Note: this article discusses consensual sex and uses examples of types of sex but does not have detailed descriptions.
In the US, mainstream culture has a confusing relationship to sex. On one side, there’s pressure for everyone to want sex and to be sexual. On the other there’s an intense pressure for “purity” and a lot of shame around sex and desire that is taught to everyone. For example, sex between monogamous straight, cisgender people is regularly depicted and normalized in popular culture, while other forms of sex are often considered taboo. On top of that are pressures and stereotypes around gender and race related to sex, which are super racist as well as just flat out inaccurate.
In Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, Sherronda Brown describes the “widely held belief that Black people are given to excess and have poor impulse control concerning both sex and food, a myth that continues to inform anti-Black and anti-fat attitudes and policies. In this way, and many others, purity culture and diet culture are indeed siblings. They are the offspring of colonialism and capitalism, and shame is integral to them both.”
Add to that all the contradictions in expectations around how we relate to sex, and, well, there’s no way to meet all the demands on us.
While it may feel like sex is everywhere, open and honest conversations about sex are fairly rare.
I’ve been reading lots of books about relationships, sex, and not having relationships or sex. At Creating Change, the largest LGBTQIA+ conference in the United States, I went to an incredible workshop on intimacy and disability, which had a big focus on sexual intimacy.
For many trans/nonbinary people, sex has been complicated at some point in our lives. Maybe we’ve experienced sexual violence. Most of us, statistically, have experienced sexual harassment and/or assault of some kind. Our relationships to our bodies, due to trauma or gender or illness/disability, or any number of other things, can impact our relationship to sex. And not all of us experience sexual desire – though we’ve probably all been told that we’re supposed to.
At the same time, many trans/nonbinary people find new forms of connection and pleasure as we heal from violence or get to live as ourselves.
Comfort with our bodies, our desires, other people’s bodies, other people’s desires – all can take time. This is by no means a comprehensive guide to healing all things sexual in our lives. Instead, I want to highlight a few concepts that I have found especially interesting or useful. I call this my “what you might talk about in sex therapy” list.
Note: Sex therapy is a type of therapy that focuses on sex and relationships. Some people go with a sexual partner, some people go solo. There are lots of different styles of therapy and different focus areas, but it’s generally meant to help with things that are not feeling okay about your relationship to sex. This blog is by no means therapy!
Along with these topics, I’ve also included journal prompts to explore as you read, to reflect on your own relationships with sex and sexuality.
1. Spontaneous vs responsive desire
To be very clear, not all people experience sexual desire – and that is 100% okay! Lots of people are asexual. Asexual people have varying relationships to sexual attraction, desire for sex, and the thought of sex. For folks who do experience desire, the experience can change over our lifetime.
While there are many types of desire, two types are often discussed in sex therapy or with regards to understanding our sexualities – spontaneous and responsive desire. Spontaneous desire is desire that happens without physical stimulus. For example, someone might have a random thought about sex or they might see someone they think is attractive and feel turned on.
Responsive desire is more of a response to a situation – it can be an openness to see where an experience leads. Responsive desire may look like someone feeling in the mood for sex after they’ve been making out or sharing a bubble bath or another intimate experience.
Neither type of desire is better than the other, though responsive desire is often less represented and less valued in mainstream US society (and further, these are not the only types of desire). Many people may only ever experience responsive desire. Others may experience a shift from spontaneous to responsive desire (or the other way around) during a relationship, as they age, or after major life changes, like having children or transitioning.
We may also be challenged by our own assumptions of what desire we “should” experience as well as societal pressure to feel or express a certain type of desire. For example, Sherronda Brown writes extensively of the racist stereotypes of Black people, “how sexually available we should be, and how we allegedly use sex irresponsibly and immorally, and therefore do not deserve to have autonomous sexual desires. Meanwhile, others are free to project their own desires onto us.”
As a side note (to be discussed in detail some other time), there are really great and helpful conversations in Ace (Asexual) communities about consent and different types of desire. The commonly used FRIES model of consent (Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific) can be too simplistic for some folks, particularly the “enthusiastic” portion. The book Ace discusses this more in-depth.
Journal prompt:
What is my relationship to sexual desire? How has that changed over my lifetime or over the course of a relationship?
Do other people or society expect me to behave in a certain way (sexually)? If so, how does that influence my feelings or behaviors?
2. Changing understandings of what sex is
Sex is not limited to activities that lead to orgasm. Sex is not limited to putting one body part into another body part. Each of us gets to define sex for ourselves.
For many queer and/or trans people, what we consider to be sex changes over our lifetime. Perhaps we were brought up with a very limited definition of sex. Consider how many people will have anal or oral sex but still say they have not had sex or are a virgin, while other people exclusively have those forms of sex and do not think of themselves as virgins. Many of these assumptions are based on the idea that heterosexuality is the norm (and within that that there’s only one “right” way to have sex), ignoring the ways that many queer and trans people have sex.
Often times as we learn about our bodies and our sexualities, our view of what sex is can change. I can’t count the number of people I know who consider some things sex now that they didn’t consider to be sex in the past.
Sometimes we don’t even agree with the person we are intimate with if an activity is sex or not. At best, this can be funny, like when we can’t count the number of people we have had sex with – because well, what counts? It can be liberating to realize that we can define things for ourselves. But it can also be confusing and complicated.
In terms of healing, I find this useful because it helps to take away the pressure for sex to be a certain thing. This concept can help us to broaden the activities that we consider to be sexual or intimate for ourselves in the future. It can help us reduce pressure for anyone involved to orgasm or have a specific experience during sexual activities. It can give us permission to explore and to focus more on what we want, what we like, what we’re curious about, rather than what’s expected of us.
There is also a layer of this that delves into sexual violence. Many people who support survivors are quick to say, “rape is not sex.” Survivors often have more complicated relationships to the assaults we have experienced. Perhaps we had consensual sex with someone who is abusive or who was violent afterwards. Perhaps we don’t feel ready to label what happened as an assault, but also know it wasn’t consensual. Perhaps our first experience of a specific act was violent. Survivors get to decide what they call what has been done to them and whether they speak of it at all.
(Note: sex therapy may also be a place that people talk about traumatic experiences, trauma reminders, and healing.)
Journal prompt:
What pressures do I put on myself when I think of having sex?
How do these impact me? What happens when I don’t meet my own expectations?
3. Mediocre sex/what to do about high expectations
Not only do we often get taught that sex must be a certain type of activity, but there are also a lot of pressures to be, act, and feel a certain way during it. Often this is pressure to be “good” at sex, to be talented, creative, adventurous, or the like.
Sometimes the pressure is to not want sex – often purity culture teaches that certain people should not have much sexual desire and shouldn’t initiate. Other people get taught they should always be the one to initiate. These lessons are rarely about what an individual actually wants, and more often are connected to stereotypes and assumptions about gender, race, religion, etc. For example, people who are (or are assumed to be) tops are stereotyped to initiate more, as are people who are butch or masculine (and often people who are masculine are assumed to be tops).
There can be a lot of freedom in finding out what we find sexy, if anything, and getting comfortable with our bodies and the bodies of others in ways that help us to have really pleasurable sex. I find that there’s also a lot of freedom in letting go of the assumption that sex will always be super hot. Sometimes sex is mediocre. Sometimes it’s awkward. Sometimes we get bored or hungry or have a headache in the middle and stop.
All of that is okay! We might laugh, cry, fart, or get distracted. Sometimes we don’t want a long, elaborate sexual scene that fulfills all of our kinky desires. Sometimes we just want five minutes of touching. Again, that’s okay! By giving ourselves permission to not be good at something, to do something badly or mediocrely, we often give ourselves permission to have more fun.
To be clear – the mediocre or bad sex in this case is still consensual. Being okay with mediocre sex does not mean that we can’t stop or change something if it hurts (in a bad way) or isn’t a feeling/experience we want to have.
Journal prompt:
When was the last time I did something “awkward” during sex? What was that like?
Has there been a time when I felt okay about not doing my best at something? What was that experience like?
4. Rethinking our assumptions about what body parts do and what they are “for”
Our bodies change throughout our lives. They can change even more if we have surgical procedures or based on the medications we take. Change is normal. Where blood flows, what parts create their own lubrication, how stretchy our skin is, all these things change. How much energy we have, how bendy or flexible we are, what positions we can stand, sit, lie in and for how long change too. This means that what sort of activities our bodies are physically able to do changes, and so does our interest in what we do with our bodies. Trans people have higher rates of disabilities than cis folks do, so I am really serious about looking at all the ways bodies change!
This feels really obvious every time I say it, yet I still see so much pressure for us to keep our bodies the same. I constantly see people talking about wishing they could wear clothes they wore twenty years ago or being able to hike or party or stay up late, like we could thirty years ago. But our bodies change.
Once I start to honor that fact, I can be way more comfortable with the fact that the sex we have changes too. Maybe we start to like something different than we used to or with different people. Maybe we still like the same thing, but our body is less up for it. That’s normal. It’s okay. If it’s okay, rather than feeling shame about it, we can get creative to experience our desires.
Maybe it’s using toys, props, or other accessories to engage in an activity that our body doesn’t do on its own. Maybe it’s asking to try something different with people we are intimate with. Maybe it’s dating or having sex with different people. Some people find it useful to explore dating different genders or people with different sexual interests or introducing monogamy or nonmongamy into our lives.
By opening ourselves up to changes in our patterns, we may be able to embrace or learn about the changes in our interests. Whatever it is, it can be really helpful to lift the pressure on ourselves to be able to do the same things we have always done.
Journaling prompt:
How has my body changed over my lifetime? Are there changes I feel good about? Are there changes I feel bad about?
How do my feelings about my body impact my sexuality?
5. Shame
Oof, shame is a big one. Shame impacts so many aspects of our lives. Shame tells us that we are bad or wrong (different than guilt, which tells us our actions were harmful). Shame can be contradictory – we might have shame both for having sexual desire and for not having enough of it, or shame for having sex and shame for not being “good” at sex.
I greatly appreciated Dr. Devon Price’s Unlearning Shame that calls for radical self-acceptance and connectivity as part of changing our shame-based culture.
One step I find useful is starting to recognize and name shame when it shows up. Unlearning shame can be a long, winding process. Recognizing shame can be too, honestly. Still, it’s a start, and lower pressure than unlearning a lifetime of stuff. You could even name it out loud to yourself or others. Try something like, “Oh look, there’s shame!” or “Hi shame, way to make me feel weird after sex.” Or even, “Hey, person I had sex with, I’m feeling a lot of shame, can we just cuddle while I let this pass?”
Journaling prompt:
What’s one thing you want to ask for but haven’t? What is holding you back? What could you do to move closer towards asking for what you want?
Conclusion
All of us have been taught messages about sex, sexuality, bodies, and gender. Some of those will be affirming and empowering messages, and some of them will be hateful, shameful, racist, or homophobic messages. Often we’ve gotten a mix of each. Sexual healing and liberation is ongoing work for many of us. The above is just an introduction to a few concepts that might be helpful as we navigate our lives.
Resources
Unlearning Shame by Dr. Devon Price
Love in a F*cked Up World by Dean Spade
Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Approaches by Lucie Fielding
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown