David Davis XVII, Part 3
On genital preference
Donald Moffett, Lot 080820 (open red), 2020
Why am I even writing about genital preference?
For one thing, I don’t date the kind of people whose genital preferences would exclude me—I’m lucky not to be cursed with an affinity for uglies. And in case you think this series is a crusade to convince the fabled ~98% of straight people who don’t want to date trans people to reconsider, well, I certainly don’t want to date anyone who thinks dating someone like me is gross. I want even less to date an admitted heterosexual.
In any case, whereas a few recent studies have indicated that a very small number of straight people will admit to being open to dating trans people, rest assured that all of them want to fuck us. We know from experience that “genital preference” has nothing to do with sexual desire. If straight people want to fuck me—and they do, very much—it’s because of my genitalia. Being in a romantic relationship with me, of course, would most likely be another matter, but that’s fair enough. Like I said, I have a strict no-uglies policy to uphold.
I used to believe that “genital preference,” as shorthand for a discourse about fucking trans people, was not necessarily a euphemism for transphobia, and that is so very sad to me now. If you are a trans person who shares that uncertainty, I hope this series can help you articulate why “genital preference” rightfully sets off alarm bells, as other trans people did for me. This series is not for cis edification, although cis people are welcome to it if they find it here.
Still, just to head off any ungenerous takes: If you don’t want to have sex with someone because their genital configuration is not pleasing to you, I do not care. That’s your business. Knowing what you want is how you get what you want. Preferences are not just unavoidable, but good. I happen to have some of my own, as types, like mean femmes with long acrylics, stern motherers, trashy girls, dopey boy bottoms, clever faggots; as features, like pretty feet, fat asses, dark hair; as activities, like fisting my hot girlfriend. I’m not immune to a tall, clean straight man being kind to a child on the C train. I mean, who is? To insist that someone else abandon their preferences would make about as much sense as asking me to stop being horny for low-affect sadists with control issues, and would be about as useless. We can’t change what we’re drawn to, at least not through force of will alone, and fantasies aren’t prescriptive anyway.
But preference per se is different than “genital preference” as it’s deployed by cis people (and occasionally self-loathing trans people) who use it as a cowardly and frankly stupid means of dismissing intimacy with trans people. “Genital preference” only makes sense if trans and cis people, including intersex people, all have predictable, standard, and distinct genitalia. The problem with that is that none of us do. Not only is biological sex constructed from naturally diverse human variation, but our genitals undergo changes throughout our lives caused not just by transsexual surgeries and HRT, but injury and illness, “natural” and “unnatural” hormonal shifts, pregnancy and birth, not to mention aesthetic modifications, from the permanent—like piercings—to the temporary—like dildos and toys, packers, and tucking. You can’t look at a trans person and know what their genitals look and behave like any more than you can for a cis person. Cis people who take “genital preference” seriously are pretending that our bodies are weirder than theirs.
The interesting thing about deconstructing “genital preference” is that you can’t fail to acknowledge that genital preference, broadly speaking, is very real. It’s not only cis people that have preferences for the genitals they have sex with, and the genitals in question aren’t only those belonging to trans people. Straight cis people want the genitals of their partners to be that of the “opposite” sex. People who want to get fucked with penises tend to value bigger ones, with the racialization of penis size being one of many ways that “genital preference” can play out for people of color (“gender is only truly accessible for white people”). And then of course straight men men are on record as having all manner of ideas about what women have between their legs, which I don’t need to reproduce for you here.
But “genital preference” is not genital preference. It’s a distinct concept that functions as an easy out for (typically cis) people who don’t want to be accountable to their own desires, and while this comes standard from straights, it’s definitely a problem among cis queer people, too, which is a pity. By necessity queer people must communicate more and better about how we fuck—that goes double for leatherqueers—which in part accounts the lip service about better consent practices among our subcultures. This should be the norm for everyone, because pleasure is specific and unique.
When it comes to the silliness of “genital preference,” it’s easy to dismiss cis people, who as a group are famously unable to even correctly identify their own genders. It’s harder with other trans people. Someone that I presumed to be trans and who I was arguing about this issue with on Twitter (lol) wanted to know how I squared my stance on “genital preference” with informed consent. My response was a variation on this: What’s the difference between private and secret? Personal and public? My body and your deceit?
I didn’t dig into informed consent there, which a little light googling shows me is a concept that dates back medico-legal contexts in the 1950s. Contemporary legal and ethical standards of meaningful permission from a medical patient to receive care requires informed consent, or clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and consequences of said care. I thought that was a telling if illogical deployment, in keeping with the transliteration of medical, legal, professional, capitalist terms—gatekeeping, gaslighting, validation—into queer life.
“Gender preference” exists on the same field as gender fraud, of which Carlos Delacruz, the stealth trans man who was recently convicted of rape for having consensual sex with cis women, is only a single victim. In “Trans men’s stealth aesthetics: navigating penile prosthetics and ‘gender fraud,’” which I had on PDF but which I now can’t access, Chris Straayer argues that, “For some trans men, the phenomenologically incorporated prosthetic is tantamount to a corporeal penis.” I don’t know how Delacruz feels about his body as a stealth trans man whose identity is complicated by the perceptions, and so-called preferences, of his sexual partners, but one might guess that this is the case for him.
“Genital preference” is for cis people who believe they have a right to live in a world without trans people. Is it a lie to exist while they assume as much? Is it a secret to have a body that they have not yet dehumanized? Is it deceit to fuck the way I fuck, without having to explain it to someone who doesn’t even know enough to wonder what I might mean when I say, “cock?”
As I asked in the last entry, who is to say what constitutes the prosthesis, the cock, the body, the self? We should be able to say as much about ourselves, if nothing else.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.