A little over a year ago I went on a date with a cis girl named Lily. A detail so psychoanalytically self-indulgent that it would be absurd to include it in any kind of fiction. Anyways, for a while I’d been fantasizing about a sort-of evil cis girl chaser (if this describes you DM me immediately) who would tie me down and have her way with me. This was not Girl Lily’s deal. Girl Lily was a virgin who, despite a semi-erotic fixation on Andrea Long Chu (???) had never been on a date with a tgirl before. We met at a culturally desolate ‘book bar’ on the Lower East Side and discussed Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin as well as her love of mainstream literary fiction. She said she’d been on a handful of Hinge dates before this one, but I guess those hadn’t gotten very far because when I reached down and took her hand in mine, she gasped like she’d never been touched. We walked from the bar to Tompkins, a much more vibrant location, and chatted. She talked about her fantasy of going on a date with a girl who had the same name as her, quipping about what our wedding invitations might look like. We made out on a bench, me taking the lead. A drunk man sat across from us and watched before leaving and thanking us, which was very polite. We got eaten alive by mosquitos; it was a sweltering Wednesday night. I made Girl Lily nervous; she was clearly new to what we were doing. I was polite, downright respectful, borderline chivalrous. I never touched above the mid-thigh, you know. Still, whatever she was afraid of was extremely powerful. I could smell it wafting up from between her thighs. It made me hungry. It scared me too.
The question of perversion has been at the forefront of my mind since long before my dangerous date with the first Girl Lily. I’ve been fantasizing about perverts who never materialize. Believe it or not, another cis girl named Lily hit on me while I was writing this piece – she was turned on by another piece I’d written about my girlfriend’s bottom surgery. I’d woven grotesque operating room prose together with the erotica I can’t help but write; I’d put my lover’s body on display like bait and caught a few hungry cisgender fish. I desperately need a pervert to come and take advantage of me, but with these sweet cis girls I keep ending up in the role of the pervert, wanting too much. Taking little by little until I can’t help but bite a chunk out. They get scared, stop responding. I get scared too. I’ve been submitting my work a lot lately, and I keep getting told it’s, in so many words, too perverted. Yea, it’s true, I’m a pervert! I own the criterion Pink Flamingoes and a beat-up copy of The Story of the Eye. If ‘pervert’ is a sexy leather-adjacent signifier to put in your bio on Feeld or whatever, I’m as perverted as they come. But what is real perversion?
As a teen, I was pretty immersed in online smut writing – AO3 and the like. I had yet to discover the phrase ‘t4t,’ and while a lack of meaningful framework didn’t stop me from kissing and loving other tgirls, there weren’t many around. Really, at the height of my smut career, I was still two years out from sucking Kay’s dick and having a feeling in my stomach that sex could mean something, that together a trans girl and I could make love. Finding, for the first time perhaps, the embrace of the Goddess. All this to say, I was writing about cis girls fucking trans girls. Trans girls sucking strap, trans girls arching their backs, trans girls with hungry, lubed-up holes. In retrospect, it was giving True Transsexual that my sexual fantasies involved getting fucked. They always centered a trans girl, like me but skinny, moaning as a cis girl stuck the tip of a silicon dick inside her. It was my practice too, when I started having sex. But when I was with Girl Lily that’s not the image in my head. When I smelled her, when I knew what she wanted, an entirely different image came to mind. Trans girls rutting, shoving, thrusting, fucking, giving, topping. Cis girls under them squirming, begging, desperate for cock. A grotesque and forceful desire that threatens to break my own womanhood from the inside out. A terrifying need. A perverted thought.
Perversion is to desire what the sex act is to time (which is of course what the tiger is to space). This is to say, as my hero and transtemporal lover Bataille famously said, it brings us one step closer to death, to divinity, to true continuous being and the disillusion of the self. To the Goddess. We lack true communion with one another, an ability to be together in space and time. Sex brings us together. It connects us. It dissolves identity in favor of something greater, but in this dissolution is death of the self. It brings us into communion with the Goddess. I speak of a Goddess because to touch the taboo, the erotic, is to touch the religious – itself an inherently erotic manifestation of communion. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes (the clown) offers an explanation of the access to continuity provided by sex. If you’re cool, you’ll have heard it in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We, as animal creatures, were once whole but hubristic, and the great gods struck us down, cut us in half. When we fuck, we’re coming back together, searching for our other half and trying to make ourselves whole. Trying desperately, hungrily, animalistically, to achieve our previous form. We can’t, though. It’s impossible. It’s a very cute idea; despite being presented by the clown it’s certainly the standout theory of love, but it’s limited. What we desire, what we achieve when we come together, is not continuity with one other being. It’s not reconnection with a mythical soul mate. It’s connection with something so much greater. What we want is everything. We want it all. We want the Goddess.
If what we want is access to something continuous, or rather everything continuous, what’s the Goddess? The angel Gabriel, that sweet cherubic little femboy with his long flowing hair and holy transfeminine appearance, announced the one and only God’s coming son to the virgin mother (when he did so, did he smell what I smelled? Did Gabriel consider, even for a second, thrusting himself inside of Mary?) Sweet holy Gabriel’s annunciation is one of the most depicted moments in the great European artistic tradition, perhaps second only to the birth and death of Christ himself. Lovely Gabriel is always androgynous, often with a bare ass displayed for our pleasure (or did Mary ever think about thrusting herself inside the virgin Angel?), flowing hair, and budding breasts. Gabriel is instantly recognizable to me as one of mine – one of my Angels, sweet beautiful trans women. The ones I sleep with, the ones I obsess over, the ones who come to me in dreams and tell me that they’ll make me a virgin mother, with my pussy unfucked. The girls who follow a descending staircase that the idiot Jacob mistook for leading to heaven. It leads instead to a gaseous chamber beneath the Sibylline temple in Pythia. When my girls reach the bottom, they deeply inhale the fumes stored beneath the ground – sacred amyl nitrate. They castrate themselves in order to see through meaning. In order to understand the texts, they worship they must ingest holy hormones ordained to them by a Goddess they neither see nor understand. They speak to the Goddess.
I often scoff at my angel’s obsessions with Cybele and the Gallae. I don’t need to worship a long dead goddess just to draw a pop-historical connection to her worshipers. A loose parallel between the rising fascist tides that threaten my life and the bastard Roman Empire that attempted to eradicate those poor little eunuch priestesses. But I shouldn’t be so dismissive. Cybele is a perfectly valid name to ascribe to the Goddess, to call out when I make you cum. You can call her Cybele, Dionysus, Lillith, or Ingrid Pitt. All names that tell us what she is, tell us how we can connect to her, all names erotic. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to call her Pussy.
I’ve wanted to speak to Pussy for as long as I can remember. I, like so many exactly like me, laid awake crying out for her, praying to her that I would wake the next morning a woman. Even if only for a single day, to let me be a woman. I first felt her when a girl (now a bisexual she/they) kissed me behind a tree on the playground. I didn’t kiss her, she kissed me. She put her hands on my arms and kissed me. Was it then that I became a woman? That night, I again prayed. Prayed to the Goddess that me and the girl who kissed me might switch bodies. That I could be her and she me. That I could put my strong feminine arms on her delicate boyish frame and kiss her deeply. That I could lead her while being a woman. I felt Pussy when my best friend, who called me a faggot often, showed me his penis. I showed him mine in return and he told me it was wrong – deformed. I almost cried with joy. Maybe it wasn’t a penis at all, maybe I’d been sewn up as a baby and I was actually a girl.
I feel, perhaps foolishly, that a thing’s method of production dictates its form. The surgeon who creates the women I sleep with’s vulvas does so not in the interest of continuity or Pussy, but in her own interest. Out of a desire for a challenge or a sense of self-interest; out of obligations to capital and empire. They won’t give me Pussy how I need her, but it is hubris to believe I have a say over how a Goddess comes to me? When I was nineteen, I wrote a ‘non-op’ tgirl manifesto. Now I’m not so sure. If an angel, a priestess of Pussy, could make my pussy, I’d let her in a heartbeat. I’m desperate for Pussy, I’m humping at the leg of a goddess. I’m trying to get her attention. Twenty years later I’m still lying in bed praying to my Goddess to wake me up a woman. Still, nowhere have I felt Pussy’s presence more than in the recovery room. Watching a nurse drain away a lover or friend’s cock, now liquified. Watching a friend cry when she sees her pussy for the first time. Watching a friend feel nothing at all. Still, She’s there. Even when our new vaginas don’t make us happy, Pussy is there.
The truth, the thing I’m too scared to tell you, is that Pussy speaks from within me all the time and I ignore her. I tune her our because she scares me. I’m afraid of what she’s offering. I’m terrified that I might like it. I’m scared of what she might show me. So, I stay guarded, deny myself what I really want. What is it I really want? The same thing as you, honey. I want to die with you. I want we, and we want it all. We want everything.