Communication without explanation and touch as transformation – Jo Goforth explores lust without limitations in T4T sex.

Freedom in T4T

When I first set out to write this piece, I wasn’t sure where to start. There’s so much to say, and so much I never want to say, because my intimate, life-changing, experiences aren’t for ogling. What I’ve settled on is discussing a couple of modern representations of trans sex, compared to what my real-life experience has been. Most ‘representations’ of queer, trans sex are anything but what euphoric trans sex has looked like in my life. Television’s trans sex is more often an exploration of trauma than it is about being hot. 

The brief stop I’ll make into media is to contemplate The L Word: Generation Q and Netflix’s Tales of the City (2019). Both feature trans masculine actors who were consulted on their sex scenes. I’m really glad both Leo Sheng and Garcia had input on how their characters were portrayed. But notably, both of their sex scenes are with cis lovers. Cis lovers who they then have to navigate explaining what they want to someone outside of their own experience. Every sex scene is derailed by a cautious approach to cis ego. Both embody a tension of ‘Will I be rejected?’ or ‘Will I be hurt?’ in their scenes. Neither gets a whole scene dedicated to them just being hot people that audiences might want to watch fuck the way the cis leads do. 

Watching trans sex scenes makes it extremely clear why Jamie Clayton wanted her character in Gen. Q written as a cis woman. Her role isn’t consumed with explaining her transness and instead, she gets to have a complex story that shows the richness of human experience – and just how fucking hot she can be in a sex scene!

The tentative nature of trans sex scenes is exactly what someone like me, a proud trans slut, not want to become the staple of what we see in media. Trans people aren’t only having sex while nervously explaining what we are comfortable with. And it’s certainly not the majority of what I experience in real life. Having sex with other trans people is freedom. Freedom to communicate what you want and when you want it. Communicating what to touch, what not to touch, what words to use, and words not to use, without needing to explain why. It’s knowing that my touch will affirm my partner’s body and vice-versa. 

During T4T sex, touch itself becomes an act of transformation. The way jerking a t-dick like a longer cock is different than flicking or circling it. The way lapping at the head of a woman’s fat clit, or teasing her nipples can transform sex into an act that reframes our bodies. 

How I touch a trans woman’s tits while I kiss her, or how my hands grope someone’s ass communicates different things about gender, as well as about dynamics between us. It’s no surprise to me that so many queer and trans people are also kinky. Once you’re already breaking a barrier of acceptability, it’s easier to keep questioning, to keep exploring. Kink fits in so well with sensual and sexual T4T experiences because it allows you to mindfully explore your relationship to your own gender. So many of us feel an intense lack of control over our lives that engaging in kink becomes a way of letting go and just letting each other feel good. 

First, let’s look at fetish wear. As much as being fully naked can be a liberation of its own, fetish wear allows you a more dynamic relationship to gender and power when you put on these particular clothes. I have leather that is untreated; it feels like leather used for an age-worn horse’s bridle. It smells like hard work and a kind of masculinity I enjoy. I like the lavishness of cowboy boots. I put them on and I feel like I can command a room, while also kicking back at anyone from my childhood who would balk at me wearing them during queer sex. Seeing my friends in glistening leathers, latex, and lingerie fills me with euphoria. It lets me see into a world where we get to be the most of ourselves. Seeing other trans people explore their bodies feels like a scene where a thief finally cracks open the safe: each mechanism sliding perfectly into place and opening up a whole new, beautiful, hidden world. 

And then with the kink we do, it can emphasize gender or flatten it completely. While I love the trappings, the mental exercise of kink is incredibly precious in my experience of trans sex. As I mentioned before, kink allows mindfulness in your relationships. It allows you to express the need to let go – whether that is to let someone else give you pleasure, or give you pain, or even to let you have catharsis over something difficult that’s happened to you. On the opposite side of things, it allows you to demand your pleasure, to demand control: whether that be control of your body, someone else’s, or control over an experience where you previously had none. 

One moment that stands out to me is the time I found myself in Brooklyn punching this guy’s chest, binder on, while his partner fucked him. In the few inches above the rise of his chest to impact it felt like I was physically transforming him. Each hit was as if I was molding his chest into something new, something erotic, and something more true to his being. He groaned and begged for more from both of us, while we gave him what he needed with pleasure. It felt like kneading clay, till he came out the other side with a beautiful array of purples and blues that we were all proud of. 

Intersections of identity are more complicated than just T4T. Race, disability, class, among other things, take part in who we feel secure with when we fuck. This is not a piece on how to achieve the perfect T4T sex, or a cry for trans people to never fuck cis people, or to ignore the very real intersections of being black, brown, indigenous, and/or disabled, alongside being trans. This is simply a reflection of how T4T sex has become an incredibly important part of my life. 

Sex with other trans people has changed who I am as a person and continues to grow me in new directions. Without it I wouldn’t be quite who I am today, nor can I fully anticipate who I will be in the future. T4T sex gives me power. It is dirty talk that makes my partner blush. It’s getting out the big bottle of lube to fuck someone deep, or getting your face a fucking mess, buried against another person. Trans sex, to me, is trust that the person, or people, you’re fucking are going to give you exactly what you want, without the pressure of cis expectations marring the view.