sexuality

Function and Role

  • Reading time:14 mins read

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.

Hickory Dickory Dock

  • Reading time:21 mins read

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:

But why cis dudes, tho? Specifically?

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.

The Intersectionality of Me

  • Reading time:7 mins read

So the first healthy step is to throw away everything I think I know or understand about sexuality, either from what people have told me or what I’ve absorbed from the culture around us—but particularly as pertains to the misapprehensions that others used to hold about me.

What I’m increasingly seeing is this deep and meaningful intersection between my sexuality and my understanding of my gender. It’s really hard to for me to hold in my head without that as a framework. Likewise I want to do that as free as I can of gender preconceptions, but, well. I may flub a bit as I get used to the dynamics, because I’m really really not used to thinking of myself in sexual terms, to acknowledging any of the thoughts and feelings that my mind has always produced and I just… Learned to ignore. So, this is gonna be clumsy. Workin’ on it.

In the cases where I make a kind of a dumb assertion about gender roles or whatever, I mean. I’m Azure. I don’t go in for that shit. I’m non-binary. But I need some kind of a language to communicate to myself the things that are going through my head and ascribe them some meaning. We’ll work on the nuance as I stop bumping against the walls and start to figure out how best to talk about the things I’m trying to feel out. Until then if I do some questionable shit like associating being a bottom with femininity, just, I’m talking about me here. My wiring.

I have never ever been comfortable talking about sex, at all, in any sense other than stupid jokes. And definitely not comfortable entertaining deep thoughts about it within myself. So, uh. Yeah. I’m wearing flippers to a tap dance recital. But at least I’m showing up now.

If it seems like I’m setting up an abundance of caution, then well yeah. This inherently freaks me out to engage with, and every little concession and admission that’s brought me to the point of thinking about it deeply has been a point of rending concern, verging on panic. But, well. Exhale. I know me well enough now—roughly speaking. I understand that nearly all my fear is other people’s garbage that I’ve just been carrying around all these years. But I also do know this can be sort of sensitive. So I just, uh. Want to go about it methodically.

Where the method leads me is, the intersectionality of me. How all of these elements, none of which I was correctly informed about and I’ve been having to reassemble from core principles and observations, interplay and inform each other. My sexuality only makes sense to me as a girl—non-binary, trans, or otherwise. I am what I am. Without that key, everything feels wrong. Deeply upsetting. But through that lens… okay. I think I am starting to get a small hold on things. Like, they’re beginning to make sense.

There’s an element of how attraction works and how to read it, an element of preferred roles and behaviors. And, I don’t have better words for it and a way to distinguish it as clearly as I feel it, but a big wash of the emotional implications for me. Which is so hazy, I know.

As my rantings for the last week would indicate, my choice to start to unpack all of this is catalyzed by just, Christ, a certain dam breaking—after a long period of cracks and drizzle—regarding my feelings toward cis men, right. Which is a whole thing for my brain to deal with.

I should stress this isn’t in relation to any real people, because, aroace, right? Which is another whole dynamic to workshop, because that is so important and fundamental to what makes me who I am. But attraction, sexuality, they’re complicated fuckers. So to speak. Lotsa levels.

I know for a fact and it feels like it should be self-evident that obviously I can and do and have and will feel attraction to anyone of any gender, except to the extent that I don’t toward anyone in reality. But, right now we seem to have hit on a certain fixation. So—okay.

It’s a thing that, it’s always been latent, like everything about me. None of this is new. It couldn’t be. That’s not how people work. It’s just that only a narrow range of my attractions were… Safe, or socially acceptable, enough to acknowledge as real and so to entertain. And even then, the aroace thing again, I was always encouraged to misinterpret the feelings I could admit in… Less than healthy or productive ways. So in a sense I’ve got a lot of stuff to unpack about all these dimensions of attraction, right. For different reasons.

Ideologically it feels wrong to me to be gendering my attractions like this. Like, I know for a fact that I’m not bi; gender doesn’t really factor into the way I see people. It’s just, fuckin’ repression, right. Once you let go of the pressure, well: boom. All this unaccounted wetness. So, that’s a part of the messiness until I figure out how to organize my thoughts and feelings sensibly. Right now, my brain’s just kinda going nuts with a narrow range of, hey, I can do this now. and… Fine. You know. It is what it is. We can humor this until it evens out.

It almost feels problematic that it’s not until I get comfortable understanding myself as a girl, like holy shit how could I be misunderstood as anything else, that I start to go, welp, guess dudes are on the menu then! It doesn’t read right, you know. But that’s, uh, incidental? It’s more a matter of just, knowing who the hell I am, establishing a frame of reference. Though yeah, there’s going to be some subconscious cultural garbage to strip out of there of course. We do live in a society, and so forth.

Knowing who I am makes me less scared of things. And anything to do with sex or sexuality is terrifying for me. But as I said earlier, we can keep sex per se on the back shelf for now, mostly, at least in practical terms, while we deal with the more existential issue here. You know, it’s fine. I’m ready. I can handle it. Maybe.

So yeah. There’s my lens. I’m a girl, with a sexuality. And the sexuality pertains to me as a girl, as much as it does to me as a person—even as my sexuality does not particularly concern itself with anyone else’s gender. Except for when it does. Like when one gets a hankering.

Which I guess seems normal, reasonable, rational enough. I’ve been eating a lot of cheese lately, but eventually I’ll get tired and drift to something else. One fixates, one rotates. One appreciates. (Heck, a thing I adore about my own body is how much variety there is to appreciate.) And I guess as one explores, one incorporates. All that one finds, will inform everything else once one gets back to it. I can take this a piece at a time, just break it down to what I’m feeling in the moment, what it means to me, and just… trust that it will add up.

So, March 2021, where we are is, Azure is a girl who at least broadly and non-specifically, all up in the fantasy and hypothesis and art and literature, is permitting herself to fixate on cis dudes. And, uh. All of the mechanics and dynamics associated with that hazy attraction. We’ll see what happens from here.

Start of the Breakdown

  • Reading time:6 mins read

To proceed, we may need to distinguish a few things. The trauma I have around sex per se is different from the trauma that I have around my sexuality—though both are really difficult for me to engage with to the degree I need to unpick everything. (Well, half of my sexuality, I guess I should say. The part that isn’t just nope.)

It’s way easier for me to engage with my gender, though even that has kind of two levels to it. My enbyness was obvious and no problem at all; it took a lot more work to connect with my femininity. Either way, ultimately that’s just an obvious visceral fact of me. Clearly I’m a girl, and clearly that’s on my own terms rather than some external binary road map. And, okay. Sure. It’s all inward-focused, about my relationship to myself. I can work that out, with time.

Before we even get there, though, we need some body autonomy, which is provided by recognizing my aroaceness. That’s kind of the key to everything about me, the thing that allows me ownership over myself in a way I never previously understood.

It’s all the other parts, when it stops focusing entirely inward, that are hard for me. Whenever just the concept of other people enters the picture, the terror comes along with them, right—and that scrambles and complicates any effort to understand what’s really happening, how I function.

Breaking the problem down, though—I think that may help. I think it’s easier to engage with one part at a time, carefully strip out the bits that are just other people’s damage and tend to what’s left, puzzle it into a working order and see what it’s really like under there. I think the question of the trauma around sex itself is just too big for me, as I am now—and it’s not really pressing or important, in that I’m never going to have sex again. (Well, not with another person anyway.) That’s too hard, too painful, and just… not a priority to sift.

Sexuality, though, is a totally different thing, if obviously related. That’s way more hypothetical, more about ideas than actions. Yes it’s hard to engage with some of these ideas, but it’s just a playground of the mind in the end really. There is still mirrored glass. It’s way easier for me to deal with the notion of being pan, and what goes into that (or… hypothetically, uh, into me, one says with intense bottom energy), what it means for my ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world and the people around me and in my imagination—than it will ever be to deal with my past experiences, and how I feel about the actual practical elements of sex and just—

I can’t even finish that thought, Christ. Even approaching it makes the dam threaten to burst. I don’t feel like crying right now. It’s 12:30 am. So, I’m just—I’m not going to go there, for now. And that’s fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll never reconcile, never work at it. But, you know. One thing at a time. I don’t have to deal with what’s happened to me to play with the nuances of the way I’m wired to think and feel about people. That’s got enough baggage, that’s confusing enough. But, I think it’s workable if I just take it as its own thing. If deeply peculiar for me to engage with.

I’ve got so much to get over here. All this internal mess, that’s just a reflection of other people’s problems. And so much of that weight, it doesn’t even reflect the reality of who I am. It’s based on all these wild misconceptions of me as a person. So the question is, why am I listening to it? Why is it affecting me at all? But that’s how they get you with the programming, right.

So. Okay. I guess that’s kinda where my hyperfocus is gonna be for a while. Call this stage four of Azure unpacking (ignoring the neurology, which is related but kind of its own separate set of concerns from the whole queer parade I’ve got running through my head here). I’m a non-binary girl. I’m so very aroace, holy shit. But, it is also clear that I am intrinsically pan. And that’s weird to engage and hard for me to understand, and I guess I’m ready to try now.

To be precise, I need to understand it in relation to me, to Azure, not to the gender that other people misdiagnosed for me so long ago, or the persona they projected onto me. That’s never going to lead anywhere useful.

I got, like, feelings here. And I guess this is a long time coming, huh. I’ve never really been in a place in my life, in my relationship to myself, to even begin to figure them out. They’ve always been here in hindsight, same as I’ve always been a girl even when I didn’t have the tools to see it clearly. I just, what feelings I housed, they weren’t ready to rise to the surface.

In this dive, I don’t want to be crass about it. I don’t want to be performative or weird. I definitely don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. But this isn’t about anyone else; this is me, this is is my space, my self, my recovery. And I guess this needs to be my interest for the next while.

So. Okay. Shit, fine. Yeah. I’m, uh, gonna have to think on this, and where to go from here. Now that we’re dropping this next brick of shame off the highest possible bridge.

God, this is what we’re actively engaging with now.

All right. Let’s see where this leads.

I’m hella pan here. And, uh. Right now the fixation is on certain dimensions of that which have a novelty of not previously being allowed recognition.

It’s normal for a girl to be into dudes. Well, if it were anyone else I’d say of course it is, dummy. It’s normal for anyone to be into anyone. It’s always different rules for me than for others. I’m gonna have to really start checking myself on that line of thinking.

Whee, so.

…

Here we go, I guess.

Muddle Bubble

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Sexuality is weird when you’re aroace, all the more so when you’re trans. Just because you don’t feel attraction to people, and may possibly be averse to things, doesn’t mean you don’t have ideas in your head; fantasy, preference, interest, appreciation. It’s just theoretical.

Lately that theory has mostly been based around dudes. Which is hard to process. I don’t know how to really categorize anything, because people aren’t math problems, but I kind of feel like my head is making up for years of repression and trying to sort of even the balance.

Like, my subconscious is kind of going, oh yeah that is a possibility too huh. So that’s kind of… where all of those energies seem to flow these days when my head goes to those places. I’m guessing when the novelty rubs off it’ll be like okay, had my fill of this. We’re good now.

Ideologically I am so obviously pan, right. It doesn’t even make sense to me to engage a person on any basis other than who they are as a person. Who really cares about the practical details, beyond how they support their whole deal as a human. But, uh. Right now I’m in a mode.

And it’s confusing me, and making me feel all sorts of weird things that I don’t know how to manage too well. But I guess these are what one will work through.

I think my second puberty may just be hitting me really hard here.

Lack of Choice

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Part of this weird chagrin I feel when forced to admit that historically everyone I’ve been involved with has been a cis woman comes from the understanding that there will never be anyone else. Like, there will never be an evening-out of the record, no proof of my sentiment:

“No, it’s not what it looks like! I like other people too! Don’t judge me! I’m way more interesting than it sounds, believe me!!”

Which indicates my other big problem: the lack of a sense of control, it leads to a certain shame. I’m still trying to reconcile my past and how much of that to consider fully consensual. Ideally I’d just not have not had any of those experiences. Like, none of this has much to do with me. I didn’t really choose it; it chose me, and I relented. It says nothing about me, and I sort of resent the implications that have been plastered onto me as a consequence.

On a deeper, if possibly stranger, level, I am so very clearly a bottom, to the extent that I am sexual at all (which is: nope), which the more that I unpack, the lack of regard for which informs much of the trauma I have experienced—and I feel that the incidental facts of my history misrepresent who I am in a way that furthers that core existential trauma.

Like, I don’t want to be tarred with anyone else’s brush. I don’t want to carry that anymore. If you’re gonna judge me, judge me for who I actually am. I can’t deal with being defined by my trauma any longer. But, I’m still trying to work out how to reconcile this dimension of it.

I’m sure nobody but me could possibly care about any of this. It’s just, it matters to my own feelings about myself, my self-possession, my basic body autonomy. And it’s rough in this weird vague painful way I keep trying to understand.

What Dreams May Come

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Ardently as I may be aroace, I feel like my fantasy life has loosened up and is making sense to a degree it never really had. Just allowing things to fall into their natural places, stop trying to force other people’s roles and expectations; so much dysfunction clears up. There’s so much I have been coaxed to do to myself, psychologically—playing out all these biases, fears, punishments, hiding and correcting and holding myself back from even my basic thoughts or feelings. And what was left never made sense; it just left me empty, dead, anxious.

Learning what happiness feels like, it gave me this tool that I never had, to measure all these other things against.

It is so wild to reassemble myself from such a granular level and see just how shaky the old architecture was, the lack of attention to basic supporting walls. I’ve been taught to misinterpret pretty much everything about myself; every day I feel like I find a new depth, realizing that signal doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, that this response is problematic to me personally for such-and-so reason.

There’s so much rewiring to do, it’s overwhelming; feels endless. But the more that I do, the more I find to salvage in here; it’s all good, actually—we have a perfectly workable person under all this, just been maintained by a bunch of idiots all these years.

Just need some time.

Connective Tissue

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, a curious thing. Now that I have tits, it makes me feel way less weird to look at tits. There are a few things going on here, with my recognition of my gender and my sexuality and all the physical, psychological, emotional changes that I’ve experienced in a fairly short time.

It used to be that naked forms would just make me deeply uncomfortable. I’d avert my eyes, try not to think about it. It felt lurid to engage, like some kind of a boundary issue. In the event that I did, I felt ashamed of myself, which just built up and kept getting weirder. Now that I better understand what’s going on inside me, that I have a better relationship with myself and trust my feelings and reasons, a lot of that has fallen away and it’s easier to appreciate form for what it is. Now that I can look clearly, I see beauty and commonality.

There’s a universality to us, right, for the brief period we’ve been around to record our experience and what we think about it. Now that I understand that I’m looking for connection, that’s what I’m finding—a common humanity, a common femininity. A piece of everyone in everyone else—but more significantly, me. I wasn’t part of the equation until now. I was outside. None of this was for me, about me. I had no right to it, just as I had no right to myself. Except of course I do, as much as anyone. (And I am the only one with a right to myself, goddamn.)

Now when faced with a nude female form, at least in representation, I don’t get much more than a residual embarrassment. I get the relationship now. And it’s a meaningful one, to at least some extent, that helps to shed light on my relationship to my own body.

Glibness aside it’s not really as easy as, hey I’ve got breasts; it’s no big deal, whaddayamean. There’s a lot more going on here. It’s more that I’m starting to understand what it is to be human. As I lose shame over my own body, so I lose shame over the concept of bodies. And as I lose that shame I’m afforded the room to connect and appreciate and embrace a beauty that kind of feeds a cycle. It’s an acceptance of my place, now that I know what that is. Now that I understand how I fit in with just… Everything. Everyone. In a way I never did.

Hook and Eye

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Since I was… However old I figured it out (Early teen? Maybe?), I have had an ambivalent relationship to masturbation. Nearly every time, I come out of it thinking, “… Why did I just do that?” I feel gross and unpleasant and ashamed—and then to nail it home there’s this mess. That last stage, when I had no energy or will to handle it, was like this punishment for something I should have known better than to do, that didn’t get me anything, that made me feel physically unwell, and that just reinforced all these negative ideas I had about myself. Yet as will happen, particularly to one with a masculine-coded penis, there was this compulsion, right. A thing one feels the need to deal with, if for no other reason than to get it out of the way so one can think about other things. And it was so friggin annoying, god.

The thing about all this is, between this and my real severe problems with sex, and my transness, and how that plays into my sexual identity, there’s a lot of really confusing messaging going around, every piece of which has to be examined on its own terms to determine the shape of the puzzle and where it may actually fit.

The problem isn’t with my dick, right. I like dicks, and I’m very fond of my own—especially since it’s gotten feminized and has begun to behave itself, but even before I fixed my hormone situation. That’s not a problem. That’s not what weirds me out here.

As I’ve talked about, the fact that I feel very little compulsion these days is such a relief—as is the fact there’s so little cleanup in that regard anymore. But even with no punishment it’s not really—like, I don’t get much out of it. Not enough to bother almost ever, right. Like, I just feel empty, lesser. Annoyed with myself. Physically there’s this fleeting glowing rush, which is more intense than it was in the old days. But it’s like, who cares? Any therapeutic value from the physiology is usually more than offset by everything else still. At best I wind up with this sort of neutral situation, like, well, that just happened. Oh well. So, it’s pretty great that what barely-there libido I ever had is pretty much vanished entirely. It’s like my body and mind are finally operating on close to the same level.

So, to put a pin in this, now I’m thinking about my problems with sex—which are many and complicated, and will possibly never be fully unwound—in part because there’s no practical element. I will never have sex again under any circumstances, and I wish I could erase what I’ve had.

One especial trauma point for me, when I look back, is the expectations lumped onto me. I’ve only had two partners, right; both were cis women, with their own… issues, that are none of my business. But they really expected me to play a role, that they expected me to understand. And for their part they just… did not want to be involved. They wanted to be 100% passive, and they projected all this stuff on me on the basis of my genitalia (and I guess their misreading of my gender). And they got so vicious when I failed to play that role in the way they imagined it.

I’ve often dwelled on how inhuman I was made to feel. Like I was just some kind of a wind-up toy for the other’s benefit. There was no communication, no fondness, no joy. I was a tool, and I was there for a purpose, and if I failed to do so automatically, I was useless to them. So it was my responsibility to be the horny one, to regularly initiate sexual situations, to arrange everything appropriately, to actively engage them in everything, while they just kinda… sat there. Because I had a penis, that made me a top. Because they saw me as male, to them I was mega-top.

Except, whee, that has nothing to do with me. I couldn’t, can’t handle that garbage. I don’t have a libido. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t really like sex. I just wanted to be close buds, right. Share my life, spend my time studying the other. I didn’t want to dominate. It made me so sad and it freaked me out and made me feel awful about myself, and in hindsight it shot my dysphoria through the roof. I was so ashamed of the way I looked, of the way my body worked, back then. I felt disgusting. I nearly had a panic attack every time. It was bad. On a couple of occasions I did actually have a full-blown attack, and wound up pulling away in terror and just curled up in a ball in a dark corner, shivering and sobbing. Which they then seemed to decide that was a thing never to bring up again, to imagine never happened.

And for all of that, sex was my exclusive responsibility. I was tolerated as a person on sufferance with the understanding that I provide them a service, right. Which was not my understanding, entering into these agreements.

Which is kinda where I have consent issues. I don’t know how to parse the situations I was in. None of it really feels fully consensual to me, and it’s just… I’m holding back tears just writing this now, as long ago as it all was. Hell, the last time I had sex at all was… I think, 2014? Not nearly long enough, but still.

So, there’s a lot going on there, right. But if we strip away the interpersonal weirdness and narrow it down to my own physical and emotional mechanics, there may be some things we can pick apart in here.

A big issue here of course is the dysphoria: deep and crushing and all-encompassing but undiagnosed at the time and not understood in the least. I felt like some horrible creature, and did not want to be seen the way that I was. More than that, I did not want to play that role. In that itself there’s a lot to unpack, about communication and genuine care and affection and love and concern and so on. But it’s worth focusing on the gendered expectation, and the assumption that well of course I would be a top. They thought I was male. I had a dick, right. Sexual roles have nothing to do with gender or anatomy, obviously, but like everything else, people tend to make these assumptions. And not to play too much to stereotype, but contrary to what people kept telling me, I am a girl. And I think this is relevant to some of my wiring.

To bring that back to the masturbation thing, if we posit that to the extent that I would have any sexual role at all, I would very unambiguously be a bottom in fact, that may inform some of the historical issues here, including the focus on my dick (which is otherwise great). Like, psychologically, emotionally, it does nothing for me, even upsets me a little, to emphasize stimulation through penetration. I don’t want it. And what physiological payoff may result doesn’t really offset the personal damage that it does every time.

What’s confused me with most of the literature that I’ve read around this topic is the hyper-focus that it tends to take with genital dysphoria, right, which again I don’t have going on. My dick is gorgeous and one thing about me I’ve always been happy about. In my case, it’s not the penis itself that’s the problem, but I think probably the role lumped onto it and the consequences of leaning on it as a primary instrument. Which just messes with my head and makes me feel awful.

So now, there are a hundred problems with butt stuff as well, right. In my case it’s almost entirely down to cleanliness, which is just… you know. Not a thing I want to dwell on here. And as fine as I am with the mechanics, it feels so weird to talk about in so many words. The thing is, though, for all the aversions and complications about cleanliness both going into and coming out of that scenario, ultimately it’s less of an imbalance than the what-feels-like punishment when one focuses up front—which again almost never feels worth it on balance.

Again I don’t really have an active libido, and it’s never going to be more than a rare occasional thing, but I feel like butt play is both more affirmative and more rewarding than genital play. Like, I find myself glowing for a whole day afterward as opposed to feeling miserable. The near total lack of shame (as hesitant as I may feel to verbalize it), the full-body rush of calm and giddiness. The feeling like I am a real person. Something in my brain clicking, and my feeling my gender more strongly than ever. Feeling in love with myself and who I am.

Even if it’s super gross.

Between that grossness and the general lack of an impulse, there’s more than enough to prevent me from getting around to it almost ever. But it actually does make me feel good. It has a therapeutic value that masturbation is supposed to have, right, that I don’t associate with the act.

All of which feeds back into sex. I think I better understand a piece of why it has always upset me so very much. Again there will never be a circumstance where it comes into practice, because this is just not a thing I will be doing with myself, but I’m so very much a bottom. And that’s fine, and that’s good, and that’s neither here nor there. And it’s kind of obvious if one knows anything about me. But it’s interesting just how deeply wired that is, and how much it wounds me to go against it. How much it makes me frankly hate myself.

Which is absurd, because I’m wonderful.

So. Okay. That’s me, thinking this through. As these discussions will tend to be. I think this makes more sense to me now.

Anyway. Another brick in place, in the puzzle that is Azure. One that really shouldn’t have taken this long to cement, but here we are.

Filling the Void

  • Reading time:4 mins read

To own myself is to unlock so much that had been inaccessible to me. So many thoughts and ideas, so much of my understanding of the world and my relationships to others. And it all started with my aroaceness. Through that came enough of a sense of bodily autonomy and self-possession to permit me access to my gender, some aspects of my neurology, and everything else that defines me as a person.

It’s funny. I didn’t really want to be in the romantic or sexual relationships I have been; I just felt like I didn’t have a choice, right? That it was what was wanted from me, was the trade-off I had to make for retaining those… what-I-thought-were friendships.

I didn’t so much consent as relent. I gave myself up—or I suppose just handed myself over, from where the last owner left me. I didn’t feel like I had any real agency over myself. I knew I was always wrong about everything, and I didn’t want to upset anyone because of my hang-ups or preferences, which I knew didn’t matter.

And it sucked. A lot. I hated the expectations. I hated being objectified. I hated the constant criticism and judgment. I hated having no control over my body or my mind or my life. I hated having everything I cared about diminished and demeaned, all my principles dismissed.

Sex was upsetting on so many levels. I couldn’t manage spending every waking moment worrying about someone else’s actions and feelings and well-being, and getting nothing but contempt in return; that raw disgust and fury at my just… being a real person, and not some fantasy idol.

In hindsight, somewhere in the deep recesses of my subconscious, I think beyond the toxic decayed friendship that offered me nothing in the end, the thing I wound up clinging to in each case, that intoxicated me enough to freak me out over losing, was their femininity—being in its aura, right? I was too meek to engage with it much, but there were all their girl things all around me. There they were, as a point of study; something I could never be, never have for myself, in a way that felt almost unfair. But I could do osmosis.

(Though sex and physicality freaked me out, I also did find boobs hilarious and fun—another thing to low-key envy.)

And yes, all my past partners—all those I will ever have—were cis women, though they needn’t have been. That they were is largely due to the circumstance of they being the ones to have pursued me; in part because of internalized homophobia; in part because I just… I think had all that unsettled business, existentially. I saw in them some part of what it hurt so much that I was not.

I guess it’s probably no accident that embracing my own femininity led almost directly into realizing all my tertiary attractions were pretty much regardless of gender. Once I had filled that void in my life, it was easier to step back and take measure.

Now that I understand I am my own girl, I’ve got no special need to live vicariously—so that weirdness is cleared up. I am the person I want to be now, or am on my way at least—so what narrow confused longing there was is gone, and what attraction I do feel, it’s free to be all about individual appreciation of the other, on merit.

People are just people, right? There’s so little that separates or distinguishes us except for who we are, and how we choose to behave—and that’s the power, the energy that generates beauty. Now that I’m on my way to being a complete person, it’s harder to discriminate—except in the sense that romance is dumb and sex is gross, and I have no desire for either. We really love to brand and package love in this culture. There are so many other, more interesting, more constructive ways to appreciate people. To show and receive affection.

I feel like I have missed out on a lot of meaningful connection, a lot of mutual support and fondness and care and joy, from playing other people’s games for so long. I want to learn how to love in my own way—a way without conditions or performance or… bodily fluids.

I feel like the world kind of needs it too.

Small Talk

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On reflection—sex is a conversation, right. It’s a kind of communication one works out with one’s partner(s), pooling the mutual appreciation you hold for each other into something bigger. At least in theory. Ideally.

I don’t think I have had proper sex. It’s more that in each case I have been used as an elaborate masturbation aid for the other’s benefit. No connection. No communication. No foreplay, no exploration, no fondness. Just, be expected to read their mind and satisfy their unstated urge while they zone out. Then go away. Fail any of these steps, and be punished.

Which is not to say that sex is a thing I need or desire in my life. It sure as heck isn’t, and I sure as heck don’t. At all. Ever. But, I guess those are some of the words for some of the distress that I associate with it. None of which, really, has anything to do with sex itself, or with me. Rather, it follows the personalities and values of the other parties.

As I’ve been saying, I want to be saying no for the right reasons, from a position of calm and understanding. I don’t want to just be reacting with fear to everything; I want to make good decisions, that reflect who I am and not just the damage I’ve been dealt.

So. Here’s a piece of that, I guess.

For Why This Sight

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I have a lot of internalized homophobia. And it sucks. There’s no mystery what it’s doing there, of course—four decades of defending myself against accusations that, well, turned out to be true after all. At least I can grapple with it now, and understand what it’s covering for.

It’s so irrational. I’m not even male, right. If anything it’s become more and more clear to me that I’m not just non-binary (though that too, now and forever) but an actual girl as well. Still, there’s this deeply ingrained discomfort and fear that I have to work against when I find a guy attractive, even just aesthetically.

There’s this Portishead lyric that’s always stuck with me; for decades the way I thought it went was, “Did you realize / No one can see inside your view? / Did you realize / The world inside belongs to you?” As it turns out, that’s not at all what she’s saying. But still, as a closeted queer you can imagine what sort of terror I had over my thoughts, their implications, and what would happen if I got caught thinking the things I was thinking.

On top of a few major tasks and changes of practice for this year, I’m trying to make it a project to get over most of this deep-seated shame I’ve been lugging around in regard to every aspect of who I am and how I think and behave. The fact that I have a body with biological functions. That I have emotions and senses and ideas about things that may not be what people want me to be thinking or feeling, but that are true nonetheless.

It’s like, just shut up, amygdala. Trying to appreciate a thing here. I’m not gonna die. Stop making me feel like that.

Weirdly I also feel a similar, if way less pronounced, freak-out with attraction to binary women. That also feels like this terrible no-go zone, like what if anyone catches me. It’s only that wibble room of enbies and gnc folk where my brain unclenches a bit and feels safer. Which makes very little real sense, but here we are. Emotions. Trauma. They make their own rules.

I have a lot of aversions, some of which are genuine and constitutional and are a part of who I am as a person. This garbage, it’s always been this way—but it’s dumb. This isn’t me; this is just damage.

I don’t have to be afraid of myself anymore. And I know this.

There’s just a lot of wiring to strip out still.

The Face Underneath

  • Reading time:4 mins read

A thing that always encourages me is to see a familiar cis woman with a clean face and to realize again how androgynous most people look when not performing Gender.

Our notions of femininity and masculinity are cartoons that we lean into, exaggerating the slightest of differences. People, the Big Two sexes, really don’t look that different. Any distinction is subtle and mostly superficial—which requires us to blow what slight nuances there are out of proportion, so as to prevent confusion.

Cis people often are just as scared as trans people of being misgendered. There are consequences—and it’s easy to do! Just fail to perform correctly. Wear your hair the wrong way, demonstrate the wrong body language, and everyone will let you know.

So for me to see the actual face underneath the gender costume, it’s like—oh, right. she and I really don’t look that different at all, huh. Most of this is just about how you declare and assert yourself, more than anything intrinsic. Gender is a verb. And one can always work on that.

Once you realize gender is 90% performance and that sex is only a hair short of arbitrary—there’s no good reason we classify things as we do, our system is broken as hell, and it’s literally all the same hardware, just with some late developmental tweaks—sexuality becomes absurd. Like, it just doesn’t make that much sense to me to prioritize attraction to one person over another except on an individual basis, based on who they are and what it is specifically about them. If you’re gonna be attracted to people, why be an exclusionist dork? What difference does it make. or are you one of those “I like all music except rap and country” people.

I mean, I’m aroace, so I don’t… actually get the two main kinds of attraction that stop people’s brains from working. Maybe if I were more insane I’d get this thinking.

Our whole system of relating to ourselves and each other is based this weird lattice of fiction and generalization and hyper exaggeration that upsets us so deeply when it fails to match the reality. The dismay when we’re faced with the idea that people are just people—I’m sure you’ve seen the cishet bros who express dismay after seeing a girl take off her makeup, like they’ve been lied to. The fact that she just looks like a person; that a moment ago they were attracted to someone who could just as well have been a dude if she’d performed differently, it freaks them out.

It’s all internalized power structures. That’s the script we’re playing out and reinforcing and policing every time we get dressed, every time we interact with another person in this stupid culture we’ve made for ourselves. We’re playing someone else’s game for their benefit. It’s the last thing we’re meant to realize, that behind all this branding and spin we’re all basically the same—because, what then? Why are we doing all this to each other? Why aren’t we all cool and supporting the people we meet like they’re another part of ourselves?

What’s the point of this garbage we’ve been filtering? Well, it’s to keep us busy, lest we address the, like, twelve people in the world who are taking everything from us. All these rules are there so we don’t take apart these fucking systems that do us no good, that drain us of our basic humanity, to elevate the most inhuman of us all. of whom there are scant few.

I’m not saying, don’t do gender, kids. I’m not saying, do away with makeup or gendered dress or behaviors or this that or whatever. I love being feminine. It just makes me so happy with myself. It makes life worth living. I’m just saying, it’s all dress-up. None of it is real beyond the meaning that we individually give it.

And just seeing that baseline of androgyny, seeing just how close the prettiest woman in the world can look to just, I dunno, a soft boy, feels to me like such a weight off. It’s this reminder of commonality—that it’s all cool. Just, be you. Everyone is an individual. Everyone has these choices.

Bounding Box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Every sexual situation I’ve been in, I’ve been so scared—and the more scared I’ve been, the more angry that’s made the other person. the more they would yell and berate me and threaten, all while I was completely exposed and helpless.

It’s like how people explode at you for daring to have an anxiety attack in public: how dare you embarrass them like that; what’s wrong with you; you need to shape up right now and apologize and stop having emotions of your own, or there will be consequences. Except, worse.

Part of all this is—I’m aroace, right? So any time I’ve wound up in a scenario like that, it’s because I’ve been coerced into the situation. and I’m doing my best to placate them, avoid upsetting them, by trying to give them what they want. And, it just… never goes well.

All of which is to say, I’m—I have a lot of trouble framing, finding the language for the experiences I’ve had. I don’t want to be dramatic, or to claim a kind of victimhood that doesn’t apply. But the experiences I’ve had, they’re not good. I have regular nightmares.

I feel like every relationship in my life, romantic and otherwise, there has always been a huge imbalance. I am used to being at a disadvantage where someone else controls all the money, the mobility, the plans, the terms. I have nominal input if any. I agree, or I am a problem.

Which is not to say that I want to exert power either. That’s gross. It’s that it is always made clear to me that I exist on sufferance, and that this can be remedied at any time. Since I was a child, this has been my baseline understanding of life. And, I don’t want it anymore.

It can be really hard to tell what’s normal when one doesn’t have a reference, right—and boundaries and self-respect are just about impossible to measure out when one comes to understand one will always be wrong about everything.

It’s hard for to process all of this. I am all for sex positivity, for other people. You, do whatever you need to, to live a healthy consensual life. But, it’s so hard for me to wrap my head around what I’ve been through. There’s nothing but negative association here.

I just want to wish it all away.

Writing the Unspeakable

  • Reading time:23 mins read

So sex, right. I don’t like this topic. It makes me cry, and not happy tears. There’s so much built up in and around this, that hurts and scares me to examine. It’s fortunate, sort of, that being aroace means I don’t have to actively contend with it much, except in my own head.

As I’ve unraveled elsewhere, there are a couple ways to frame the relationship and the distinction between my aceness and what has become clear as my pansexuality. One approach is more granular and is about modes of attraction—I don’t experience sexual or romantic, and my neurology and trauma complicate sensual attraction, but there’s an element of aesthetic and platonic is definitely on the table. The other is an innie/outie thing, sorta like gender—you know, like identity versus presentation. That’s an inexact parallel, but it gets at the idea of this outer practical awareness and expression (aceness), versus the theory and fantasy and inner life (panness) that never thinks or wants to cross into real behavior—which doesn’t make it any less a part of me.

The aroace angle is easy enough for me to manage. That was just a matter of identifying, oh that’s why my interactions have always gone this way; that would explain these other things that never added up. Okay, cool, so it turns out that’s just how I’m wired and there’s nothing wrong with me. Phew, good to understand that at last.

The inner modes of attraction are harder, for so many reasons. There are so many layers of shame, and fear, and bad memories and past violence and trauma and blame and accusation. and it is weird and difficult to realign my feelings with my current understanding of my gender.

I grew up ostensibly male in the 1980s and ’90s, in a rural area. It’s not just that “gay” was the ultimate insult; it’s that it was a pathology for those with power over one’s life to be concerned with: You’re not one of them, are you? Do we need to send you somewhere? I had all this other stuff going on as well, of course. I was neurodiverse and I was badly, reluctantly playing out the wrong gender. For reasons beyond my understanding, everything about me was wrong, and I could never betray a word of my full, true thoughts or feelings on any subject, without putting myself at risk.

The most terrifying shame out of all the things I shouldn’t be thinking and feeling, and here we get to the point of this discussion, was my fixation with dicks—a topic I always tried to dance around and not to dwell on, but it would always surface. So here I demystify it: I have always liked dicks, okay. It is what it is.

In the year 2020, with our current nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality, and with all the discourse and controversy about genital preferences, this is sort of a different world to be breaking this down in. but in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, masculinity was super not appealing to me—which made it more confusing. How was I to resolve this attraction?

Back in the present, I know now that I am pan. My block against attraction to dudes on principle has to a large degree melted with time and hormones and understanding of my own gender in particular, though still it feels so fucking strange and triggering to wrangle with. And with that dam down, it’s now clear that my attraction to people—in theory if not in real life, where again it simply doesn’t happen—has everything to do with who they are as people; that gender doesn’t really enter into it meaningfully. (Trauma-based hang-ups aside, of course.) But it is also clear to me that on a personal level, though I can appreciate any equipment based on its attachment to the person who’s sporting it—the person being the only thing that really matters—all things being equal, given a choice, I have an obvious preference and fascination for the penis. And it’s clear that this fascination ties into a lot of other things about me.

I am of course passive as hell in most things, even the topics that engage me, and the aroaceness sure as heck indicates a lack of active engagement with sexuality or attraction. It’s more that sometimes, ideas come to me. and then, there they are for me to manage somehow. And in all this ideation… well. A thing I have observed a few times, with increasing clarity, is the possibly strange way i have always engaged with porn. As I’ve explained before, I tend to see the central figure as the protagonist like any story, and to identify with (usually) her on her journey. And, as it turns out—oh. That’s not just an abstraction, huh. Like, it’s more than empathy and narrative analysis.

Not to cross lines between porn and reality, but, well, again reality doesn’t much enter into my sexuality. it’s all in my head, all the time. But all things considered, I am so clearly a bottom, right. Almost exclusively. It’s all about navigating things done to me, rather than seeking to do them. Which, whee, sheds so much light on my history, such as it is. Which has exclusively been with cis women who insisted on perceived gender roles, and so expected me to take on the behavior of a certain cultural narrative, growing more and more frustrated with my timidness, reluctance, confusion. It had nothing to do with attraction to them or otherwise. In each case they were at that time the center of my life and my attraction was proportionate to my all-encompassing love. That’s the only motivation that matters, right. It’s the performance that freaked me out. Had they initiated rather than always expected me to and grown furious when they felt forced to lower themselves to ask me, and had they taken the lead, I would have let them carry me anywhere. Instead there was this tangle based on assumed roles, that they would not deign to discuss.

To equate the penis with action is of course reductive—I have a dick, and I like my dick, and we’re having this discussion here—but there are connections going on with all of this, right. It’s not the realm of binary black-and-white objective labels, as we’re talking about people. And likewise not everyone with a penis is male, not everyone with a vagina is female, and it’s all complicated and that’s great and weird and as it should be. Again, case in point: me. But my preference for dick, it makes a kind of sense that wends through every part of my being, touches so many things.

It is perhaps messy to be pan, yet to have a clear and unambiguous preference for one mode of genitalia—but we’re messy, right. Of course attraction isn’t based on what’s in a person’s pants, and even if it were, a preference isn’t exclusive. Once you get that far, who cares? It’s messy in the same way that I can be pan but far more importantly aroace, and that it all makes a sort of sense because people aren’t math problems. There is only so much external logic you can apply to a person. It’s not about the outside, about all these boxes and labels. All of that is just death.

But yeah, this is all me coming to terms that i’m a girl who dreams about getting railed by hypothetical dicks even as she recoils from any actual touch. And, like. I shouldn’t feel shame about who I am, right. That’s what I am trying to get past, so I can just fucking live here, goddamn.

I like dicks. That’s a part of who I am, and it’s normal and it’s fine. Because people are fucking weird, man. I have talked about this all a little, in bits and and pieces and behind ciphers and in private conversation that has unintentionally gotten weird, for which I feel I hope appropriate chagrin. But here’s me thinking it straight through, finally; coming to terms with it all.

Of course in real life also, sex is gross and unsanitary and awkward and emotionally overwhelming—and with my sensory issues, it is viscerally unpleasant. Perfectly normal behavior just hurts to the point of weeping, in the manner of whacking one’s shin or funny bone. So yeah. no. Fun thing about keeping it in my head is, one can overlook the practicalities like that and work on the basis of aesthetics and fascinations without having to deal with, like, suffering and disgust and a big mess to clean up.

On which note, HRT has also been amazing to me. I swear, nine months in, I have not experienced one adverse effect. Nothing at all. Everything is the way I want it to be, and that I have always felt awful that things weren’t since I was about twelve. It’s a little bizarre how it even affirms my basic attitudes toward sex—which my body did struggle against a bit, when on the wrong hormone path for so many years.

Sex is gross and undesirable and overwhelming and unpleasant, but a feminine penis is so much better-behaved, it’s superb. All the literature they hand out is framed to make this sound like a scary, undesirable side effect to put one off of treatment. But, uh. no? It’s very good. It is such a relief to no longer experience random arousal, and that in the rare event I feel compelled to engage nonetheless, hardly any mess now!

See, the thing about the feminine penis is that it wants to behave like vulva and vagina. It’s all the same hardware basically, right, and the hardware gets its instructions from the hormones it’s sent. so the priority shifts toward lubrication instead of ejaculation. So in all this there is way less of a sense of urgency. It becomes more about the journey than the destination, as it were. (Though yes, multiple destinations are entirely feasible, if one’s brain can handle it.) Which is also in part why it doesn’t demand attention the same way.

Even in the event of arousal, which again is way less frequent, it comes more of a decision point. It’s not a case of, Christ, guess I need to take care of this huh. It’s more like, oh. Well. There’s an option. Do I feel like making time for this right now? 90% of the time if you’re like me, the answer is probably no—because there are other things to do, it’s a hassle, it’s time-consuming, and it’s not very important. For that one time out of ten you do make the time, it’s way less annoying and gross and… depressing, than before.

I feel like I have control over my body for the first time, or rather that I am on a level with it and we are able to communicate clearly and agree on principles and priorities. It’s so wild that everything now works how I want and expect. I guess some people who put a lot of stock in sex might be frustrated, but it’s so cool to me that all my aspects can be friends now rather than constantly argue. I am a greater whole than I used to be, as a result of dynamics like this—of which this is just one dynamic example.

So for like three decades my physiology was one of a million ways I felt like I was fighting myself. This sense of calm that I feel now that all my parts are alight may contribute to my ability to finally step back and take tally of my sexuality and attractions; figure out what I really feel and want for myself.

This shift in function, it plays into a broader shift in my self-image. There are of course a few angles to this: general self-worth, confidence, fear about asserting boundaries, shame about my general weirdness—but my body plays into it big-time.

Historically I have had big old issues about being seen. There was a sense of danger and vulnerability, and also of this disgust and shame I felt for my form. I didn’t want to see or acknowledge myself. I definitely didn’t want to be touched or commented on. I was horrible.

It brought me to tears to be stripped down without my protective layers. Shorn of jackets and waistcoats and sweaters and shirts and trousers and everything else, there was no hiding my horribleness: my long, bony limbs, my weird chest, my birth marks—and of course my terrible skin. It was bad. It took such trust to get me that far—and if trust faded?

It’s funny how late, even into my transition, I processed what all that was. Somehow I’d never connected my body issues with my transness, even after accepting that I was trans. There was just so much rewiring to do, I guess, and it took a while to get to that particular wound—one I had no interest in touching. Appropriately enough.

About six months into my regimen, I decided that I actually really like my body and where it’s going. Suddenly now I am not ashamed to have arms and legs and a torso and a face. (Well, the facial hair is a problem still, but.) It’s all on a knife’s edge every day, and my mood is up and down and all over the place, but I have never felt this before, and like so many things lately it makes me drunk with novelty and glee: Hey wow! I’m not completely disgusting! I can apprehend myself as a person worth seeing and touching. With my hips and my breasts and the changes to my face and posture, I enjoy the way I am now shaped. I can dance naked in the mirror, and think, wow, I love her.

So that would seem to be another hangup in the can—if one were to desire sex, which, still: no. For all the reasons. But, like. Since we’re clearing house here, sanity dictates that I work through the issues that aren’t really about me or my wiring and wants and needs. And my body issues, they aren’t innate. I’m dealing with them. They don’t need to affect the choices that I make.

The goal is to get it down to the necessary hang-ups only; the things about me that I can’t, and don’t want, to change. I want to be making decisions based on truth, not trauma, even if the answers turn out the same. When faced with something as big and confusing and momentous as sex, I want to be able to confidently say, nah, not for me—not to melt into fear and uncertainty.

Wound up of course in all of this drama is the age-old question of what it means to be trans and to have gendered attraction. The paradox being, by lifting my mental block on a gender in order to nullify gender as a factor in attraction, my brain goes into these gendered conniptions.

It can be hard enough to wrap one’s head around the meaning of gay or straight attraction if one is just flipping polarities, right, from one binary gender to the other. There’s the label logic, but none of this is rational. One’s perception is all based on a lifetime of emotional appeals and enforcement. If you’ve got decades of people incorrectly calling you a boy, then attraction to girls doesn’t feel gay even if mathematically is sort of works out that way. And vice-versa, one presumes.

To be non-binary, though, the labels all become sort of a mockery. I guess, Logically to be non-binary and gay would be to feel attraction to other enbies, right, but, like. It’s more complicated, right, in part because these terms and categories are inadequate. Again, people are weird. So of course the sensible thing to say is, fuck the labels. You’re queer; just do you. Feel what you feel. Who cares. And… right! Sure. if we’re going to be sensible, absolutely that. But, what’s sensible about any of this? To assert that, we’re just dismissing our natural emotional response, which is a sucky kind of a solution. Due to the way this fucking society works, there can be (and in my case is) a lot of trauma and headfuckery to untangle and work through to be able to get to the point of just shaking it out and saying, yeah, lol, whatever, love is love—as true and perfect as that ideal may be.

All of which is to say, to accept myself as in some capacity pan means wrangling with the very visible and visceral hangups over this one angle of attraction, that have been so long wrapped up in fear and threat and accusation, and the labels that I’ve absorbed that go with it.

It’s funny in a way. Because I was (ineffectively and erroneously) raised to be male, I can’t help but read attraction to men as gay. What’s funny about this is that, this should in itself be a good thing, right? Let’s all be gay! Hurrah! And in any other context, it transparently would be. But there’s so much wrapped up in this. For me this isn’t fun-gay. This isn’t happy-gay, iconoclast, freedom, anarchic empathetic human acceptance rainbow self-direction gay. My brain wants to process this to at least some extent as weaponized, accusation, terror gay: the thing to be denied at all cost.

The other funny part is that, like. It… kind of really isn’t? Again if we’re just going mathematically—which doesn’t work when we’re talking about people, but here the architecture serves a support purpose so let’s go with it—how can attraction to males be gay if I’ve never been male?

So it is that there’s all this internalized garbage, that elicits a certain protective panic to surface the moment I start to relax and think, you know, it’s fine; this is true; this is just how i’m put together; I can appreciate all people the same way—yes, even dudes, okay; it’s fine! I try to bring down the wall and make things equal, and just admit what’s in front of me, and something in the back of my head begins to sputter and go, oh no, oh shit, oh God, I can’t be thinking this, no one can know about this, I’m going to get in so much trouble, help. So that’s a reflex I’m going to have to keep working on. It’s nothing inherent to me. it’s just an injury. with a really strong immune response.

To go back to the labels, everything is a big old shrug here. Nothing feels straight; every kind of attraction is some kind of queer. I’m in this weird old gender space where, like, I’ve taken myself outside of normal kinds of polarity, even as I continue to recover from the above garbage. so just the act of feeling any kind of attraction at all becomes—like, no attraction will ever be straight again.

In a sense being non-binary makes it easier to just go, yeah, whatever. Gender is a fuck; people are people; find attraction where you will, or don’t. It’s all the same; don’t worry about it. But to embrace this also adds extra pressure when I recognize my hang-ups. I don’t want any of that mess guiding my thoughts and my feelings, since it really has nothing to do with me and just ideologically it’s gross, right. With all this rumination on dudes and dicks, I feel like I’m putting way more emphasis on this one angle of attraction than it probably warrants, to the point where it comes off as a little weird and fixated—but that is, I think, because it bothers me. I’m trying to wrangle this deep terror, in the face of reality. It’s so hard to admit. I feel like I have to keep looking over my shoulder, like I’m going to get in trouble. But this is one of the last pieces in the puzzle of me, I think; one of the last facets to embrace until it can stop hyperventilating and accept that everything will be okay.

It was so much easier to accept my asexuality, followed a little later by my clearly non-binary gender. Accepting my femininity was more of a drawn-out, mildly terrifying struggle, but I think i’m pretty well committed to that concept now. (Like, seriously. This is amazing.) In broad terms, recognizing myself as pan feels like it should be simple—but then, this. It’s so hard to talk about, especially as I have such a strong aversion to sex and romance, right. On top of the more present and visceral issues, I have all this trauma wrapped up that I don’t know when if ever I’ll begin to unwind. Then admitting this in particular? Oof.

Which is of course why I have to do it. God, I have absorbed so much crap—but I need to fucking accept myself for who I am. I don’t want Azure to have to deal with any of this. She is a new person. We’re dealing with our shit, so Azure can just live her fucking life.

So in terms of my innate qualities we’ve done my lack of attraction and interest in anyone ever, which are 100% valid and important to recognize and assert. We’ve also addressed the neurological issues—the physical discomfort to sex and sense of ickiness about the whole business. In terms of things have been done to me, we’ve gone through body issues, shame, confusion over my orientation and what it means. What I think is left is a sense of physical fear.

To be sure, this isn’t entirely unwarranted. It can be dangerous out there, for men as well as women, but especially anyone femme-coded—and especially if they happen to be transgender. And likewise it is not unwarranted to place much of that fear in the lap of men. I do not, for instance, to get get enbies and women honking at me trying to pick me up outside the grocery store, and that’s far from the scariest this could get.

But it is also true that despite a certain share of bad actors, the world is not a field of bogeymen and most people are not in fact monsters. Despite what some first and second-wave feminists may assert, this includes men—because people are just people, right. No one has to be a certain way; largely people behave as they think they’re expected to.

Now that I crunch the obvious, I think that historically this whole patriarchy thing has also helped to unnecessarily gender my attraction. It’s so easy to equate men with toxic masculinity and physical danger, right? In which case, zoop, there goes any interest for me. I’m not going to consciously put myself in a dangerous or violent situation, if I can avoid it—and threat is anything but attractive to me.

But that’s a gross and unfair attitude, and yes it feeds right into patriarchal notions with the presumption that boys just gotta be that way. And to be sure, our culture does create an element of yikes that i don’t want to think about navigating. But since were talking about intrinsic and extrinsic qualities, that’s not the former, right. Dudes don’t gotta be like that any more than I need to be shamed and traumatized over being the person who I am, feeling the things that I do.

I think that engaging with queerness and the variety of ways that everyone can ultimately just kinda be as one—coming to grips with my own gender, having interactions with trans men, and all of this stuff that goes into interrogating the systems that we’re living in—it’s helping to loosen up that deep associative fear, which has helped me come to grips with my reality. If I’m not terrified, it’s a lot easier to let other feelings in.

All things equal, people being equally cool and non-threatening—yeah, in that circumstance it really comes down to the individual. Gender’s not a significant factor. Of course we don’t live in an ideal world, so complications and fuss and worry do abound. A big problem in my marriage was, I did not feel safe. Like, ever. But especially not at my most vulnerable and under the closest scrutiny imaginable. That’s not going to help any sort of attraction or desire. But as that also demonstrates, that fear and danger are not exclusive to a gender. It’s all about the people, as individuals. The fear is individual, just as appreciation can be. Anyone can be a monster, but that’s up to them, and it’s not determined by any objective factor. There’s nothing rational or empirical or necessary about being a cruel person. It’s a choice that people make. That anyone can make, or not.

As I say, 90% of my reason for putting this stuff all out here in public is to help me push through the thoughts in a linear form and lock them into place so I can understand them all better. The other 10% is thinking, maybe there are some other people like me whom it could help—other neurodiverse queers out there, just trying to make their own sense of all this garbage they’ve been handed. Everyone’s different and will have a different experience, but gosh I’d be a lot better off now if I’d had something, anything to work off of when i was younger. So, as I help myself, maybe this is my addition to the global data bank.

Drizzled over all this of course is this glaze of defiance. Just, seriously. fuck all y’all, trying to shame me and force me to be something I’m not just for your comfort. I’m awesome. and I’d never have known that if I hadn’t dumped all that baggage. I deserve to be myself.

In the end it’s hard to see how anything will change. There’s no real visceral end to this introspection. I’m not gonna bang anyone, I’m not likely ever to enter into an intimate relationship. That’s just not what’s happening with me, and it’s such a fucking weight off to understand that part of my wiring. There’s no compulsion, there’s no desire.

What’s important to me is that I make the decisions I do for the right set of reasons. That my actions are guided by what I want and need and I think is best, rather than by fear and trauma and denial. And likewise, I want to be free to appreciate myself and others and the world in general, in the manner that I choose. I’m a grown woman, even if I don’t feel particularly grown, and I have a certain well of compassion and I know I’m not gonna be objectifying others. I’m not gonna be shamed for the things I think and feel. I am who I am, and I am beautiful.

And sometimes, not altogether infrequently, I dream of cocks and all the places they might go. As a healthy living person well might. Such is the folly of our lot.

Just, nobody touch me, please.