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Gender warriors | page 1, 2, 3
Some F2Ms get testicular implants, but not phalloplasty, and some get hysterectomies. Many others, particularly younger butch punks, just leave their vaginas and clitorises in place and let the power of suggestion fill in the gaps. Those flights of fancy were detailed in a workshop called "Cock Talk: A Discussion of Sex and the Erotic for F2Ms, Transmen and Butches." The panel was so popular that it had to be moved into a giant ballroom to fit everyone.
Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives
"Imaginary friend," took on a whole new meaning during Cock Talk. The penis is the invisible manifestation, the magically appearing stigmata in this faith-based masculinity. The ways the conferees transcended their fleshly limits sounded like a shared hallucination or a vision. Workshop co-leader Harrison Prado claimed she could feel lust through her strap-on dildo, reading an impassioned essay about why she liked getting blow jobs. "By going down on the butch, the femme is honoring, validating what makes the butch a butch," Harrison Prado intoned in her gruff voice. "I have a very gendered eroticism when I'm with a femme, it's a psychic hard-on." The young queer-as-fuck crowd chimed in. One pretty young dyke with a shaved head said, "I'm always packing [a strap-on] and I can come from a blow job, even with my eyes closed." Another pierced, buzz-cut college kid said her dyke lover didn't even need a strap-on; they could summon up a phantom cock. Others echoed this, including one baby dyke who said, "I'm so glad people are talking about this, because I thought I was losing my mind." A scene in "Boys Don't Cry" captures this insistence on a personal vision of the body. One of the male goons who ends up killing him says to Brandon Teena, "Man, your hands are so little." Brandon replies, "They're not little, they're big." Not a disguise, not a deflection, but a simple denial of the facts; it reminds me of many conversations at True Spirit. The transformative love light must be turned on to girl parts besides hands, too. Harrison Prado said she could only let fingers into her vagina if she thought of it as an "internal hand job." Workshop co-leader Stephen Whittle, a bald Brit who transitioned 25 years ago but never got below-the-waist surgery, addressed his reality gap the proper English way. "I just didn't look at my genitals for 21 years." His wife finally eased him out of his distaste with this F2M tautology: "You're a man, so those are male genitals." Saul, a burly bearded man with a vagina who's dated F2Ms, said that everything must be discussed before F2Ms can start touching or even talking dirty. Some unreconstructed F2Ms call their vaginas the "bonus trannie hole" or the "manhole," he said. "A lot of them like their nipples touched, but you can't cup their breasts," because that means there are breasts. The nipples may perch atop breasts in this shadow world, but they float above flat pecs in trannie heaven.
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