(hoping the formatting comes out okay; posting from the iPad)

Lately I’ve been thinking about the nature of sexual attraction.  I’ve made a few attempts to write about this the past couple weeks, but presenting my stream of conscious mental meandering in an organized and readable way has proven difficult.  In the end, I’ve decided to divide the topic into two broad areas: (i) the sexual attraction I hold for others, and (ii) people I find sexually attractive. 

Trying to tease out what attraction I hold for others is a bit of a minefield.  I tend to tread lightly here for fear of stepping on that mine that annihilates my self-esteem, self-perception, self-confidence. 

It should be no surprise that the most explosive mine in the field of my self-perception is the experience of being transgendered.   In my early years after transitioning it was particularly important to me that others were sexually attracted to me as a man, attracted to my maleness. I was passing by then, so that validation from others of my gender in day-to-day interactions was unquestioned.  Questions about gender aren’t going to come up unless we’re in the bedroom.  Physically, there’s no getting around the fact that I am not a cis-gendered male. 

There’s not a surgery in existence that will make me a fully functional man.  My transgender experience is unavoidable when it comes to sex.  If I wanted to have a full sex life, I was going to have to figure out if I could see myself as sexually desirable.

I have very few regrets about transition and the process I followed to move from ♀ to ♂. I do wish, however, that I had spent some time getting comfortable with that transgressive aspect of myself before proceeding with hormones and surgery.  Being different, pushing boundaries, transgressing the norm, is not something that sat comfortably with me.  My innate personality was and is conservative.  Back when I started this journey, I wanted to get from  ♀ to ♂ as expeditiously as possible.  I didn’t want to explore the terrain in between.  I did my best to turn a blind eye to the distinctly non-conservative and patently weird nature of what I was doing – of what I was.

In the end, I’m nothing if not pragmatic.  Once I got here, to the ♂, I realized there is no getting around the fact that I am and always will be a transgendered male.  Physically, socially, mentally, emotionally.  Since I was not going to damn myself to ignoring such an integral part of my experience,  I had to embrace it – all of it.  I wanted to know that both the male me and the transgendered me could be sexually attractive to guys.  There’s not a way, really, to separate the two.  I started by asking myself if I found transmen attractive.  The answer to that was yes.  So that’s where I started experimenting.  Fortunately, by then there were larger numbers of out transmen and in the larger cities or at conferences it was easy to find those hook-ups.  While it wasn’t one night or one encounter that made a difference, in time I was able to see the sexual attraction of my trans experience.  There hadn’t been an erotic aspect for me of transitioning, but I was searching for that erotic component of being transgendered.  Embracing that part of myself, instead of ignoring it, was the only way I could see myself as attractive to someone else.

 Once I got here, to this place where I see myself as sexually desirable, and where I can understand why others find transmen desirable, I did regret that I didn’t play around in that middle area a little longer.  I missed out on exploring that fluidity, the sexual component of that blended gender, before pursuing all the physical and social changes.  That said, even at my most conservative as a girl, I wonder if there wasn’t some inherent transgressive element about myself that drew others to me.  Maybe it’s just there, inescapable, and even when I was unaware of it myself others saw that weirdness and were drawn to it. 

My very first boyfriend liked wearing women’s underwear.  I met Gary at college when I was 19 and he was 20.  He was my first kiss, first lover…lots of firsts.  After a year of dating, we decided to get an apartment together.  About two months after that, I was complaining that my undergarments were falling apart even though they were just a few weeks old.  He said that it was probably his fault. At first I thought he meant he’d used too much laundry detergent or run them through a hot clothes dryer, but then he admitted he had been wearing my underwear and that’s what had stretched them out.

Oddly, or maybe not given where I was ultimately headed, I didn’t freak out in the least.  I just told him we’d go shopping for women’s underwear that fit him so that he didn’t keep ruining mine.  Looking back, I have to wonder if there was something innate about me, some invisible gender transgression, that drew him to me.  He didn't have to confess to me. If he hadn't straight up told me, I never would have guessed. I was just a straight girl back then, nowhere near exploring any sort of transition to male. 

All signs would have pointed to the fact that Gary and I were a mismatch.  He was a collegiate swimmer – tall, blue eyes, dirty blonde hair – highly desired.  I was an awkward girl with no sense of fashion and no patience for make-up.  I wasn’t unattractive, I suppose, but I certainly wasn’t spending any time on typical female primping.  I had no idea how to flirt, and the girls in the dorm absolutely had no idea how I’d “landed” him.

Anyway, back to the cross dressing.  Gary and I had a lot of fun with this proclivity of his – and a lot of sex – because of it.  I’d talk him into wearing the women’s underwear to the one class we had together, and then we’d come home and spend the afternoon screwing each other’s brains out.  Cross dressing turned him on to an unbelievable degree.  His cross dressing didn’t really turn me on.  In actuality, I sometimes had to suppress the urge to laugh because the sight of him jacking it so vigorously in sky blue bikini panties with applique flowers on the front was sort of funny.  What turned me on about it all was the fact that he was so turned on.

One more story, this time less titillating, from a different past relationship before we get back to the original theme of the blog post.  I’m white.  My former husband was not.  It became a minor issue in our marriage early on.  The more I was around his family, the more I heard things like “He got himself a white girl” and “I always knew he’d end up marrying white.”  For a lot of them, my name was ThatWhiteGirlSamMarried.  The comments did make me doubt the foundation of Sam’s attraction to me.  I mean, I knew he liked my features, my skin color…but I had always thought it no different than having a preference for redheads over brunettes.  I liked his skin too – the color, the texture, the smell.  It was sexy, erotic, to see the contrast of his dark flesh against mine.  In my mind, that wasn’t why we were together, but it was wrapped in the whole of our sexual attraction to each other. 

At the point I started questioning whether his attraction for me was based on my being white, that’s when the self-esteem took a hit.  I questioned whether Sam was attracted to the sum total of me, or if my being white took precedence over everything else.  That type of attraction felt creepy and revolting.  Fortunately, we started talking about being an interracial couple…we hadn’t discussed it in depth prior to then.  Turns out we couldn’t separate something so innate to ourselves as race from who we were or from our sexual attraction to each other.  It was definitely part of the attraction though certainly not what led us from attraction to love.

So, back to me and the sexual attraction my being transgendered holds for someone.  Whereas Gary’s gender transgressions were based in eroticism, my own gender transgressions are not.  Yet, at some level I’m rather thrilled when my being transgendered is eroticized.  I want that to be a sexual pull for others.  I think there’s a tipping point in there somewhere.  I’m actually OK being objectified, fetishized, by someone as long as they too understand that is what’s happening.  That can work and be fun for a purely physical relationship.  But long term, if that’s all there is, it’s creepy and revolting.  I guess my being transgendered is sort of like my being white.  If that is what someone finds sexually attractive about me, that's natural, sexy and fun. Long term, though, that element of attraction needs to be wrapped up in the whole of why someone is into me.

Thus concludes Part (i) of this two part post on sexual attraction. More to come, when I get around to it.