The first thing that ever made me happy was me. It was recognizing myself, realizing that I was an actual person—that I had always been me, I’d always been in there. That my own ideas about myself were clearly the truth. All that other happiness that I’ve felt since has built on that basic core. Which isn’t to say all the happiness I feel is about me, exactly. It’s that I didn’t have access to that emotion at all until I felt that way about myself—and now that I can, I can extend that love to other things.
Tonight I stumbled on a dumb thread from an artist who didn’t seem to have met a real girl in his life and had no idea how bodies work. In particular he focused on “W-sitting,” which is that whole thing that kids often do where they turn their hips sideways about 90 degrees and sit with their legs splayed out sideways in front of them. He described it as this innately feminine posture that the male body was unable to reproduce due to the differences in the female skeleton. Which is uh, of course complete nonsense on so many levels. But also, this has for 40 years basically been my go-to whenever I sit on the floor. I had to check many times to make sure I understood correctly, and yeah W- and even T-sitting (where the calves are straight out to the sides) have always been natural to me.
And… yes I am of course a girl, but I have a feeling he wasn’t thinking of a girl quite like me here.
What strikes me though, out of this ignorance is, how angry my ex used to be with me when they saw me sit like that—or squat. Or… really do much of anything with my body. This whole time I’ve been like, well, it’s comfortable? And what’s it to you? I didn’t understand what their problem was. Now, though—in mind of so many other complaints, I wonder if their brain was in the same place as this guy, and they were uncomfortable with the implications of this body language.
I often think about how when I finally worked out I was trans, everyone who knew me pretty much shrugged. “Oh, yeah,” they replied, “That makes sense.” Of the people I talk to regularly, I don’t think one of them expressed anything approaching surprise. It was more like, “Ah, that would be it. Okay.”
So what strikes me here is, all these leg motions and positions that come naturally to me, that have historically made other people uncomfortable or angry—a lot of that is probably kinda gender-coded, right? Just like everything else in my body language that kept getting me into trouble, sheesh.
Basically my whole life the people around me encouraged me to stop moving or holding my body in ways that were easy or natural or comfortable to me—without explaining to me why exactly—in order to prevent others feeling uncomfortable.
I have so much to unlearn. Like, the emotional state that I get in, the way I move and behave when I am chilled out and comfortable and yes on some level happy? With what I now understand, it seems that most of that default is uh super-duper feminine-coded.
To be happy, to be myself, to me is feminine-coded.
Which says a hell of a lot about my first 40 years—the persistent message that for me to be calm and comfortable and happy was wrong and disgusting and disruptive, and that I had to contain it at any cost lest I bother someone or invite some kind of punishment.
This all brings a certain light to our now-common term for same-sex attraction. To be allowed to simply be one’s self, to do what comes naturally, to be comfortable in one’s skin, is to feel gay. This isn’t quite about that, but, well, all queerness is related, right.
It is another level of galaxy-brain to understand at last that the people I relied on, who controlled my life for four decades, literally wanted nothing more from me than for me to be unhappy. To be uncomfortable, stressed. To understand how worse-than-worthless my humanity was. I’m just following the logic here, right? If to know happiness is to feel comfortable with who I am, and if every behavior that comes naturally to me is considered wrong and off-limits, then the last thing that anyone central to my life has ever wanted was for me to be happy.
And so, I wasn’t.
To be happy was wrong. It bothered others. It was dangerous. So, fine, I wasn’t happy.
Ever.
For 41 years. And about two weeks.
Anyway, it’s astonishing how things can shift for me now. When I calm down, I feel so, well, girly. I feel so myself. Just being able to chill can bring on this kind of a euphoria, as I lock into who I actually am as a person. Then when I freak out and tense up, I feel like I am regressing into that other person; I feel so much less charitable toward myself, I like myself so much less, down to what I look like. How I hold myself, navigate space.
Then I look at Azure in a good moment, and I think, this is what those dummies were afraid of? Seriously, her? And it just underlines even further how pathetic all those people were. How deranged their sense of good must have been.
I find it increasingly unavoidable that much of the trauma that I have such trouble detaching from sex as an act of communication is based in my relationship to gender—specifically in the expectations that it sets me up for when engaging with a person in this way.
So I’m a girl, right. Non-binary, but still. Obvious as my gender may be to me now—and to anyone else, it would seem—I didn’t always know it. I had no sense for what I was, beyond what people told me. The things they told me… didn’t seem quite right, and made me deeply uncomfortable, but as with so many things I didn’t want to argue so I shrugged and tried to play along.
Like the act of sex—like most of the things we do with our lives—gender is a conversation. The way that you frame it defines a role, and the role suggests a kind of a relationship. Much like art, when we define ourselves by our actions, we unavoidably embody a certain philosophy or ideology within our identity.
At the risk of getting reductive, every role that we embody serves to signal a set of expectations for how we mean to behave toward others and how we expect them to behave toward us. The coding can get complicated and conditional. But it’s there. A big part of understanding one’s relationship to gender, at least to my mind, is in coming to grips with how one wants to relate to one’s self and others; how one feels about the world; what behavior one considers constructive and important, and makes one feel good to perform. The identities we build through our actions represent a set of apprehensions about how the world works, or how we want it to.
To that end, when one is compelled to behave as someone other than who one genuinely is, that is on some level a breach of principle. You know that you’re doing something wrong, that you’re betraying something important, even if you can’t quite articulate how or why. For me, constitutionally the expectations put on me most of my life made me feel ill, and wrong, and like a horrible human being. Which isn’t to say those roles are awful in and of themselves—there are people who can rock them and make good out of them—but they did not fit my view or ideals, and just made me more and more upset and disgusted with myself. To project them onto me in particular, and expect me to follow them, was harmful.
This definition could be a discussion in its own right, but where I’m going with it here is that, to maybe even a greater extent than my sexuality, these sorts of gender issues may be the source of my biggest problems with sex.
I say, with good reason, that my asexuality is key to understanding everything else about me. This is absolutely true. It also is complicated to understand, and a little misleading until you get there. After, all aces can and will and do fuck—some of them—without it necessarily being this big traumatic ordeal for them. So my asexuality isn’t in and of itself the answer here, though it is of course relevant.
Where trauma comes in with a thing like this, it’s not really to do with attraction or orientation. It’s from how you’re treated, what happens, and how it makes you feel. It’s a matter of the individual relationships that you form, and the patterns and associations and expectations that you take from your experiences. And those specific dynamics—about what feels right and wrong and good and bad and healthy and harmful and how it affects you and changes your ideas about yourself and others and the world that you live in—those are based in that ideological coding that you carry around with you, that gender in part serves to express.
With that ideology of self in mind, when you’re expected to act in ways that feel wrong to you, and due to whatever power dynamics you feel no real option to refuse or negotiate, that constitutes a violation. Whether by direct threat or unspecific fear, consent can’t be compelled. And for me—from the gender dynamics at play, the expectations put on me, the threat of punishment either expressed or implied or readily tacitly understood—sex was a horror show. Because I was not who I was told. And the person who I wasn’t, carried certain narrow expectations, for how they should act, what they should want, none of which were negotiable. If I didn’t want those things, I was lying or I had some other agenda, and it didn’t matter because that was my responsibility.
More and more I understand how my evidently hard-coded sexual roles and interests are interwoven with my gender—with my femininity, my sense of myself as a girl; with my relationship with myself; with what kind of a person I want to be, with how I want to relate to other people. As far as roles go, how much of my being 100% bottom can be triangulated with my asexuality and how much to my ideas about power and fairness and truth and sincerity and trust and openness, I don’t know. I just know I hate to impose myself onto others, and that I spend all of my time taking in others’ worlds. In essence I am made not to assert but to receive.
For me there is a natural and kind of obvious line between the way I feel comfortable communicating sexually to the way I feel comfortable communicating in any other way. All of this is an expression of my sense of self—which by that definition above is an active process, tied to my ideals.
Which is not to say that for another person femininity or being some kind of female is this deferential mode of being. I’m just talking about Azure here. My gender is my own. My ideals are a part of me in particular. This is how all of this ties together for me, as this coherent whole.
Likewise my whole overwhelming, if you will pardon me, thirst for cock—it’s always been there, basically since I became aware of sex at all. It’s a part of me, whether I’ve acknowledged it or not. And—well, it’s both complicated and not at all really. Sometimes one just has a special craving. But a big part of that craving is again just my whole concept of myself, in relation to myself and in relation to others and in relation to the world. It’s rooted in my mode of interacting with things, in how I am inclined to interface. To be receptive is, like, the basic thing about me. If we’re talking sex, then I’m gonna want to take things in, accept them. So to me a fascination with this particular structure… well, it just naturally feels like it follows everything else that makes Azure Azure.
So to the extent that sex interests me at all, I have… favorites. And it’s all part of this same system, the best I can tell—this “correct” way of relating to others. A monkey wrench in all this is my equally ideological tendency toward panness, for most of the exact same reasons, and all the tricky business with gender and anatomy and so on. (I mean, genitals aren’t gendered. As a girl with a dick of her own, it’s difficult not to be sensitive to the complications here.)
Of course in practical terms I’m aroace and I’m never gonna actually pursue a sexual relationship with anyone in real life. All this is a thought experiment more than anything; it’ll never affect anyone outside of my head. And yet it all does lean into some of the historical trauma that I associate with sex—with the dynamics that have felt so wrong, and how they relate to my concept of who I am as a person. And so, abstract as it may be, this business can’t help getting a little messy as a result.
I’ve only had two actual sexual partners. Depending on how we define things, I might have had… I don’t know, a few more romantic partners beyond them. Things were often weird, what with that ace/allo misalignment. Their ideas and mine never quite lined up. However you count, one common factor is that they were all cis women—which, you know, sure. Fine. Cool. Though that homogeneity feels a bit… off, considering all the things about me.
The other common factor is that I never went looking for any of this. Generally they all pursed me, and normalized themselves as a part of my life until I started to think of them as friends, then intensely close friends. From there, any romantic or sexual development was always a change of terms. Suddenly I’d have this choice: either to lose this friend I was getting to rely on so much emotionally, or to make this compromise, step outside of my comfort zone, and accommodate these new expectations. And then, to keep accommodating. Keep playing along, to make them happy.
An ultimatum is not a good start for any stable relationship, but that’s the only experience I’ve known. Sometimes it was more pointed than others. Sometimes more was at stake. It’s always been coercion, though. And built into that coercion was this demand that I perform this alien role.
And, I was awful at it. I didn’t want to do it. I felt miserable. I felt like I was betraying myself. I felt like I was doing something ethically wrong somehow.
This is a little hard to find the right words to express the way that I mean to. My experience has been narrow, and it’s been entirely focused on my sorest pressure point, and it has really really sucked. As a girl, 100% of my association with sex and romance has been of other girls pressuring me to pretend I was a boy and punishing me when I failed to do it correctly. And that’s just. Uh. There is nothing good about any of that. Beyond girls generally being awesome of course. And it creates these unfortunate associations for me.
It’s like. In a scenario where in fact I were not aroace down to my teeth, I would say, yeah, great, let’s have a balance of everybody. Keeping in mind who I am and the dynamics that I need to be healthy, let’s get in some men, some women, some enbies, cis, trans, whatever. Anyone who’s cool and kind. I’m polyam, even. Party on. Then with that kind of a broad net established, one can narrow down special interests and favorite parts and dynamics, and it doesn’t really matter because everyone is different and people are just people and one will appreciate something new with every individual.
But like. I never got a cock in there, y’know.
Not only did I never actually get the kind of dynamic that I’m most specifically—though not exclusively!—wired to favor. Every relationship was also another riff on the same sucky dynamic that served to deny my humanity, to work against my sense of self, in service of someone else’s whim.
It’s frustrating on a certain level, as I’m never going back to that well again. I know myself well enough now that I’m not going to be in another sexual or romantic situation. I know this isn’t for me. So what I’m left with is that the entirety of my experience is defined by this trauma—and by never once getting what means the most to me. Like, the energy balance I need to feel well, I never got it and I never will. That’s not an experience I’m going to ever have.
And, you know. That’s fine, in the sense that I know this isn’t a part of my life. The future is more important than the past, and I have a good handle on that. It’s just that on some level it seems like a shame, and to be real it’s kind of annoying, that in that whole… er, brief novella that is now closed, I never got a chance to relate to anyone on my own terms, as a girl, in a way that felt healthy and enriching to me.
No one has ever treated me like me. And what they wanted from me, I couldn’t give them. Because I wasn’t that person. And it hurt. And made me frankly want to die.
Most of that is just, yeah, the people who’ve macked on me against my wishes have, surprise surprise, been awful people. But gender, it’s not an insignificant part of that.
I’m a girl, dammit. Of some kind, anyway.
And you know. Hypothetically I like girls too, it’s fine. But, just—even then it would be different if they’d allowed me to be myself. But they didn’t. They made up their own minds.
I was only ever a toy. And a broken one, because I never worked the way they assumed I was meant to. And it was always my fault, for failing to fit that mold.
And it sucked.
It just sucked.
And it’s over now. And I won’t have to worry about it again.
Well gee whiz, I sure did have horny dreams last night. And they sure did reflect my last couple years of firmware upgrades. I have had sexual dreams before, and I have increasingly been myself in my dreams. This whole situation was a bit, uh, new though.
So much cock. Gee willickers.
When I said I was doing progesterone mostly for the brain stuff, this isn’t exactly what I meant.
Is is kind of getting ridiculous at this point. If you will pardon me in my own space here, since starting progesterone I basically just want to suck all the cocks all the time. For weeks now it’s never not on my mind. And it’s so present and palpable in the way my senses and my headspace work—every bit of it. Taste, smell, warmth, texture, pressure. It’s so real. And it’s like a gum-chewing habit. It’s always there. Always on the verge. Like I am continuously primed.
There are other places to put a penis, yes, and those are all engrossing as well—but those moments come and go. This specific buzz never seems to dim, whether awake or asleep. In my actual literal dreams now, there they all are. And there I am, as me. And just one offering after the other, almost nonchalantly, almost inevitably, it’s just what I do. Almost like a handshake.
I kind of feel like my brain is melting a little. I’ve never felt a thing like this, and it just never seems to turn off anymore. If I didn’t know myself as well as I do, if I had an ounce of impulsivity, this could be a real problem. It’s like, beyond an urge. More of a mania.
There are worse things to drive a girl insane. This is basically positive I guess. It’s a good feeling. But god is it distracting. It’s just—God, I, uh. Again I guess it’s good that I understand myself fairly well now, and that I am almost a complete shut-in. Like, if I had an impulsive synapse in my brain, and were even a little more confused than I am about what I really wanted, I might be making some bad decisions these days. There is a part of me that is a little permanently insane here, it seems.
I mean, I guess I might as well bask. No shame in being who I am. No good in denying. It’s just, this has become constant and overwhelming. Not entirely sure what to do with all this energy. But I guess it will find its outlet somewhere. There is certainly some creative work I could undertake here.
Of course the feelings behind the urge are nothing new, really. What’s new is them making sense to me, and my choosing not to push them down into the unthinkable zone. As I understand me now, shame does me no favors. I’m just me. I’m wired the way I’m wired.
I remember feeling like this as far back as maybe 13, 14. As soon as I could entertain any detailed thought of sex. I just couldn’t cope with the things my brain dealt me. People were already accusing me of stuff, in confused bits and pieces—of being some funhouse mirror of who it turns out I am. The thoughts gave me a kind of panic, a sense my brain was terrifyingly out of control. I was like, “This is not helping me here. Can we just not, please?”
But, well, Well that’s the thing. Who I am isn’t a thing to be controlled. It’s not possible to do, and trying can only cause damage. So, one leans into the curve.
Like many people I am a girl who loves cock… at least in the abstract. Which makes sense, and is fine and normal and generally positive. And I guess there’s still this novelty in being open with myself and letting my feelings just do what they need to without judgment. But also, I am hormonal as shit here, and a little bit insane from the rush. And it’s kind of—
a lot
—to figure out what to do with.
Neutral and human and healthy as it may be, this thing that my head insists on doing these days, it is not a thing that most people want to hear about. Reasonably enough! When I do bring it up, it’s most often as a punchline, with mind to how inappropriate it is to spring without warning. Because this is my level of humor, somehow.
(Penis.)
I’m not even sure what there is to say that’s constructive beyond a point. Beyond just acknowledging how I’m feeling, affirming that it’s cool, that this is just how I’m built and these things are a part of who I am. Which, yes, I feel does need a degree of ongoing reinforcement. The person I am is amazing, and I love her, but there’s gonna be some friction from the four decades of garbage I was fed.
I just want to assert the pieces of who I am, whenever they present themselves to me, whenever they hand me a challenge. Each one of these segments, it comes in all fragile and vulnerable, and there’s this implied question—I’m gonna accept this, right? I’m gonna embrace it. The more I acknowledge it, the more normal it becomes, letting that wound finally heal over. And I don’t want to hide it.
Inappropriate humor aside, I’m not in this to make people uncomfortable. But sometimes I just gotta stress a thing. When I really feel I shouldn’t be ashamed. When I want to be clear about who I am and what my own boundaries are.
Sexuality is a weird thing for Azure. I still don’t really understand what makes me tick, or why. I have been making a lot of progress, but there are these constant surprises. It’s an alien zone of my humanity, that I’m not used to giving any careful or enthusiastic thought. It’s this big weird void, that is kind of overwhelming me to acknowledge at all—to admit that as a real person I have this dimension, and that its dynamics are both natural and unique to me. And as a part of me, those dynamics are important to develop a functional relationship with, wherever they may carry me. I can’t force them. I can only listen and accept the reality.
So anyway. This is gonna be nuts for a while. It ain’t going away. It’s not going to be a primary topic, if for nothing other than my bafflement at finding words for any of this material, but I need to respect Azure here. And she is uh… well, this appears to be where she needs and happens to be right now.
If you’re here, you love me. You’ll be fine. We’re all learning to adapt.
My second face session went even better than the first. After all the new people at Planned Parenthood the other day, we got a new nurse here who kinda rocked to be honest; she seemed like a person it might be cool to know. She marveled at the confidence I had walking in, “this little gothic steam-punk diva.” Which was, uh, one way to put it I guess.
We’re making progress, but there’s not much to really talk about yet. At best we’re like a quarter or a third done. And it’s working! Just gotta keep on keeping on.
The return though, mask all full of the smell of burnt hair—I didn’t even make the bus before the misadventures began. First I swear to God I got a wolf whistle from a car as I crossed the street. Then while I sat at the stop, under the little bus-gazebo structure, whatever it is, there was the, uh, social interaction.
This guy ambled up from my right—and to his credit, he did keep his distance.
“Excuse me miss,” he said, “I wonder if I could have a word with you.”
I felt this boulder in my stomach. Here we go. What do we do here? “… Er, thank you so much for expressing an interest,” I said, “but no, I’m okay.”
He boggled at me. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I nodded. After a beat I asked, “Are you okay?”
He was flustered but determined. “I just want to get to know you,” he said.
And well, fuck. There it was. “Well I’m very flattered,” I said, “but that’s all right. I’m not—I don’t do that sort of thing.” I tried so very hard to keep my calm, to get ahead of the situation, to use an affirming, if firm, tone. This is not a scenario where I want to mess with a male ego.
Even so, he was getting frustrated. “What sort of thing? All I want to do is get to know you,” he repeated.
“Yes, well, thank you for the gesture, seriously.” I made a point of looking right at him, leaning in. Acknowledging what he was doing, even as I refused to entertain it. “But right now I’d really prefer to just keep my space.”
Ultimately he did back off and leave me alone, though it took a few rounds to make myself clear—if the bus hadn’t arrived just then I’m not sure how long this would have continued to drag on. He boarded right after me, and sat behind somewhere, putting me on a sort mild alert the whole ride home. I wasn’t sure exactly where he was, or when he meant to get off. I continued to document things as I sat, just for… reasons.
And I made it home fine. There were no further events. I don’t want to make more of it than it was. I mean, he did keep several paces away. He did actually say hello and ask if we could talk. And in the end he did accept that I wasn’t having it. But gee was he assertive. I’m so bad at people stuff anyway—and I expect learning to navigate eager horny dudes is hard for anyone, never mind this timid autism space cadet girl here.
There’s this diplomatic balance. I feel a need to handle male pride very carefully, because—it’s probably fine, but, well, things have been known to happen at times. And being trans only heightens the danger. Socially I’m not good enough to really have a sense about any of this, so it’s just this blanket caution I’m trying to exercise. Not paranoia, but… one will be mindful.
Anyway. I guess this is my life now. These are the decisions one makes. I can’t control other people; I can only work on myself. So I’d better figure some shit out.
Which isn’t to suggest I never got this kind of thing before—just, uh, not from dudes, typically. Only very occasionally. But I didn’t know what to do about horny allos then, and it freaked me out even coming from women. The exact dynamics here are… perhaps a little more treacherous. And gee whiz are they continuous. Going outside is kind of this whole thing for me lately.
I don’t want people being horny on me. I don’t care who they are. I’m just Azure. There are, I am certain, plenty of other horny people toward whom you might better direct your energies. Nothing’s ever going to happen here. Allos go home.
So on top of everything else, I think I may be polyam. And when I say I think, it’s less doubt and more me starting to come to terms with things that have been there forever. Yeah, hi, this process is still ongoing. There’s a lot about me that it turns out does not fit into the models I have been fed. Who knows what else the future will bring!
Obviously I’m aroace; averse to sex and romance and everything to do with dating culture, etc. But were I to be in a committed relationship, that shape makes most sense to me—which feels like it should feel weird, considering how introverted I am; how much space I need mentally, physically, emotionally, in sensory terms. But there is a certain security and stability I feel with, say, a hypothetical two (?) others that’s not there with one. More context for stuff. Less individual pressure to change myself to someone’s expectations. Less of a linear powderkeg of two people against each other when problems come up. More motivation to compromise and just be kind and understanding. More room to just be human, and more resources and support and just more to appreciate and be appreciated by.
I cannot of course conceive of a practical application to any of this. As with anything to do with intimate relationships or sexuality or things involving other people (e.g. that pan business), this isn’t like some map of what I actually want or plan for in life. It’s just a matter of how I seem to be wired, what my models of emotions and relationships and the world and myself look and feel like. And I think this model has never not been true for me.
What’s kind of wild is, I have never really explored this topic actively, but on some very cursory reading it turns out that polyamory is a pretty common sort of framework for aces and demisexuals. For those who don’t build their models of relationships around sex or don’t have much interest in sex more generally, it seems to be a lot easier to rethink what an intimate relationship structure can look like. I uh was unaware of this phenomenon, though now that I see it described in so many words, it does fit things I have noticed with others in my orbit.
Again this is nothing new for me. It’s not like some idea that just landed in my head, that I’m suddenly latching onto because it seems neat or whatever. I think it’s been with me at least as long as this idea that, gee whiz, life would be a lot better if I were a girl instead of what people are telling me I am, or that I have had… certain ideas about hypothetical people of different genders. I’m just continuing to dig down, to get at the truth of me. And willikers, is it a relief to acknowledge this stuff.
This piece just kinda needed a little more time to bake, I guess. I am still unsure what to do with these thoughts, as they’re just now rising to the point where I can put words to them. But they do kinda inform how wrong the shapes of certain things have always felt to me.
Again, like. I will never fuck. This isn’t about that. It’s about my perception of myself in relation to the world and other people; what makes sense, and feels right and psychologically, emotionally healthy and safe to me personally. I just think uh I am kinda wired toward polyamory. Which, like anything else about me, is neutral. It just is what it is. As aggressively non-standard as that may be.
Everyone is different, right, but being aroace can and often does mean having the most bonkers inner life, even as one has no interest in seeing it manifest. Like, this is just for me. And that lets it ply on certain ideals, to elide certain logic, to do exactly what it needs to. In hindsight I can see how this might possibly have been confusing for my past partners. Every… intimately complicated relationship I’ve been party to—I’m unsure how to define half of them—has begun online, way back to 1994 or so. And my actions have never added up to the words I can spin.
It was never my goal to lead anyone on. I guess I just still am working to understand how it is that allos live really. All this stuff I see in our culture that seems so silly, that people don’t really think or behave those ways… I guess many of them do actually. It’s bizarre. Yeah, I have this whole universe that does not and never would translate to reality. I’m bursting with goo in the abstract. But, like. I just don’t feel that stuff in the concrete. I don’t comprehend it in real terms. Or want it. I just want to be me, and for that to be enough.
But it never has been. They always want the other thing. The thing that makes no sense to me, that makes me so uncomfortable. And they can never understand why I’m being so weird about it. And they make up so many stories in their own heads as to why I am the way that I am. And all the time I’m like, why don’t they even seem to like me? I thought we were friends. Why are they demanding I perform all these things for them? Why do I feel like some broken toy?
I imagine they must have their own questions. But they never communicate. They just accuse. I’m always denying them what is theirs. I’m always holding them back. I’m a cold fish. What’s the point of even having me there if I won’t fulfill my part of the bargain. And I’m just like. But, I like you. Why don’t you like me? I don’t get it. Why is it always like this?
Anyway. I guess I can see how I might seem to send mixed messages. Which sucks. I never wanted that. I’m just, you know. Me. I’m just a dumb ace girl who falls in the deepest platonic love, who adores the teeth of one person after another, who all end up being after some goal.
It’s not about a power dynamic, not really. I don’t do power stuff. I don’t get it. It’s about roles and ways to relate to another. I’m the receptive one. I’m so very receptive. Receptive to anything, if it’s true and it’s kind and it’s fond and made out of love for the other. I’m not the actor, never the active agent. I will not assert—except perhaps in reception. Active listening, if you will. Following up. Touching base. Making sure. Finishing a thought. Continuing the conversation. Demonstrating my interest.
There are so many ways to receive it’s hard to know where to begin. In my dreams, there is so much to do. Maybe start with four of them? One to occupy my g-spot, another my tongue. A couple on standby, maybe to lend me something to grab. And as things progress, so they swap in. I’ve been on the other end; I know these things can’t last forever. But I can, now. Or just about. As one finishes his run with me, and sends me his gift, the next steps in with his own distinct energy.
It all starts so gentle, then grows to such an eager pitch—the thrust and the slap and the rhythm and the pressure. Kind yet firm and overcome with the frenzy, sending the shudder through my perineum, radiating up all the nerves of my body. Warming my chest and my face. And that’s before even the warmth of the deposits—in me, on me, drizzling so slowly down my tummy and my breasts and what parts of my face they find. As the ones I’ve teased earlier each rotate in, find my main hole, and one by one give me what they’ve brought.
I want it. I want it all. I want the burning heat of it. The sickly slick of it. In my dreams it’s always love, it always means something. It’s never just the thing. It’s always a kind of speech. The semiotics can be so perfect I never have to question, never have to hedge. The semiotics of semen. All the signal, clarifying my being.
And as my face and my arms and my chest explode and my legs and my toes threaten to cramp forever, I want nothing but to live. To be. To exist. Right there. No rush to clean up. No shame. Just stars in my vision. Just me, being human. Just the fondness of the other. The hypothetical form to hold. The light and the music and the feel of the pillows. The lilt of the air of the fan on the ceiling, reminding me of my flesh. This awareness of the moment. This drunken existence. My femininity.
I am a real girl. As I have always been. It’s never been a mystery. But there I am. And I am reminded. And I am in love with myself, as I should be. As I was never afforded. And through that love, I love everything else.
It is worth being alive. I never really got that message.
Okay, so for a while now I’ve been unfolding and rewiring and figuring out how my sexuality fits together. The major focus has been on dudes with penises, and on how that whole business works with my understanding of who and what I am. What’s my deal with cis women, though?
Well again I’m aroace, so anything with the “big two” attractions is gonna exist mostly in the hypothetical inner space of my imagination rather than something I experience in regard to real people in real life, though I do feel all the tertiary things—and do so without gender. Right now that head zone where sex and romance can exist regardless of any tie to reality is chock full o’ cock, in part I think just from the opening of the floodgates and allowing myself access to this whole aspect of humanity without shame. I’m just me, right. Just a person. But I can and have and do and very probably will continue to feel attraction to binary cis women, same as anyone else—without any real regard to gender I presume, once things iron out and I frickin’ catch up to my own self and decades of repression here.
In all the earlier rambling though, despite these assertions of panness, there’s been this sort of a reluctant quality that seems like it goes beyond my current fixations and freedoms. And yeah, I guess it’s kind of complicated how all of this works with me. Given my history.
I’m going to say this this is less an innate aspect of me than it is just… crap, absorbed from the life that another version of me happened to live, that I have inherited and have yet to sort through and deal with entirely. There are a few things that go into that, that all work together. A super-duper big one is the misapprehensions that I lived under for most of my life—misapprehensions of others, placed onto me, that I never knew how to question or push back against, even as I knew they were wrong from a very young age (as I am rediscovering and remembering).
I say often that my aroaceness is the key to me, and it really is, before anything else. It’s the root of most of the trauma I’ve faced, most of the confusion about every other element of myself, most of the misunderstandings I’ve been caught up in, most of the bad situations. I think this reservation I have toward cis women—well, it’s a sense of caution, with a few sources. The most foundational one comes from the intersection of my assumed gender and my assumed sexuality, and the assumed behavior that would result in from one of my assumed neurology.
There’s a lot here. But most of my life, starting from early childhood, people told me I was a boy; they told me boys were supposed to be interested in girls; and they got very strange and suspicious and accusatory toward me when I didn’t demonstrate this the way they wanted. Which isn’t to say that I had no interest in girls, in theory. But, aroace, right? I didn’t have interest in anyone, in practice. Not romantically, sexually, anyway. Which is the next part of the problem: the lack of nuance to the narrative of allo attraction as it was fed to me.
I’ve messed up a lot of things, confused myself about so much including my basic understanding of who I am, on the basis of what I was told I was feeling, as compared to what I actually felt. I’m a girl, yo. A girl with the genderweirds. And I am drawn to people I respect. I didn’t understand “role models” as they were described to me, but it turns out I did have them. I had all the strange, quirky, smart, pretty women that I deeply wanted to be like, or wanted to be buds with, but had no way of framing my feelings, which didn’t fit the narrative.
So there’s a fuckery in here, right. It’s already getting wound up and complicated, my being encouraged to misread my feelings of commonality as feelings of sexual or romantic attraction, even as I knew there was something deeply wrong about all of this. One consequence there was how it only further walled me off from understanding my gender or my basic attitudes toward myself. Another is that it meant I never really got the benefit of that admiration or modeling, and that I messed up every one of those personal relationships.
So I’m stuck with some garbage wiring here that I have not yet had the patience or motivation to untangle, knowing for a fact that (again in theory if not in practice) I do have access to these feelings for binary cis women. But I don’t want to make those mistakes ever again. Sorting out the nuances of one kind of attraction from another, it’s difficult and sort of beyond what I want to bother with right now. And much of the reason for that burnout is my other big problem: the trauma.
For all the reasons, every romantically, sexually intimate relationship I’ve had has been with a cis girl. Which is fine, sure. But every one of them has been bad, and misjudged, and based substantially on factors outside my own wishes or interests. Each has messed me up more. How much of this is fair to blame directly on my past partners, I don’t know and I’m sure it varies. In some cases the violations have been unambiguous enough. In response to my unpacking the other day, I had someone encourage me to embrace a certain four-letter word. I don’t know.
Part of this is a lack of understanding of myself and why certain things make me feel so very bad, and my tendency to just… do what’s expected of me, not want to make waves, because I know how wrong I am. To just do what people tell me is correct, and to try not to hurt their feelings. And mostly to fail stupendously. But, like. A good person would respect boundaries. Would care if they were coercing people into things they didn’t want to do. Would care if people were hurt, expressing obvious dismay. Which speaks to the circumstances under which I have wound up in these sorts of relationships.
My entire basis for sexually, romantically intimate relationships has been as the object of someone else’s desire and lack of concern for my basic humanity. The more that they realized I was in fact a real person with wants and needs of my own, the more disgust; the more control. And as unfair as this association is more broadly and as limiting as it is to me internally until such a time as I figure out how to deal with it, every one my my abusers has been a cis girl or cis woman with no regard to my autonomy. Who actively tried to erase what self I had. So after a few decades of that, close to non-stop, there’s this extreme caution and fear and aversion that’s kind of etched in at this point. It’s not a part of me, and it’s not useful, but there it is. And it makes it hard to appreciate the full range of my feelings for others.
I mean. This is probably a thing for me to actively work on at some point. It’s not a big priority in the sense that of course I’m never going to be in a romantic, sexual situation with anyone again. And also in that, I just need a rest here. I’ve spent so much on that.
So that I think is a big factor that feeds into what’s going on with me lately. I’ve been there, and it’s been messed-up and it’s messed me up. And I could clear the mess and figure things out on my own terms, and maybe I will eventually. I imagine I will. But, not now. Because, jeez. And at the same time as I’m able to set that all aside and just kind of go, “no,” for the moment, I’ve got this explosion of hormones and newly unlocked emotional ranges and newly unrepressed interests and desires and fixations in relation to who I now more correctly understand myself to be.
So. Yeah. That makes sense. I guess I understand why cis girls would be on the back burner for now while the masculine dick parade explodes in my new zone of endless potential—and while all the trans enby GNC warm fuzzy unthreatening comfort range continues its normal pattern somewhere under this new noise. The fact that I can, and now fully accept that I do, feel what I do for dudes, and that this is perfectly okay and normal and nothing for me to be ashamed of in the least, is just such a goddamned novelty that it will probably occupy me for a while before it becomes everyday.
It’s going to be hard to go through and work out how to relate to, how to feel about the narrow segment of people I’ve been basically forced to demonstrate a kind of feeling toward, that wasn’t in many cases what I genuinely felt, resulting in most of the abuse I’ve suffered. Which was, like. That was just specific people who deeply sucked, obviously. I’m not about to tar anyone by someone else’s brush. I’m just broken here, right. And I get to make my priorities for how I’m going to recover, where I place my interests. And that’s way down the list right now.
Again, this is in regard to my own capacity to entertain certain kinds of hypothetical attraction. In practical terms I’m still aroace, right. I’m as able to be fond of anyone as much as another—platonically, aesthetically, sensually. The stuff I had so little access to before. I’m just too tired and messed-up to entertain “big two” thoughts toward this particular segment of my full available range. But, I think that may be healthy for better exploring more general forms of affection and fondness, that I was led to misunderstand for so long.
And again, I’m uh. I’m all set in that playtime zone right now. Got my current set of distractions. And whee, they are making me feel good about myself in a way that I did not have access to before. It’s so interesting!
I’ll be whole one of these days. It’s just coming back in pieces.
So okay, after the last several weeks of unfolding, following months of buildup, following years of roiling pressure and repression, I think I’m at a place where I can talk about this more confidently, put the thoughts into an order here.
Anyway, masturbation, right. Whee.
This whole discussion is gonna tie into that business about my attitude toward my body and my sexual role, and the way my attraction works. Like, my views toward my genitals and my bodily processes and my engagement with them and with other people, and how those reflect on my ideas about myself, who and what I am, how I feel about myself as a human being and as a person in relation to everything else.
I’ve gone into this divide I have here in regard to my body. Physically, cosmetically, anatomically, I love what I have going on downstairs and would not change it. There’s zero dysphoria toward my genitals, in part because I don’t gender genitals; in part because they’re great. What does make me feel absolutely awful, though, is sexually engaging with them. It’s worse when, as in past relationships, I’m expected to be the assertive, penetrative party, right. But even for my own alone-time purposes, there’s never not been an essential problem here.
I have not been shy lately about my extreme fondness for cock, right. (At least hypothetically. As pertains to the land of dreams where all pronounced sexuality rests, for this girl.) I’m not going to dwell on that, but suffice my issue is not the concept or behavior of a penis in itself. Like, yeah, I am all about everything to do with that… when it’s attached to a hypothetical other. Super-duper, yeah. Good. But in regard to my own body and processes, it freaks me out. It feels dirty and wrong and uncomfortable and there’s this inescapable shame associated.
This isn’t a thing I really want to “get over,” as it’s not—like, I don’t think of it as an external problem that I’ve taken on and I’m carrying around for no reason. It’s maybe not the most constructive response, but I’m coming to realize its origin is in me, actually. It’s my own signal. It’s not even a hang-up as such. This is hard to disentangle, but it’s wrapped up in my gender and my core ideas about how to relate to myself and others and the world. The wiring, it’s like it sends me this wordless jolt to say, “No, dummy, you’re doing it wrong. Figure it out.”
Historically it has been this uncomfortable thing, having these masculine physiological responses to things that don’t align with my emotional responses, or really anything I want or that matters to me, and feeling this almost coercive compulsion to address it. There was an indignity to my body’s demands upon me and its behavior through the whole process. I never went eagerly into masturbation; it was a matter of relenting—like okay, if I maintain this stupid thing, it’ll go away and I can think about something else, god. And there’s this kind of, every single time it almost felt like I was being tricked by this promise that it’ll be fast and simple and no problem—only to be left with this mortifying mess, that could be hard to contain, was hard to clean entirely. It left me feeling disgusting.
Like, all of this just reinforced all of these negative feelings I already had toward myself. It’s not the penis that was the problem; it was the masculinity, right. It was the behavior everything down to my own physiology seemed to demand from me, that left me distraught. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as, like. Me being prudish or any of the other things my exes have labeled me. But, no? That’s not the problem at all—the fact of sex, the fact of masturbation. Or, I mean, that’s not at the root of it. (One does have a bit of delicacy. I am a girl of some taste and refinement and dignity after all. Goodness gracious. Ahem.)
Coming to understand myself as so unambiguously a bottom, as I have done recently, clarifies so many dynamics at the center of my being, as a person. The way I react, the kinds of dissonance I feel, the things I prefer, the things that scream out as wrong for me personally. And the way my body works now, it feels like one of the missing pieces—my physical reality finally aligning and clarifying everything else about me as a person. It makes so much more sense, and it feels right, and there’s no innate sense of shame attached (beyond social decorum).
So, just gonna leap into the whee zone here. Butt play, right? You’re this deep in the topic, you’re not gonna get too many vapors from this discussion. It’s not like it’s new territory historically, but until lately the focus and significance were unclear to me. There’d always been this interest, circling the drain, but my predecessor never quite knew what to do about those thoughts and feelings and images and impulses. And again, all the roles seemed to demand attention where it was least wanted, so the issue was always sidelined.
Now I get it. As a girl, as a bottom, as this aroace creature with no active drive but this volcano of feelings on the inside, and in my pansexuality—with an aggressive current fixation on men and a lifelong, hitherto confusing, interest in cock. It all, uh. Fits. To to speak. I’m not the one who asserts unto others. I’m the one who entertains and accepts and embraces and nurtures and appreciates, who doesn’t insist on her singular way in the world but takes the world in to make herself more whole. Ideally, hypothetically. Constitutionally.
As far as hormones and impulses and self-maintenance go, the thing about butt play is that though it takes a bit more prep work, it is for me at least substantially less soul-destroying. And weirdly, managing it feels more honest and straightforward than just masculine wanking.
The main concern here obviously is going to be cleanliness, because. Well. There are certain things about a butt, right. But in a way, that concern is so incredibly obvious and immediate and top-of-mind that it feels less insidious than the mess of a promised quick, simple wank. One has to think ahead a bit, plan one’s actions, book some specific time with the understanding of how it’s going to be used. Make an appointment with one’s self, right, with the knowledge that one is going to be exploring and appreciating one’s body. There’s a humanity already. One needs to lay out some tools, make some space. Prepare one’s body. It’s not a quick, easy impulse. There is a deliberation here. An earnestness and transparency of intent. A need for existential consent with one’s self. So just the emotional groundwork is so much healthier.
Also in regard to cleanliness, it’s mostly up-front here, as opposed to being held off as a final insult after this hollow yet physiologically overwhelming and unpleasant experience—Now you feel like garbage, and here’s this awful situation to clean up. Go to hell. See you next time, on my clock. Won’t call ahead. With butt play, cleanup—on the one hand it’s again kind of baked in as an understanding, what issues may exist here and how one may need to deal with them. But overall it’s way less of a problem. Everything’s water-soluble in a way that a masculine ejaculate is aggressively not.
With all the changes to my body, semen’s no longer a thing, right. And good riddance (again specifically in regard to me; it’s fine, from other origins). My body’s working on girl logic, which extends from the fluids I produce to the way I feel arousal, to the mechanics of orgasm, to the wiring of my senses.
None of it is a fully automatic process. Like, I have to engage with my emotions and notice and study the way that arousal comes to me now—not with this petulant screaming flush of blood to one area, but an overall heightened sense of interest and receptiveness. This tingle and warm pressure from my upper limbs, up my torso, to my lips and cheeks. This depth to my breath. This mental clarity. This wryness, fondness, playfulness. And when I’m lying there, every time it’s like the next chapter in an ongoing conversation as my mind gets wired a little closer, those synapses get strengthened, and everything is a little more intense than the last time. My lips feel numb, with the prickle of a foot that’s waking up from a long sleep. The rub of my face on the pillow has this jolt as strong as the rub of my genitals as a teenager.
And—we all have the same anatomy; it just gets specialized late in development, some even after birth. For masculine anatomy, we call it the prostate. Feminine bodies, if we address it at all, it’s usually in terms of its sexual function, and we say “g-spot.” (Skene’s gland, if you want to get nerdy.) It’s the same organ. As one goes on and rewires one’s senses away from one unwanted nexus to one more in line with one’s understanding of the world, everything just becomes so much more wholesome and joyous and holistic and meaningful.
As the connection strengthens and the body responds all the more intensely, one feels so complete and at one with one’s self. It’s about the entirety of me, appreciating my humanity, appreciating my body, my femininity. Strengthening the link between my mind and my body as inextricable parts of a whole person. About feeling human in a way that has always been unavailable, and that runs completely counter to the mode of engagement that my body used to demand of me.
And much like the thoughts that go through my head and the way I engage with my current emotional fixations, none of it feels lurid in the way that I tend to associate with sex and masturbation and the modes of attraction that had I felt been assigned to me. It just feels honest and right and warm and good. It’s very clearly constructive, at least to my relationship with myself and my humanity. But also just, at the essence of my being I think it helps to reinforce this essential love for the world, this compassion for the other. It makes me stronger as a person, gets me in touch with what it means to be alive. As opposed to making me want to die.
This isn’t subtle. It is so deeply etched to my grain, to the way I engage with the world, to my political ideology, my ideas about art and communication. Before anyone else, before any outside projections or assumptions, every piece that I lock into place reinforces who I am. I am in fact a human being. I am a real person. I am a girl. I am full of so much love. These are the ways I see myself and I feel about others. This is what it means for me to be alive. And it’s all important.
Like my aversion to exercise, it’s easy to strip out these things that never made sense to me, or that made me feel awful, because of the frame they came with. Because of the way that other people engage with them as if the things, the actions are important in and of themselves. As if they’re all somehow correct and expected from me to achieve some kind of end, an end often rooted in some kind of supremacy or status, in demonstrating one’s value over others according to some system that makes no sense to me and that I want nothing to do with. But, I am my own universe, and I get to make my own terms of engagement. The fact is, I am human. When I deny whole hunks of that from the weight of someone else’s garbage, I’m chopping off essential pieces of myself and crippling my understanding and acceptance of what’s left.
So yeah, this is a piece of me I’m reclaiming. And gee whiz, does it make more sense now. Things can in fact be good. I have nothing to be ashamed of, when I am true to myself. I just need to follow the signals and ask what they’re actually trying to tell me.
It’s rarely just one. Sometimes, sure, we’ll focus. When we’re trying to make touch with our body, to meditate and take presence in our life, appreciate our flesh to avail and our time to burn, we’ll single out the one cock, in the one hole.
Or when we sketch out a cute story. The more you juggle, the harder it is to really feel and understand the one idea, the one sensation, the one modality of being. It’s all about that connection, with myself, with reality, with this life and being I still hardly believe I get to inhabit. How can I possibly be me?
But, I am scattered. It’s too much, it’s too strong, and my ADHD will only allow so much of one thought, however good or important it may be. And as sticky as these thoughts may be, they aren’t truly lurid. They are good, and they are important. They are a viscous thread to my baffled and nascent humanity. I may never have real physical sex again, and I certainly am in no rush toward it, but I am in fact a person. I know this now. I feel this now. In my brain and in my heart and in my grasping hands.
Where it does little good to grasp is my own penis. I love it dearly, but it is of no real use here. I don’t need it, and I don’t want it for this. It may play some small role in the end, but I avoid it best I can. The goal is to reach where it serves as mere pretty decoration.
The mind races, and insists there’s so much going to waste here. You have another gaping hole right there, girl, and two hands. Make use of them, at least in your mind. Be complete at last. In this moment that could last forever, except for it never really happening at all.
Well, part of it happened, sometimes. The part with me, on my back or my knees or crouched over a relevant plaything. The feelings in my body, the sentiments voiced. Not so much the shame these days. Not now that I know me, to the extent I have now discovered. Not as a bottom.
Sometimes they’re together. Sometimes they’re sequential. One after another. As one finishes, and delivers its load in or on some choice part of me, the next swoops in, just as kind but just as assertive. Just as eager. Just as energetic. Just as finite in the face of my power. As they ram my g-spot I ooze and I flap, and the smack against my perineum makes me twitch all the more.
There’s no refractory period like this, same as there’s no shame, or some ghost of a fragment from what slamming my own cock ever brought about. That never brought happiness. It’s a funny thing that my own semen, the sort that I no longer make, caused me nothing but shame, that even now to think of it fills me with disgust, when that of the hypothetical other brings out of me such joy and calm, and fulfillment. It’s not the same when it’s a gift.
My own contribution, as an ornament it’s a dick, and what a marvelous dick it is. But as a tool, as part of my inextricable sexual role, the haziness of all our words settles in. They’re all the same parts. They’re amongst the last to specialize. Even then they’re analogous. Clit, dick, what’s the difference. Same organ; different perspective. Different set of assumptions. I’m a girl. It’s not doing anything; I don’t want it to. Sure, maybe it can take a little touch. There are many things to stimulate. But its role is, must be, passive. So, words.
It’s a big beautiful clit, it’s a big beautiful dick. It is what it is. There’s no shame either way, though some times, some days, some stories, some positions may tilt at a habit. It’s only there to be pretty, so regard it as seems best.
It’s funny that I’m now the focus of my own mental life. I’m so used to dreaming in the third person. If I do play a part, it’s rarely my own. It’s some other character, who feels more like they belong in the story my brain chooses to tell me. But now, it all centers on Azure.
It’s all about roles, isn’t it. Roles, relationships; the dynamics between me and me, between me and the other, between me and the world. The other; so many kinds of other. Which is the other who enters my body, and why does that speak to me so fondly? Why does it affirm my self?
I am the person whose body is offered, who receives, who appreciates. I don’t seek it out, I don’t impose or intrude or insinuate myself into another. The thought is close to horror, for me. I don’t want that for myself. I will not assert my being unto an Other if I can avoid it. By that measure, the act, the performance in that assertion, it fills me with such shame and uncertainty and unwanted pressure. It’s wrong. For me, it’s wrong. Deeply, innately, horribly, painfully. It makes me die, every time. I cede my very life, my thesis of self. It is murder. There is in this some basic understanding of me, some basic theory of life, right and wrong. I am not built to assert, on any level of my person. I am built to perceive. To understand. To accept, interpret, to process. To love. This openness of spirit and of body, to me, is love.
And as I learn to appreciate, to let the feelings in, so I learn to receive in so very many ways. As voracious as my mind and my heart and my spirit, as eager to integrate it all and make me a better whole of it, so aligns my body. Only now am I becoming a complete theory. Which is of course where this remains. It will ever be a theory. Beyond my own manners and methods and what tools I may employ, there will not be an other. Which is in turn my freedom. The freedom to not, to know that I am my own at last. I will never be had again, in that way.
All while my head swims with the projections of senses, too visceral, too intense ever to live out in full. My brain, the signals are too strong. Give someone else the input, and make that input physical, and they burn out and overload and kill me again. I love me too much now.
I will take care of me. I will maintain me. This is my core relationship. I will learn to trust me, as I have never trusted anyone.. This is how I heal. This is how I become human.
Specifically this human with an impossible yet nourishing thirst for cock. The thirst is enough.
I am a girl with confusing urges. I’m slam in the middle of a puberty like I have never experienced, and all the scales of other people’s shame are falling away, and gee whiz I have my new set of fixations.
I am absolutely aroace, and I am clearly pan, but what that means right now is that my imagination is going nuts with the urges and interests I was until now not prepared to fully entertain. So what we’ve got is a lot of cock, substantially attached to hypothetical dudes.
Cock, cock, cock. That’s all I can think of. This isn’t exactly new, but gosh is it unavoidable now that the repression is lifted. And gosh is the specific association with men a novelty for me. It kinda… feels like it should feel gayer than it does.
I mean, it’s not not-gay. But I’m a girl, and I’m non-binary, and no part of me is a dude, and never has it been. Yeah, I have a penis of my own, but so what. Girls have dicks. Not all of them obviously, but, like, genitals aren’t gendered like that. Who cares. Beyond, er, what fixations one may entertain
So, like. With all these hormones rushing through my system, it’s like my long interest in cock is somehow justified, and this new option of men is now just super fascinating to me, and I’m understanding how all this relates to my natural role as a bottom, and whee bob the logic.
So, as I sort out what exactly makes me tick, irrespective of other people’s problems, there will be a certain unfolding of this inner text. Be warned, but also be mindful that this is my own personal space you’re choosing to browse here.
After more than a year on HRT, my body does not experience arousal in the way that I suffered for about 30 years there. This change is recent enough, and affects so much wiring, that I really don’t know all the implications. I just know that it comes as such a tremendous relief.
As a physiological response, what I’m getting now feels more wholesome and substantial and meaningful. It feels more real and grounded in my body, less like I’m being attacked, and it better reflects how I actually feel about myself and others, and experience true attraction. There’s less a build-up of pressure than a sort of a loosening of tension. It’s no longer this functional, goal-oriented discomfort, screaming for release. It’s a spark, an awakening of potential. Physiologically, it’s not about the genitals; it’s this glowing warmth and softness all up my torso and my face and my upper arms and legs. This sense of receptiveness. Acceptance, of fascination, anticipation. At higher levels, this shortness of breath, and all-over prickles.
My association with arousal has been this sense of wrongness, of my body working against my interests and my feelings. For my body to respond, there’s always been this dissonance, leading to shame and discomfort and piling ever more disgust on my feelings toward myself. This, it’s… different. I don’t know how to feel. I have all of this baggage to work against, all these expectations, and it’s confusing for me that it doesn’t feel so bad now. Whatever this is, it feels sort of positive, constructive—not lurid in the way I’m used to.
What’s more interesting is the sense of continuity. Each instance, it’s less its own isolated episodic happening with its own short unsatisfying arc, and more dipping back into an ongoing conversation, returning to a prior train of thought, checking back into an emotional space.
This all ties into how the act itself, which I will not labor, is now less about desperately reaching a goal than about appreciating the moment and the ongoing changing mix of feelings and senses. And it’s so much more visceral. Holistic. Decentralized. One literally sees stars.
Like, I do not associate good things with sex, or with arousal. It’s bad, and it’s so delicate to dance around the reasons why it causes me so much grief. But broadly, cautiously, the way my body works now, it makes so much more sense to me. This feels correct. Basically healthy.
What I find interesting about this is how the body workings intersect with my emotional and psychological response. Like, the way I’m wired, I realized I’m expecting my body to behave a certain way, and it never has. And now it kinda does, and this ties into all this other stuff. The way my body now poises all up and down my frame to anticipate and measure and receive and study—it speaks volumes to my expectations of a sexual role. Those dynamics in turn feed into my wiring of how to relate to others and to myself, and my sense of self and identity.
Having estrogen in my system, it causes my body to experience arousal in such a way as to further affirm my gender and justify my core assumptions about how to relate to, feel about people. All these things that I knew on some level were right, yet were a struggle to reconcile.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but—to be wired as an unambiguous bottom, and to experience arousal as navigation of reception and acceptance? It’s congruent. The basic dissonance is gone. The slow perusal does the same with my more detached and abstracted modes of attraction. And yes, to continue the recent conversation, this also to no small extent speaks to the whole deal with attraction to men and long fixation with a particular anatomical feature that I’m just at the point of shrugging and accepting, now that the floodgates are fully demolished.
(All of which, I still feel compelled to underline, lest there be any chance of misunderstanding, remains basically hypothetical of course. See the noodling about internal and external experiences, and how they work when one is aroace. (If… one happens to be Azure, I suppose.))
Anyway, I’m at this confusing juncture here where, ever so cautiously, feeling horny no longer seems like this evil, disgusting thing that makes me wish I could vanish. It’s just… neutral. A thing one can embrace and explore, or not, to what level may feel best in the moment.
I think that’s positive. Probably? It’s weird. It grazes so hard on stuff I’m really not able to deal with still.
But this whole concept of me, it’s… getting more stable. It’s making more consistent sense. Every piece I slot in, it just confirms the placement of the rest.
I still feel like I have to tiptoe around here, but. I think it may be okay. I think we may be good. I just need to settle in. Chill out a little. Get used to the world not ending.
It’s weird, how attraction works when you’re aroace. I don’t really understand it all that well myself. I just know that I don’t work the way that everyone else seems to. Like, I don’t get it. These things I thought were just poetic exaggeration, I guess people truly experience.
I don’t think I’ve regarded another person who exists in the world, and thought, yes, I want to have sex with that person imminently, please. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at someone and fallen dramatically “in love” and had these dreams of being made to feel important by them. People are just… people. They’re just trying to get through their lives. Leave them alone, you know. Why project this nonsense onto them? I don’t want anyone to look at me like that. Gross. What would be the purpose of any of this? It’s so weird, like adults believing in Santa.
I mean, I guess religion is a thing for a lot of people. The unflappable reality of traditions and social order and family and all these power systems that we’re told to regard as gods unto themselves. I just, don’t get power, or desire, or status. Why? Why not be cool? Of course lots of people do know their own minds and seem to make it work for them in their own ways, and live their lives according to these sorts of interests, and sure, okay. We all gotta have hobbies. I like dinosaurs a lot. I could sit down with a person and talk about dinosaurs a while.
Anyway. I say all of this in practical terms, right. These are my dynamics as applied to the physical world. None of this really makes sense to me, and I don’t care if it does or not, really. Things don’t elicit these anticipated responses, and I have other things to think about. But, there are a couple of big caveats here that weird up the whole system. One, we’ve got this whole galaxy of tertiary attractions. Two, we’ve got everything to do with one’s inner life, which in its rules and substance really has no direct correlation to material reality.
Of the two, the harder to get my head around is tertiary attractions. I guess it’s just that hard for me to engage with the real world, right. I never interact with people, and I’m poor at abstracting out meaning from my scant awkward experiences, most of which aren’t even my own. So even here we’re working in this abstract theoretical plane, parallel to the fantasy zone (which, as I have established, is currently screaming). But, well, I guess that’s what I’m doing here to some extent. Trying to hash that out for myself a little better.
You ask the Tumblr crowd, you’ll get a thousand fine-grained ways to break down tertiary attraction, some of which seem built only to baffle or justify one individual’s very specific hang-ups. But broadly, there are a million ways to feel attraction and love besides the “Big Two.” You can enthusiastically appreciate and enjoy how darned pretty people are without feeling any compulsion to bonk them or date them. You can want to be touched and held, without those impulses. And yes, of course there’s the whole teakettle of platonic attraction.
People who are really really into the mythology of sex and romance kind of like to cast any other kind of relationship or personal attraction into this “lesser” or “other” pile they label platonic. But, uh. No, that’s frickin weird in itself, and diminishes an extraordinary thing. Everyone’s going to define things differently, but as I see it, platonic attraction is a deep and meaningful appreciation for the essence of a person: you love and respect and appreciate the fact that they are who they are, that they work the way that they do, as themselves. This isn’t about wanting them for yourself, or wanting them to do anything for you, or even wanting to do anything for them necessarily. It’s not about lust or desire or power. It’s this pure delight from recognition of the nature of another person; this glee over what makes them them.
That kind of attraction or love can exist alongside anything else, whatever other terms you might use to categorize a relationship. It’s what you get in the best of best friends, in the closest marriages, functional families. Situations where people just fundamentally adore each other—which is distinct from this broad sketch we might draw, as adults, of “being friends” with a person. Oh yeah, we get along. We talk about deeper things sometimes. Sometimes we help each other out. We have a good time when we hang out. All of which is super. But you see the significance, right, of just thinking a person is absolutely the cat’s pajamas and appreciating them as a human being, as they are, the way that they’re put together? Of having that degree of faith and trust and emotional investment in the nature of another’s being?
Platonic attraction ain’t no joke, kids. It is, if I may, the Realest Fucking Deal. It is to what a person who actually likes and respects other people as individuals might aspire, and I would imagine how one might most aspire to be regarded by others. It’s not colored by any of one’s personal garbage.
I, uh, don’t want to labor the point, but, lacking the ability to appreciate or on some level frankly fucking accept as real (??) the terms under which most people seem to pursue intimate relationships with each other, I think past partners and I have worked cross-purposes in our apprehensions. Now that I have the language these days, I’m pretty sure my understanding of all my prior relationships was something like a QPR—a queerplatonic relationship, as they’re called. I just kinda thought that’s what close relationships were. My partners all had… other, profoundly different, expectations.
They seemed to all have these stories they wanted to play out, featuring each of us as characters with particular roles and lines and independent subplots, winding around to certain present plot events and… like. I just thought my partners were neat, you know. I liked their minds. I wanted to be around them, appreciate how they did things. Study how they used words. Figure out the how, and the why, of how they were put together. Take delight in their quirks, even and especially the infuriating ones, because I thought I understood where they came from.
But then there were all the complaints about, uh. My failure to put out, I guess. And failing to take initiative to progress this plot that had nothing specifically to do with me or with them, that I could see. Not saying the right lines. All while I adored their every word. I just wanted to be constantly around them, listen to them talk, make dinner with them, do projects with them, maybe cuddle sometimes, I trusted their every judgment, no matter how ill-advised in hindsight. Including and especially judgments about me. I always want to be better.
So in no instance did that turn out well. But, there we have some pretty intense tertiary attractions at work, right. I am capable of rich and close and meaningful intimacy and affection and love for others. But I don’t get these “Big Two” attractions at all. Not a piece of ’em. This kind of an apprehension for what it means to be intimate with another—this seems to be pretty common with aroaces actually. This is why the term “QPR” exists, to describe a certain model of a close interpersonal relationship that… really isn’t accounted for elsewhere.
Someone cynical and just… I feel like, devoid of joy or interest in other human beings, would maybe say, what I’m describing is just a friendship. But, uh, no? Jesus Christ, no. I mean, yes, but, what? No. There is clearly something going on here, right. This all is important.
Again without wanting to labor dead points too much, but for context here, my ex-spouse at one point asserted very strongly that if we weren’t constantly having sex we were no different from roommates. At the time I wondered, dear, are you sure you know what a roommate is? It wasn’t until years later that the other half clicked: did they even know what it meant to love somebody?
So this is me, right—so extremely, innately aroace, before anything else to do with gender or sexuality. Just at my deepest core, we have this set of understandings of how to relate to other people, of what love is, of what affection and attraction are, that don’t map to the world. And dear God, is it lonely. I didn’t really know what loneliness felt like until about three months ago, but I get it now. And gee whiz, this actually does deeply suck.
Anyway. This is just sort of skimming the surface of any of this. But, this is how I feel toward people, when I feel a certain way. It’s so goddamned intense. I love the atoms that make up the cells in their bodies because of the particular polarity of their constituent particles. But, sex? Romance? Uh. I mean. I guess, if I were to feel that way about someone, and they were interested and, I were interested at the same time, then we could do anything together, right? Go on any kind of an adventure. But I don’t understand those things as motivating factors in and of themselves. Just, why?
So take this, and—as I seem to now be able to better appreciate—apply a lack of a real gender filter to the way I feel about people. Historically, whenever I’ve wound up in this scenario—well, there’s that awful misunderstanding, right? Coercion, even, frankly, on their part. Also it’s always been with cis women. But, those were just the circumstances. (And, that wasn’t me. That was the other person.) Both ideologically and just… by the way that I see people emotionally when I can drop all the external garbage and shame, I don’t distinguish by that kind of triviality.
So when I say I’m pan-aroace, that’s what I mean. It sounds like a contradiction when we assemble these discrete terms, but there is a consistent throughline to my perspective, I think, toward other people and what I find meaningful and important, and toward what’s just noise.
At least, that’s the practical end of it. When you actually climb inside my head, where something deep within me and outside of my control determines the fabric of the universe, things kinda, uh, look different. Strictly unto myself for example, divorced from material concerns or the agency and individuality of real people with their own emotional landscapes, yeah, absolutely, fuck town central up in there. Some times are stronger than others. Right now, biologically I’m wired like a 17-year-old girl—and thus does my sensibility abide.
In the midst of this second, exponentially more aggressive, puberty, the clamor is loud and distracting and bewildering to a degree that I am unaccustomed, as familiar as I am with the differences to the worlds inside and outside my skull. It’s wet and sticky and shameless. There are fixations, there are interests. There are feelings. There are physical manifestations of arousal (which gee whiz, works very differently for me than it did for them). But, basically none of this bears any relation to reality whatsoever, to any person who exists. It’s all the raw theory of emotion, if you will, untempered by concerns of practical application. Sometimes it will latch onto some scrap of an anchor, like a fictional character who hits some mix of aesthetic and ideological ideals or fascinations. Or a hypothetical other; some might-be entity who can act in the eternal maybe of my mind.
And yeah, in that realm of the hypothetical, which really has never mixed well with reality in any of my experiences on this planet, and just seems bizarre to me to regard in anything like the same way, those much more visceral attractions also very much occur ungendered—sort of. Which is to say, one will fixate. One will specialize. Different genres of ideas will come and go. And, uh, I think I’ve made it clear enough which specific details are giving my mind its dopamine of late. Those details absolutely are gendered. And, one will have certain lasting favorites.
The thing is, being unable to experience or really understand sexual or romantic attractions for the other doesn’t mean those same impulses can’t reach absurd degrees of resonance inside one’s imagination. Ultimately that’s the home for all of this stuff, to squirt with impunity. From observation, this seems to be pretty common with others on the asexual spectrum. There’s so much going on upstairs all the time, but there’s such a disconnect between that and the outside world, that it’s the perfect cauldron for the most salient and spicy of art.
So that’s the other part to being pan and aroace. Inside it’s just gonzo, profane wonder. Outside, it’s this earnest joy in the being of another—not necessarily chaste, but uninflected by personal desire or expectation. It ain’t about me, right. It’s about how neat they are.
In my case, uh. Yeah, it is chaste. Because in practical terms, sex is gross and upsetting and it makes me want to die. But, that’s beside the point. I don’t even know how much of that is even innate and how much is unresolved trauma, and again I’m not in any real rush to deal with it. It’s never going to apply to anything. I can pick it apart over decades, as I feel able.
So I think, having put it all in order, in so many words, that all makes a lot more sense to me now. What does it mean for me to be pan and aroace? Well, that. It means that. What does it mean for me to be aroace and have these feelings that have been making me melt lately? There’s the start of it, at least.
So all this business about how the different aspects of my sexuality inform each other, and they all inform my gender, which reflects back on my sexuality, and how aspects of all of these play into my interests and fixations and feelings about myself and others, real and abstract—it’s a lot, right? It’s all connected in these ways that I’m struggling to entirely navigate. It’s easy to just say, forget it; I am who I am, and I don’t need to define everything. And: sure. But, the better I understand, the better of a grip I have on myself on my own terms. And I have to understand what my terms are, to be able to be true to them with full confidence and be in full possession of myself as a person.
Likewise, I’ve got all this toxic code planted in my routines by outside agents, that one needs a fine comb to strip out and patch. Part of that external stuff comes from possibly a better-meaning place, and it’s all this concern I have built up about the problematic implications of this or that conclusion or association I’ve made on my own terms, as if they serve to comment on anything or anybody else. Part of it’s just pure disease.
So I guess part of this whole project here lately, in regard to my sexuality, is de-heebing my jeebs by really taking a look at the why behind the connections I’m making; how they hold the meaning that they do to me, where that comes from, and what its real implications are.
One of the big things I’ve been chewing over is, so what does my interest in dudes have to do with my femininity? It’s a question that feels obvious in some ways, but in turn anything obvious about it feels highly questionable once one steps back to think for more than a moment. What does it mean when I say I felt I was “allowed” to be attracted to guys once I came to understand and accept myself as a girl? What can we unpack from this on a granular level, apart from and in contrast with any kind of presumptions one might carry into the discussion?
Well, broadly, one’s understanding of one’s identity colors the nature of one’s relationships to others. I relate to so many things differently through a correct understanding of my gender than I did with that misaligned filter. My own words sound so different to me. This plays out on so many simple, visible levels. I’ve found a need to exercise a kind of caution in some situations, some kinds of conversation, that wasn’t even on the radar before. I’ve noticed that people are just nicer to me in some situations than they ever were before.
Our dynamics from person to person aren’t neutral. There’s a lot that plays into the psychology and the associated emotions based on our understanding of who we are and how we expect to be perceived. And those are weird and complicated, based on all these micro-power spikes. Even my close friends, even people I’ve known for years, I don’t talk to them exactly the way I used to—or I should say, the way that my predecessor did. And that’s not entirely a function of my changing emotional or chemical landscape, though those certainly are universes.
So just in the most unspecific possible terms, when I take a step back and look at myself as a rebuilt person, the way I feel about this person is going to be different. When I judge how this person will relate to others, I have different expectations than I did for the old me.
More to the point, there are a couple of obvious components. A lot of it is just self-possession, right? It’s just that recognition of who and what I really am, regardless of what that may be, gives me a solid foundation to start to build connections to other people and concepts. Being able to nail down, okay, Azure—non-binary girl; aroace; pan-whatever; neurodivergent along these dimensions; this is all inarguable and fundamental and has always been, will always be essentially true, some wiggles and nuance aside—it takes a load off. Sets natural guides.
Another thing I really don’t want to downplay is my changing body. Like, my chemistry is totally different now. I’ve had my intervention, things are quickly repairing themselves. I have access to all these emotions I didn’t have before. All my tastes and preferences are changing. There is an inarguable link between the feminization of my body and this abrupt shift toward intense new ways of thinking. I feel like a teenage girl in so many ways here. I never really had a dramatic natal puberty, so this is a first for me and it’s kind of overwhelming. Again without wanting to get too crass about it, there is a measurable association between the amount of estrogen in my system and the degree to which my fixation with cock has reached absurd levels, as well as just… the feelings I get from certain kinds of healthy masculinity.
So those two factors are kind of accessible and clear and simple for me. I don’t feel the need to labor them too much. What I want to unpack is more to do with the puzzle dynamics of gender specifically as it pertains to sexuality and vice-versa, and how they pertain to my wiring.
As a social construct, gender is this made-up dumb thing but it’s also got these real internal components that really go beyond assumed models or whatever. Like, sometimes your body is just gonna respond a certain way, you’re gonna have a certain emotional response, and so on. Certain things are going to feel inherently right, and make you feel good about yourself and like a functional human being even as you would never dream of asserting them on another person, and some of those are going to I guess inevitably align with this prescriptive garbage.
With me, I’ve got all these… gender feelings, that are complicated and that I am tempted to wind up with guilt over things that have nothing to do with me, no matter how I come at them. I’m an enby through-and-through, right. But I’m also obviously a girl. Which is fine, right. But one is tempted to read in this innate conflict, especially as the more comfortable I get with myself, the more I dig around, the more frickin’ femme I turn out to be, to a degree I’d not have anticipated. But this is what makes me feel like a real person. It’s clearly right.
I like makeup. I’m no good at it yet, but this really plays to my sense of self to a degree that surprises me. I have never felt more comfortable in my body than in delicate, lacy feminine-coded dress. I feel more human with smooth, shaved legs—even as I think hairy girls rock. I’m an individual, and as an individual I just… seem to be put together in such a way that all of this makes me feel well and right in myself in a way I didn’t know was possible. I didn’t know I could own myself, like myself, in this way—to not find myself revolting. Turns out, I’m great!
None of that is in any way prescriptive or indicative of broader thoughts or expectations toward femininity or what it means to be a girl or non-binary or trans or to hold any kind of attraction or lack of attraction to others. It’s just the status quo of Azure. Nothing more. It’s about putting the pieces together to make a whole person, whom I like and respect and want to be—exactly because of the innate, verifiable, undeniable truth of every atom of what makes her who she is. It’s about asserting the reality that I’m finding, that was denied me.
So it’s into all of that that we play this concept of, now that I understand myself as a girl—but more specifically as this girl named Azure—I have this availability and this certainty and this confidence to access these feelings, at the same time as my body is going nuts with its hormones and sensations.
Okay then, we’ve got this basic stage for why it would make practical sense for this to be a juncture where, if these feelings were gonna get un-repressed and we’d work to accept and own them on our own terms, this would be a reasonable time for that to happen. It makes sense. But, why “allowed”? Why do I feel permitted to house these feelings as a girl, when they were all out-of-bounds before I understood myself?
I think there are two aspects to that. One is just, I’ve put this work into disassembling and stripping all that external garbage. These feelings were always here; I know they were. That’s not the issue. To a large extent what kept them in check was the internalized homophobia [sic], combined with my basic disgust for myself as a person, to the degree that I was led to understand my identity. I’ve put a lot of work into dealing with this junk that was put onto me, that had nothing to do with who or what I am, and just scraping off a critical mass of that was enough to send this impulse bursting through the crust to assert itself.
Another part is, uh, a portal to another land of weirdness, and it scrapes right up on this area that I really don’t want to get into right now, but I guess I’ve talked about it a little bit already—so here we go. It’s to do with sexual roles, right. This topic has all of these complicated dynamics of its own, to some of which we can apply all the above discussion about Azure just being Azure. But the more that I unpick this topic the more it helps me to understand my feelings toward myself as a girl, and vice-versa.
The better I understand the dynamics of my pretty darned innate, hard-coded sexual role as it applies to my gender, the better I understand a lot of practical elements of the trauma that I’ve experienced in my sexual relationships, from the perceptions and expectations set on me. Obviously to be a girl doesn’t mean to be passive, it doesn’t mean to be a bottom, any more than to wear skirts and pantyhose. Azure is just Azure. But to understand the components of me as they add up to a whole person and color and are colored by my own personal femininity…
So here’s a thing. I of course have a penis, as girls will do sometimes. I have absolutely zero dysphoria in regard to my penis as a part of my body. It’s marvelous. It’s almost a shame I’ll never have opportunity to share it. It’s so pretty, seriously. I love it. What I very much do have however is role dysphoria. And this has taken a very long time to unpick, despite indicators going back literal decades. It’s still strange for me to talk about, as is anything to do with sex. And I’m getting really close to some danger zones for trauma. In brief, though, the act of using my genitals for a sex act does not make me feel good, along several axes at once. I just… am going to stop with that, because I can feel the panic rising. But of course there are certain coded expectations that one will carry around based upon anatomy—and I think it’s really taken me a long, long time to fully work around to detaching from those associations and expectations.
One of the things that has helped a whole bunch is the physiological changes brought about by HRT. Stuff works differently now, right. The anatomy works differently. Emotions are different. Physical sensations are different. Arousal is just this completely different narrative now, one that is… better. That actually kind of, makes me feel affection toward myself and the world rather than just shame and horror. My feminized body does not respond the way that my predecessor’s did, all of which supports my feelings toward myself as a girl and comes as an enormous existential relief. It’s just another development like my tits, right, which emphasizes the reality of what I know to be true. And you know, anyone can be anything. There are plenty of girls of any genital situation who are all about being the assertive or penetrative party or whatever. And that’s rad. But, my body cooperating with my mind and my emotions, putting me all on the same page for once? Phew.
So as a girl, this is one component of my understanding of myself; of how my gender functions in relation to me as a person; of how all these elements of me feed into and communicate and support each other in a healthy way that allows me to feel well and respect and love myself.
I break out all of this to say, that—the relationship of my sexual role to my gender—is the other part of what I think I mean when I talk about being “allowed” to feel this attraction as a girl. Or that’s a non-trivial ingredient of a larger picture. That’s the internal part, not to do with other people’s baggage. What I think is accessible to me now, it also has a logistical, even uh geometric, component that I was not fully able to process before, that has to do with my understanding of my sexual role, wound up as it is in my understanding of my gender.
In terms of my own personal dynamics with masculinity, I have zero interest with the role others have projected onto me. But now that I have largely broken away from my body even being able to respond like that—I, uh, have come to better appreciate alternative modes of engagement. Which isn’t just to make attraction all about what parts go where, right. That’s just one component, even to the subject of sexual role as pertains to gender. What it is, is indicative of a critical shift in perspective toward my personal and emotional role in respect to dudes. To understand myself as a girl, and for my body to work as it now does, is for a certain amount of logic to go click. Suddenly—oh! I get it now. If I’m over here and they’re over there, it looks like this now. I get how this works. It makes sense from this angle. Okay, vroom vroom.
Again much of this presupposes cisness on the point of the masculine party, because this all exists in the aroace magic hypothetical zone. And I already have long wrapped my head around how I feel about those of us in the weird zone, right. That’s relatively easy to understand.
So basically, a big part of it is just a matter of unlocking this modality of feeling in relation to my body and my role, that didn’t even exist until I was in a place to embrace my girlhood. It was not “allowed” in that I could not reconcile it with my prior understanding of me. That attraction was always there, but even absent of other people’s garbage, until I understood who and what I was, I had no idea what to do with it. Even if (misplaced) homophobia weren’t a thing, 20 years ago the thoughts and feelings would have felt divorced from reality.
But seeing as a girl, I get it. I have the perspective that I could not have had, in terms of the dynamics of how I fit together as a human being. Now it has become, for lack of a better term, logical. Which basically triggers a green light. Thus do my dreams become a dick parade.
I mean.
Again, I’m sure things will calm down eventually. Even with my hormones being as they are. But well. This is where we are at the moment.
So. Fine, okay. This is part of what it means for me to be human. This is part of who Azure is. So might as well bask in it, I guess.
Okay, so we’ve gestured at how as I’ve regained possession of my self and my body and gained a level of comfort with who and what I am, I’ve begun to shed all these layers of other people’s shame—and how that informs my developing understanding of my thoughts and feelings. How as I’ve explored and strengthened my relationship with myself, I’ve grown more confident in similarly reexamining my relationships to others and to the world around me—all of which is the realm where a sexuality is going to rest, right, ergo these newly freed aspects thereof. In a foundational sense then, it’s clear why (as I put it earlier) the dam is breaking after all those years of cracks and trickles, and I now am able to consciously embrace these previously unavailable feelings—and also why that novelty would become a fixation, at least for the moment. But that sketch kind of skirts what feels like a blink-tag question:
Well. Okay. There are several dimensions here, as there would be. Nothing becomes real for me without eighty citations and empirical proof of inevitability. As before and ever, I’m going to try to chip at this without being too problematic about gender roles and biology and societal assumptions and things, and try to couch everything I say in terms of my own wiring. But this is new, and I’m going to be clumsy. I use the words I got.
So this sudden fixation on cis dudes is an intersection of a bunch of things that assemble in a logical way that’s basically only able to lock together now. It’s absolutely not an exclusive thing, or indicative of much beyond my own wiring and the dynamics of the moment. The first thing I guess we need to unpack is the broad ability to observe, admit, and embrace an attraction to men—alongside the better-documented attraction to women and enbies, which is complicated in its own garbage ways—which again isn’t new. It’s always been there. It’s been there, but any time my mind has gone anywhere near the topic, there’s been this learned sort of magnetic repulsion; this immediate sense of nope. “That is not an alley to walk down,” my reflex tells me. “Turn away, now. Think of anything else.” It became an automatic process almost the moment my head began to form these thoughts.
That repression itself isn’t just one thing. Absolutely yes, there was a (misplaced haha) internalized homophobia going on—homophobia in the sense of, not hatred as the word is often used, but existential dread. Because I knew the dangers; they’d been drilled into me. I knew what would happen if I let on even a hint of the things flitting around under the surface, allowed myself to consciously entertain any of them. I’ve already had my head bashed into a bleacher once, I’ve been put through youth therapy, gotten lectures from authority figures. It was the kind of fear of, say, someone who’s been through AA, when they walk into a bar—that whole one-drop mentality. It’ll all be over. You’ll be forever tarnished. (Even removed from the moralism, of course in reality things are more nuanced than that.) I’d feel like, if I don’t block out these pictures from my head, if I don’t look away, if I don’t think of literally anything else—well, I already knew everything about me was awful and wrong and gross, and was never to be expressed. This was just one of a million shames. One for the list. But boy is it a headliner. There would be no going back from here.
And that there, that speaks to the other big problem: me. My utter learned revulsion for myself, combined with my more understandable revulsion for the person I was wrongly expected and coerced and compelled to be, whom I never successfully could and never wanted to be. Every day of my life for so many years, I was just… well, I’d long since given up hope or dream or desire. I knew I didn’t belong to myself. I knew my body didn’t belong to me. I had no choice, no power of decision about anything—about who I was, what I was, how to be. This shell that I built up in order to survive, this previous person who wasn’t really a person—this rudely hacked-together series of automatic processes with no animating soul, that guided this body for at least three decades—for what there was of me breathing inside that husk, it was a horror to me. And for that, there was I think an element of association—this horror over the hateful thing that I did not want to be yet was trapped inside, and the reflections of that unwanted ideal, out there in the world, that mocked this point of abject misery and disgust for me.
This trauma is kind of a warped mirror of my other attraction issues. I don’t want to say that my attraction to men is any innately stronger than my attraction to women or to enbies—again innately I don’t think I really gender my attraction to people. What we’re unpacking here is a current fixation, now that I’m allowed full liberty of emotion. The thing about the way I was nonetheless socially guided by gender, though, it also fucked up and confused any attractions I felt toward women in ways that have really damaged me over the years, again on several levels, for several reasons, at once.
I’ve explored this a little in isolation, but—the aroace thing? It’s so important to me. Everything about my feelings toward and relationships with others goes through there before it goes through anything else, and it’s the only healthy, honest filter to understand me. Likewise it’s the main thing and the basic key that set off and permitted this sense of self-possession and body autonomy that I never knew, was never allowed, at any point in my life before about two and a half years ago. I belong to no one but myself, and that includes my heart well, so to speak. Attraction is a weirdness, ergo this whole discussion. But the goddammed cis-allo-heteronormative presumption that goes into every fucking message one will receive from culture and from the controlling figures in one’s life, it infests one’s read on every possible relationship one could develop. Even where it’s clearly obviously undeniably wrong, you’re made to question and override your own intimations and go with what you’re told, because there is no conversation, no vocabulary for asexuality—a scant one for any non-straight sexuality, even from a cis perspective. So when you feel a thing, you’re told what it means—and if you’re uncertain, you’re fucking wrong and stupid, and just scared and told to stop doubting yourself (by way of listening to yourself and doubting them) and listen to the people who know more about what’s really going on.
So, I’m a girl, right. And I’m ace before anything. So when I’m young, and I’m looking at rad and smart and strong and weird and interesting and pretty women, what my head is doing, though I don’t know how to read the feeling, is saying, whoa, I want to be like that. She’s great! 95% of my attraction that I was allowed to express to the point where it could be misinterpreted, it amounted to a kind of affinity: a recognition of myself, or my potential self, in the other. An admiration, a respect, a fascination. A sense of inspired commonality. But that didn’t make sense with the tools I was given, and that kind of a read opened up all these worrisome notions about my possibly not being the person I was told I had to be or else there would be very very deep trouble for me—the person who so disgusted me to pretend to be. So I wound up being encouraged to ignore my understandings and forcibly misread every feeling I ever had toward another girl or a woman. And gee whiz, has that ruined my life repeatedly over and over and destroyed so many things about my relationship with myself over the years.
What I was feeling toward men, then—toward “other” boys—it was corrupted by other people’s ideas of gender and attraction in exactly the same way as my feelings toward women. Just, the other way around. Because, whoops, genitals guide every dimension of our lives, right?
Which leads into the next thing. To allow myself to actually feel these attractions toward men—equal as they may be to my attractions to anyone else—to a large extent it’s just a product of this recent sudden release of pressure. So that makes a sort of functional sense. It’s just—it’s one thing to finally embrace this part of the puzzle, but why do I keep saying cis dudes? What’s that about? That feels deeply strange and possibly a bit dodgy in some ways, especially with this whole context in TERfy circles about “genital preferences” as a set of dogwhistles for biological essentialism, transmedicalism, whatever.
So, okay. I’ve really tried to avoid going too hard on this topic (so to speak), but I really have a lot to say about dicks. And it’s just—it’s been hard to contain for my entire life, and I’ve never taken the opportunity to properly unpack it, so just bear with me on this for a minute.
Now obviously genitals aren’t gendered, right. That’s, like, day-one absolute duh material. Anyone can have anything. All bodies are basically the same; all the parts are equivalent and only diverge at basically the last minute, and even then hardly at all in a meaningful way. And your body says absolutely zero about who or what you are, except for what you personally want to project onto it. I really shouldn’t have to say any of this, but I feel like it’s important to establish it before I go all cock-hungry in this discussion.
To skip back a minute first, the binary fuckery that I’ve been taught to apply to every thought and feeling I experience toward myself or others may start to indicate why I’ve felt an unusual freeness and safety in my attraction to enbies, trans, and GNC folx. Once the concept of people outside the binary landed on my radar, they immediately glitched out the toxic framework that otherwise saturated every element of my life. They didn’t fit the system. I didn’t have any preset rules to warp my responses. And yes, to follow an earlier thread, of course I felt an intense (if super confusing) affinity as well. So I think the feelings that developed were more pure and honest and available to me, easier to understand, than my feelings toward people of either binary gender. This room outside the binary was my safe area that had escaped the existential normative, self-loathing, life-denying blitzkrieg.
At some point I’m going to have to reckon with my feelings toward cis women, which for the above reasons are messed-up in all of these unfortunate ways. Right now that’s not where the novelty is, though. I’ve always been not only allowed but actively forcibly compelled with that. So it’s nothing inherent about cis women, or even my innate attractions to them, that I feel my own sort of trauma about anything to do with entertaining attraction to them at this point. It’s just, all the abuse. I’ll get to that in time. It’s down the road a bit.
I bring all this up now because it informs a really important element in the larger question we’re asking here. I’m already sort of chill with my attraction to the genderly peculiar. I always have been, except to what extent it took me a while to strip out and isolate these notions of romantic and sexual attractions that do not exist in my system the way that I’ve been told that of course they must. So when we’re going to start asking the question, okay, but what’s the deal with attraction to cis people, of either binary—on some level I’ve already reconciled those feelings, or never had an issue with non-cis people. By its nature, that range of emotion managed to sidestep the basic problem here. Mostly. But more to the point, more starkly and energetically, as a boundless topic of discussion in and of itself: cocks.
Being aroace is a weirdness for so many reasons. It’s hard enough to fully understand or to communicate what that means. It’s even harder when you start to observe tertiary attractions and cross it with other sexualities, and try to unpick the dynamics of how and why. I feel like I have to assert forever and with the strongest emphasis that to be aromantic and asexual means that I don’t experience or understand these attractions to real people—like, it doesn’t happen; I don’t view people that way, and it weirds me out a little to be honest— but that not only are there a million other kinds of attraction one can experience, a million other ways to feel and express one’s love or fondness or interest in another, a million kinds of intimacy that don’t involve bodily fluids; that people also have an internal dimension. There is a difference between fantasy and reality. I can deeply appreciate things in my own head, dream about whole scenarios and dynamics that make sense to me and hold great emotional power—yet have no desire or indeed ability to see that replicated in this external body zone. That doesn’t make either side more real or important than the other. They all make up who a person is, and their relationships to and understanding of themselves and of others.
What goes on inside me is its own universe and of critical, fundamental importance to my life. The barest, dumbest example here: I am not going to fuck. (Well, not another person anyway.) It will not happen. Doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter when. I have no interest. I don’t experience or understand the basic attractions that would lead to such an event. That’s not the way I’m wired, and I never will be. That doesn’t stop me from having the raunchiest things bouncing around in my dreams, or from finding sex-that-doesn’t-involve-me-specifically a hilarious discussion topic, or from easing up in my own personal fantasies and in what I’m allowed to appreciate and entertain without triggering this deep shame and aversion. And the thing about fantasy is, it doesn’t always necessarily play by the codes and principles and linear emotional logic of life. It picks and chooses and fixates as it’s going to, on all the meatiest bits (as it were) that attract the most particular fascination in isolation.
If we were talking about real relationships, genitals are the last and least important possible consideration. They have nothing to do with who a person is, and the love one individually holds for a person as a person is the only important motivating factor for a meaningful and healthy attraction, right. In real life once you get to the point where someone else’s genitals become anything like your business at all, if they hold any relevance at all to your attraction to that person beyond in their role as another part of them to love by virtue of being a part of them, then what are you even doing? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to yourself, and why are you subjecting that poor other person to you?
So at last when we ask the question, “Why cis men in particular?” we’ve got the start of a roadmap, and then we’ve got the big thing. It’s because of the novelty of feeling allowed to like men now. It’s because attraction to cis people of either gender has always had its specific problems, that again are only now beginning to defrost. It’s because, fantasy! It doesn’t apply to anyone real. And its because—and I can’t possibly stress this enough—I really, really, really, really, really like dick. Not exclusively. And not in a gendered sense. But, particularly—and with the gendered inflection of thirty years of restrained pressure unleashed all at once.
Though one is publicly coy about these things, yeah obviously I’ve been all about the girldick for ages. As with everything about me, it took me an age to realize that this was actually way less about desire than affinity; recognizing myself, and putting myself in the shoes of the figures I saw. But again, the gender strangeness, it’s made that easy. It’s this zone where my head was free of bias and allowed to get a little weird with its own ideas, albeit without an understanding as to what or how or why. One doesn’t talk about it, but. Internally? A-OK over here. And vaginas are good too! Sure. As traumatic as my past relationships have been for so many reasons outside the purview of this discussion, all my partners have possessed vaginas, and I found deep fascination and enjoyment and appreciation there—even when attached to utter monsters.
But again, genitals aren’t gendered and for all the equanimity may feel in one’s attractions to others, within any given field one will have one’s particular interests and favorites, and gee whiz in isolation is there ever a strong, strong, overwhelming preference for penis. This one option looms ever so large—which, due to the way society likes to gender things that aren’t gendered, has of course been… difficult to really embrace in a meaningful way beyond fantasy for most of my life, and even within my fantasy there have been all these walls of caution, to do with gender. So in this moment where I’m feeling more free to permit myself attraction to men, and I’m feeling more able to deal with attraction to cis people, I also am feeling more free to admit specific fondness for cock. What we have then is this conflation of a few things, all at once. Ergo: cis men.
Now, a significant detail that plays into all of this, that feels kind of… uh, extra super duper strange for me to focus on, is my recent and abrupt understanding of my innate sexual role as a bottom. I very much do not want to go deep (as it were) into that topic at the moment, but—again without wanting to get icky about gender prescription because we’re just talking about me here, understanding this in the context of my gender has been a revelation for my acceptance of and relationship to myself; my whole conceptualization of myself as a girl. And one should perhaps note that following a long series of cracks (e.g., after correcting my body chemistry) this recognition almost directly precedes the breakdown of inhibitions toward cis men.
Like, there’s a lot going on here, a lot to unpack that on the surface is kinda… strange. But there are some, uh, distinct bits of physical logic that cascade in terms of what goes where, and—look, this discussion isn’t about sex, it’s about my sexuality. But the detail of my sexual role ties into this breakthrough in my acceptance of various attractions and dynamics that were hard to entirely resolve before. There’s a certain logic that clicked in terms of how I see myself as a person and as a girl, that made everything else line up and go, “Ah. Yes, that makes sense now. Track is clear at last. Full speed ahead.”
I feel so hesitant about this framing for all the reasons, not the least that, to the extent that I have attractions to other people, they are not gendered and that I really don’t care about genitals and seriously guys, I can appreciate anyone and anything. It’s all cool. But… there are impulses. There are specific very real and important and unavoidable feelings, and they bear a close association with specific very real and very valid preferences. And whereas in a real relationship with a living person none of this would really be important in my appreciation for them, when it comes to the life of the mind… well, one can prefer. And just, holy cow. The intensity and innateness of my specific preference for that specific dynamic, and the physical elements that logically go into that dynamic, it’s overwhelming, in a way that illuminates so much that has always felt wrong in the past and affirms so much.
It’s not to comment on anyone but me here to say that I never felt more secure and correct and unambiguous in my role as a girl than I did the moment all these pieces clicked for me, and I understood how everything is meant to, uh, fit together, for me, emotionally—and I absolutely get how weird it is that not only am I associating my innate sexual role with my understanding of my gender, but conflating all of this with a sudden attraction to men. In a sense it’s like. Just. What are you doing, Azure. It feels so problematic to me, out of context. Again, though, people are messy. And I really don’t know how better to talk about these things. And as I will forever emphasize: the dude thing at least is a fixation. March 2021, this is where my focus is. That’s clear enough. It’s just that my brain has this whole new thing to play with now, and it’s gotta run its course.
Now that I’m able to feel these things and admit to what and who I am and how all of this works, I know I’m going to chill out eventually and my feelings will get less, uh, specific than they happen to be at this moment. At least, in regard to other people’s gender. The specific interest in dicks, well, that’s kind of innate. It’s not budged in 30 years. It’s a part of me that ain’t going anywhere. But now we see that there are procedural, dynamic, logistical reasons that play into that attraction, which relate to who I am and how I see myself as a person.
And holy Hannah, I sure did spend a lot of a Saturday afternoon talking about why I love me some penis. This is not a thing I imagined I would be discussing in public only a few months ago. But here we are. If you will, I just couldn’t hold back anymore. There’s so much more to this topic, but I… think I’ve scraped around this barrel as much as I can bear at the moment. This is so weird for me to unfold like this, and I honestly don’t know what to do with myself at this juncture. I’m kind of twitching. But I had to work through it, so. Okay. Breathe. Azure is going to do… Anything else than this, now, and just try to figure out what the fuck is happening with my day.
But we’ve got a sketch down. This is important. This is how I’m managing to structure my thoughts these days. This is how we get better.
We’ll let it stew for now.
TL;DR: the fact I am a girl informs the fact I like to get it; the fact I like to get it informs the fact I am a girl; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it informs my long historical fixation on the anatomical structure involved in giving it; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it from that structure informs my long-suppressed non-exclusive attraction to men, resulting in a sudden rush of confusing, overwhelming interest in cis men, seemingly out of nowhere; and the fact that this is all hypothetical, given the whole aroace thing, informs the peculiar specificity of these fixations, since it’s all internal and removed from the concerns of any real relationship I will ever entertain—which doesn’t make it less important to understanding myself as a person!
But no, it’s not out of nowhere. It adds up, it makes sense. I’m just healing here. Continuing to become a real person, despite it all.
And hey, got a new interest I guess. So that’s nice.
