it's only sex
i do not feel as though i know how to be intimate with another person.
it’s only sex.
i am, for better or worse, at the behest of meaningless and short-lasting teenage relationships, not a virgin. i have experienced most of the range of sexual contact a girl can have. save for my feet (as of yet?) pretty much every part of me has been used in a sexual way by another person.
one part of me, specifically, which i have quite mixed feelings about, has been Used by one other person. my feelings about this event and this person are not mixed but are also rarely formed into any kind of conscious thought. it is an occurrence that i have frequently heard ruins lives, but over time for me it has turned to something that i just feel a need to politely inform any possible sexual partners of. the terms and conditions hidden away at the bottom of an advertisement reading ‘we can fuck’.
“i might freak out and cry because i got assaulted when i was younger. it’s not your fault.”
“i might freak out and cry because i have a dick and i’m a girl. it’s not your fault.”
sorry.
it’s only sex.
i’ve never particularly felt as though i ‘get’ sex in the way most people seem to. i can take part in it. i can feel some degree of desire for it when warmed up by gentler acts limited to fingers and lips and teeth. i can look at pornography and get hard (although, those life-saving drugs i now take are doing their best to offset that part). i can be meaningfully aroused by the thought of fucking or being fucked by or sucking the dick of or eating out someone attracted to me that i care about. i can thank those people when they objectify me in a nice way and be fairly sure i mean it.
when the actual act occurs, though, i am very quickly in an entirely different state of mind to the period leading up to it. nails digging into tense flesh turns to fingers splayed out on white sheets, limp. teeth sinking into soft lips turn to a vacant, consciously maintained smile and a slack jaw (or a jaw propped open, in some cases).
there is undeniably a lot happening: moans and liquids exchanged, marks both temporary and lasting left on skin and psyches. genitalia melting into genitalia into hands into mouths into nothing into cotton.
i am simply not there.
it’s only sex.
i don’t think this is a trauma response, despite that assumption being understandable. i had had sex before that, and i have had sex since. this still happened before, even when i had not yet been Used. before and after, i would be used. not in a non-consensual sense - there was genuinely no shortage of trust and care and safe words and embraces. i was used as you would use a tool - a means to an end. i accepted and internalised this as my role within sex: i was there to help the other person get off. that’s what i was for, that was the service i was there to provide. that’s what sex was for, to make whoever held my heart at the time moan and squirm and grip me harder and bite at me and cum.
then it was over, and the tool had been used, and my presence could return to cuddling or gently touching lips or falling asleep or leaving their home or watching them leave mine. if i’d done well enough, they might come to bed again. friends informed me at the time that this is ‘not what sex should be like in your head’.
it’s only sex.
i think i vomited in my mouth a little the first time someone complimented my ‘girldick’. it wasn’t a matter of chasing nor fetishisation from a man projecting his denial onto me. it was from a girl with quite the same between her legs. but something about the word just disgusted me. to have my transition, my dysphoria, my lack of girlhood or childhood, my desperation to make up for lost time, distilled and, well, packaged along with this sex organ that i am already unsure if i can accept. it’s just so visceral, so simple, so degrading. it’s something to be typed in a porn site’s search bar, not a dating app preference list. it’s somewhere adjacent to the gulf between ‘make love to’ and ‘fuck’.
i have had sex since coming out and gaining the adjective of girl to my dick. i can’t say i particularly wanted to. i started a new relationship with someone who accepted me for who i am (early in my transition, so the clockiest bitch you ever did see - it meant a lot). i felt the least i could do to show gratitude for their kindness was give them the sex they evidently desired. they took me into bathroom stalls at bars, pushed me against the cheap plastic and told me they wanted me. i said okay. we walked home, we had sex, we went to sleep. there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the interaction. it’s what couples in their honeymoon phase do, i guess.
i still felt very little when it was happening. i asked if we could not do it anymore, they said okay. we didn’t have sex again. we eventually broke up. i haven’t had sex since.
i still don’t feel as though i know how to be intimate with another person.
it’s only sex.