i’m not sure if i’d be able to find it bc i don’t think i saved it but i saw a tiktok a few weeks ago of a trans woman talking about her experience of having sex with trans men, and she brought up that specifically she refuses to see it as ‘penetration’ or ‘penis in vagina’ because she doesn’t feel that way, she doesn’t understand why the penis takes the dominant role. Instead, for her, it’s more like being engulfed, swallowed, surrounded. And i’ve been like. thinking about that constantly ever since. I don’t think that referring to it as penetration is bad, but i think that theres an assumed importance of that certain aspect of sex, that the most important factor to whether something ‘counts’ is the dominance assumed by the role of penetration, with fingers, a toy, etc. In a lot of ways, as a trans man, i’ve learned to distance myself from my body. I am able to feel through peices of plastic better than my actual nerve endings. I feel that the act of transitioning sometimes upsets this hierarchy of sex. The idea that someone may use their body in a way seen as traditional sex but not view it through a traditional lens can be just as terrifying to people as someone not having traditional sex at all. It’s really difficult to articulate. Sex can be a lot of things to a lot of people, and i find it so frustrating when people limit the ways they are able to describe and connect with their bodies because of assumptions that something is not ‘real sex’ because it doesnt involve a certain act, or that penetration is inheritly more accurate or important than alternate views, such as the one i described before.
