Potential

I’ve told you all about how my parents’ greatest fear is that I’ll never find love again, right? That and the whole getting killed thing?

I was discussing dating while trans with a friend who’s also a transguy. We were talking about the advice we’d give a newly-out or new-in-transition ftm about romance. Most of it is what you’d tell any teenager: Be your own person with your own life and your own interests. Your ability to find and retain relationships with worthwhile people depends on your ability to love and value yourself as much as on the love and respect you have for your partner. Don’t assume that celibacy is due to you being unattractive rather than your schedule, energy level, social setup, or any of a number of other factors. Don’t assume it’s permanent. Don’t assume it’s bad. Don’t assume that ending it is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. Most important of all, never settle for a person you aren’t crazy about because you don’t think you’ll find anything better. And never assume that self-loathing won’t attract all the worst people for all the wrong reasons.

That last one has more to do with what I’m about to talk about: fetishism, and why I’m so personally resistant to it. The problem is this: for transpeople (and, I think, for most other fetishized groups) the fetish is often as much about the social position of the person as it is about the body.

That’s the problem with a fetish based on the transgressive nature of a sexual encounter with whatever group. (As opposed to a sexual encounter that’s equally transgressive for both parties, e.g. a lesbian pairing.) In order for that sexual encounter to be transgressive, that group has to remain subhuman, and that type of body has to remain disgusting. Some people on the receiving end can enjoy that dynamic, and some can put up with it, but its attraction does revolve around inequality. So much of tranny porn is based on that understanding of a transsexual body as freaky, freakish. It amounts to sexual slumming.

That hierarchy is also necessary to the consumer’s claim to normalcy. In a transphobic society, sexual encounters with transpeople are segregationist: intimacy is allowed only insofar as it preserves a hierarchy between “real” men and women and the aspiring, failed, lesser, fake kind. Demeaning objectification is not merely natural to a society in which trans bodies are reviled, but a reinforcement of its beliefs.

People can also be attracted to us not because we’re subhuman, but because we’re factory rejects; a mercenary evaluation of the disparity rather than an adventurous one, but no less exploitative. In other words, people are attracted to us because they think we’re not worth very much, or because they think we think we’re not worth very much. We are supposedly so lonely and desperate that we’ll be grateful for any kind of attention, no matter how coarse or selfish. We won’t complain. We won’t be the ones to leave. It’s very easy to find people who have internalized hatred, particularly if they haven’t had time to figure out the truth. Once you’ve found them, you have the perfect opportunity to convince them that they aren’t attractive to anyone else. I have encountered the idea that people who are attracted to transfemale or transmale bodies “validate” our post-transition gender.

That’s the context in which I read this question, which has come up in the context of transpeople as well:

In that same educational vein, especially since strangers and acquaintances have sometimes bothered with questions about disability and sex (and pregnancy and orgasms, etc.), I’m conflicted. Does mainstreaming disabled people into pornography help disabled people? Does it help disabled women be seen as less asexual? Does it educate nondisabled people at all or does it just create a bigger fetish market?

This same friend told me about some really disturbing circus porn that involved Buck Angel (google him yourself). It was all blah blah blah nasty things involving clowns but there was one scene where Angel was outed to the other participants, and then suddenly he was kneeling naked on a table while they all inspected his junk.

“That sounds like the nightmare you’d have after watching the tranny clown porn,” I said.

There’s another problem with the transsexual-as-fetish: it involves attraction to a transsexual body as a transsexual body. This can mean seeing a transsexual as the man or woman they were, or seeing them as a “two-spirit” or a “third gender” or “the best of both worlds.” . It can mean seeing transsexuals as specially feminine or masculine or imbued with male or female “energy.” It can mean seeing transsexuals as a special kind of man or woman, or seeking out transsexuals at a particular stage of transition. It can mean feeling a particular attraction to transsexual bodies or body parts or genitalia.

Some transpeople have no problem with this, because it more or less meshes with the way they see and feel their bodies. Some transpeople put up with it. Some transpeople find it alienating, even when it does not rest on denigrating stereotypes about transsexual bodies. For them, it turns them off at best and induces dysphoria at worst, because it emphasizes parts and roles that make them extremely uncomfortable. Some of us see ourselves as simply men and women, and we need our partners to see us that way, too. Some of us who are comfortable with their sexual bodies are not comfortable with those bodies being fetishized.

Even when we feel transgendered in one way or another, that sense of self might not mesh with the definitions our partners have. It might be based on an affinity with our post-transition gender and pre-transition history more complex than they understand, one which pop culture will not help them understand. A transwoman who feels comfortable with her non-surgically-modified genitalia and body is not a she-male. That transgender identity might also be based on an understanding of “male” and “female” broader than the one they hold. Explaining all of that can be exhausting. Explaining it while naked , to someone we happen to like like, can make us feel extremely vulnerable.

We can also suffer from their anxiety about their own gender and sexual identity, which we might or might not destabilize. Some men and women need to sleep with cissexual men and women to feel like men and women themselves. Some gay men and lesbians need to sleep with cissexual gay men and lesbians to feel like gay men and lesbians themselves. Transsexuality blurs those boundaries as they see them. The transsexuals they sleep with can feel a great deal of pressure to downplay their histories and identities, or to contextualize them in certain ways, lest their partners catch gender confusion.

This post at Diary of a Goldfish, which was written as a follow-up to Blue’s, touches on some similar issues:

I am aware that often people are excited by the mere existence of a taboo; in a culture where disability paraphernalia is generally symbols of weakness and indignity, perhaps their is some perverse thrill from, for example, having sex in a wheelchair.

(snip)

Physical restriction also negates performance anxiety, thus reducing inhibition. Some people are loaded with guilt or nerves and like to be lead or looked after. Other people are the other way inclined; whilst I believe that very few people wish to dominate their lovers, some people like to maintain control, to do the giving, as it were.

Now, disability ought not to have anything to do with this. But folks do dress up in all sorts of daft costumes in order to symbolise a certain power dynamic, all based on some exaggerated and highly-sexualised cultural stereotype; the nurse, the fireman, the french-maid, the police officer etc, each symbolising a specific role. The disabled person is just another (if far more obscure) concept – apparently a passive and helpless one. And as Wheelchair Dancer says, there’s nothing wrong with sexual passivity per se; the association is …discomforting

Going back to Blue’s question and the hypothetical baby tranny: to what extent can depictions of dehumanized people as sexual creatures free them from being dehumanized sexual objects? Does breaking out of invisibility–i.e. celibacy–involve settling?