By Rooster Girl
As a fluid/bi trans person, I obsess about my bodies and their varied desires. My bodies. Are they flesh or are they spirit or are they both? What do they desire and how? Trying to figure out my body in isolation for years was unnecessarily painful when it turns out that my experiences and desires are not uncommon.
While physically I have a male body, psychically I have a female body. I feel breasts and vulva hovering, vibrating, floating over the top of my smooth man’s chest and penis. When completely relaxed, I can feel my vagina. I can use masturbation as a sacred ritual to completely inhabit this psychic body. I can alternate between inhabiting my male body and my female body with my subjectivity floating in between the two.
As for my sexualities, the female spirit body mostly desires to be penetrated and dominated by men whereas my male flesh body mostly desires to dominate and penetrate women. I often wonder if this makes me bi or straight? My subjectivity is so fluid that it’s hard to say, although I know I desire men, women, trans and others.
I thought I was alone with my experience but I found some community with other trans people who have similar experiences. I then thought that only “trans” people had such fluid experiences of their bodies. But as I explore my sexuality, I am surprised to find that the experience of trans bodies is more common than I thought.
One girl I met did not identify as trans but she felt sometimes like she had a penis. Another woman I know loves to pleasure men; she feels like she’s so good at it because she feels like the penises she handles belong to her – that they are hers. A boy I know loves to pleasure women and feels like their vaginas are his. A book I read on cunnilingus says that the best lovers treat their lovers’ vulva as though it was their own. And The Big Book of Lesbian Sex talks about how some lesbians feel like their dildo is a physical manifestation of a psychic reality of having a penis.
If it is that common, won’t non-trans or cisgendered people start talking about the experience of their bodies and show that many cisgendered people have common trans experiences? Can’t we start to take down the barriers and blur the lines between trans- and cis-identified people? Don’t bi/pan/fluid identified people have some unique voice or perspective to add to this discussion?
Recently I had the pleasure of being intimate with a woman whom I love. Deep in our intimate wranglings, while laying in her arms, I felt like her body was the physical incarnation of my female body. How many other people – transgendered or cisgendered – have had a similar feeling when being close to the ones they love?
The body seems to me to be a physical container but also a vessel for a magical spirit that does not have a strict fleshly delineation. If we can think of our bodies as spiritual as well as fleshly creations, perhaps we can demystify and demarginalize the trans experience and also become closer to and more respectful of the magnificence of our bodies.
“Rooster Girl” is the pen name for a Canadian writer, artist, activist, and adventurer in sexuality and gender.