In the entire time I’ve been with the CSPC, I’ve been privileged to be a part of one of the most accepting and loving communities I’ve ever interacted with. I’ve made friends, had fun with many partners, and most importantly learned more about myself. But with all that, I have definitely noticed a lack of knowledge among a lot of members in our community towards the LGBTQIA community. I hope that through my writing, I can help better inform our community about the trans community. We are a small minority of a minority in the world, and as such, it’s important for trans people like me to get their stories out. I think the best place to start, is the most personal to me, and the one I know the most about.

I fully came out as trans less than a year ago, and started Hormone Replacement Therapy a few months after that. One of the biggest changes I was forced to undergo was a complete overhaul of how I experienced my sexuality. When I identified as a Cis-Man (Cis referring to comfortable in one’s assigned gender) my sexual interests were blunt. Everything was in service to reaching the finish line, getting my rocks off, and moving on. While foreplay was something I occasionally engaged in, it was never the part of sex I was looking forward to, and despite this being what my brain saw sex as, I was never satisfied mentally with this routine. It was as if two separate people were warring in my mind, and this resulted in constant sexual frustration. 

This completely changed as I underwent my hormone therapy. As my testosterone was blocked out and estrogen began to take more and more control, I began craving so much more from sex, and very little of it involved the previous vanilla acts I was used to. I became a cuddle bunny, completely enamored with the idea of simply snuggling up with someone. I began finding more sexual satisfaction from pleasing my partners rather than receiving. However, it wasn’t until I was able to work up the courage to attend my first CSPC party that I really began becoming in tune with my sexuality. 

As I got deeper in the kink community, I found myself enjoying kinks I never thought I would be into. I found I liked impact play. I found I liked rope. I found I liked getting talked down to, and I still often find more to like as I continue attending events. But why has all of this become such a major part of my life? Many reasons are ones that I share with those I’ve spoken to in the broader kink community, such as having the ability to safely relinquish control during a rope scene, bringing much needed relief from a life routine full of important decision making. Impact play giving me an avenue to use aggression and receive aggression in a way that is fully consensual for all parties. However, there’s several reasons unique to my experience as a transwoman that led me to this lifestyle.

When my sexuality started fluxing, I found myself in deeper conflict with myself than I had before HRT. I was finally able to begin expressing my true self, but I also found that sex had become a much more complicated endeavor. From birth, the vast majority of us are expected to follow very strict gender guidelines. “Girls do this, boys do that” and that extends to sex. The stereotypes I was raised with was that men are supposed to be the dominant one in bed, and women the passive. Now obviously this doesn’t account for the non-binary folks, but societal norms only recently have begun adapting to the reality of the gender spectrum. 

I found myself struggling with my identity constantly. I’m a switch, I love being on both ends of most scenes, but I found that I was massively uncomfortable any time I was assuming a dominant role. I felt as if I was betraying myself, “reverting” to before I had come out, and that my partner was not seeing me as a woman. I was in a monogamous relationship at the time, and my insecurities were increased tenfold by the fact that my partner had known me as a man for 8 years. Finding the kink community offered me a safe space to both confront my insecurities and embrace my sexuality in full. I got to be with people who met me and knew me first and foremost as a woman. It was an amazingly validating experience, but even when I first joined the CSPC, I mostly stuck to vanilla experiences. While these experiences were fun in their own right, I would still find myself regretting taking a dominant role, and having those negative feelings bubble back up. 

My first true kink experience was being able to act as a rope sub for an experienced dom, and even in the short time we spent together, something crucial happened that finally brought me some degree of peace with my sexuality. In being rendered immobile and vulnerable to this person, I finally felt my womanhood become one with my sexuality and I decided to even further immerse myself in kink. I found myself enjoying impact play soon after, something I had never thought I would even try, let alone like, and I was even able to dominate without my dysphoria peaking sinisterly around the corner. Being able to engage in a sexual act that did not involve my genitals completely altered my perspective on my sexuality, in a much needed way. I was finally able to embrace my womanhood through my sexuality, see both sides of my desires, those of a dom and a sub as equally an unequivocally female. My evolution of sorts, culminated in a particularly great night where I fully dominated someone, getting to scratch them, spank them, order them to fulfill my urges, and came out feeling like a valid woman.

Kink is more than just a fun past time. It most certainly is that, but for many of us, it offers so much emotional release, bonding experiences, or any number of other things. For me, it offered me a chance to finally come into my own sexuality as a woman. To embrace who I am, and to not let the various societal biases I was raised with prevent myself from achieving happiness. This extended beyond just the sexual realm, I also became more confident in my daily life, with feelings of “betraying my womanhood” by showing my assertive side largely erased. I can’t speak for anyone else but myself, but from the trans people I have met in my sexual misadventures, a common story is how kink played a great role in allowing them to feel at peace with their identity.