juleenatee

I am a heterosexual submissive transwoman named Julie, and one of the several categories for which the modern term is sissy.  That means as a transwoman I am primarily attracted to men and am submissive to them, though I also enjoy other transwomen.  I am however bigender because I do not want to give up the societal advantages of being male to earn a living.  It took me a long time to figure these things out and realize I was not bisexual.  As a transwoman, I am ideally looking for long-term but occasional relationship with a mostly heterosexual man, ideally as his mistress.  I want to make a man really happy because I'll do things for him that most wives will not.  I will appear to him and behave for him as close to his ideal female partner as I can.

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The one essential book every transwoman should read is Whipping Girl: A Transexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano, now in its third edition (Seal Press, 2024).  This is a detailed analysis of what it means to be a transwoman and the obstacles we face.  It is important to note on this site that the title does not refer to masochism but to the frequent scapegoating of transwomen in the media as a threat to society.  Serano's argument is that transwomen are demonized because of the rampant misogyny of Western society, where any feminine traits are denigrated, and any masculinity, including the toxic masculinity of cultural conservatives, is privileged. Even some feminists are anti-feminine, not realizing that is probably because they have transmen tendencies.  Part of this "transmisogyny" is also the mistaken notion that male and female are opposites ("oppositional sexism") with nothing in between, and part of it is due to the mistaken belief that your birth gender cannot be changed.  But as the book points out, many men have some feminine traits and many women have some masculine traits.  The book also notes that we constantly unconsciously judge people as male or female based on just a few characteristics without every seeing their genitals or their chromosones, so a person's sex in society is not based on their genetics or organs.

The third edition has many good rejoinders to current antitrans-hysteria, notably in the new last chapter.  3% of men and 3% of women appear to have some trans tendencies.  Gender-affirming medical care such as hormones and surgeries for trans people has a low rate of regret, around 1%, whereas similar interventions for nontrans people such as breast augmentation and reduction or hormone supplementation have a regret rate of 14%.  Puberty-blocking medications have been used for years for nontrans children with hormone defects, with no ill effects or inabilty to reverse them.  Trans children who have been denied gender-affirming care have a 14 times higher suicide rate than other children.  Trans children appear in families at the same rate independent of the degree of trans support in their families, so there is no "social contagion" with trans tendencies.  There are more self-identified trans people today than in the past, but that is because society has become more welcoming.  Trans people show no evidence of being sexual predators, any more than women who dress well are sexual predators: Marginalized groups (think blacks) are often hyper-sexualized in the media.  As for "bathroom bills", I find it amusing that the current policy for U.S. government buildings which says that people must use the bathroom of their birth sex, in the avowed goal of protecting women from perverts, forces transmen to go to female bathrooms no matter how much facial hair they have -- something that will make women pretty uncomfortable.  But forcing us transwomen to go to male bathrooms in full drag will not be bad -- men are terrifically scared to look at other men in a bathroom, much less men wearing dresses, for the danger of being throught gay.

A weakness of Serano's book is that she sticks to her own perspective as a lesbian transwoman, and doesn't have much to say about transmen.  She also doesn't sound sympathetic to us sissies; she says tranwomen are "fierce" and not passive.  But of course being passive is not necessarily feminine, and could be just reflect to the long oppression of women (as with other minorities) by society.  We need more books on other kinds of trans people.  But for now, Serano's book is important reading.

Another essential book for many people on this site is Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberence: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, St. Martin's Press, 1999.  I'll bet many of you didn't know so many animals were gay and lesbian; relationships with one male and one female are not all that common among most mammals and birds.  There are lots of rapes in some species (like mallard ducks), something of interest to BDSM people.  There are also a few transgenders among animals, either those looking like neither sex (like velvet-horn whitetail deer), or those just behaving like the opposite sex (like a class of male bighorn sheep that act like females and hang out with females all the time -- but don't have sex with the females).  I found it funny that PBS lin 2024 broadast a Ken Burns 6-hour documentary on preservation of bison, but didn't have time to once mention that male bison are primarily gay, something many native Americans knew but European settlers never figured out.  Since the documentary focused on efforts to preseve herds starting in the late 19th century, putting all the males and females together in one herd as was often done doesn't work too well when most males are gay almost all the time. 

I heartily recommend the second edition (2016) of Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein (Vintage Books), original edition 1994.  Things have changed a lot in 22 years and she's done a good job of modernizing the book, notably in terminology.  She comes across as a cranky but smart grandmother to all us transwomen, and she's not afraid to criticize internal divisiveness among trans people.  "Would you like to meet other people who feel the same way as you do about gender?" Well sure, I've met a lot on great people on this site.  And after a somewhat difficult life, Julie knows who she is, and is happy with it.