Thread by @sapphixy

I thought I'd done a more detailed, lengthy discussion of the topic referred to here (the way we tend to center our ideas and conceptions of sex and sexuality around cis men's dicks), but it seems I've only discussed them briefly around bisexuality in men vs women…

https://twitter.com/thotscholar/status/1175142444733804544

…and also how this is at the root of toxic framings like "gold star" lesbians and cis women's virginity.

But it's all part of the same white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy framing all sexuality around cis male desire and experience.

🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: I'm going to be quite frank and explicit in my discussion of this stuff, so there will be mentions of genitals and sex. 🚨🚨🚨

It feeds into transantagonism, transmisandry*, and transmisogyny as well.

*Transmisandry, the specific systemic, institutional marginalization of transmasculine people is, of course, quite real; this does not mean cis men are marginalized for being cis men.

There are a laundry list of microaggressions I could itemize, but that would be a distraction when I'm trying to interrogate the entire framing.

And that framing is this: our default assumption is that only cis men own the right to enjoy sex and sexuality for its own sake.

And that there is nothing more desirable, either to possess, interact with, or both.

Because of this, sex and sexuality, for everyone else, must either be about riding a dick or obtaining one.

And the most "real" sex is either penetrating with a penis or being penetrated by one, either vaginally or anally (if the recipient does not have a vagina).

So just working from that, we can predict several pernicious, toxic stereotypes:

- Bisexual women are "really" straight and will always only commit to men, and only perform queerness to titillate cis het male partners.
- Bisexual men are "really" gay and only pretend to be interested in women to be more socially acceptable in cishet circles.

- Trans women are "really" just trying to "trick" straight men into sex, OR we're trying to "invade" women's spaces to whip our penises out.

- Trans men, if acknowledged at all, are "obviously" super butch lesbians who want an actual flesh dick to fuck femmes with.

Vaginas, vulvae, they're only desirable as a place for a penis to penetrate. Nobody who owns a vagina is sexually satisfied unless they're regularly being penetrated by one, or, in the case of lesbians, being penetrated by a penis substitute.

"A good 80s lesbian, you know, didn't enjoy penetration because penetration was simply mimicking heterosexual sex. You were just a tool of the patriarchy. But, you know, secretly, everybody was, like, sticking as many things in as many orifices as they possibly could."

That quote is from a 2006 TV series on lesbian sex and sexuality, by a woman who worked on a porn mag by and for lesbians, ON OUR BACKS.

And it's something that goes all the way back to second wave lesbian feminism and political lesbianism.

That is, defining lesbianism not around the love of women by women but about the exclusion of men, and more specifically cis men's penises.

See also: "gold star" lesbians, and the toxic idea that cis dick (or even trans women's dicks) "taint" queer women.

In TERF discourse, this goes so far as to treat trans bodies as forever defined by the presence or absence of a factory original penis, as it were; they repeat myths about the results of bottom surgery that can be traced to channer trolling, because their ideology requires it.

They disguise this paradigm with smokescreens about how the ontogony of patriarchy is the existence of the uterus and the capacity to carry children, and dismiss any further examination of the dynamics of oppression and the creation of marginalized classes.

TERF discourse goes so far as to flatten out all oppression to patriarchy, flat out denying that any woman (by their definition, i.e. anyone assigned female at birth) could ever benefit from systemic oppression at the expense of any "man" (i.e. any AMAB person).

They use this to deny their rampant racism and to dismiss the existence of systemic cissexism and transantagonism, despite the empirical realities us trans women face.

And I'm not exaggerating to say that it all — ALL — comes down to our dicks.

Last year, a British television station, Channel 4, hosted something called "Genderquake: the Debate", in which Caitlyn Jenner, Munroe Bergdorf, and two terves were supposed to discuss gender identity and the Gender Recognition Act.

What actually happened:

There's a photo floating around of a particularly vile American TERF, the Payday Loan Lawyer, holding a paper doll with a penis and the words "sorry about your dick* written on it.

I'm not going to name her because she's notorious for namesearching.

Us trans women are (hyper)sexualized under the assumptions that:

- our penises function identically to a cis man's
- we can and do penetrate our partners with them just as a cis man would be expected to
- our orgasms end in ejaculation

Trans women who perform in pornography, particularly that oriented towards unqueer men, have to cycle on and off HRT in order to perform in such a manner. As you might guess, this can be dangerous and actually do some long-term harm to the body.

But because sex work is all too often the only option we have, especially if we want to fund our transition?

Yeah, they do it anyway.

It's *possible* to retain some level of cisnormative penis function without cycling, but it's something you have to consciously do.

See, if you have a penis at birth and go through testosterone puberty, for as long as you're running on T there are some autonomic processes that maintain cisnormative potency. In particular, when you're sleeping you have an erection every 90 minutes or so.

This keeps the skin and erectile tissue from contracting.

Once you go on androgen blockers, this stops happening.

I had unusually low testosterone levels before I started HRT, below the lower bound of the "normal" male range. (One of the reasons I think I might be XXY.)

My penis was right around the population average for cis men in terms of length and girth. I was also more of a "grower" than a "shower" probably because of those low T levels.

After four years of HRT?

My penis is roughly the size of my thumb at full arousal, and even if I was skinny I wouldn't be able to penetrate anyone with it. I describe it as more of an overly ambitious clitoris, because functionally that's what it is.

And I haven't ejaculated in years.

(I'm seriously considering getting a harness for a strap-on once I have money again, because I'm very toppy.)

Even if I was capable of penetration, though, for a long time the thought of it gave me massive dysphoria.

All of which is a probably-TMI way of saying that unless you are a trans woman or you have non-cisheteronormative sex with a trans woman your concepts of how we have sex are probably very wrong.

This is extensible to other trans bodies; cisnormative sex can be quite dysphoric.

When I have sex with cis women, I typically just want to get them off with my mouth, hands, and/or toys, and I can and do actually orgasm from that now. I haven't had any transfeminine lovers yet, but what we'd do together? That'd be very much a matter of careful negotiation.

Because it's going to depend on how they want to be touched, or if they even want to be touched; a lot of us are some variety of asexual partly because any sort of sexual contact is too dysphoric.

I can't speak to the transmasc experience, though.

I can tell you that trans men often experience an enlargement of the clitoris due to the nocturnal cycling I mentioned above, and one of the bottom surgeries available for transmasculine people, metoidioplasty, builds on this. (More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metoidiop…)

I also know that it's a common experience of transmasculine people for T to cause their sex drive to ramp up a great deal.

It's also possible for the vagina to lose much of its lubrication response to arousal and for the cervix to atrophy and even close entirely.

The thing about all of this is that individual trans people's response to medical transition, if they choose to undergo it, and to whatever degree they pursue it, is, in fact individual.

My body hair basically vanished under HRT. My legs look like I shave them, but I don't.

And I wasn't lacking in body hair, either! I had hair on my toes!

The birthmarks on the backs of my hands actually lost most of their pigment, too. I only noticed this a few months ago.

I bring these up because they're examples if the idiosyncratic results of HRT.

This includes sexual response and function.

I've talked to trans women who still have definite ejaculation (I just drip lubrication from my urethra throughout arousal cycles) and are capable of penetration. I've gathered that transmasc experiences are similarly diverse.

I expect that whatever fertility I had prior to HRT (I was never tested so it's a complete unknown) is irrevocably gone. Some of my transfeminine friends have recovered fertility after pausing HRT, but it's not guaranteed; for transmasc folks, it's even more variable.

Lastly, I want to touch on how this cisheteronormative assumption about sex affects intersex people.

Here, I'm talking about ambiguous genitals, where the newborn's genitals don't conform neatly to cisnormative assumptions.

For a long time, in the West at least (I don't know much about practices outside of the West), in the case of ambiguous genitals the delivering physician would surgically alter them as a matter of course.

The criterion for this so-called "correction"?

If the clitorophallus is large enough that, after puberty, the person it's attached to can use it for penetrative sex. That is, whether it's "big enough" to be a dick.

If not, it was surgically altered to reduce its size to that of a "normal" clitoris.

If the clitorophallus was large enough but the infant had a vaginal opening? They'd sew it shut.

The parents would know about it but they wouldn't tell the kids until they needed to know for medical reasons, if ever.

Thankfully, these practices are increasingly deprecated in the West, although this is a recent development and there are people in their twenties now (and younger) who were mutilated without consent as infants and children.

So, to sum up:

Our culture centers all sexuality on cis men and their penises, and this has a vast array of toxic effects on us, cis or trans, intersex or perisex, queer or unqueer, in how we view our bodies and our relationships. And we all owe it to ourselves to unpack and unlearn.