(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

praying-for-a-miracle asks:

I’m transgender. My girlfriend has supported me from the time we got together, celebrating my “transliness”, even finding tips to help me transition easier. When I got my packer, she laughed at it and asked me to take it off. I felt humiliated, but did so. Ever since then, she begs me to take it off if we start to become intimate. (The term there is “if”; our intimacy has been on a steady decline ever since then.) Now that I’m on testosterone, she’s shying away even more. It seems that being able to afford a decent quality binder has really halted anything. She’s even refusing to kiss me more than once or lay against me. A few nights ago she said that something was bothering her and to not get offended. She admitted that she is a lesbian, and only got with me originally because I was female bodied. She says that she’s fallen completely in love with me, but is no longer sexually attracted to me unless I take my packer and/or binder off. She coaxes the binder off by offering a back massage. (Seeing as I have pulled every muscle in my back and slipped 2 discs, I can’t refuse.) I have absolutely no idea what to do. I’m humiliated. She says that she will always love me, but is sexually frustrated. She doesn’t want to leave me because she loves me, but would rather have sex with a girl. Any advice or..?

Molias replies:

I’m sorry to hear that things have been so strained between you and your girlfriend when it comes to your transition. Gender transition is a pretty intense experience; a good thing for you, to be sure, but it’s still full of a lot of changes in a relatively short period of time. And it can be tough, even for folks who want to be supportive and are happy for you, to adjust to those changes as quickly as they’re coming.

For some people, too, it’s a very different thing to be supportive of the idea of trans people, or of trans acquaintances and friends, and to see a loved one go through that process. You’ve probably had a good while to sit with your thoughts about your own identity, get excited about the physical changes that testosterone will bring, and try out changes to your gender presentation. But even if your girlfriend’s known that you were trans for a while, she still hasn’t known as long as you have, and the reality of it may be startling or jarring to her as changes become more apparent.

There’s a process some cisgender folks go through, consciously or not, of “mourning” their “lost” sister, son, girlfriend, father, etc. when a loved one transitions. To be honest, I personally roll my eyes at this a bit because I didn’t die or vanish when I transitioned, and didn’t feel like I was mourning anything at all - I was celebrating! Even so, I don’t have to like or agree with it to understand that it happens.

Your girlfriend may just be taking a while to really understand and process the changes you’re going through. It also sounds like she’s been thinking a lot about her sexual orientation and what it means for her identity if she’s in a relationship with someone who is not a woman.

Your girlfriend is entitled to whatever feelings come up for her right now, around you, your transition, and her own identity - there’s no way any of us can control our feelings and emotional responses to things that happen in our lives. However, while your girlfriend has the right to her feelings, no matter what they are, it’s also her job to manage them in a way that is not excessively hurtful to you.

She doesn’t have the right to be disrespectful by laughing at your packer or anything else you wear that makes you feel happier and more comfortable. That’s really not okay.

Read the rest from Molias at Scarleteen here.

I came to know a similar mistake had been made, except that at that time, I didn’t have words to explain it. I learned to live a lie. Pretending to be what you’re not, hoping things will magically fix themselves, seems easier at times. But lies have consequences.

It is unfortunate that Coy’s school has not learned the lesson that so many other aspects of our culture have already acknowledged, that a person’s gender is more complicated than a body part or a chromosome.

Workplaces across this country are recognizing the challenges that their transgender workers face and are removing deeply embedded barriers to health care and wellness benefits. Organizations ranging from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the Girl Scouts are accepting transyouth, sometimes under fire, treating children based on identify, not body parts.

Transwomen have openly competed in mainstream beauty pageants and have been featured in magazines such as Vogue. Transgender athletes, artists and writers, people in all fields, have shown there is a pathway to a happy, well-adjusted and fulfilling life — not as an “other,” but as the men and women we know ourselves to be.

Apparently none of this matters to the school that denies Coy the use of the girls’ bathroom or to the parents who demonize her and her family. Arguments to treat Coy with dignity often fall on deaf ears. Why? Because discussion of the topic quickly becomes emotional rather than rational.

Read the rest at CNN here.

The Dirty Normal, which is a blog you should read, recently had an amazingly shiny chart about gender differences in libido!

Things you can notice about this chart: first, I really wish Emily Nagoski would have labelled the axes (according to the comments, “You can think of the Y axis as N and the Y axis is desired frequency or frequency of masturbation or whatever other measure of sexual interest you prefer. Left is high interest, right is low interest, and the size of the bubble indicates number of people.”).

Second, it’s totally wrong to say that there are no differences between women as a class and men as a class, in terms of libido. A randomly selected man will probably have a higher libido than a randomly selected woman; a person with extremely high libido is more likely to be male, a person with extremely low libido is more likely to be female. “There are absolutely no differences between men as a class and women as a class!” is something more straw-feminists believe than actual feminists (or maybe I just hang out with awesome feminists), but I would just like to clarify that that is absolutely wrong. Furthermore, this difference has an effect on overall social structures: for instance, the fact that most sex workers cater to men.

Third, the differences? They aren’t huge! There is more than enough space for women who can’t go a day without an orgasm, men who want sex once a year on their birthday, and millions of couples with a horny woman and an uninterested man.

Read the rest from Ozy Frantz here.

elinor asks:

Help! I’m in a relationship with a man (I identify as a straight woman) who identifies as queer. He’s mostly had sex with men in the past (there might have been 1 woman), but this is first heterosexual relationship. It’s also my first relationship with a queer man. I really care for him, but I am struggling with checking my own heteronormative attitudes. For example, I don’t know how to get over the fact that he enjoys watching gay porn, and mostly gets off to men. We still have great sex together and I know he is attracted to me, and I try to remind myself of this when I find myself getting bothered by what turns him on. I’m learning to love, not accept, that he is queer and that he has made me shift my thinking about relationships and sexuality so much. However, I still don’t know how to get myself out of these moments, sometimes ongoing, of insecurity.

I know many people experience different romantic vs sexual attraction, and from talking to him, I feel like he is a little more sexually attracted to men, and a more romantically attracted to women. We also have a very friendly/open sort of relationship (we started off as really good friends) where we talk openly about everything (something that seems to weird out my straight friends, especially when he talks about having sex with men). I love that we have this, but I can’t deny there are plenty of moments when he tells me how hot his favorite male porn star is or how horny he is after watching some video and I feel confused. We have talked about this, and he assured me that he wanted to be with me. Yet, I still feel increasingly insecure. I don’t want to make him feel like he has to repress a part of himself in order to be with me (and he is the type of person that would hide it from me if he saw it was hurting me). Can you give me some pointers on how to deal with this on my own, or what I should talk to him about?

Heather Corinna replies:

I’m glad you asked this question. I’m hoping I can give you some helps to evaluate your feelings, explore them some more, and find some things to talk about with your partner and perhaps work through and adjust together. I do suspect this is something where we might do a lot better having a conversation with some back-and-forth, so when you’re done reading this, if it doesn’t really do it for you, or you want to talk some more, you can hop on over to our message boards here and I’ll be glad to talk with you.

Before anything else, I’d be real with yourself about how bothered you are by what, as you say, turns him on. I’m not sure what you mean by that, but if there’s a big conflict between what he finds sexually exciting and whats to do, or how he wants to do it, and what you’re comfortable with and works for you, I’d start with a step back to make sure that a sexual relationship is really the right one for the two of you, or that it feels best emotionally to be in a sexual relationship with him right now rather than dialing things back to a more gradual place while you figure out what you’re really okay with and what you’re not, and how you two do and don’t mesh in this regard. In doing that, I’d encourage you to let go of worries that you’re being heteronormative or heterosexist: figuring out what you’re comfortable with or not in your intimate relationships like this truly isn’t going to impact someone else’s rights and liberties.

One thing I’d say to your questions and issues here, and I say this both as a sex educator, but also as a queer person, is that something that tends to get lost in translation for people who are only attracted to people of one gender when trying to understand those of us attracted to more than one is that gender is often a lot less relevant — and sometimes even totally irrelevant — for many of us who are queer and attracted to people of more than one gender.

Now, that can make some people feel more comfortable, while it makes others less so. If you’re someone, for instance, for whom gender is a huge part of who you are, then a partner who could care less if you were a man or a woman might feel uncomfortable. You might really want your femininity or womanhood to be something a partner is super-duper into; for whom it is very relevant. I can’t speak for you in this regard to know, nor can I say how important or unimportant your gender is to your partner. But, on the whole, gender often is far less important to queer people than it is to straight people.

On the other hand, that gender-whatever-thang can be a very freeing thing for people, especially in a world that puts gender so front-and-center all the damn time. And if you have the idea that the fact that you’re a woman somehow makes his feelings for you more iffy because he’s had a lot of history with men, and is also attracted to men, seeing that gender probably plays way less of a part for him as a queer person than it does for you as a straight person might give you some breathing room. At the very least, I’m hoping pointing that out might help you recognize that chances are good that gender in this equation is probably a bigger issue for you than it is for him.

I think if you can take some time to think about what role you want your gender — or gender, period — to play in your sexual or romantic relationships, and how, ideally, you want a partner to see your gender in that regard, how much focus and weight you like it to have, that could give you some good starts for talking about some of this together.

Something I’d suggest thinking about for yourself with this, too, are your feelings and ideas about male sexuality. When I say “male sexuality,” for the record, I’m really talking about however you conceive that yourself. Sexuality is so diverse that while we hear a lot about “male sexuality” and “female sexuality,” and our world tends to have often simplistic ideas about this that we can’t help but pick up, in actuality, there are so very many parts of sexuality for every person, and we all differ so much in our sexualities (and the ways we experience, perform and present our gender) that I find those terms to be mostly useless because the diversity is so great even amongst people of one given gender. But where they’re not useless is when ideas about those things may be playing a part, as they often are, in our sexualities or sexual relationships: then it makes sense, I think, to explore our feelings about those ideas.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here!

When I discovered masturbation (quite by accident) at the age of 12 and the intoxicating end result of it, the hypochondriac in me naturally thought I was experiencing the first signs of a stroke. Leaping up from the bath from whence I’d been rubbing myself, I glared at the porcelain accusingly. ”YOU HAVE KILLED ME!” I thought. ”I HAVE BEEN DOING THE DEVIL’S WORK, AND NOW GOD HAS FORSAKEN ME!”

I was a religiously troubled child. It took years to overcome the sense I was doing something wrong, but I’m proud to say now that I’m a firm advocate of being the master of your own domain. I only wish I’d had someone tell me that when I was young, embarrassed and filled with uncertain shame about what it was I was doing.

It saddens me to think that this might still be the case for girls today. We seem to be reluctant to discuss sex in relation to girls at all, terrified that we’ll be perceived to be sexualising them. Typically, ‘expert’ commentators on sexualisation (particularly those regularly sought after in Australia, most of whom seem eager to institute a nationwide distribution of chastity belts and clutchable pearls rather than any kind of sound advice) bristle at the mere mention of sex and teenage girls in the same sentence. Sex for girls is viewed as predatory, emotionally destructive, overwhelming and dangerous — a responsible, moral society seeks to protect its most vulnerable citizens from it, lest they be ruined forever, their fragile psyches crushed amidst discarded condom packets and whatever tawdry metaphor is supposed to represent their sullied virginity.

Unfortunately, girls are still the casual victims of a society that views sex as a rigid binary — something that boys are empowered to do, but that they must have done to them. Jokes about 13-year-old boys spending too much time in the bathroom are de rigeur, because we have no discomfort with the idea of boys touching themselves. It’s natural, they’re boys - everyone knows that they’re biologically predisposed to want sex ALL THE TIME. Don’t you know they think about it every seven seconds?

And so forth.

But teenage girls… they’re a different story. Our hesitation to discuss the real fact of young female desire and sexual awakening is spawned from our hysteria over sexualisation. Because sex is something that ‘happens’ to girls, discussing it taps into that fear that others will think we’re preoccupied with it. That in the discussion of it, we are ourselves exhibiting unnatural and predatory desires.

It’s impossible for some people to believe that girls can actually engage with their sexuality, can seek out sexual experiences willingly and responsibly and without risk of permanent psychological damage.

Read the whole (fantastic) piece from Clementine Ford here.

cookie127 asks:

My boyfriend has a problem with sex, I know him very well and I know he’s not just being a guy. He likes to play around a lot but he’s very iffy about me touching him. I don’t know how to help this or what to do. He did have a really terrible experience when he was younger but he’s had long term relationships and he has slept with other women but only 2. He wants to have sex we’ve tried it once but he got too nervous about it and pulled away I don’t know how to handle this situation?

Heather Corinna replies:

I don’t know what “just being a guy” means. I’m not messing with you; it’s just that boys and men, like girls, women, and everyone else, vary so much. There’s just no one way guys behave. Who a guy is and how he behaves have more to do with the person he is, and the whole of his life, than they likely do with his gender or his gonads.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have the idea that men are more innately or biologically comfortable with sex than are women. But that’s a gender stereotype that often doesn’t hold water, one that many men feel they have to live up to. Like all stereotypes, it  doesn’t necessarily reflect real behavior, feelings, and experiences. The idea that men are more comfortable with sex puts pressure on them to behave in ways that might not feel right to them, and don’t benefit anyone.

The idea that there is a set of “rules” for one group of people and a radically different set for another group usually implies a double standard. Let’s understand right out of the gate that the dynamics in a situation like this aren’t different for guys than for girls. I’m also assuming that you care about this person, and that you not only want to have a sex life you enjoy, but also one that’s positive and safe for both of you.

Sometimes we want to do things for which we may not be ready. Sometimes we don’t know yet what we need, or don’t feel able to voice those needs, especially in a high-stakes situation. Having any kind of sex with a partner is a high-stakes situation for most people.

Sex is almost always an experiment, even with a long-term partner. If it becomes routine, people can become unsatisfied or uninterested mighty quickly. In our sexual experiences, we’re often going to be surprised by ourselves or others. We can’t always anticipate how something is going to feel, especially before we try it. When I say “before we try it,” I don’t mean just once. I mean every time. Too often, people frame sexual “first times” as the only time sex is experimental, dismissing the fact that sex never really stops being experimental.

People in a sexual partnership should know that it’s always okay and no big whoop to pull back from anything at any time. They should let their partners know that they’ll do their best to avoid making snap judgments. For instance, you’re not going to figure that if your boyfriend pulls back, he’s less of a man. This is an oppressive cultural message that few men have been able to avoid. And you’re not going to assume that he doesn’t love you or find you attractive, or anything else like that, right? I hope you just said yes to that question. Does he know that? If not, reassure him, and he should reassure you of the same kinds of things…

Read the rest at RH Reality Check here.