David Davis XVII, Part 2
On genital preference
Read Part 1.
This week, I went to the doctor for long-overdue pap smear.
Out in public with my mask on, most people think I’m a man until they hear my voice. After that, what I am is no longer a secret, even if it is a mystery. At the OB/GYN, of course, I’m more obvious. Not only am I by myself, without a pregnant woman to signal me as partner rather than patient, but my legal gender is right at the top of my file, my paperwork, and all the screens that are referred to by the medical providers that shuffle around their ugly little rooms.
It makes me nervous to pass (“pass”) and it makes me nervous not to pass. I don’t like cis people knowing or not knowing. Neither seems to benefit me. This is a constant, especially in medical contexts with doctors I don’t know. I had never been to this particular doctor before, but when the receptionist did not act surprised or nervous to see me, I relaxed a little. I relaxed even more when the tech who took my vitals, a matter-of-fact woman with purple hair, referred to my testosterone cypionate as “T” and asked for my pronouns; relaxed enough to be honest with her about using they/them. The gyno was nice, too. By the time she started her intake, I was feeling downright comfortable, until she got to the question that always trips me up.
“Are you sexually active?” quizzed the gyno.
I never know how to efficiently answer this question, or rather, this line of questioning, because what it’s trying to get at is not what my partners’ genders are, but whether they have penises that they on occasion put in my vagina and anus. Doctors use this information in order to assess my risk of contracting STIs and of getting pregnant. My girlfriend is a cis woman, but I do sometimes have partners with penises, or what a doctor might call a penis (or I did, before the pandemic). But I’m stone. My partners could have pinecones in their pants and it wouldn’t make a difference to my doctors. It certainly doesn’t to me.
In any case, for medical purposes I am not a sexually active person, even though I am, because I don’t get fucked. But in my experience, saying that I’m not sexually active—for simplicity’s sake—only leads to more questions, and even sometimes to a little grilling. It seems that “no” is not a viable answer to that particular “yes/no” question. Feeling, as I was, downright comfortable, I decided to say yes.
“And what are the genders of your sexual partners?”
(Talk about progressive medical care! As a younger queer, I had to insist on having more than one sexual partner with some medical providers, the kind who got sniffy when I said I wasn’t monogamous, pissy when I confirmed that I was a dyke, furious when I asked about medical care for transsexuals or sluts.)
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied, knowing how ridiculous that sounded. “I don’t bottom.”
“But I have to put something in here,” said the gyno, pointing at her screen. I imagined a form that wouldn’t allow her to click Next Page without having all its holes filled.
“My partners are whatever,” I went on unhelpfully, failing to find the combination of words that would communicate what she needed to know without creating more confusion. “Just all of it, I guess.” I’m better at writing than talking.
“So no receptive sex,” she confirmed.
“Yeah.”
“Can I just say ‘pansexual’?”
“Sure,” I said, though I don’t care for that word. It reminds me of cis people who are trying to find a way to say that they’ll also deign to fuck trans people, as if we are a separate gender category (which we are, I suppose. But not in the way they’re thinking).
“Well,” she said, breezily pushing herself back on her rolling stool. “At least we don’t have to give you the gonorrhea and chlamydia screening.”
If our genders are produced, that means that the concealment, deception, and revelation of deviant genders is also produced. Even the kindest and best-informed medical providers are unable to fit our diverse embodiments into the frameworks we’ve built to serve the superstructures of racial capitalism.
It’s not just transsexual bodies. It’s queer bodies, racialized bodies, disabled bodies, intersex bodies, women’s bodies, crazy bodies, sex-working bodies. If you’re lucky, like I was the other day, you get a provider who adapts the framework to you as best they can. If you’re unlucky, you get a provider whose mindset mirrors that framework, in which case you must come clean (or come out) about existing.
In this scenario, you become the lie, not because you have been deceptive (although you might have been, as so many of us must while at the doctor), but because you are not shaped like the truth. You exist in a situation in which there must be disclosure. Some lies are made to be told.
What is the relationship between the sexualized secrecies of premarital female sex and trans bodies, inflected though they may be by cultural and temporal shift?
In my last DAVID entry, I began exploring concept of genital preference by staking out the similarities between the secretly unwed mother of my grandmother’s generation and the stealth transsexual of mine (this is not to say that we can’t also draw comparisons between unwed mothers and transsexuals of other times, but I’m trying to keep it tight here). I posited that the state of exception we find ourselves in as transsexuals who are forced to out ourselves in various contexts has its touch points with the once highly stigmatized out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
That’s because the bastard, as evidence of their mother’s indiscretion, is inherently sexualizing. The bastard creates a fucked woman, a woman that has reproduced in a way unlike that of a married woman, which is to say beyond the boundaries of decency, heteromonogamy, and the accumulation of capital, which for our purposes are one and the same. The unmarried mother—a figure that no longer exists in the same way that it once did, at least in America—conceals, deceives, and is eventually revealed, whether by seeking an abortion or carrying the child to term. Similarly, the nature of the transsexual’s genitals, the focal point of our identities for many, if not most, cis people—whether we have had “the surgery,” or whether we continue to have the “wrong” configuration—is a question of concealment, deception, and revelation, always revelation.
As a culture (god, I know this is so broad, so sweeping. Bear with me, etc.), the gendering of our biological understanding goes deep, as deep as the biologizing of our gendered beliefs. Upon learning that he was raised believing his aunt was his biological mother, Paulie Gualtieri is devastated. “You’re a fraud. You’re a phony!” he screams at Nucci, the woman he knew as his mother who has been revealed to be his aunt. But the even bigger transgressor, he says, is his biological mother. “A whore!” (“A whoo-er!”) he calls her, the woman who became pregnant with him while unmarried and concealed it in order to avoid a scandal, which would have been just as bad for Paulie as for her.
But her sacrifices, or her rationalizations, don’t matter. The nature of Paulie’s biological mother’s motherhood has been newly, negatively, hyper-sexualized, and in the moment, he finds this intolerable. The humiliation of this reveal recalls, for me, the humiliation of standing in the receptionist area of the doctor’s office, appearing one way but indicating, with my very presence, the way that exists under my clothes—like a spotlight is on my pants and everyone is looking to see what it illuminates. The secret is out.
The simple fact of our bodies—as unmarried pregnant women or as transsexuals—become secrets because there are penalties for disclosing them. We exist prior to the secret, but our context makes us liars.
Paulie’s mother and aunt face negative repercussions for disclosing to Paulie the nature of his paternity, just as they would have faced negative repercussions for failing to conceal it in the first place, all the way back in 1942. What are the penalties for transsexuals disclosing the nature of our bodies to cis people who believe they should be able to comfortably assume that we don’t exist? There are many, have been many. I will narrow my focus to a single one*: that of Carlos Delacruz, a trans man who was arrested for raping two cis women after they learned—long after having had sexual relations with him—that he was transgender.
To begin with, a 2018 Newsweek headline: “Transgender Man Who Fooled Women With His Prosthetic Penis and Caused Them 'Extreme Pain' Jailed for Sexual Assault.” Delacruz pleaded guilty to “penetrating two women with an unknown object without their consent” after his trans status came to light following consensual sex with two cis partners. To these women, with whom he had romantic relationships, once-consensual sex with Delacruz became nonconsensual after they learned that he “lacked a biological penis.” One of his victims said she “suffered from flashbacks and panic attacks because of what Delacruz did,” while one of them reported she felt “dirty and used.”
From EdinboroughLive, later that year: “Victim of transgender sex attacker Carlos Delacruz slams the decision to release him from prison.” “The stunned victim,” the rag reports, “believes ‘justice has been taken away from us’ after she was told of the change in sentence.” She felt that the Scottish justice system, where the case took place, “failed her.”
Again, Delacruz did not assault either one of these women; consensual sex that took place between them was rendered nonconsensual after they learned that he did not have a penis permanently attached to his body—or rather, that he was not a cis man. Legally speaking, is the claim, “he didn’t have their consent to use an object to penetrate them.” Secondarily, both women noted that sex with him hurt and that it caused yeast infections after. Incidentally, I have had consensual sex that hurt and have had a yeast infection or two in my time. I wonder if his accusers would have considered their sex with Delacruz assault of it it hadn’t hurt or caused yeast infections; I wonder if they have ever had painful sex or sex that caused yeast infections with cis men.
Here’s one from The Daily Mail: “Transgender man with no penis who tricked two women during sex by using an unknown object while the lights were out is jailed for three years.” At first, I thought the awkward phrasing of “transgender man with no penis” served two purposes: 1) to emasculate the trans man in question and 2) to let the reader know that he has not had bottom surgery. Upon a third read, I realized that it’s more likely that “transgender man with no penis” is meant to clarify “transgender man,” which would read to most cis people, and particularly those who read The Daily Mail with any credulity, as a trans woman.
In this article, Delacruz is said to have “tricked” his partners by inserting an “unknown object” into their bodies, but later on in the copy, “unknown object” is replaced with “prosthetic penis.” Which is it, mystery meat or fake dick? Based on the lede, it could have been anything. Cucumber? Bottle? Knife? Hand? Who is to say?
I don’t doubt that the women who claim to have been assaulted by Delacruz feel that they were assaulted. I believe them when they say they feel “dirty and used.” I believe that they feel tricked. And I don’t think that matters. Contained in my belief that no one should go to jail ever—because prisons are bad, not because no one is ever violent or dangerous—is another: that no trans person should be imprisoned because they are trans, which is what this case boils down to.
Nowhere does the phrase “genital preference” appear in the coverage of Carlos Delacruz that I can find, but it’s there as subtext. To me, it’s a very obvious subtext, although it hasn’t always been so obvious to me. Knowing my own history, I would like to make it more obvious for other people, especially those who might look at the Delacruz case and wonder if his accusers might not have a point.
Until our third installment.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
*I became aware of the Carlos Delacruz case through Morgan M. Page, writer, artist, and trans historian who has created—among a good many other very impressive projects—One From The Vaults, a podcast about trans history that you should listen to!