Because, by most people, trans and gay were two sides of the same coin – heteronormativity demanded that the only relationships that could be seen as real and valid were those between a man and a woman, and in a strictly gendered (and grossly sexist) culture, being attracted to the “opposite sex” (a vile phrase, but that’s another issue) was seen as a fundamental part of being one’s own sex. As a consequence, homosexuality and transsexuality were not distinct, but different manifestations of the same kind of perversion. Trans women and men were not really women and men, they were just gay people who took their homosexuality to its logical conclusion.

As a consequence, gay people and trans people took great pains to distance themselves from each other – trans people aggressively re-asserted their heterosexuality, gay people their cissexuality, and gay trans people were left in the unfortunate crossfire to be riddled with the holes of conflicting allegiance and the judgmental incredulity of ignorant bystanders.

And I bring this up because I think this is roughly the relationship asexuality has with the rainbow band of non-heterosexuals, albeit on a smaller scale.

In some ways, asexuality is very obviously distinct from other sexual minorities, at least according to the public view – asexual people don’t want sex, homo (bi, pan, poly) sexual people want sex outside of expectation. But at the same time, there are a even more similarities, at least insofar as media representation (and even moreso, the grasping at straws for representation that occurs in places concerned with the consumption of and resulting community related to said media) is concerned.

The narratives that can be told about asexual and homosexual (et al) people share a lot of parallels, especially in certain contexts. If you look at celibacy Through The Ages (which I recommend you do, as it is a fascinating subject – this book is a good place to start), for example, celibacy is frequently attributed to homosexuality – but in a lot of cases, I think, it could just as easily be attributed to asexuality. Inability and disinterest, as it turns out, are very difficult to differentiate from action alone.

And this issue tends to manifest in this kind of annoying impasse; both asexual people and (otherwise) queer people lack for adequate representation – acknowledgement of either rarely appears, and when it does it is more often as a token, lesson, or joke than as well-developed characters or relationships treated as legitimate and with respect, without reservation. And the simultaneous absence of both and natural similarities between those who could easily fit either classification (but aren’t explicitly identified as either) creates an unnecessary conflict between the two, causing two groups who have, in some ways, a lot of overlap, not only of issues but of experiences and those who could claim allegiance to either, because representation of one often means an absence of the other, largely because of those natural similarities.

In the same way those who are trans are frequently forced to be at odds with those who are gay – and those who would interpret characters/figures as trans are at odds with those who would claim them as gay (see: every single person who ever was assumed female at birth and lived their life as a man, only to be repeatedly – and rather thoughtlessly – declared a lesbian despite any definitive evidence one way or another) – those who would claim characters as ace are often at odds with those who would claim them as a (different) variety of queer.

And I think there’s something to be said for interpreting relationships that are presented as being limited to friendship as sexual or romantic, especially because these transcendentally important relationships are usually between two people of the same gender, more usually men, and used as a stand-in for a legitimately homo-anything relationship, but at the same time, I see the point in leaving them as is.

As someone who is ace-spectrum, if no longer identifying as unreservedly asexual, it chafes to hear people interpreting relationships I can look to as a blessed respite from the constant prioritization of romantic (and, by common reasoning, necessarily sexual) relationship over those which are friends, but without the “only,” as … something other than that, especially when they do so by insisting that the relationship must be sexual, that they’re so close that there’s no way it couldn’t be.

And a common argument against taking these platonic relationships and seeing them as decidedly less so is that there is no dearth of these stories – important male/male friendships are frequent in literature, at least, and they’ve never been frowned on, and maybe not – but the fact remains that almost always, characters are at least expected to prioritize romantic/sexual relationships above others, and in contemporary stories that feature friendships which are primary to characters, it’s frequently because of necessity – they want a romantic/sexual relationship to take its place, but for whatever reason, they can’t get one.

And there’s something to be said for explicit representation. There isn’t a shortage of strong friendships in stories, sure, but we do lack for stories where characters only want friendship, or where a romantic/sexual relationship does not automatically take precedence over a friendship, and is not expected to. I want more gay characters – and bi, pan, poly, WTF, queer, unidentified, etc. – and the relationships they’d have to be explicitly recognized, and I would like them to exist with the kind of variety presented by LGBTQetc. people who actually exist, but I also want more asexual characters, and aromantic characters, and those whose primary relationship is not “more than” friends, where being “more than” comes with the addition of romantic or sexual feelings, but their primary relationship – the people with and around whom they build their life – are not non-platonically entangled.

And I think, which is actually kind of the point of this sprawling mess of a post, that asexual people should still be allowed their interpretations – that a reluctance to see Sherlock and Watson as anything other than extremely important best friends is not latent homophobia, but a very real, entirely legitimate, desire to see themselves and their relationships presented, in exactly the same way otherwise non-heterosexual people want to be able to see themselves.

If someone tells you they are asexual, they are stating something very clear about themselves – they do not experience sexual attraction. Usually this means that they do not want to have sex – often it means the idea of having sex is uncomfortable or even disgusting to them – and if it does not, they will most likely make that clear.

Trying to trick or coerce someone into having sex with you, or into wanting to have sex with you, is unreservedly unacceptable. Not all asexual people are absolutely disinterested, and many are not even necessarily averse to it, but many are, and ignoring when they tell you that – ignoring their hesitation, disinterest, or discomfort – betrays a fundamental disrespect for their ability to define for themselves what they are or are not willing to do. If someone tells you they don’t want to have sex, do not try to make them have sex with you. 

1. College has had exactly the effect on me I expected, and that effect isn’t good.
2. Also apparently university courses require investing time? It’s wild.
3. Puberty is no more fun the second time around.
4. I have more or less run out of things to talk about.

To be frank, as the days go by and I see ever larger numbers of handsome and well dressed men in a city whose primary resources, I’m pretty sure, are poutine and beautiful men (in that order), I’ve felt my allegiance to asexuality slipping somewhat. It is not that I can no longer claim any association, but simply that it feels less pressing, and although I still think about asexuality a lot, it’s mostly in the context of other things than by itself.

That said, I do have something to say on an issue that is kind of a running tug-of-war in fandom (how I came to spend so much time in fandom-oriented places is an enduring and horrifying mystery), which is between two sides which are frustrated by how extremely close friendships  (usually between two men – for example, Sherlock and Watson, Abed and Troy, Merry and Pippin, Sam and Frodo, etc. etc.) are often betrayed, claiming that leaving them as “only friends” is an exercise in heterosexism, and thus stand in opposition to those (frequently asexual) people who wish that everyone would leave well enough alone, between the absence of platonic – and only platonic – relationships prioritized over those which are romantic/sexual is frustrating.

Neither side is really wrong, I don’t think, and the problem is that nigh-transcendentally close friendships are often used as a substitute for actual gay/bi/pan/etc. representation. They exist instead of canonically homoromantic/sexual relationships, rather than alongside them, and so it is a common impulse for LGBQetc. consumers of media to interpret those relationships as being romantic or sexual rather than just platonic (ignoring the common impulse of commonly straight female fans who interpret male/male relationships as sexual just because it’s hot) as a kind of a shot in the dark for representation.

And this then annoys asexual/aromantic people who cling to those relationships as rafts in a sea otherwise full of sexual and romantic relationships unthinkingly, and almost invariably, prioritized over those which are not. Nobody comes out ahead and everyone is angry.

And I don’t really have a point to this, except that, especially the past month (as BBC’s Sherlock returned with three new episodes, re-igniting the age-old “but are Sherlock and John fucking” argument) I’ve seen a lot of this kind of argument, and it’s exhausting, and also has the problem of turning the blame on each other rather than the producers, who are pretty awful.

Actually, that is my solution. We all turn on Steven Moffat, because apparently he doesn’t care for interpreting Sherlock as asexual or as gay. And that’s the real problem –  a character who very well could be either, for whom there is canonical evidence for being very decidedly not straight, he has taken time, more than once, to re-assert as unreservedly heterosexual.

But besides that, there should just be more shows that show actual romantic/sexual relationships between people of the same gender (and including people who are not binary-identified, since the last time I checked there is no representation of any such people in any widely consumed media), as well as platonic but nevertheless extremely meaningful and important relationships.

And to be honest I’m posting this here mostly because I don’t want to wade into these murky waters on Tumblr, where

everyone is angry and

no one wins.

And it was… okay.

There was a very large focus on David Jay, unofficial helmsman of the good ship Asexual Community, particularly on his experiences, initiative in starting AVEN and unflagging spokesman, and relationships, including documentation of his daily life, the first AVEN contingent in the San Francisco Pride Parade several years ago, him talking about coming to the realization he was asexual, etc.

Between stretches of David Jay were personal accounts from different asexual people –  Barb, a Texan woman who’d had sex with several dozen partners and never felt any differently about it (I really liked Barb – to be frank, I think it’s worth seeing just for her); a woman whose name escapes me, who found someone online who didn’t mind her asexuality (their marriage was shown at one point); and Swank Ivy, a thirty-some year old woman fairly well known within the asexual community for her Letters to an Asexual videos on Youtube.

There were also moments of different “experts” talking at different points – good ( Anthony Bogeart, the researcher/professor who conducted the 2004 study which is most widely cited in defense of the 1% figure), neutral (a sexologist from San Francisco who mostly talked about the Great and Beautiful Rainbow of Human Sexuality), and bad (Dan Savage, who needs no more explanation for why he was bad than the simple fact that he is Dan Savage).

And in fact, when we all found out that Dan Savage was to appear in (A)sexual there was collective shock, bewilderment, and disgust. Which, now that I think about it, may have more to do with the kinds of people I know than Dan Savage’s general reputation, but … he’s terrible, and he has been known to say rather ignorant and often hurtful things about people who definitely are or may be asexual, namely that there’s something wrong with us and we don’t have any real problems. And that, unsurprisingly, continued. He mentioned that he thought us gathering together or trying to spread awareness was pointless, adding that lots of people – either because of not being heterosexual or having general frowned upon kinks or unhealthy perspectives from childhood, etc. – would benefit from being asexual instead, and concluded saying that asexual people should only date asexual people, and to date anyone with any interest in sex at all was not only ill-advised, but absolutely cruel.

Stay classy, Dan.

And the documentary itself was framed by short Man On The Street-type moments, where those with no credentials or ties to the asexual community voiced ill-informed opinions on a subject they knew nothing about, presumably to give context for the asexual community and the “movement,” as far as it exists. These moments were spaced throughout the documentary, and served as both a beginning and an end.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly taken with it. It wasn’t bad, by any means, and I have enough of a lingering crush on Anthony Bogeart to have had some reason to continue watching, but as entertainment it falls flat, as education it’s not perfect, and as a supplement to The Asexual Experience it comes off as incredibly limited. There were a few moments that made me swell with a kind of weird pride, like when they featured a short stream of users on AVEN whom I’ve known and liked and been friends with, but all-in-all it didn’t really cover much of anything that makes the asexual community what it is, which would be fine, if indeed it is meant as more of an educational resource, but it’s so limited in its scope that those who go into it without knowing much about asexuality or the people who claim it will probably come out not much more knowledgeable.

I wouldn’t encourage you to actually try to have sex with a unicorn, though. Not only would it probably enrage the unicorn in question, but you would then no longer be a virgin and your partner would probably gore you halfway through.

An interesting way to die, but certainly not a pleasant one.

In other news, I apologize to anyone who cares for not having posted something new in a month and a half, and even then … it was porn.

I would like to have a good excuse, but honestly I’ve spent the last week, no joke, writing about animal sex.

No really.

I haven’t abandoned this blog by any means, but for now I’m kind of tapped out – I don’t have any relevant ideas and even if I did I probably wouldn’t have the motivation to pursue them. But stay tuned!

Respectfully. 

I hope I don’t have to say this but if you are under eighteen or otherwise legally prohibited from viewing pornographic material, don’t click the following links. Because they’re porn. And it’ll be illegal. I am eighteen, and thus at perfect liberty to view and spread pornographic material, so this is totally legal. 

Anyway.

I don’t actually know of many porn suppliers, because I am not in their target demographic, which is, I’m assuming, “people interested in watching porn.” I do, however, know of these two sites:

Trans Lady Sex, a tumblr which posts pictures of trans women who run the gamut in regards to most things the gamut of which may be run (all kinds of bodies, at all stages of medical transition), and, for the retro fan,

T-girl Pinups, which is exactly what it sounds like and features porn of trans women as ’50s pinups, though I think you have to subscribe for the full experience

So I hope that satiates you, porn seeker of the world, and remember – trans women are women, and they deserve as much respect as any other group of humans. So stop using slurs and consume* respectfully.

*As in, watch/read/view

But anyway.

I figured that my audience, insofar as I have one, consists primarily of those who are around my age or slightly older, probably stretching up to about thirty before tapering off, and a lot of those people don’t like to read young adult fiction, so, in an effort to adult up my blog, I tried to read Ian McEwan’s (of Atonement and pompous, self-satisfied blowhard fame) On Chesil Beach, which is mentioned every so often in asexual circles as a short, simple book with an apparently asexual character.

And that decision was one of the worst decisions of my life.

I only got about three fifths of the way through before becoming so fed up with… everything about it that I could not continue, but I read enough to know that the book is about two people in the early ’60s in England, set primarily on the night of their wedding but partly in flashbacks to the time leading up to their meeting and pre-martial relationship. The book opens on them having dinner in a house they’ve rented for their honeymoon directly after the ceremony, and flips between Florence’s (the wife) anxiety and disgust at the thought of what’s to come and Edward’s (her husband’s) excitement, which would be fine if the prose weren’t as purple as an eggplant at an asexual pride parade and Ian McEwan’s writing style weren’t founded on the assumption that the quality of a sentence is directly proportional to the number of dependent clauses it contains.

A lot of the book is about Florence’s inability to get excited about having sex, and how it’s a fundamental betrayal of everything she wants and it’s something she cannot really process and never understood, and then Edward being frustrated about that and wanting to have sex and wanting to have sex and wanting to have sex, but honestly it doesn’t offer anything a good book for asexuals to read offers, outside of an ambiguously asexual character whose anxiety and disgust is given a lot of airtime.

How to  Say Goodbye in Robot, for example, is a much, much better book to read, and it is without ever once mentioning the word “asexual” (or even explicitly mentioning the idea), and this is because How to Say Goodbye in Robot is not only just a really good and poignant book, but because central to it is a relationship which is not sexual, which is not even romantic, but which transcends friendship – it offers a beautiful, believable relationship founded, not on sex or fluttery stomachs or kissing or romance, but on a deep and profound commitment between two people. Their friendship is the kind of partnership that often accompanies romance or sexual intent, but by eschewing both it proves that neither is a prerequisite for a close, deeply meaningful relationship.

And On Chesil Beach is not. It doesn’t get into anything interesting, nor does it spend any time on what I think is really interesting and compelling and … not totally pointless about including asexual characters in stories, or making stories about asexual people, which is that sex is not a prerequisite for close (romantic) relationships or a universal constant. Describing over the course of long, tedious pages how gross someone finds the act of penile penetration isn’t going to accomplish anything, and that’s really all On Chesil Beach has to offer to asexuals, and that is rubbish.

And, if that doesn’t convince you, take a gander at this passage:

It must have been accidental, because he could not have known that as his hand palpated her leg, the tip of his thumb pushed against the lone hair that curled out free from under her panties, rocking it back and forth, stirring in the root, along the nerve of the follicle, a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a minuscule smooth-edged speck, and continued to swell. She doubted it, denied it, even as she felt herself sink and inwardly fold in its direction. How could the root of a solitary hair drag her whole body in?

That is an entire paragraph about Edward inadvertantly fondling a pubic hair.

Yeah.

I’m going to assume not supporting trans here means that you, wayward googler, don’t agree with the validity of trans identity, don’t think trans people’s struggles are worthy of attention or support, and are probably self-deluded people who took gender non-conformance a few steps too far, and that’s all bullshit. So you should shape up.

The fact is, trans people exist. We exist and it’s impossible to get rid of us – short of killing us, or making things so bad that we’re all driven to killing ourselves (which honestly isn’t that far removed from reality), there’s no way to rid the world of the scourge of trans people. Multiple studies over decades have shown that trying to rehabilitate us to fit our assigned genders, or rid of us physical dysphoria, is a massive exercise in failure.

So that leaves us with a minority which is far larger than anyone assumes – anywhere from 1-5% of the population could be trans, depending on how inclusivity of the definition in use – who have to deal with massive disdain and disgust from the masses, very real danger (especially for those who are on the transfeminine spectrum, as they are far more likely to the objects of harassment and hate crimes than transmasculine spectrum people or faab non-binaries), often massive amounts of physical dysphoria that will only be helped with very expensive procedures which are very difficult to gain access to, and bound by a bunch of extremely outdated laws set in place by cissexist people who believe in the policing of trans people and forcing people through a lot of (difficult, dangerous, expensive) hoops before they can get everything sorted out.

In many states (and other countries) it is impossible to get one’s birth certificate changed without proof of GRS (genital reconstruction surgery, which is what people generally think of as “sex change surgery”), social security requires proof of SRS, many states require SRS for changing one’s driver’s license, and until relatively recently so did getting a passport changed. SRS runs anywhere from 7-30 thousand dollars – a huge sum most people can’t afford, especially since almost no insurance policies will pay for them at all, considering them elective rather than medically necessary. So a huge number of trans people can’t afford to get the surgeries that will enable them to change their legal documentation, and with those still with the sex you were assigned, rather than the one as which you’re living, you will be continually and involuntarily outed – and that opens you up to awkward, dangerous, triggering, and unpleasant situations anywhere you might have to be identified.

Imagine living in constant fear of being “discovered” – and discovered in a way that may trigger depression or suicidal thoughts, that just reinforces something you may with desperately weren’t true, and which will label you a freak or pervert in the eyes of entirely too many. Imagine almost having a panic attack whenever you have to use a public bathroom. Imagine feeling condemned to profound loneliness forever because you believe that no one could ever love you, because you’ve been told repeatedly that your very existence sets you up as a joke and a caution, a threat to heterosexuality and a gross perversion. Imagine not being able to get medical attention because no one can get past how “weird” you are – imagine knowing that it’s very possible that you could get injured and then, once the ambulance got there, no one would bother taking you to the hospital and would instead leave you to die because your genitals are “wrong”. That has actually happened. More than once. 

I can understand being confused by trans people, because it’s not something people are taught about, and are instead taught to view any non-strictly-cis person as an oddity and a mistake. But rejecting trans people as fakes or freaks basically makes you a douche, and I would say especially from members of the LGBT community – who should understand what it’s like to inspire disgust just by your existence, to be widely hated, and to be reacted to with horror and thoughtless disapproval – but it’s not as if a cLGB person hating (or what have you) trans people is new, and that’s a shame.

Before I can proceed with today’s episode, I must note that “man becoming a woman” or “woman becoming a man” is an outdated way of phrasing transition which has largely fallen out of favor with the trans community (or if it hasn’t, it really should), not only because it’s awkward, but because it’s a very simple, kind of insidious way to de-legitimatize trans* existence. Saying that someone, through medical transition, “becomes” a man or a woman is the same as saying that anyone who has not, cannot, will not, or does not want to go through the “full” transition is not a valid member of their identified gender, and it ties another knot in the rope that binds sex and gender as somehow irretrievably linked ideas – which is what causes so much trouble (or a lot of trouble, anyway) for trans* people in the first place.

A much better way to phrase things is to say that someone was male or female assigned at birth, and is transitioning – because it is not their status as a man or women which is changing (and do forgive me for binary-specific language, but as of now there isn’t really much of a system or general recognition of non-binaries, so the languages, situations, and concerns are often considerably different), but because their appearance, and, often, social presence is. Medical transition too often becomes the axis around which trans* narratives revolve, which is, in many cases, an accurate portrayal, but certainly not universally. Respect diversity! and all that.

That said, the first “man to become a woman” was in fact not Christine Jorgensen, but a different woman entirely.

Christine Jorgensen was a woman who served as a soldier in her younger years and later, after returning to the US and specifically to New York, read a book about the “male hormone,” which served as a turning point of her life and is often described as the moment she had a great epiphany and knew how to pursue what she felt was necessary. She began taking the “female hormone”  independently and, on the way to Sweden, stopped in Cophenhagen and met Dr. Hamburger, an endocrinologist. She continued, now in a regimented way, hormone replacement therapy and underwent a series of surgeries culiminating in vaginoplasty.

It was upon returning home again to the states in 1952 that she was caught up in a whirlwind of publicity and medica activity, hailed as the “first man to become a woman” with the famous headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” in the New York Daily News, and much of the rest of her life was spent being made into a spectacle, particularly as one of the most well-known and recognizable trans people in the public eye (though she certainly wasn’t the last, and there’s a tradition that followed in the trail she blazed of trans women who were propelled into the spotlight for simply being trans).

But which Christine Jorgensen was among the, and perhaps the, first to become extremely well known because of getting a full “sex change,” she wasn’t actually the first person to do so. Transsexuality has an interesting history, and one which stretches out long before Christine Jorgensen flew into the spotlight – in fact, had there not been a practice established of “sex changes,” she never would have been able to head to Europe specifically to seek one out.

Rather, the procedures which were later perfected and made available to, if not everyone who wanted and/or needed one, then to a great many more such people, were already in development decades before Christine Jorgensen even got it into her head to consider one, with a woman named Lili Elbe being one of the most famous examples of those who were lesser-know precursors to the well-publicized Jorgensen. Lili Elbe had a number of surgeries beginning in 1930, first an orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), followed by a penectomy (removal of the penis), an attempted transplant of ovaries (which were rejected), and finally an attempted uterus transplant, which was the cause of Lili’s death shortly afterwards due to transplant rejections.

And actually, Lili (and to a lesser extent, Christine) is an example of an interesting trend in the Early Days of transsexuality (insofar as “transsexuality” is defined as the actual medical adjustments rather than simply the desire for them). When there were fewer visible trans people, many of those who sought surgery or hormone replacement therapy claimed that they were doing so to follow through on what nature clearly intended, in that they were some variety of intersex which then called for them to in effect continue the work of their non-standard reproductive system. Lili in particular was assumed to be intersex, as she apparently appeared “more female than male,” and she, among others, used that as justification of what otherwise would have been seen as a perverse or freakish desire.

Christine tried to use this herself, claiming that she had underdeveloped “male” organs and she was clearly “intended” to be born a female but somehow development in that direction had been botched, and she and Lili certainly weren’t alone, as this was the dominant narrative in the very early days.

Later, however, as more people came forth requesting the surgeries, not to correct an obvious physical abnormality but a deep-seated feeling of discomfort or incorrectness, this fell out of fashion and people progressively used their own dysphoria as justification enough for a “sex change.”