Trans Questions
Questions and Comments from trans readers
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
Since it’s Trans Awareness Week, I thought it might be a good time to share some of the feedback I’ve gotten from trans folks about Come As You Are.
First, let me explain where CAYA sits relative to trans and non-binary folks:
It’s a book about using the science of sex to make women’s sex lives better, so when I say “women,” I’m necessarily limited to the people included as participants in the research… which means almost exclusively cisgender women.
Even though the research is heavily cis-centric, I have no reason to believe anything in the book doesn’t apply to trans folks or even to cisgender men. But I don’t have evidence peer reviewed evidence for it.
However, I do now have the evidence of a few dozen trans, non-binary, or gender non-conforming folks who’ve written to say that, yes, these ideas absolutely do apply them! And they also say, “Maybe, since these ideas definitely do apply to us, you could use language that includes our experiences more explicitly, instead of explaining how we’re not in the science.”
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Q: My therapist recommended your book, Come as You Are. I’m only about twenty pages in, and it felt so comforting to read I was normal; however, as I reflect on where you listed a couple of caveats about the book—I’m reminded that I’m not so normal...and that you couldn’t possibly say whether or not these experiences hold true for trans folks. I am curious if in the five years since you published this book if you have found any research that would make you feel confident to address this topic?
A: I have been disappointed with how slow the research has been to include trans folks—slower than the publishing industry has been. In the years since CAYA went to press (2014), I’ve been looking for work, especially in the area of psychophysiology, that includes trans participants and uses language I would feel okay showing to a trans person. Progress in the research has been…. not non-existent, but…. almost.
Though it’s disappointing, I suppose it’s not too surprising, since it took until this year, 2021, for a major academic journal to publish an article suggesting that ciswomen’s low desire in straight relationships might not be a biological or psychological problem, but rather a result of heteronormative scripts that objectify them, cast them as the adult caregiver of their supposed “peer” partner, and teaching them that they’re not supposed to initiate. A field that has only just begun to acknowledge that the patriarchal gender binary might be a cause of distress for cisgender women is a field that will probably… eventually… acknowledge that trans people deserve to be represented in the research.
I know for sure that that will happen, especially as more trans and non-binary folks become sex researchers themselves. It happened for women in the 1970s and 1980s, as more of them became sex researchers and brought with them the wild idea that being a woman is not a disease—but again, it took another 30 or 40 years to catch up.
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Q: I just read your book Come As You Are. In the beginning of the book you mention that the book is really targeting cis women, but I wanted to tell you that as a trans women I found this book invaluable and wanted to explain why I think it's absolutely safe to recommend to other trans women.
As you probably know, once we go on estrogen, we go through a lot of physical changes---breast development, fat redistribution, muscle atrophy. This stuff happens whether or not we opt for bottom surgery, something that a lot of trans women opt not to have either because of cost, a lack of need (not all of us have bottom dysphoria), or whatever.
Another thing estrogen does is change how our genitals work. Doctors like to pathologize it and call it "sexual dysfunction"---a lot of us can't get erect, only get a little bit erect, or just stop having them altogether. We end up not having as much—or any—ejaculate. A lot of us lament to each other about how we can't cum after a few months on E. I see it all the time on the subreddits I frequent.
I also see trans women on subreddits I frequent talk about how orgasms feel amazing for them now. Julia Serano talks about how sex changed for her after transition in her book Whipping Girl. Online trans people on Twitter and elsewhere talk about being able to have full-body orgasms, multiple orgasms, etc., etc., etc. And some girls just continue to have orgasms the way they did pre-hormones, although maybe with slight differences. There’s a whole lot of variety of experience.
I was one of those people who was super frustrated. It wasn’t that I lost the ability to orgasm completely, but it just stopped being all that enjoyable. Or maybe I should say I could ejaculate, but I didn’t feel like I could orgasm? Anyway, I knew this book wasn’t going to be aimed at trans women but I figured I’d read it anyway to see if anything in it applied to me.
It turns out it absolutely applied. I was going about things with the older mindset whereas I am a woman (because trans women are women) and my sexuality is absolutely a female sexuality. E has absolutely had an effect on how my brain works, and my sexuality has been rewiring itself over the last year and a half. It’s more of a responsive sexuality, my erogenous zones are different (and more sensitive), but I had all this old experience about how things worked that no longer applied to me. (I’ve incidentally heard the converse is true with trans men: their orgasms are like the ones I *used* to have when I had testosterone pumping through me).
This book was basically like the missing manual for my body. You say it yourself in the book: we all have the same parts, just in different configurations. Orgasm is what happens between the ears (omg that is so true). Much is made about how the clitoris has a lot more nerve endings than the penis but again—it seems to be close enough. I had so many epiphanies reading this book, things that made my experiences having sex with cis women (before transition) make a lot more sense, like why women like sex even if they don’t orgasm (because it feels amazing) and what someone telling you “right there—just keep doing that” actually means.
All the stuff about spectatoring, about allowing orgasms to happen, the thing about the socks… it helped me to realize what wasn’t working for me. Turns out I’m one of those people that gets full-body orgasms and they don’t necessarily need genital stimulation—it can just be from touching other erogenous zones or in a couple of cases, no touch at all. It happened when I was meditating and I was all kinds of conflicted about that because orgasm wasn’t really what I was going for at the time. I actually have a trans woman friend who also meditates and can also do this, apparently.
I think about all the trans women out there who are struggling after starting hormones and think this book could really, really, REALLY be helpful to so many of us. Especially the stuff about worrying about our junk looking different to other women’s. I mean, non-op trans women’s bodies are about as phenotypically different as it gets from cis women’s. But I don’t think that matters.
What matters is that I think this will help a lot of trans women (and non-binary people taking estrogen) if the word got out about it. I’m willing to bet my letter isn’t the first one you’ve received from a trans women who had a “holy shit” moment while reading your book. At least, I hope it isn’t. There are so many positive lessons in here about body positivity and sex positivity that have had a profound effect on me. I’m actually getting a copy of this book today for my girlfriend, who is pretty bummed out about how estrogen has affected her sex drive.
It isn’t that we’re broken. Okay, maybe some of us really do lose the ability to orgasm forever, but I can’t imagine that’s a whole lot of us. I think it’s just a matter of learning our brains’ new operating system and working with it instead of against it.
I don’t expect a response but I would absolutely be curious to know if other trans women have reached out. If I don’t hear back I won’t be upset or anything :)
Best,
Zoë
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Message: Hello! My name is Parker, and my pronouns are they/them. I'm 28 years old and live in Alberta, Canada. I am writing to you because I had some feedback about your book, Come As You Are.
First, I just wanted to say that so far, I am absolutely loving the book. I've got a lot of trauma to unpack and at 28 I've decided to have my sexual awakening now that I've spent the last 8 years in therapy workin' on my stuff! It's a great time. I'm learning a lot, and your book was recommended to me by a close work colleague who is working through some similar struggles.
I identify as a non-binary transmasculine person. I was born with a vulva, and I have a great relationship with it. I, unlike other trans guys that I know, don't have much dysphoria about my genitals. I am on testosterone now to proceed with a more physical/medical transition, so my genitals are changing and I'm learning to develop a whole new relationship with my junk! It's an adventure, let me tell you.
That being said, I do struggle with social dysphoria. So if I am perceived as a woman by others, I struggle a lot. Although I love the content of your book, it is directed at females, not people with vulvas. So as I'm reading it, I'm putting quite a lot of energy into a "take what you like and leave the rest" process, where I absorb the content about sexuality etc without considering myself as a female. I am in a really healthy and wonderful space in my life right now and I can do this without much actual distress, but it would be nice to not have to. I'm sure I'm not alone in this, and I wish more trans people had easier access to the information in the book.
One day, if you write a revised or updated version, I'm wondering if you'd consider more inclusive language. I do recognize that cis women need sexual advice and support as well 100%, but it leaves out less privileged trans folks who want to learn all this amazing information about sexuality that you have for us all. Another idea is to write another book that's similar, for trans people specifically, and then Come As You Are remains something that's directed to cis women.
These are just my thoughts, and I figured someone like you would be open to at the very least hearing them. Thank you so much for all of your work in this field, it means a lot that there are professionals out there writing books like these so that people like me can get a little further on the healing journey. I have several work friends who, since the book was recommended to me, have said they also read it and absolutely loved it. It changed the game for a couple of them (apparently my entire office knows about this book, I don't know).
Thank you for your time in reading this e-mail - I hope it found you well.
Sincerely,
Parker (they/them)
A: Hi Parker!
I wish trans people had easier access to the information in the book, too. It’s not even that it’s for females, it’s that it’s written for cisgender women.
You wouldn’t believe how hard I had to fight in 2014 just to get the publisher to use the singular “they” throughout the book. In the first edition’s caveat, my editor recommended I add a sentence that said basically, “If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about trans people, no worries.” She was worried it would alienate the cishet readers. I made the compromise, since her other suggestion was cutting the caveat altogether (and cutting the intersex section). (Let me add, my editor was fantastic and supportive and amazing and I adore her, she was just doing her job of making the book palatable to as wide an audience as possible, knowing that trans folks are wise enough to read the way you had to, taking what works and leaving the rest.) Fortunately, a couple years later my literary agent saw some comments online about what a shame it was that sentence was there, and she pushed to have it removed! So hooray! Small progress!
A few years later, the Chicago Manual of Style, arbiter of grammar, changed its position on the singular they, so copyeditors stopped trying to change mine. I also began the CAYA Workbook with an exercise for trans folks, written with S Bear Bergman, and nobody at the publisher worried it might alienate anyone! Between 2014 and 2018, that much had changed.
Another change has been that more trans authors are being published! I especially recommend Trans Sex by Lucie Fielding, which is written for clinicians but has great information for everyone. This is actually my greatest source of hope for the future, since I think a book that centers trans folks shouldn’t be written by me, it should be written by a trans author.
My aim, as the world becomes marginally less violently protective of the gender binary, is to write in a way where every reader feels welcome and represented. As I continue to grow as an educator and an author, I recognize that I can center pleasure, and make sure that includes everyone's pleasure.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
Feel free to say hello on 📷 Instagram, 🦤 Twitter and 🤖 Facebook – I don't always reply but I read everything.
Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
