This piece was written as a partner to A4066689

It is rather odd to know that there is no name for the kind of
sex that you are having. There are so many names for so many
different kinds of sex, many of them thought up by the Victorians,
but there is no term for having sex with or for being the partner of a transsexual. I find it amusing that the nearest term SOFFA*, implies that I am an article of furniture. It is strange to know that though I am straight, I am also queer*. I rather enjoy having sex that cannot be labeled and the freedom from the burden of expectation that it brings.

I never thought I'd be the sexual partner, main squeeze and
Significant - uh - Other, of a transsexual. Who would? I fell in
love with a Nice Young Man* at University, married,
settled down with a mortgage, 2.5 credit cards and an expectation
of children. I managed the apple pie, but not the motherhood. When my marriage ended I had the usual post-divorce flings, all with Nice Older Men, most of them enjoyably filthy, but I was older myself by then.

What is missing from that story, and what goes some way to
explain how I got to where I am now, is a long history of sexual
self-analysis, a one-night stand with a sex-kitten at University
and a sexuality flexible enough to admire women as well as men. I
never for one moment thought that 'made me' a lesbian. I considered myself to be a non-practicing bisexual, (as I think most people are, to be honest), but I chose not to label myself in that way. I mean, who
would actually want to annoy rugby-playing lesbians by
claiming locals' privileges after a one-stop visit?

As part of this self-analysis, I had read Jan Morris's
account of her sex change in the 1970s and various other books
about transsexuality and transgender including Ursula LeGuin's
'The Left Hand of Darkness'*. It would be crude to say that my
marriage put an end to my sexual self-analysis, but I did move in a direction that was clearly and very normally straight.

I knew he was a transsexual, of course. It may be that no-one
knows you are a dog on the internet, but the anonymity
encourages confession and he was, for a while at least, open
about his gender history. He was also interesting, funny and fun.
We'd spend hours on MSN chatting about life, the universe and,
well, everything. Sex was always part of our conversational
space. We'd sit 50 miles apart, watching shows like The A-Z of
Sex, and predicting which sexual practice had been chosen for
which letter. We'd talked about his gender history, and which
operations he had had, and which ones he hadn't had. We talked
about orgasms. We talked about all sorts of other things of
course: politics, books, immigration, his plans to work as legal-
aid lawyer, options for my career. We were, quite clearly and
despite the age difference, friends. The friendship had moved
from I-space to R-space as well. I liked him and his flat-mate;
they were very nicely brought up young men. Despite being queer
as coots, bless 'em both.

During one of these late night MSN sessions he showed me some
pornography that had disturbed him. There are few stated pictures
of female to male transsexuals in circulation, and only two
photographers are regularly photographing nude
FtMs*. Loren
Cameron does arty photos, documenting FtMs in the informed and
stylised way that Richard Mapplethorpe documented homosexuals in
the 1970s. However there is one female to male transsexual who produces transgender porn. He is buff, he is fit, he is muscled like a bloke from the waist up and the hip down. The contradiction of his masculinity was in the middle. I found the photographs compelling: I was intrigued by such an explicitly mixed message.

My friend, on the other hand, was grossed out. He found them
disgusting, disturbing, and repellant, and this was the point that
I realised that he was not as healthily sorted in his attitude to
his body and his gender situation as he appeared to be. What upset me the most was when he calmly said that no straight woman would ever want to have sex with him. I thought he was right to be wary of the fetishists whose particular kink is transsexuals and never mind the person they are screwing, but I knew it was untrue that no straight woman would ever want to sleep with him. I knew that there are women out there who consider themselves straight whose sexuality is flexible enough to enjoy sleeping with someone who happens to be a transsexual, and not just for the sake of the t-shirt*. I knew it, because I was one of them.

The question which scrolls like a marquee from a badly designed
website behind the eyes of some of the few people who know is,
quite clearly, blatently, obviously and hilariously, the Willie
Question. "So how many operations has he had?" the more diplomaticly curious ones ask. He hasn't had the operation they are asking about. "So you don't have sex, then?" they say. Well, yes, we do: it is an astonishingly sexual relationship. "But, I mean, it's just
foreplay," they say.

Hmmmm...

I find it fascinating how much people's reactions to the
thought of our sex life expose their views, and even their
experience, of sex. There is so much more to sex than "push the
piston into the cylinder and repeat until well lubricated". There
are clitoral orgasms for a start*, and it is a treat to be with
someone who knows how, because he has one. Cervical orgasms are harder of course, but there is always the G-Spot. The lack of labels actually helps: we are free to explore the sexual space that we share without dragging our previous histories along with us like invisible critical voyeurs.

What I find more concerning is the assumption that, without
external tackle, my partner is obviously not a real man. I've
never seen him eating quiche and he is as blokey as they make
them. But it seems that almost everyone thinks that a penis, any
penis, any vaguely penis-like thing, is an essential part
of masculinity. That is something I do find disturbing.

There are many reasons why men have phalloplasties: even I envy the ability to pee standing up; then there are the subtler and more undermining fears about swimming, getting changed at the gym and using public toilets without being found out*. There is a difference between transgender, which is about how society treats you, and transsexuality, which is about your own body, and for FtM transsexuals a phalloplasty is the final completion of themselves.

However I did not believe that an improved sex life is a reason for a phalloplasty, and now I know it. A phalloplasty is not something to be undertaken lightly. It involves at least three operations, and will take a matter of months or years. Skin and flesh is taken from the left arm, if the man is right-handed, or from the lower abdomen, and used to build the penis. Sexual function is maintained as well as possible, though sometimes the existing clitoris is incorporated into the new penis. The exact methods used for creating a scrotal sack, for redirecting the urethea and for creating a glans vary from patient to patient and from surgeon to surgeon. The results vary too, and many men like their phalloplasties. But equally, many do not. Not all partners of transsexuals feel as I do, and many like their partner's new genitals because of the pleasure they give and because they are part and parcel of the man they love. However that amount of surgery will inevitably damage sexual function, and the result is, well, not the same.

Maybe it is because I am a fellatrice that I find the thought
of a cobbled together pseudo-penis upsetting. I guess if your
view of sex is that it is something that happens "down there",
that all that counts is pushing the piston into the cylinder, then
a phalloplasty might be sexually necessary. But that is, surely, a diturbingly mechanical view of sex? You see, I know how penises work. I delight in the different textures of skin. I enjoy the attention to detail involved in performing oral sex and the amount of concentration and control that it requires. To be honest, I prefer to play with a fully functional set of XX-chromosome genitalia, even if they are giving pleasure to a male partner. I take the view that everyone's genitals are pretty odd anyway, and that statistical rareness cannot in fact make them much odder.

So there you are. Here we are. An odd couple, having sex
which defies labels. The strangest thing about our situation is
that we can't out one of us without outing both of us. He doesn't
want to be out in his professional life: in is safer than out.
It makes it an oddly isolating experience having a relationship
with him. People know that we are a couple of course, but I have
learned to be cautious about telling people much more than that.

One of the reasons for writing this piece is that we are both
politically aware enough to wonder to what extent our silence is a
betrayal of those young men who are looking at their growing
breasts with horror, alienation and despair. Another is to ask questions about the extent to which our society's view of straight sex and of masculinity is coloured by phallocentricity. My final purpose is to encourage FtMs who are considering phalloplasties to consider them carefully: unlike the mastectomies, this is a private procedure, with private consequences.

This is not to minimise just how hard it is to be a
transsexual, and just how hard it is to get a partner. You cannot
just go and buy a soffa from DFS. And I am lucky. I have never been
bashed because I am queer.

Related BBC Links

• 
  If you have any wonders, ponders or vague interest in the different ways that sexuality is viewed, check out A543818 for links and explanations to various sexual labels and the ways they have changed throughout history.

• 
  For information specifically about transsexuality, look no further than A830413 which will hopefully answer all your questions.