thing either in this context tbh. At the end of the day maybe the biggest issue here is that we're discussing this on SufficientVelocity tbh. This forum doesn't have the right clientele to productively discuss very big things like whether porn; its production and consumption, is inherently anti-feminist and if it can't even discuss porn then there's no way it can discuss the thornier issue of fantasies.
Where does the other sort of trans person and their extremely rich, varied, and transformative sexual experiences land in any sort of radical feminist theory?
This is actually a really important critique, and I am thankful to you for posting it.
The answer is, probably, not very well. Radical transfeminism as a framework, especially in its more rigid and orthodox forms, has never particularly well equipped for talking about trans masculinity, or trans masculine desire. In fact, that radical feminist critiques of lesbian BDSM tended to focus so much on the figure of the butch is indicative of the fact. Even Finn McKay, one of the most prominent contemporary masc-of-center proponents of trans-inclusive radical feminism, is kind of evasive on the issue, and grounds his theorizing primarily in his lesbianism.
It's a noted weakness of such theories, and also, I think, a solid part of the reason why Cameron Awkward-Rich eventually reaches for the conclusion that "transfeminism", this utopian fusion and trans and feminist thought, will conceptually always exclude trans men, and as such a different formulation of the affinity between transness and feminism is needed. To this I would also add, focusing more on my essay, is that I am working with trans femininity specifically, and making no claims as to speaking for transness in general. The point you raise about trans in this work standing for "trans women" is a common problem in trans studies, but it is not a conscious intellectual operation. I also don't think that writing about transness should always strive for being about transness as a whole. The trans feminine, and the trans masculine, are more than just mirrors of each other and require distinct, theoretical approach. This is also why I try to specify that I am writing about trans femininity, and not transness in general because you are right - my writing clearly fails to be about the latter.
(I think that this critique is also far more applicable to my previous essay, the one on trans envy, especially given how the text I was riffing on - a chapter on envy from Hil Malatino's book on being trans and feeling bad - is explicitly about trans men and their particular kinds of trans envy.)
However, in a peculiar twist, trans masculinity is far better theorized within BDSM studies than trans femininity. From the works of Gayle Rubin on butches, catamites, and kings, through Paul B. Preciado, Eliza Steinbock, Robin Bauer, and especially Pat Califia, there is a wealth of theory on how trans masculine bodies and identities operate in scenes of BDSM - and no such comparable theory exists for trans women. At best, we get tepid praise for BDSM as a scene of gender-making, in which the specificity of the trans feminine desire gets mostly lost.
Finally, I would also tentatively make a point that some of the questions of relationship between feminisation and the patriarchy that I touch upon have relevance in more specifically gay masculine context. Gay BDSM cultures have a long history with various kinds of femmophobia, and in fact old leather as a subculture arose in no small part as a way of distancing oneself from the stereotypical queens. It's what Bersani gets at. I think you could take this as a starting point for thinking about specifically trans masculine forced feminisation kink, and then use it to blow a gap in the entire radical feminist analysis of the apparatus of feminisation. Incidentally, it is not that far from what Preciado does in parts of Testo Junkie. It is also not something I am equipped to explore. To return to my previous point, the history of the role of feminisation in the context of gay life requires a different approach and attitude from the one I am working with.
I don't think it's helpful that the essay is also trying to dance around the whole 'is porn inherently derogatory' thing either in this context tbh. At the end of the day maybe the biggest issue here is that we're discussing this on SufficientVelocity tbh. This forum doesn't have the right clientele to productively discuss very big things like whether porn; its production and consumption, is inherently anti-feminist and if it can't even discuss porn then there's no way it can discuss the thornier issue of fantasies.
There are actually a number of porn and porn adjacent communities here on SV, I myself post one of the sexier stories on the site, with more wild fantasies than you can shake a washing machine at! There are definitely people willing and able to discuss these things, or else I would never get comments. (Though for my part, updates have slowed more as the world has devolved, I admit.) There are puritans on here, as there are everywhere, and there does seem to be a sort of "culture of pretending sex doesn't exist" to some extent outside those threads, but that is mostly because people are afraid to try it rather than because people are incapable of engaging if you do.
There's an expectation you will get shouted down that doesn't seem to manifest in reality, which I think comes from the... sociality of SV as a space? I saw someone say SV is like Thanksgiving dinner or the Family Reunion, with histories going back years, and I think that has something to do with it. There simply aren't many environments IRL to safely discuss kink with people you have other kinds of conversations with unless you are already in a specifically kink-adjacent space, and it's maybe weird to see people recontextualized that way for some members? Hard to say, I am relatively new at the table.
Either way, don't count out sex on SV, is what I'm saying! We need more sexy stories and discussions, not less.
There are actually a number of porn and porn adjacent communities here on SV, I myself post one of the sexier stories on the site, with more wild fantasies than you can shake a washing machine at! There are definitely people willing and able to discuss these things, or else I would never get comments. (Though for my part, updates have slowed more as the world has devolved, I admit.) There are puritans on here, as there are everywhere, and there does seem to be a sort of "culture of pretending sex doesn't exist" to some extent outside those threads, but that is mostly because people are afraid to try it rather than because people are incapable of engaging if you do.
There's an expectation you will get shouted down that doesn't seem to manifest in reality, which I think comes from the... sociality of SV as a space? I saw someone say SV is like Thanksgiving dinner or the Family Reunion, with histories going back years, and I think that has something to do with it. There simply aren't many environments IRL to safely discuss kink with people you have other kinds of conversations with unless you are already in a specifically kink-adjacent space, and it's maybe weird to see people recontextualized that way for some members? Hard to say, I am relatively new at the table.
Either way, don't count out sex on SV, is what I'm saying! We need more sexy stories and discussions, not less.
the world may never find out about the smutty Number None omakes that I wrote but never posted because I deemed them not on-brand
This is a very good point. I think people are unsure what is actually considered allowable to be posted under the rules, so they're hesitant to post it, and when they do they're wary of the audience reaction, even though in reality the rules are more permissible than expected and the audience more welcoming than you'd think.
I do think this kind of essay with its very specific scope is really interesting and deserving of a broader audience than it gets on SV, but like, I don't think I would want to see it thrown to the Twitter wolves, so it has to live in this kind of awkward place. Maybe someday thanks to garg SV will be known as a premier place for queer theory essays!
the world may never find out about the smutty Number None omakes that I wrote but never posted because I deemed them not on-brand
This is a very good point. I think people are unsure what is actually considered allowable to be posted under the rules, so they're hesitant to post it, and when they do they're wary of the audience reaction, even though in reality the rules are more permissible than expected and the audience more welcoming than you'd think.
More seriously, near as I can tell, the rules are intentionally unclear on the matter, and I know from personal experience that even when you "ask a private question" to try and pin down if what you're about to post violates the rules, the response you get is unhelpful at best. I think the vibe was essentially "fuck around and find out"? Which, I mean, I ultimately found out I wouldn't be smacked for what I posted, but that could always change next chapter. It's pretty stressful, and I don't blame folks for skipping it.
Infractions by themselves aren't like, the end of the world, but people remember what you get hit for, and you're never not gonna be that person who wrote something on the wrong side of Rule 6. Playing chicken with the rules is a lot less risky when it's something people commonly get hit for and doesn't label you as a special sort of outsider. Kind of like how public urination can get you on the sex offender list, maybe? I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about it and still have a hard time narrowing it down but I know it's a cultural norm I'd like to see shifted some.
One, I think that Chu would take offense to being called a "gender theorist", and two, I think she would find a place devoted to nerd culture too revolting to handle.
One, I think that Chu would take offense to being called a "gender theorist", and two, I think she would find a place devoted to nerd culture too revolting to handle.
This is actually a really important critique, and I am thankful to you for posting it.
The answer is, probably, not very well. Radical transfeminism as a framework, especially in its more rigid and orthodox forms, has never particularly well equipped for talking about trans masculinity, or trans masculine desire. In fact, that radical feminist critiques of lesbian BDSM tended to focus so much on the figure of the butch is indicative of the fact. Even Finn McKay, one of the most prominent contemporary masc-of-center proponents of trans-inclusive radical feminism, is kind of evasive on the issue, and grounds his theorizing primarily in his lesbianism.
It's a noted weakness of such theories, and also, I think, a solid part of the reason why Cameron Awkward-Rich eventually reaches for the conclusion that "transfeminism", this utopian fusion and trans and feminist thought, will conceptually always exclude trans men, and as such a different formulation of the affinity between transness and feminism is needed. To this I would also add, focusing more on my essay, is that I am working with trans femininity specifically, and making no claims as to speaking for transness in general. The point you raise about trans in this work standing for "trans women" is a common problem in trans studies, but it is not a conscious intellectual operation. I also don't think that writing about transness should always strive for being about transness as a whole. The trans feminine, and the trans masculine, are more than just mirrors of each other and require distinct, theoretical approach. This is also why I try to specify that I am writing about trans femininity, and not transness in general because you are right - my writing clearly fails to be about the latter.
(I think that this critique is also far more applicable to my previous essay, the one on trans envy, especially given how the text I was riffing on - a chapter on envy from Hil Malatino's book on being trans and feeling bad - is explicitly about trans men and their particular kinds of trans envy.)
However, in a peculiar twist, trans masculinity is far better theorized within BDSM studies than trans femininity. From the works of Gayle Rubin on butches, catamites, and kings, through Paul B. Preciado, Eliza Steinbock, Robin Bauer, and especially Pat Califia, there is a wealth of theory on how trans masculine bodies and identities operate in scenes of BDSM - and no such comparable theory exists for trans women. At best, we get tepid praise for BDSM as a scene of gender-making, in which the specificity of the trans feminine desire gets mostly lost.
Finally, I would also tentatively make a point that some of the questions of relationship between feminisation and the patriarchy that I touch upon have relevance in more specifically gay masculine context. Gay BDSM cultures have a long history with various kinds of femmophobia, and in fact old leather as a subculture arose in no small part as a way of distancing oneself from the stereotypical queens. It's what Bersani gets at. I think you could take this as a starting point for thinking about specifically trans masculine forced feminisation kink, and then use it to blow a gap in the entire radical feminist analysis of the apparatus of feminisation. Incidentally, it is not that far from what Preciado does in parts of Testo Junkie. It is also not something I am equipped to explore. To return to my previous point, the history of the role of feminisation in the context of gay life requires a different approach and attitude from the one I am working with.
I've definitely noticed that radfem in general falls apart when the topic of trans masculine people is brought up. This weakness is no different in communities claiming themselves as trans inclusive radical feminist. Radfem largely only works if you retain a universal rule of men vs women as a social caste, and in a world where trans men or non-binary people exist it is increasingly hard to retain that without heaps of nuance unless one has little qualms with transphobia attitudes when aimed only at non-women. I've indeed read about a few trans men who used to think themselves as radical feminist lesbians, one of which is now a bisexual trans man, but I will say I haven't read much of those works yet. I stepped away from second wave feminism some time before accepting that I wasn't a woman.
As for the essay itself, your previous one indeed had a large write up sitting in my Google docs for some time. I ultimately decided to not post it and deleted it because I wanted to focus on other things. However, both of these essays still have an undercurrent of pinning certain things as belonging to or indictive of womenhood. Trans or otherwise. To the phenomen of the nerdy online trans cat girl I can only raise the quiet epidemic of nerdy online catboys. The many many trans boys whose induction into queerness, in general, has been via content largely made for cishet women (until recently) and thus sometimes paints their journey with less than healthy approaches to themselves and one another.
Having also actively talked with trans women about what they like, trans men, and non-binary people... I don't think our kinks are so vastly different that someone can point at your BDSM examples and say that it's uniquely trans feminine and makes one a woman. Some trans men I know would look at the scene you wrote about an find it quite distressing to hear a trans person thinks that what they like makes them part of a womanhood social caste, that they are made women by penetration and submission. Doubly so when to some of them it is gender affirming to submit to other men in an D/s gay, faggot slur degradation including, Sir and boy context.
I similarly cannot count the times I've talked about sex and kink with a trans femme friend of mine and found we have a lot in common. Perhaps not personally, but in a sense of us seeing others of our "demographic" have patterns of behavior. Of course, these exist with degrees of same-different motivation or execution of the kink in question. There is definitely what looks to be a certain vein of trans masculine desire to reclaim femininity, or acts cisgender people insist are of womanhood, from cisgender women. Sea horse dads are out there being fathers while gestating babies. Constantly attacked and shamed for it, but there you go.
Kinkwise: Femboy communities, oviposition communities, and sounding/cervical penetration communities tend to have trans men and trans masc enbies welcome. I'd be remiss to frame any of those as unique to them. There are cis gay men who very much wish they could give birth and cis women who are stretching their cervixes enough for penis in cervix sex. Non-binary femboys who are trans femme, anyone?
On a more controversial hand, the largest kink subreddit for trans men and trans masculine enbies is a subreddit built from misgendering and forced detransition kink. There's been plenty of actual and very unsexy abuse or harm spilling out of it for years. Most of the users are cis male chasers. But it remains so popular and influencial that the regular ftm porn subreddits have, in my time observing both, had to near constantly run damage control due to spill over. This tends to be part of a larger fact: overall I have observed that trans men avoid BDSM communities or hook ups due to risk.
So yes, I have spent years lurking around various trans spaces and BDSM ones as well. This could potentially be used to write essays about my particular intersections. Currently I'm gathering up sources and personal ancedotes about trans masculine reproductive health. I think that it's more relevant and important right now. Various progressive spaces that made attempts at trans inclusion, specifically of those with legally targeted organs such as uteri, have spent the last months off and on reverting in the name of protecting cis women; to the extent of directly telling trans men to detransition if they want to matter. Trans masculine people have exponentially worse health outcomes than cisgender women when it comes to reproductive health, and 51% percent of trans men are sexually assaulted. Becoming pregnant while taking testosterone is far from impossible. It's easy to see where that leads in a country banning abortion while others are explicitly using trans masculine bodies to ban transition.
When I see people claiming to be inclusive acting this way, I'd rather gather up articles about pregnant trans men being left to die after doctors laugh at them than I would trans men's complex relationship with the word cuntboy. There's a severe lack of research and awareness when it comes to trans men and non-binary people. I'm gathering up emotionally tense scraps of information on this topic before I start another one.
Good essay garg, can't wait to see how you tackle that one sex scene from TMIW though lmao
the world may never find out about the smutty Number None omakes that I wrote but never posted because I deemed them not on-brand
This is a very good point. I think people are unsure what is actually considered allowable to be posted under the rules, so they're hesitant to post it, and when they do they're wary of the audience reaction, even though in reality the rules are more permissible than expected and the audience more welcoming than you'd think.
I do think this kind of essay with its very specific scope is really interesting and deserving of a broader audience than it gets on SV, but like, I don't think I would want to see it thrown to the Twitter wolves, so it has to live in this kind of awkward place. Maybe someday thanks to garg SV will be known as a premier place for queer theory essays!
I considered posting a lot of my nsfw content, but after talking about it with people familiar with staff I decided against it. All my works are decidedly not to SV's preferences and I have not been told anything that works make me reconsider not posting 100k+ words of (trans) men kissing and sometimes fucking onto this particular website. Especially since the general consensus at the time was "post and find out" combined with "SV throws epic shit fits about dudes kissing but not chicks kissing because muh demographics." Without stopping to think about why the demographic spread might be that way.
There are a few things I'd like to pick at in what you have just said, but in general I believe that the argument we could have here is a kind of a border war (to use Jack Halberstam's memorable phrase) that have long since characterized trans and queer communities. Maybe the split between trans catboys and trans catgirls should be best analysed through those lens, as not so dissimilar from the old story of the butch/FtM no man's ground? Food for thought.
In any case I freely concede to your point about me taking certain things are indicative of (trans) womanhood - but I also suppose the same thing can be indicative of many things at once, and the way we focus and frame it is key. To use another analogy, it's the ambiguity between drag queens as pointing towards gayness, and drag queens as pointing towards trans womanhood? Neither category can really claim exclusive rights to them, after all. So perhaps the answer to this criticism that it can be both trans femme and trans masc thing? Or maybe - I am just spitballing here, really - it's trying to put too much stress on identity labels which are too constrictive by half, and by design too? I don't know, but I firmly believe that there is no contradiction between the spirit of what I am trying to argue for here, and your observations, it is just approaching the phenomenon from different angles.
As for the matter of political pertinence of such investigations - I don't know. I feel like there is this kind of desire to make your work and research always be about the Currently Pressing Issue, and that's by no means wrong. But I also keep thinking about how marginal worlds - such as the one of trans kink, for example - have a tendency to get unravelled in the shadow of great crises and then go unmourned and unremembered. The interwar SM scene got destroyed by the Nazi war machine - literally. Between mourning for the dead across the border after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February I kept nervouslly checking if one of the best latex manufacturers, based in Kiev, is okay. He made it out okay and is back in business, but it is not hard to imagine his work getting lost on account of a stray missile. So- while I am not going to argue that talking about trans kink and trying to think through it is some kind of a great, emancipatory gesture that we need today, I think the world is richer for it.
Finally, as for posting pornography on SV - I would be very cautious about people telling you that this site is unwelcoming of it. I wrote an entire 120k words dronekink novel here and the reception was really, heartwarmingly positive. And I can think of more than a few ppl who would be overjoyed to see some more MLM content go live on this website, too.
