Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Four: Penetrability

How a society so singularly fixated on the phallus manages to be so, so very unsexy.

Before we get started, imagine a straight man, unpleasant though it might be to do so. You likely have a particular image in your head, but consider the following: imagine this man as someone who is exclusively attracted to women, but the only manner of intercourse he engages is the practice colloquially known as “pegging”.

Did your mental image of him change at all?

We’ll come back to that later.

Phallogomania

We have, thus far, variously considered how social dogma becomes layered over empirically observable, tangible subjects. A “woman’s biology”, her so-called sex, may be “oriented around” gestation, but it does not naturally follow that a human being with the capacity to bear offspring must be feminine, must be subordinate and subservient and attracted to those society deems “men”, and must submit herself to be a mere cog in the regime’s natalist machinery. Nor does the absence of gestational capacity exempt anyone deemed a ‘woman’ from misogyny—in fact, this perceived ‘defect’ marks her, intensifying both scrutiny and repudiation. Many societies third-sex women who cannot be reproductively exploited, irrespective of their actual biological, chromosomal make-up, denying them the title entirely and deeming them worthy for little more than hypersexualization and violence. It is more than evident, then, that sex is itself a social designation, a (frequently nonconsensual) labeling of an individual to designate their role in societies wholly oriented around male-supremacy. Women are not karyotyped or subjected to X-Rays prior to facing misogyny; their actual anatomy factors far less into their status than advertised.

What, then, truly differentiates patriarchy’s two alleged sexes? What is the true root of the ideology of sexual difference?

This essay is an admission of an unavoidable truth: that one cannot truly discuss and fully encapsulate sex-the-ideology without reckoning with sex-the-practice. I am, of course, speaking of fucking, of copulating, of—dare I say it—intercourse.

I am not, however, speaking of all sexual practices under the sun, and certainly not a great deal of the more stigmatized ones (such as biting). There will be no serious and lengthy meditations on cunnilingus, digital stimulation, mutual masturbation, the incorporation of machinery, or indeed anything actually fun. This is not merely because sex under patriarchy is largely not fun—and not meant to be fun—but is also due to the simple fact that only one kind of sex act truly “counts” under a heterosexual regime. There is only one real sexual act, and it is this act that both constitutes the social dimension of sex as well as engenders it, sires it, in a sense.

We are, of course, speaking of penetration.

This is a topic we have visited a few times, most explicitly in Understanding Lesbophobia, but shall now give all the attention it certainly does not deserve, yet receives anyway. Penetration not with a finger or tongue or strap-on, and penetration not of the mouth or even anus, but good old-fashioned, societally-sanctioned, traditionally-approved god-fearing red-blooded patriotic peepee-goes-in-hooha penetrative sex, the kind that results in babies, if all goes well, bless.

Of course, while reproductive utility does factor prominently into this societal sexual calculus, we should be careful to not over-emphasize it. For while doing the babysex to a privately-owned wifemother is the fulfillment of a peepeehaver’s natalist, reproductive duty, as well as proof of his vaunted, valorized virility, we do live in social contexts that constantly reminds us that the fleshpole and its oft-inconvenient tendency to puff itself up is reflective of a certain runaway, uncontrollable, barely-suppressed libido. (Or at least, that’s a good enough excuse to cite when seeking to absolve a member of the Revered Sex-Caste of any sexual violence he may perpetuate.)

One can only support so many families, after all—certainly fewer families than erections—and there is always the troubling conundrum of how one can even maintain one—erection, not family—with all these darned kids running around, leaving our dear wifemother with too little energy and too many headaches. It certainly would be nice if it were possible to enjoy all that sexhaving without having to worry about such boner-killing things as “oops, pregnant again”, or “can you seriously not even watch the pot while I change the diapers?!”

As it turns out, the discardable offal with no reproductive utility has a use, after all!

Hierarchical societies that organize their social strata by degrees of dehumanization will always have pools of precarious un-persons from which the most sexually exploitable candidates can be made available to those higher up on the food chain. Whether instrumentalizing poverty, racialization, religiously-mandated inferiority, queerness, or any other stigmatizing and devaluing Mark, societies have always had their public women—or close enough—standing in sharp contrast to the respectable, hegemonic, privatisable demographics, constituting an underclass of sexual labor that is not deemed productive, nor even usually reproductive, but some … third thing.

Here is where one can “maximize their erotic delights”, as scholar Adnan Hossein has so nauseatingly put it. While societies have always stigmatized adultery—punishing women more than men, usually—they have also always tolerated it, due to how much sexual access to the gender-marginalized is cherished amongst those men free of gender. Such avenues are rife with permissivity regarding penetration, allowing penetration that is nonprocreative, recreational, and even in some cases, scandalous.

What remains constant through all this subversiveness and salacity is that singular maxim: you, who are doing the penetrating, must not be penetrated. Well, maybe you can get away with it a little, every now and then, but certainly not where anyone decent might catch wind. If you dare sport the signifiers of masculinity, of gendered personhood, of impenetrability, you cannot under any circumstance call into question the permanence of your position! Those on top must always be on top, in every sense of the term, because that is what sets them apart, assures their humanity: the ability to breed with seed. Those who aspire to penetrate without the divinely-endowed gift of the meatshaft, and those who turn their backs on that holy gift are both beneath contempt, beneath consideration, and any attempted contravention of this natural order that we are enforcing will be swiftly dealt with!

Sex-the-ideology thus has an underlying simplicity in much the same way as sex-the-act does, a boiled-down, reductive threshold of acceptability underneath all the modesty, all the moralizing, all the complexities that have sprung up around its enforcement: you’re only a person if you possess a penis, and use that penis to penetrate those un-people it’s socially acceptable to fuck. We are, therefore, all designated either penetrators, who possess the full glory of humanity and agency, or penetrated, who are marked for consumption and by that marking rendered subhuman.

In other words: if you were born to be fucked, or like to be fucked, you don’t deserve rights.

Let’s all just sit with that for a moment.

Because it’s every bit as fucking stupid as it sounds.

“So which one of you takes it up the ass?”

A distressing amount of queerphobia sort of snaps into place once you consider penetrability as the lens through which gender is determined. Questions such as “So who’s the man and who’s the woman?” have always been amusing to gay couples—after the fact, excruciatingly mortifying in the moment—because how absurd it is to ask that about a same-sex relationship! Except, that’s not actually what’s being asked, insofar as the questioner understands that they’re looking at two people who cannot perceptibly be sorted into a heterosexual dyad. What’s really being asked is, “So which one of you gets railed, and which one does the railing?”

You know, that common ice-breaker.

This is why heterosexual dynamics appear so quaint to us Enlightened Queers. We do not attach any power or status or verticality to something so mundane as sex acts! We do not consider our value or demeanor or heaven forfend, our roles to be defined by how we fuck! We’re busy having sex, not gender! Gender is for the heteros, honey.

I mean … Well sure, we do have the occasional little in-joke about how tops are like this, bottoms are like that. And, um, sure, we do tend to associate topping with masculinity, with dominance and assertiveness and ‘taking the lead’ in intimate situations. I suppose the idea of ‘top’ as the one who penetrates and ‘bottom’ as the one who receives is in fact widely-accepted lingo, even amongst lesbians who cannot easily class certain sex acts they engage in within this schema (and believe me, during the lesbian sex wars, they tried). Also, hm, I do suppose we tend to associate submissiveness, femininity, and a certain desire for objectification … with … bottoms …

Oh, no!

As Judith Butler famously said in Gender Trouble, “You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.” (I haven’t read Gender Trouble.) Even amongst queers who play with gender, who consider the taboo and profane to simply be toys to pull out during intercourse, that play-acting is only legible to others insofar as it references or pays homage to or parodies an existing, established social dynamic. When we declare our selves, identities, and presentation, when we take to the stage, our gender-performances—no matter how off-script, how improvised, how avant-garde and requiring audience participation—must still be in a language the audience can comprehend, because how else are you supposed to have a conversation?

Sadly, when in Rome, we do as Romans do.

A quick look at David Valentine’s history of gay-lib and trans-lib separation or Esther Newton’s Mother Camp would disabuse us of more than a few notions of Queer Enlightenment. Gay men’s communities were rather unmistakably gendered, with a certain stigma against effeminacy and a certain veneration of the masculine, even as the effeminacy of the penetrable was necessary to define the masculinity of the penetrators by contrast. Even where the subversiveness of gender-play was valued, as amongst drag performers, there was still a certain hierarchy, a disdain expressed for those who “refused to take off the wig”, who “took the performance too seriously” and ‘crossdressed’ full time. The drag queen held the street queen and the hormone queen in low regard, while masculinity remained the prize, worthy of top billing even in these putatively non-heterosexual erotic economies.

It would also be quaint to consider gay subcultures—and their associated transsexual subcultures—to be entirely free of gendered anxieties, especially given how the politics of respectability feature in gay civil rights struggles. Notions of ‘bottoming leading to effeminacy’ prevail both intracommunally and in straight society, with penetrability almost being viewed as a “gateway” to the surrendering of masculinity, of relinquishing one’s manhood. These anxieties are reflected just as much in the criminalization of gayness, with some legal regimes historically only penalizing the ‘receiver’, while continuing to presume the top ‘straight’, or ‘still a man’. Even the term sodomite, as with the terms faggot, fairy, queen, poof—they all originated as stigmatizing terms for the penetrable ‘male’.

Gayness, then, both within and without, has often been conceptualized as “addicted-to-taking-it-up-the-ass disease”, with transsexuality frequently regarded as a particularly extreme version of the malady.

Such notions culminated in the 70s and 80s push for gay men to “come out of the closet” as men, to affirm that gays could participate in hegemonic masculinity, to leave behind the gender-threat of the screaming queens and streetwalkers. By donning the classy, affluent, manly, manful, fruity-but-only-on-the-weekends-you-know-how-it-is-sugar mask, favor was curried with the heterosexual regime. Gayness was not a disqualifier from citizenship; even gays could uphold and reinforce reproductive norms; a gay man could be a man, not a faggot.

Good for him.

The lesbian version of this took a rather different form, given the way lesbians are typically perceived as women, and so situated somewhat differently with respect to masculinity. While (sadly, tragically, regrettably, heartbreakingly) there was no widespread hierarchization of dyke communities into a butch-archy, the academic lesbian feminist crusade against ‘BDSM’ and supposedly immoral sexual practices amongst lesbians constructed a rather different stigma.

Indeed, even though they are known principally for trafficking in troonmadness, luminaries no less esteemed than Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys used to babble on about butch-femme relationships as “heterosexual cosplay”, about putting a stop to sadomasochistic sex that was ‘depoliticizing’ lesbian identity and, horror of horrors, turning it into a “lifestyle” that “re-sexualizes” women, making them “worship” the dildo as a “symbol of male power”.

You know, it’s okay to have a list of limits without trying to out-dyke everyone about it.

There is something truly perverse here, and it’s not the strap-ons. While billing themselves as ‘radical feminists’, Jeffreys, Raymond, and those of their ilk instead chose to reinforce stigmas against female—and especially lesbian—desire, reinventing Catholic guilt for feminists. In their vilification of butches as “male cosplayers”—a prototypical version of the kinds of rhetoric that would be deployed to defame transmasculinity—there is no recognition of how those sexed as women are punished for adopting masculine signifiers, no acknowledgement of the kinds of regendering violence that they are subjected to. Such ‘radfems’ are the vanguard of a politics characterized by an utter failure of analysis, in favor of pointless moralizing and the unproductive policing of how people like to fuck.

Yet there is some value in their words. After all, sometimes it’s good to remember that the people who consider me a fake lesbian discoursed themselves into thinking kinky sex with butches is a sin.

Penetration, then, remains no less a fixture and fixation of queer erotics than it does heterosexual ones. Whether it’s gay men desperately holding onto hegemonic manhood by their fingernails or “ex”-Catholics shouting that you’re making Lesbian Jesus cry—and in both cases, libeling working-class, gender-bending queer identities to do so—the engendering power of penetration is something we remain subconsciously aware of, even if we struggle to directly name it as a principle determiner of one’s social sex. The associations formed between dominance, masculine presentation, aggression, agency, and penetrating, as well as those formed between submission, effeminacy, passivity, objectification, and being penetrated, remain indelible and invisible, but still palpable, almost tangible.

To sum it up in the style of the greatest anonymous philosopher of the digital age: “Taking it up the ass makes you a woman, faggot”.

Transpenetrable

If penetrability was a clarifying lens for parsing some hidden aspects of queer politics and marginalization, it is positively revelatory when applied to transphobia and especially transmisogyny. The recurrent trope of deception features heavily in anti-trans propaganda, from the ridiculous notion of ‘men dressing up as women’ to prey on women in the loos, or the ‘trans panic’ defense instrumentalized by men to literally get away with murdering us on a plea to temporary insanity, induced by being ‘tricked’ into sex with transsexual. What engenders this particular anxiety, to the point that trans women become synonymous with threat, with dishonesty, and so thoroughly excluded from humanity or compassion?

The principle crime trans women stand accused of is adopting the signifiers of the feminine—the penetrable—while still being (allegedly) in possession of a phallus, that tool of penetration that sets men above all others. The actual presence or absence of one, the actual genital configuration of any given trans woman is immaterial, for the most relevant phallus is the imagined one, the one cis people believe us to possess when they think of us and declare us perverts.

It’s why the most common question we receive from ignorant and morbidly curious cis people is some version of “Have you had the surgery?” The Surgery, you know the one, the one that makes you penetrable in the ‘proper’ way, the one that finally, actually makes you a woman, because retaining the ability to penetrate categorically bars your from womanhood no matter how much you are seen, treated, dismissed, decried, and denigrated as a woman in your day-to-day life.

On the other end of the spectrum, these fevered fantasies are also the source of our fetishization, our characterization as “the best of both worlds”. A frustratingly common experience for trans women is the reduction of us to parts, the carving up of our bodies and beings into an assemblage of sex characteristics for cis people to try and experiment with in new and exciting combinations. We are sometimes seen as “starter packs” for queerness, as an exotic flavor of gender that might possess some frightening new anatomy that a cis person has heretofore been terrified to interact with, but also bearing some “familiar territory”, a gateway to ‘ease’ oneself through, to explore before deciding to commit.

In too many cases is the trans woman constructed as a dispenser of “safe” penetration, almost as much as she is considered a “safe”, feminized “masculinity” to ‘break down’ through penetration. Her own feelings about her genitalia—whatever genitalia she may even have—are secondary to the projective fantasies and expectations that are imposed on her, most of which reduce her to “man-lite”. She is able to be vilified and deemed sexually improper whether she refuses to penetrate or admits she enjoys it, a perversion of the natural order in either case, whose abjection ensures that no matter whether she fucks or is fucked, she usually does so in a state of disempowerment.

That, then, is the dehumanizing fantasy central to our fetishized sexual appeal: a fantasy of penetration tamed, whether we mean coercing it out of an effeminized object and thus defanging its dominant connotations, or diminishing a ‘masculine’, male personhood by subjecting it to the degradation that is almost inherent to being fucked under patriarchy, where the one fucking you is always primed to extract superiority, agency, and autonomy from the act.

It is also the core of the singular fixation on our sexuality, our fuckability, our supposed sexual danger or our hypersexualized vulnerability to exploitation. Cis people, when they think of us, simply cannot stop thinking of our sex—of how we engage in it and who and what we engage in it with, of how we distort and warp their basic assumptions about our collective sexed reality—and then blame us for their extreme reactions of disgust or desire (or frequently, both). To paraphrase Dworkin, trans women are sex, are inseparable from sex, because we are reduced to nothing but our capacity for risky, exotic, transgressive, boundary-breaking, taboo, forbidden, unholy sex, by cis people who call us sickos because they can’t stop thinking about our dicks.

Cool.

Sexual Lib-eration

You know, it’s almost funny how important shame is.

Grand theories of oppression and structural forces, while useful in conceptualizing the machinery of mundane evils, sometimes render the picture a bit too clean, a bit too clinical. Yes, there are incentives, just as there is power, labor, and unequal material conditions that enable some to secure these more easily than others. There is also, however, messiness and contradiction and ambiguity, a dozen-and-a-half failure states and fudged boundaries and imperfections that absolute decrees of dichotomous sex and heterosexual primacy paper over unrigorously. Sometimes, anything that makes a man’s dick hard is a woman. Sometimes, that same erection is a source of uncertainty, of destabilization, of questions that a rigidly-delineated patriarchal ideology does not have satisfying or reassuring answers to.

Shame is the shallow pool where trannies are drowned.

Those trans panic defenses are used by lovers and boyfriends, you know. By men who know perfectly well that the woman they’re sleeping with is trans, who have slept with her before, even, or specifically sought out a trans woman to bed, but whose internal discord about their own identity and sexuality becomes violently externalized (as is common for men), or who fear their amorous activities being discovered by friends or family and so elect to capitalize on transfeminine disposability instead of sending a fucking break-up text. I think of these men in the same vein as I think of those men who kill their families and then themselves—usually when a battered wifemother tries to leave—and I wonder, yet again, why the violence they commit must spill beyond the only deserving target.

To be penetrable is to be a receptacle for the sins of the impenetrable, a vessel for their grief and turmoil and especially, especially their despair and rage.

There’s plenty of shame to go around for the penetrable too, more than enough. The shame of being a feminist and guiltily enjoying being demeaned and tainted and ruined, of feeling like you’re letting down the sisterhood with every paroxysmal thrust. The shame of batting a hand away only to have ‘tease’ spat at you, wondering whether you were, in fact, a little too flirty, a little too provocative, whether you did in fact send mixed signals—didn’t you, really, ask for it? The shame of expressing desire only to be told you’re disgusting for it, the shame of failing to be the proper, modest woman you’re supposed to be, or the shame of being too prudish and frigid and puritanical instead of the proper, sexually-liberated woman you’re supposed to be, or just the fucking bone-deep never-ending inexhaustible shame of being born not in the wrong body, but the wrong fucking society, a society where there’s just no right way for you to be.

That pool might be a bit deeper than initially advertised.

I worry sometimes that over the past few decades, feminism at some point stopped being about agitation and action and advocacy and analysis, and became a politics of how best to live with ourselves. Of how to manage the shame that comes with being—what, a woman, an object, a victim, a temptress, an inspiration, a girlboss, a goddess, a mother, a pedestalized muse—being a lot of things, but never enough. I have witnessed the development of feminist politics without much explanatory value, but with a lot of comfort, a lot of telling each other, “We’re doing fine, we’re not doing anything wrong, we’re not evil for having desires. It’s not a betrayal of anyone or anything if I’m an unrepentant slut or a devout of the faith or an aspiring housewife. It’s my choice.”

There’s more value in that than some of us are willing to admit.

Liberal-feminist dreams of empowerment through intercourse did not catch on because they were without merit or appeal. Our desires, our libidos, our primal urges that are a reflexive, unconscious expression of what we refuse to admit we truly want, are aspects of ourselves that we have been taught to be constantly at war with. It is so, so very tempting, then, to reach out and join hands and ask for a collective reckoning with the stigma and shame of sex, to ask that this most intimate practice, most intimate expression of love and companionship and fealty and togetherness be rendered finally free of society’s judgment.

The idea is really, really compelling.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately, the stakes are not the same for everyone.

While ‘shame’ is indeed relevant—one might even say central—to sexual politics, it is also obfuscating. For the shame that the penetrable struggle with is the shame tied to navigating a series of contradictory directives that determine the sum total of our worth. Are we loose, too-freely available for use by any and every Thomas, Henry, or especially Richard? Or are we too unavailable, too difficult to make submit, and thus too jealously guarding an ultimately common resource—fuckability—that can easily be acquired elsewhere, so not worth the trouble? These questions hang over us because even in societies that purport to have moved past the equivocation of our humanity to our sexual availability, and to our management of the “correct” level of access to our bodies, peeking ‘under the hood’ reveals that pretense to be little more than theater.

Meanwhile, the penetrators are less concerned with destigmatizing sex and more with securing their position as sexual consumers. Their shame stems from wishing to ward off any possible similarity or association with those they are meant to use. Become too much like us, lose too much of that fleshpole-swinging swagger that assures one’s place in the hierarchy of “who inserts the dongle”, and suddenly they face that unenviable fate that they have relegated the rest of us to. The shame that gets trannies killed is about patriarchal mores and deep-set insecurities and the struggle to reconcile proscribed desires with self-image, but it’s also a shame that manifests as violence specifically because any ‘temptation’, any ‘deviation’ from the strictures of impenetrability are to be purged from those who wish to continue navigating the world as dominant, as autonomous—as people.

No matter how much we try to reclaim the word ‘slut’, we ultimately still wrestle with social norms where the burdens of sexual access—and condemnation for it—reside entirely with those deemed penetrable, whose very presence is invitation, whose very existence is a risk of violation.

You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.

Conclusion: Yes, I Wear Pants

Penetrability, then, is distinct from heterosexuality (despite being derived from it) because it is the connective tissue linking a series of associations we all bear in mind when navigating the sociality of sex. Masculine presentation is correlated with male ‘identification’, ‘male’ anatomy, dominance in both personality and intimacy, and a presumption of impenetrability during intercourse. The disruption of these correlations gives rise to a series of dynamics and anxieties that typify an expansive notion of “queerness”, insofar as it is understood to be a subversion, disruption, or contravention of patriarchal sexual norms.

Penetrability is what makes the idea of ‘pegging’, of a masculine, manly, manful man ‘taking it’, into a ‘slippery slope’ to effeminization and faggotry and oh my stars, maybe even transsexual woman-identification. The importance of securing one’s impenetrability, as well as the ease with which it can be stripped away, is what makes our heterosexual male bottom from the beginning of this essay such a macabre curiosity. While such an individual can—and likely even does—exist, he is what an insufferable scholar might call “queered” by his, ahem, ‘inversion’ of the sexual role he is meant to embody, even if he looks like Henry Cavill and gets railed by supermodels.

To allow yourself ‘to be used’, like a woman, is to risk surrendering all that makes you part of the dominant sex-caste.

Conversely, penetrability is why sexual absurdities are replicated in queer communities that are ostensibly free of them, making something as simple as a non-stone butch invite ridicule from queer theorists like Jack Halberstam. In Female Masculinity, Halberstam firmly equivocates butch identity with ‘stone butch’ identity—that is, a masculine (implicitly cissexual, non-transfem) lesbian who is a touch-me-not and only engages in intercourse by penetrating their partner. In this context, a penetrable butch appears as a question:

“... the question is not really why would a butch not want to be touched but rather how do butches switch between being masculine on the streets and female in the sheets?”

Here, ‘masculine’ means to present masculine, while ‘female in the sheets’ is a too-clever-by-half euphemism for being penetrated. I frankly think such an existence is not contradictory in the slightest, but anxieties around penetrability do not inform my entire sense of self.

Not that transfem identity or existence is “beyond” the binary of penetrability—far from it. Though our sexual objectification as subversive oddities is rooted in being penetrable when we’re not “supposed” to be, or in penetrating with the signifiers of those who “shouldn’t”, the transmedicalist gatekeeping of our transition care is very rigorously oriented around producing the perfect, penetrable subject. Historically, we must be hyperfeminine, hyperhetero, and hyper-gung-ho about our desire to be traditional homemakers and decorative ornaments for masculine, manful, manly, impenetrable men, if we are to stand any chance of medical institutions permitting our transitions.

It’s why the wider world knows me first as “cross-dressing pervert”, not “lesbian”.

This is the point in the essay where I dazzle and titillate my readers in equal measure through a salacious confession of just how many boundaries I transgress and how many norms I queer through sheer proximity, but if you’ll pardon the expression: I just don’t give a fuck. The status of my genitals, relationships, methods of intercourse or the people I engage in it with can be as varied and exotic or banal and vanilla as you please. What practices of intimacy I actually engage in do not matter one whit to a wider culture that has never cared about individual queers, and I remain, no matter what I do, a curiosity, an exhibit, a freakshow for cissexist, heterosexual perspectives to project all their fantasies and fears onto.

No perfectly executed move by me is going to snap the patriarchy in half, no matter how much I will it so.

No, the scourge of penetrability is historical, long-reaching, and firmly embedded into the innermost recesses of our psyches and puns. There is no surgery I can get for decoupling penetration from aggression and agency and domination, or for washing away the devaluation of the penetrated. That part of trans existence—of being women, of being sex, of being gender—we just have to live with.

Unless.

Unless, unless, unless.

Good intentions only go so far. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but whips and chains have their limitations, too. Combating shame is crucial, relevant, important—but it’s not paramount.

You also have to do the work.

To organize. To recognize who is invested in your subjugation and who isn’t. To capitalize on opportunities to build solidarities, coalitions, and movements, without centering everything on individual choice or individual trauma. To confront—legally, socially, and politically—those who seek to exploit and extract from you, and to build a world where this entire meditation on penetrability becomes an anachronism.

I really, really hope we get there. If not in this lifetime, then the next.

Because I just want to enjoy being a dyke, y’all. The rest of this shit is such a buzzkill.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay will appear in my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published up to ‘The Question Has An Answer’ have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!

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