Fake Valentines Letters, Vibe-Checks and the Overwhelming Stench of Desperation

Sometimes you can want something too much.

I’ve an old bank-vault lock box in my bottom drawer. Never fear, I’m not telling the world where I keep my valuables. There are no priceless stamp collections, no 24-carat gold jewellery. It’s just letters, artifacts and oddments of an oft-times unremarkable life. Birthday cards, photos of beloved pets long turned to dust, the wedding band my ex-wife returned to me, cracked and broken like some cheap metaphor to match the cheapness of its price tag. There’s a medal engraved with my name and the title “Best Ass in Roller Derby”. There’s one of those novelty flick knives that’s actually a comb from an Ekka show bag back when a fake knife was the sort of thing you could get in an Ekka show back. There are also some valentine cards from my mother.

Nearly four decades later I learnt that I, in fact, did NOT have a secret admirer.

My mother, with nothing but good intentions, sent me anonymous cards full of messages detailing a secret love. She dictated them to friends to transcribe so I wouldn’t recognise her handwriting. The bashful sincerity of these cards made my teenage heartbeat flutter. In all those confusing dark moments of pre-adulthood, moments of trying to find a place in the world, of drowning in hormonal fear and loneliness, I carried a provable fact in my heart:

Someone out there secretly loved me.

And for a time, while I was too quiet to engage with the world, too shy make much of an impression on anybody, it was enough. It doesn’t matter that my mother wrote them. Confidently carrying “a truth” with you, despite it later being false doesn’t change the path you took. It only changes your understanding that you still could’ve navigated it without the confidence to do so. I’d like to say that this has made me realise that I don’t need the reassurance of others, that I don’t crave attention and affection to make me feel like I have value, but that would be a lie.

You see, I’ve a real problem with needing validation.

I might couch it in clever-sounding terms like “external locus of value” and “partner-validation based needs”. But really, it’s much simpler. It’s a yearning to be loved. To be cherished. To be seen as worth something in of itself. Probably the reason why I spend so much time and energy fucking random strangers from the internet.

Hey now! I said it was fun, but I NEVER said it was healthy.

It’s one of the reasons why I have a “vibe-check” policy. Gotta check them vibes. Gotta sit and have a drink and a chat. Gently steer and probe and tease out how they feel about sex and intimacy and how all that intersects with their understanding of gender. Gotta find out if they’re wanting this body for the right reasons. Plenty of guys reading this will likely be thinking, “Hell, any reason for someone wanting to fuck you has got to be a good reason, right?” Sorry boys, you should listen to the women in your life more. Sometimes people can want your body for reasons you really don’t want. The old adage of “sex being like pizza; even when it’s bad its still pretty good” falls way short. Especially if it’s being used to coerce and control you. But if that isn’t terrifying enough for the male-sex-drive to see red flags, what about when you discover that person, you’re in the middle of a sex act with has… let’s say… a fetish for sissifying men?

Yep. That happened.

Me, a strapping, muscular trans woman, discovering that the sexy-fun-times your hookup craves the most is taking manly, masculine men and forcing them to wear women’s clothes. Forcing them to wear makeup. Forcing them to look like women in acts of play-degradation/emasculation?

“Unsafe” doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt at the time.

Not to “yuk anyone’s yum” but just in case anyone is missing the point here on why that’s something I wouldn’t want: In a situation like that, a transwoman gets to wondering “Do they think that I’m just a man playing make believe? Do they think what I’m doing to myself in transitioning is “degrading”? Or do they think I’m not doing a good enough job of ‘sissifying’ myself and I need their assistance?”

“Fraught” is a word I could use (“fucked” is also a word I could use.)

I could take some solace in the fact that this person wanted to “use me” for their enjoyment. Despite the explicit connotations of “men being transformed into women” being “used” is, by all accounts, a very “female experience”. That’s one way to look at it. Doesn’t sound like a HEALTHY way to look at it, but sometimes you take what you can get. “Validating Female Experiences” can be so few and far between sometimes the “Invalidating Female Experiences” will have to do.

[Feel free to insert your own version of the “Mom, can we get some validating female experiences? / No we have validating female experiences at home.” meme.]

It’s not like it takes much effort in a dating app to make me feel like you see me as a woman. Those moments when someone sends the dazzle-eyes emoji and tells me I’m beautiful? Being called “honey” and “sweetie”? God, it makes my heart melt. It’s wonderful. But the crash back to reality is hard. Nothing makes me feel more “like a man” than convincing someone that this body is not to be feared. Convincing them that this body is worthy of attention, that it is, dare I say… attractive even?

You smile over the rim of your cocktail. Your pursed lips are painted a livid-red cause someone, sometime said they like the colour on you. You twitch a demure smile. You try to convey every ounce of mental energy through your eyes to say, “Yes I am fuckable, and you’ll have a great time if you take the chance.” But really what is going on in your head is the voice begging “Please don’t think I look monstrous. Please don’t think these broad shoulders and narrow hips are a man’s body. Please hear the lightness in my voice. Please see the graceful flow of my gestures. Dear fucking God just give this body a chance!” I worry that no amount of vanilla and orchid perfume will cover the stench of my yearning. I worry that whoever is sitting across from me can smell these thoughts.

I worry that I reek of desperation.

I wonder what would happen if they knew how many times I gazed at this body in the mirror, detesting it. How many times I’ve wished harm on it, sought harm on it. How many times I’ve slid a blade along its flesh to score line of wet, burning pain. How many times I’ve pressed my foot on the accelerator hoping to smash this body to smithereens around a tree. If only they knew these things and how much I crave the validation of their touch. I don’t know if they would be horrified or heartbroken.

Actually, I take it back... I never want them to know.

But sometimes the stars align. Sometimes someone can see past all the expectations and assumptions of how gender is supposed to work. It happens more frequently with people who are themselves pushing at the boundaries of their own gender identity. Christ everything is so much easier with T4T romance. So, when a cisgendered person, especially one who has never encountered a trans body before, finds it in their desire to experience me I still need to explain a few things first. I still need to have “the talk” with them to make sure their opinions are informed and their expectations are managed.

It goes something like this:

“This body is both exactly like and nothing like any you’ve ever experienced.

“There are things about it that will be familiar and things about it that will but utterly alien. There are things that will both feel like “a man” and things that feel like “a woman”.

The texture of my skin is soft, maybe even softer than you’ve ever felt. The smell of by body is no longer the heady musk of a man but the sweet tang of a woman. These breasts are “real” as any other, grown via the hormones that put my body through a second puberty. Yes, the estrogen and testosterone blockers have altered it, but it functions as it should. I’m a transfeminine woman who has no interest in genital surgery. So, this body still gets hard the way you would expect if you were with a man. But it lives in the world as a woman and as such moves and thrusts and gasps as if you were with a woman.

It’s a “normal” body. Normal, because I’m a normal person, but shaped in a process that’s anything but normal. There’ll be no great surprises when you have sex with this body, no great mystery, but if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice the series of subtle differences. This body is in many ways what you would call “both”. I would never be so presumptuous to say it is “the best of both”, but there’s certainly enough of both to know that it is its own unique magnificence.

Oh, and before your ask, the softer skin thing also applies to my genitals. Yes, I have a velvety dick. I hope you enjoy it.”

You can now consider your opinions informed and your expectations managed.

–S