jenny doll seeks transformer

I’m thinking about dating a transguy—an FTM transsexual. Not anyone in particular, but I’m considering in abstract the joys of its possibility. I am a girl’s girl after all and stuff in magazines influence (way too much, perhaps) how I think about my wardrobe, my body, my psyche (in that order, by the way). The new issue of “Out” magazine is a “Transgender Issue,” featuring an article about “gay” transguys. This started the wheels clicking in the old soup bowl, then, my friend H, a dashing boyish dyke, suggested that maybe I ought to try dating a transguy. Now just a few years earlier, I would have said, “Never, I need a dick!” or something equally stupid. But I must indeed be evolving in my femme faggotry and womanishness (to borrow a word from Alice Walker) because I’m starting to imagine-fantasize about what dickless sex must be like...

...could there be such a thing as “Stone Femme”? A “Stone Butch” defines her dyke butchness by physically pleasuring her femme partner, but refusing reciprocation that would contour the femaleness of her body with the touch of an active femme. I would need to have the kind of sex that would produce pleasure without emphasizing the maleness of my body. Thinking about the possibility of dating a transguy, I wonder about what kind of FTM would desire me, what kind of FTM I would desire, and how I would arrange my femme but still male body around him. If he were pre-op, I suppose conventional sexual wisdom would have me (the one with the bio-penis) fuck him, but that idea is yucky to me. The scene in a recent episode of “The L Word,” in which the pre-op FTM Max gets fucked—vaginally or otherwise—by a fag made me, involuntarily nauseous. It seemed such a violation of dyke butch bodily cohesion to me. So, with either a post or pre-op transguy, I’d feel weird using my penis. Which made me realize: I feel kinda weird using my penis anyway. The penis is a secondary sex organ to me. The penis is an organ of orgasm, and even though the orgasm it brings is a nice thing, what I consider “real” pleasure—that which takes place during foreplay—has never really originated from its skin. Receiving fellatio never turned me on, and fucking did even less for me. So you can imagine how I feel about vaginal sex: the thought that my sperm could produce something—let alone a child!!—fills me with a dread like no other.

So as a femme—and more to the point, a very lazy pillow princess—I want to receive pleasure. But a lickety-split pleasure. And more specifically, a licking and sucking of my titties, not my penis. In the film “Flashdance,” a cheesy and losery comedian makes a joke: sticking his tongue out and up, he says, “What is this?...a lesbian with a hard-on!” The joke is crude, but I have to say, funny because it is true and sexy for me. The comedian tries to make fun of lesbian sexuality by trying to bond with the heterosexual audience about what a bad facsimile it is of “real” male sexuality. But a nice, forceful, skillfull, heat-seeking missile of a tongue is always better than any thumpy dick.

All of this sexual speculation about myself made me wonder exactly what it is that I have—and continue to seek out—in a boy. And I realized: even in the boys I’ve liked and loved, more than the penis, I’ve always been much more interested in the face, and in particular, face sprouting a lot of hair. This is why I opened this post with a picture of one of my favorite t-shirts. T-shirt, meet world; world, meet a favorite t-shirt:

-Original “Love & Rockets” tee-shirt, circa 1984. “Love & Rockets” is the famous underground comic begun in the early eighties by Los Bros. Hernandez (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario). This piece depicts an early cover, with the original ’80s logo, and depicts the famous Mexicana character Maggie Chascarillo (a.k.a. Maggie the Mechanic), drawn by Jaime. I purchased this piece at the San Francisco vintage emporium Wasteland in 1998, for around $16 (Oh the halcyon days of before vintage became “Vintage”!!). When I first bought it, it was already basically a dishrag, a conditional path on which it has steadfastly continued, as you can see in the picture. It now hangs on me like a lovely jersey Stephen Burrows evening gown. But a major secondary selling point of this t-shirt when I first bought it was that it had a completely split collar.

The collar is so worn that it has completely come apart at the circumferential point. I love such destroyed collars because it indicates that the boy’s neck-stubble was so profuse that it tore apart the t-shirt while he lived in it. And now I can slip my slippery body into it. I know this because my ex-husband had such a heavy beard and neck-stubble that many of his t-shirts had similarly split collars. Even now, I love looking for and finding t-shirts with such destroyed collars, because it floods me with such heady memories of those old hairbrush kisses on my lips and parts more tender.

The feel of rough hair or stubble on my lips and body are more sexy than being blown or fucked. If that is the case for me, then certainly I could date or fall in love with an FTM...provided that his body has responded to the hormones in a way that produces lots of facial hair. And of course, that he was a butch dyke—and treats me like he did his femme girlfriend. Actually, psycho-socially, a butch dyke who becomes a transguy is kind of my ideal boyfriend: he has a history as a woman—and it may be as fraught and frayed as the torn-up t-shirt collar—but he understands what it is to be a woman, and is now working to shape that history into the present-life narrative of his maleness. That is what I am doing inversely as a femme fag: to accomplish my girlhood not through surgery, but a physical presentation of femininity that works to create a lived sense of “femme” that integrates my own split-collar history as a “boy.” So: this Jenny doll now is open to, and perhaps seeks, an FTM Transformer who has hairy reactions to his bottled testosterone. Talking of her transguy friends, H said that transguys “have a more active and conscious relationship with testosterone.” Come to think of it, that’s what I long for in a guy, that’s what I try to cultivate in every guy I meet and try to love.