My brother is having a baby because his body just does that. Our mom said he said he’s “always wanted to be a dad” and that he and his fiancé just “stopped trying to prevent it.” But I’ve never heard him say that in my life.
My girlfriend at the time of my niece’s conception has a massive breeding kink and begs me to cum inside her even though she’s not on birth control, even though we aren’t using a condom, even though she’s never done this before. She’s not on birth control and we aren’t using a condom, because we’re both transgender and nothing we do together in bed could ever generate a human life. Also we’ve done this a million times before. But I fuck her with my fingers or a strap-on, and I swear I’m putting a baby in her. I work my Acting BFA raw—really sell it. It drives her crazy every time. She cries at babies when we see them at the grocery store or the park. I think she wishes we could do what my brother and his fiancé did. Just…slip and wind up parents. Partake in the glorious accident of creation.
There’s this picture of my dad I look at when I need to feel unconditionally loved. He’s lying on the sofa horizontal, low-slung, his neck at an absurd angle so as not to disturb my sprawling slumber. He looks like a baby himself, silky golden hair splayed across his pristine forehead, hand skin taught, forearms free from the freckling of a life. He’s holding a book; I can’t tell if it’s a parenting tome or something he would’ve been reading for business school. I was born on his first day. He loves to tell the story of his run-in with the bursar who was so enraged by his absence, then so charmed by his excuse (the baby, me). In my memory he’s holding the book upside down. We’re both sleeping—he, vaguely maintaining the posture of fatherhood, scholarship, alertness—I, blissfully unaware, passed out on his chest, an un-self-conscious little worm. We both look like angels. He’s younger than I am now. My mom always describes him as being so sure he wanted me. “As soon as possible,” she says. I could never tell if this meant she felt pressured, but I’m beginning to understand why he felt so certain about becoming a father.
There’s another photo, this one wallet-size, I can barely conjure in my mind’s eye, but I know my father’s father is wearing a flight suit and he has the haircut I keep now—regulation, high and tight, masculine, practical. He went down in a U.S. Air Force plane when my dad was a toddler. Having witnessed his mother endure a profound loneliness, getting it in his lungs and belly early, sealing it in as a family value, my dad must contain a molecular imperative to complete himself. To close the gap of that love and mentorship towards manhood he never received. He must’ve passed it on to me.
Breeding Kink Girl and I have a heart-wrenching breakup. I thought she was the woman I was going to marry, probably because she was the first woman I dated after realizing, once all my hormones and traumas were sorted, that I am and always have been a red-blooded heterosexual man. I’m trying to use my singleness as an opportunity to explore at 32 instead of feeling so behind everyone else that I wish I were dead. I fly to Oregon to meet my niece. As I hold my brother’s baby to my own flat chest (she screams to indicate she prefers breasts—too late, queen) I wonder if my anxious, transgender body is giving her the same comfort I imagine absorbing through the rhythm of my dad’s breathing in that photo. I wonder if being a father would complete some unfinished ancestral identity-trauma puzzle in me, or if my brother closing that loop is sufficient and I’m just here to fulfill my ancestors’ wildest dreams of writing auto-smut and performing live for applause.
At dinner one night in Oregon, my brother tells me he’s researching our paternal grandfather’s death. Our dad understandably doesn’t like to talk about it, so we’ve been privy to very few details. My brother has a hypothesis that goes something like this: Grandpa is stationed in Vietnam with the Air Force. The U.S. government has a secret side-agenda to support the radical communist overthrow of the Cambodian government (ultimately leading to the genocide of nearly 2 million people). Grandpa is tapped to secretly drop bombs over Cambodia (we know for a fact he was later questioned as part of an investigation of these carpet-bombings). Grandpa, guilty or not of following ill-intentioned orders, is politically assassinated under the guise of a random plane malfunction to protect classified information from reaching civilian families.
I fly back to New York. My brother sends me photos—Grandpa standing in front of the Officers’ Club with his squadron, fighter planes flying formation; documentaries; Robert H. Lieberman’s Angkor Awakens; archival pages from the Air Force internet; USAF, 602nd ACS, BienHoa, Oct. 1964-Jun. 1965. I sit in my Brooklyn apartment and toggle and swipe and text on girls. As many girls as I can think of. I download all the apps, message all the insta-hotties I’ve been banking in a dusty corner of my brain and ask them out. I make dates with friends of friends. I buy a 22-year-old choreographer a pickleback and kiss her after the dance show. Her piece is set to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which reminds me of my dad and makes me get all misty. She has hairy armpits and two pronouns, so I’m not sure if they’ll be hot for the same gender games as me, but as the night wears on I have fun captivating them against the tide of their cute roommate’s advances. I ask Choreo Girl if the two of them are in love and she says “I don’t know…it’s a bad idea, right?” which would make me want to die if my future wife were saying it, but I’m not supposed to care about that sort of thing right now. Or am I? My brother’s fiancé told me if I’m serious about finding a wife I need to not waste time dating people I know aren’t going to be good in that role. This dietician in a sleepy beach town on the Oregon coast told me to be a better fucking casting director of my own girlies.
As my little brother, now practically my twin (our dad can’t tell us apart on the phone since my voice changed), spends his paternity leave scouring the web for answers about our paternal lineage, I’m spiraling, desperate to make a connection with someone ASAP who can reinforce my masculinity in that special way that gives me the will to live. I meet a girl at a Halloween party. She’s dressed as Barbie and arrives with a gaggle of other women—a girlypop high-femme girls’ girl. I’m dressed as After Top Surgery and my nonbinary best friend who still has tits is dressed as Before. Shirtless in an open hospital gown, fake blood dripping from my real scars, I sort of assume none of these cisgender heterosexual women will give me the time of day, but this one is intrigued. She asks at girl-decibel if she can take a picture of me and my friend to send to the one trans person she knows because they “would love it.” I return the favor by taking one of her and her friend (also Barbie), and we exchange numbers to text each other the party pics. As soon as she leaves, she’s texting me wishing she hadn’t. We make plans to meet up.
On our first date, she shows up late with a story about how a man was looking at her on the train so she had to get out and call a car. She’s wearing a bralette as a shirt and pays for all our drinks. She’s an uptown princess, an aspiring actress with no day job. I can’t wait to smear her perfect makeup and shove my tongue in her mouth. We dance till late. I drunkenly tell her there’s a dick in my tote bag. She laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard and asks if she can put that in her pilot.
The sex starts out good, if quiet. I’m kinky as hell, but shy at first. A byproduct of having lived most of my life as a “woman” and endured more than anyone’s fair share of sexual assaults is that I’m extremely sensitive to consent. I’ll wait to learn someone’s subtle cues before I go absolutely off treating them like a slutty baby who deserves to be punished. Keeping everything 95% vanilla, I make her cum like an animal in heat and she tells me, breathless and unprompted, that this is the best sex she’s ever had. Bolstered by the glow of a job well done, I start to loosen up. I give her a playful little slap in the face while she’s sucking me off, and she pops up, looking stunned. “I…don’t think I like that,” she tells me, wide-eyed. “Okay,” I reply matter-of-factly, and she returns to her endeavor. I cum eventually, delicately balancing my rabid pubescent sex drive with the pious intention of not doing anything else to shock her. I kind of can’t believe she’s letting me touch her at all. I’m new to dating women, and newer to being seen by everyone around me as a man, so I don’t have a ton of data about what sort of straight women I can have sex with, or what sort of man I come across as. So far, I’m pleasantly surprised.
A few weeks later I double-fist seeing Barbie in an industry workshop of a new musical and attending an audition a few blocks away. Walking through midtown on my way home, I wander into a gift shop and buy my niece an I <3 NY onesie. The shipping costs more than the outfit, but I want her to know I was thinking of her when she looks at her baby pictures, even if I don’t move across the country to watch her grow up. I want her to think my dreams are cool and noble, not that I’m a loser living on a prayer, my nude modeling side hustle, and the table scraps of her grandmother’s income. Speaking of, my mom quits her job and flies to Oregon for a month to be a full-time grandma. I feel like the world is moving on without me.
Barbie and I begin seeing each other a few times a week. She tells me she thinks she was wrong about the face-smacking thing. She wants me to try it again. Before I know it, she’s begging me to choke her, slap her, spank her harder. Orgasming all over my fingers-dick, her ample ass covered in my handprints. It turns out I’m an ambidextrous, multitasking legend. One day while she’s pleading with me to fuck her “to death,” I pull her towards me by a handful of her hair and whisper “say ‘please, Daddy’.” She giggles, her lips quivering but her tone cautiously indignant when she says “I’m not saying that.” Approximately 2 weeks and 12 orgasms later, the training wheels are off and she’s doing it all on her own—making Daddy proud.
It might seem ridiculous to you, reader, to hear a man compare queer kink to biological fatherhood, but I’m trepidatiously taking the stand in defense of duality. We are both becoming, my brother and I, on parallel but diverged paths. Who’s to say which is more legitimate, more profound? Why should I perceive my manhood as beneath his in some sort of hierarchy? Am I not excelling per the very metric by which masculinity is measured? The fear of being unlovable kept me from myself for decades, and now I’m drowning in grade-A hot girl pussy. How top-of-the-food-chain is that? How man-my-father’s-father-hoped-I’d-be? How unsettling is this dialectic?
I am at once a throbbing adolescent, relishing the spoils of my hard-earned standing in a society that rewards cravenness in boys, and an adult man with a nurturing streak yearning for a future where I’m a devoted husband, maybe even father. Pulling ahead on my hero’s journey, falling behind on the timeline of a life. Maybe my friends, my therapist, and my brother’s fiancé are right and I need to focus my efforts on the right kind of woman, but—I’m sorry—what does that even mean? Why can’t the mother of my future children like being choked during sex and read Jean-Paul Sartre? My ancestral wounds get healed by moving the needle of everyone’s gender toward eternity. Picking up and putting down tropes because we want to, not because they’re forced upon us.
Gender scholar Kate Bornstein says that even genders that seem the same can often, upon examination, contain a multitude of distinct subdivisions. Superman and Clark Kent, to use her example. Girl and woman. Madonna and whore. Fuckboy and father. Cis man and trans man. Although I’m (problematically) proud to pass as cisgender now, the gender gap between me and my brother can never truly be eclipsed. It has become smaller and smaller until almost imperceptible to the outside eye, but we know. He has a biological daughter. I have a sea of girls screaming my name. Perhaps, for now, that is my miracle of life.
Comments
Whoa, yikes.
How can you be both “extremely sensitive to consent” and then give your partner “a playful little slap in the face” *without discussing it first*?
If I had been your partner, I would have considered this a breach of trust. Consenting to sex doesn’t automatically mean consenting to kink. Yes, kink includes slapping.
Talk about this with your partners first smh.
Hi there, Barbie here.
Everything was consensual, including my experiences being talked about in this essay. I don’t consider this a breach of trust and I have never once felt unsafe!
Xoxo
Barbie girl
Submissive femme here…this is hot! People in the comments are being way too sensitive. The author is navigating consent in real time with a partner who is having fun, exciting new experiences. Y’all need to get off your high horses and read more Devon Price.
Alexandra, there are lots of people like you who would find that hot. That’s great! But there are also lots of people who would feel violated if their sexual partner did this to them without asking. Your experience is not universal, what you consent to is not necessarily what other people would consent to. Frankly, the author got lucky here. There are a lot of other people he could have hooked up with who would feel violated in that situation.
The last person anyone here needs to read more of is Devon “Your Trauma Response is Manipulative” Price.
You’re part of the problem then, Barbie.
I urge you and the writer (and the editors – but I’m not holding my breath for that as they tend to ignore women, anyway), to have a long, hard think about the ‘edgy’ messaging this article puts out into the world at large, because it’s hugely damaging to trans men, women, and ‘the queer community’ (which I don’t identify with due to problematic stances just like this, despite supposedly being part of it).
To spell it out for you, this article says that it’s OK for trans men to behave like the most toxic of cis men, that women get “confused” about consent (but they eventually come around, wink, wink), and women exist only to please and validate men’s identities (trans and cis).
If it was consensual then I suggest changing how it’s portrayed in the article, as it certainly doesn’t seem to be as written
Exactly. That’s part of the whole problem – the editors, and the fact that no one saw this messaging as problematic. It shouldn’t be surprising though, sadly.
There has to be a trans guy in this world who can talk about sex like a normal person
This was really interesting, and enjoyable, to read. Thank you Milo, for writing and sharing some really complicated feelings. Its interesting to think about how becoming more oneself, more aligned with your understanding of yourself, can happen through different way of living, being and interacting. How the importance of other people can be as partners, as family, as ancestors.
I’m not sure why the comments always turn into a pile on as soon as a trans guy is the author, but I hope you can ignore the mean spirited comments above, and I look forward to reading more of your writing.
I do appreciate people doing creative work and also people being vulnerable. It’s very brave and Milo clearly has a skill for personal narrative.
But I clicked on this article because I’m dealing with some of the same issues of this author. I wanted to know how other people are dealing with this particular kind of gender dysphoria. But instead I just found this essay self-aggrandising in a really offputting way, and trading in really gross attitudes towards women. As a kinky person I found the sections where he introduced new dynamics just very yikes, even though I’ve made some of those same mistakes myself when I was starting out.
I wanted this essay to be useful and relatable, but instead it was a confusing mishmash of a guy being sad and also a sex god. I *really would* like to read a trans guy writing about sex like a normal person. I don’t want Autostraddle or the author to apologise or anything, I just want to give my opinion on what I think is a disappointing piece of writing.
as another trans guy, i’m also really put off by the way that milo describes women in this piece — his relationships w them seem to exist solely to puff up his masculinity, to service his ego, which betrays a fragility that is deeply un-daddy.
It has nothing to do with him being a trans guy. It is to do with Autostraddle repeatedly publishing work by trans men who seem to harbour horrific views toward women. (Which, if it needs to be said, is obviously not true of most trans men).
I thought Milo’s essay was beautiful and eloquent up until he casually recounted *slapping his girlfriend without consent*.
That was a horrible, triggering account of domestic violence. It wasn’t edgy, or kinky, or ‘complicated’. It was a story of a bloke hitting a woman for fun and having zero remorse about it.
It’s not ‘mean spirited’ to find that appalling.
This exactly. What is with the recent string of awful articles from trans guys? Between this and shit like that horrible PUA piece by Gabe Dunn, AS is continues to platform pretty nasty, misogynistic voices. It’s not a good look! It paints a really bad picture of trans men and is really dissapointing for a supposedly feminist site to repeatedly push stuff that sounds like it was a conversation from a frat house. I think we all deserve better.
The site ate my more nuanced comment. My summary is – Yes! – most trans guys are good people who deserve representation on a queer website. And BDSM is great – if it is consensual.
“she pops up, looking stunned. “I…don’t think I like that,” she tells me, wide-eyed”
“She tells me she thinks she was wrong about the face-smacking thing. She wants me to try it again. Before I know it, she’s begging me to choke her, slap her, spank her harder”
DONT DO IT BARBIE!!!!
yuck!! this is such a weird bad misogynistic take that should have stayed in the drafts…
u talking to me?
You think disagreeing with non consensual violence = yikes – why?
As someone with very similar kinks to the author´s – in theory, at least – it doesn´t seem ridiculous to compare this specific type of queer kink to biological fatherhood. What seems ridiculous is to compare Mommy/Daddy kink dynamics, which are versatile but almost always rooted in care and discipline, to “having a sea of girls screaming your name” and “drowning in grade-A hot girl pussy”.
It´s very top-of-the-food-chain for guys in the straight world, yes, to call themselves a legend because you the best sex Barbie´s ever had, but this is not kink or care or nurturing, it´s stroking your ego. It´s one thing to have a hot girl call you Daddy during sex, it´s a completely different thing to be her Daddy.
I am less interested in how she is begging you to fuck her to death and more interested in reading how you gained her trust. How do you make her life better? How do you make her feel safe so that she can discover all these new edges she didn´t think she had? That´s queer Daddy dynamics and that could be compared to what your brother is doing.
(Also, queer kink would be having a conversation about slapping while sober and not horny, and not just doing it during vanilla sex. Slapping is edge play, for god´s sake!)
(cis f) once I slapped someone without their consent during sex. I consented to this person slapping me previously and didn’t rescind consent. it happened in the heat of the moment. I am ashamed of what I did. im not sure why you would include a similar story in your article with such frivolity
YES! Thank you, Autostraddle, for finally publishing something raw and real. Over-emphasis on woke emotional fragility in queer spaces is getting exhaustinggg. We can’t all be tenderqueers. (As a bottom) I found this writing super erotic. The author is in a period of transition and exploration but still demonstrates care, sensitivity, and a commitment to emotional honesty, self-care, and growth. Extremely ungenerous take to not read it that way.
Yes this 1000%. It feels like it’s been so long (at least a year, maybe more) since I’ve read something that felt raw and real and challenging (and edgy!) on Autostraddle. It was a reminder of why I still pay each month.
Can we just not with toxic masculinity?
It’s great that no one’s consent was violated by the surprise slap on the face, but there are other people this same scenario could have happened with who would feel violated from such an act. Why is this talked about in such a nonchalant way? If a cis man wrote a piece and described this scene, the Autostraddle community would rip him to shreds. Why is this behavior acceptable when it comes from a trans man? I would be much more understanding if we got some introspection from the author realizing a mistake was made and discovering “maybe I shouldn’t slap people on the face without their consent”. The author doesn’t even apologize to Barbie. People make mistakes and that is worth talking about. This certainly sounds like a mistake to me. Instead, we get “I slapped this girl without asking her, and now she wants to do S&M with me! Cool!” This article is gross, and I am honestly surprised it was published on Autostraddle at all. Some peer review is certainly in order.
If peer review means we never get to read unfiltered work about people’s real lives, I don’t want peer review.
This piece is about the importance of exploration and self-acceptance in a world that hates trans people and doesn’t want women, NBs, or transmascs to claim daddyhood in any format. We are challenging societal norms in moments of connection. That’s what queer kink is about.
Non consensual violence is NOT ‘what queer kink is about’.
Yes this essay is edgy and challenging and maybe a little fucked up, but those are all things I want in my queer community and in my queer sexuality. I’m tired of discussions of queer sex and sexuality that have all the eroticism of a consent workshop for college freshmen. I’m so glad this essay exists. I’ve been waffling about canceling my A+ subscription since it’s been so long since an essay really hit in that way Autostraddle used to hit — like subversive queer writing I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else on the internet — but this has definitely convinced me to keep it for at least another year.
(I also just want to assert that some of us on the sub-y side of things much prefer having a top or a Dom just follow their gut and desire and trust that we will say no to them if we don’t want the action rather than going through an endless sterile series of formal litigation about actions and processes!) (for those that read this essay and feel a need to shut it down, your experiences are not universal, the diverse tapestry of life etc etc)
yes, this! while i disagree about this being the first thing in a year that i’ve read here that was edgy and subversive, i 100% agree with “I’m tired of discussions of queer sex and sexuality that have all the eroticism of a consent workshop for college freshmen.” i find so much writing about queer sex these days, even in fiction, to be so ……..unsexy.
the degree of palatability and universality that everybody seems to desire from queer content these days is exhausting. cuz one thing i have noticed on every edgy thing i’ve read this past year is how relentless the pushback is. i was surprised to see this here at all after the reaction to the college dean piece, which i’m sure was exhausting for everyone involved.
not every piece about sex has to be comfortable for everyone who reads it! not everything has to speak to everyone, or land with anyone. i want to be challenged, i want my mind pushed open, i want to be forced to consider things that make me uneasy. and i’d rather be doing that here, in community, than doing it on some mainstream site running controversial queer writing for clicks.
you can dislike a person and dislike their story and dislike everything they are about and their entire personality and how they have sex and all of it — everybody here has that right. none of you have to date this author, or sleep with them, or be friends with them, or like them or talk with them. but that doesn’t mean nobody should be allowed to read what’s going on inside their brain.
yessss im tired of safe essays perfectly crafted to offend nobody and have all sex be treated as a perfectly sterile and concrete boundaried checklist that all queer people follow impeccably at all times. real life is messy and imperfect and spontaneous-real life is exploring and getting hurt or figuring out what you like or don’t-what triggers you and what brings you joy -two consenting adults are all that is necessary. yes to mess this is the first essay in a long time that i can actually relate to as a femme sub. cheers to reality. cheers to great writing. cheers to ravenous daddy tops and their hot femme bottoms
Ah yes you definitely have arrived at apex masculinity by referring to women as “grade-A hot girl pussy” (sarcasm)… since you love ranking women by their genitalia, is your trans ex’s NOT grade-A since you’re only NOW drowning in grade A pussy? See how offensive that is. It’s really exhausting to be objectified by our own community members, but SPECIALLY in ways that exactly mirror cishet male objectification, you know the one we work so hard to get away from.
Also slapping is definitely crossing a kink boundary that needs to be discussed, period. Of course once someone has been having regular kinky sex with someone we often do relax our consent-asking if we, tops, have a strong grasp (pun very intended) on what our bottoms enjoy. This is why kink education exists and this is why many people in the comments are reflecting this.
And I really would’ve loved reading more about Daddy kink dynamics and your personal experiences with the comparisons / contrasts to your brother’s biological fatherhood. That is a unique story that you’re personally connected to! That would’ve been an excellent article, but you decided to pick up the trope of toxic masculinity instead. Please put that down.
i find it interesting that all the people that don’t like this are tops and all the people who like this are bottoms
Then maybe you might also find it interesting that to me as a kinky nonbinary switch, parts of the decribed dynamics are interesting and hot, as I can emphasize with both positions.
It’s generally a good piece and I really appreciate the perspective and writing of the article.
But the dehumanizing wording and toxic brolinity are off-putting and triggering to me.
Not something I hope to be subjected to on autostraddle.
“Not something I hope to be subjected to on autostraddle.”
Agreed. We’ve had a string of articles like this and it’s become increasingly upsetting. This used to be a feminist site.
Yes. I’m glad that the tops commenting take consent seriously.
As a bottom who likes being slapped in the face, I also don’t like how the face slap came out of nowhere during the first hookup between these people. There are ways to test the waters to see if a partner might like rough sex that don’t start with a slap to the face.
Thank you KR. It’s almost like consensual kink is different from beating your girlfriend.
it’s almost like being a submissive in a bdsm relationship is not a healthy mindset
once I slapped someone without their consent during sex. I consented to this person slapping me previously and didn’t rescind consent. it happened in the heat of the moment. I am ashamed of what I did. im not sure why you would include a similar story in your article with such frivolity
This is the best thing I’ve read on this website in years and you people are all nerds lol
yesss-time to take back autostraddle from the homely dictator nerds that kick you out of the food co op when you miss your shift even though you had to go to a wedding and travel for work types.
it’s a hot queer revolution and we won’t be silenced any longer!
Shoulda just swapped shifts with someone else tbh. But agree that food coops are only subjectively hot hot hot
I can’t believe a once staunch feminist/sapphic website is now publishing misogynistic swill from men with phrases like “grade A pussy” 🤮 and surpsise sexual violence. How the mighty fall.
Yeah. I loved Autostraddle because it was a trans inclusive LGB website. Now it’s just pushing PUA guides and pro domestic violence narratives.
this essay bravely asks the question “can trans men reach a level of misogyny even the worst cic men dare not touch”
For real, this reads like so many horror stories I’ve heard from friends that date cis het men who get randomly violent out of nowhere.
Hard agree. This is so awful.
trepidatiously taking a stand in defense of duality
my ancestral wounds get healed by moving the needle of everyone’s gender toward eternity
Amen. “Everyone’s gender toward eternity” is the battle cry I didn’t know I needed.
THIS is the autostraddle i remember. also unfortunately for the perfect feminists amongst us almost every group of lesbians i know does imperfectly objectify women in what is classified as misogynistic language and have similar beauty standards (pretty faces, fit bodies)and it is even more common amongst t verile trans dudes experiencing second coming of age . it’s not passing the portland feminist bookstore test but it is the reality of our lives. just because somebody is experiencing something doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t.
But women objectifying women, as bad as that is too, is absolutely and simply not the same as men objectifying women. In the latter, there is a real power imbalance and systematic subjugation which means that the objectification is NOT an expression of lateral violence, play, reclamation jokes, or whatever else that it is for other women, but rather that it’s a real threat of violence. Men objectifying women is a threat and an expression of pure contempt. It’s ‘putting us back in our place’, reinforcing and reestablishing hierarchy. Trans men absolutely do participate in this in the same way cis men do, and sometimes the hetero ones even do overtime shifts in the Patriarchy Factory if it’ll win them acceptance and brotherhood with cis men.
This does not have to be the reality of our lives! I can’t stand that shit. Why would we accept misogyny from trans men as some sort of “real and gritty queer world’? As if demanding that hetero trans men don’t rank AFAB pussy as “grade A pussy” is bourgeois queer feminism? Your bar is way too low.
If you non consensually slap women you are a misogynist. Academia doesn’t count.
trans men are the men of trans people
mods please delete
So everyone here is totally fine with the actual violent misogyny, but this is where you wanna protest. Lol. Lmao even. The parody writes itself.
guy who thinks halloween is about being normal: i dressed up as a trans guy, because im a trans guy. then, a group of High-Femme Women walked into the room. i could tell because they were dressed as barbie. i was also there with my nonbinary, who was dressed like me, but with boobs
I love how even beyond the “surprise slap” and the diminutive disregard of every (real! living!) woman involved in this story, this essay still fails to say anything at all beyond “here are all of my most pathetic thoughts; aren’t they interesting, or at least titillating in some way?”
No, Milo, they aren’t. It’s not even a good idea for an article lol “I’m multifaceted, isn’t that craaazyyy?” is the kind of thesis you save for high school, trans or not. Especially when the only way you can admit to it is shrouded in layer after layer of #epic macho girl-getting sex-having.
Cut out the asides to your sexual “success” and read the article one more time; what does this story look like without all of the women who decided to indulge you after a long day of work? Who have knowingly entertained your insatiable desire for their approval and awe and submission? Do you like it? Are you winning, son? lmao
Yeah. Beating your sexual partners is wrong. Guess I’m too working class for Autostraddle to take my complaints seriously.
yeah regardless of the misogyny this just isn’t a good essay (which all these commenters aren’t addressing). you can’t just throw words together and then have it automatically be good writing
Parts of this was a beautiful read, but I have to say; hetero trans men saying stuff like “The fear of being unlovable kept me from myself for decades, and now I’m drowning in grade-A hot girl pussy.” is why many of y’all feel unwelcome in queer spaces, because saying horrendous shit like that about women makes you unwelcome. Knowing what it feels like to experience misogyny does NOT make you exempt from being revolting when you spew objectifying misogynist shit like that. Can’t believe this has to be said, but like, don’t ‘grade’ women or their genitals! We’re not cattle or meat you consume. It’s not fun, trendy, hot, transgressive, queer, revolutionary or whatever else to say misogynist shit just cause you’re trans. It’s not like you’re ‘reclaiming’ anything, you’re just assimilating to violent patriarchal systems when you do that.
me and Breeding Kink Girl had a devastating breakup. can’t remember why but it was super sad. it’s no problem though because now I’m drowning in pussy. also my grandpa killed civilians in the Vietnam war
lmfao literally!!!! why is it so white het man of milo to manage to make interesting plot points in the story of his queer daddyhood out of a) transmisogyny and general contempt for women and b) a granddad who has participated in the genocidal colonial imperial settler project called the US military industrial complex. Like, milo if you’re reading this, please acquire some healthy shame.
Most trans guys aren’t misogynistic and it’s a shame that the articles published by them on this site really are. It’s not acceptable coming from anyone.
100%
Agreed, It’s genuinely upsetting. Has Autostraddle been bought by Mumsnet?
Wow. Autostraddle you’ve once again outdone yourself with toxic, misogynistic content.
Never mind the “playful” slapping and subsequent gaslighting (the writer is evidently a red-flag narcissist who gaslights sexual partners, but that’s OK!), there’s the line: “I’m spiraling, desperate to make a connection with someone ASAP who can reinforce my masculinity in that special way that gives me the will to live.” At least we all know that the writer sees women as purely sexual objects, only there to reinforce an identity. What a great trans trope to espouse, but I hope the writer finds deep meaning and powerful transformation in the “sea of girls” screaming his name.
Other commentators have voiced similar sentiments and, as usual, crickets from the editors. Yet y’all will bleat on about how not respecting pronouns is a human rights violation.
You stopped being a ‘feminist’ publication a very long time ago. Women have enough to deal with – and this kind of content is yet another reason why I don’t identify with ‘the queer community’, despite supposedly being part of it.
I would say “do better!” but at this point, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
This, 100%. I suppose being a queer woman and ‘complaining about misogyny’ isn’t subversive/transgressive/revolutionary enough to earn the time of day or like a crumb of dignity from autostraddle editors. It’s like the most painfully white middle-class phenomenon to maybe read stone butch blues and a bell hooks article once and proceed to have your minds fetishistically blown at the pain of queer working class and woc realities, and then think that a trans man spewing misogyny is a “very real and raw” representation of Real Gritty Kinky Queerness. Y’all wanna be us so bad it’s almost pitiful!
Autostraddle, stop doing the thing where you have a dirtbag trans guy come onstage and say something that you know will piss people off so they thrash around in the comments and get you a lot of engagement. You have to know by now that your commenter base isn’t going to be particularly charitable towards trans men, and you’re not moderating around it at all. If you don’t want that kind of atmosphere, then stop doing exactly what you’d be doing if you were trying to create it on purpose.
(I’ve struggled for a while on how to word this because I know someone will think I’m saying we have to be nice all the time or shouldn’t criticize behavior we don’t agree with. Mean criticism is different than getting excited to take a member of a group you don’t like down a peg, and while it’s difficult to articulate the exact boundaries between those behaviors, everyone’s seen this and everyone knows it’s a thing. So.)
Oh, no. The puriteens have grown into humorless, sexless adults and raided the comments section.
I am 40 years old. And this is misogynistic trash. Consensual BDSM is fun. Beating up your girlfriend is abuse.
“You have to know by now that your commenter base isn’t going to be particularly charitable towards trans men”
This comment from @Aster sums up a general attitude I am seeing in these comments. It’s frustrating when we don’t see comments such as this as also part of TERF culture and rhetoric.
Sure, people can have different reactions to how consent is negotiated in different sexual situations and how misogyny is displayed. There are so many different sexual dynamics that can arise between two people and NOTABLY the women involved in this scene said in the comments that she felt safe and consenting etc. The fact that she could say this and then there are still viscous comments demeaning Milo makes me very uneasy. In that context, it feels like many of these comments against Milo are coming from a desire to impose a strict, monolithic sexual ethic. This makes any sexual interaction that falls outside of this seen as delinquent/perverse/wrong. And there’s nothing new in these critiques – they have been used to make kinky / trans / queer people deviant and criminalized.
Milos story reads to me as a wrestling with expectations of masculinity – both it’s nurturing aspects and violent aspects. I’m not sure why an honest grappling with messiness is being so derided. We all have messy parts that don’t align with our highest values. This is human. In the life I live, outside of the influence of Christian puritan ethic, this messiness is allowed. I wish we could all have the compassion and self awareness to allow this complexity in one another. I fear a world that does not allow this.
– written by another trans guy
Oh ffs. Trans guys are amazing – they have a valid and nuanced space in WLW and queer culture. Doesn’t make it ok for misogynistic scum to attack their partners. Regardless of AGAB or identity.
Milo is very, very lucky that his partner granted post encounter consent. Many people are reacting negatively because things like this have happened to us thst were NOT consensual and this brings us back. It fucking reeks of misogyny to be called things like “puriteens” because we advocate for consensual sexual encounters. It’s like talking to a brick wall, you have made up your minds violent misogyny is acceptable when it comes from trans men and no one can say otherwise.
Calling the negative reactions “TERF shit” is further evidence that the trans men community has a massive, MASSIVE misogyny problem that needs to be addressed, because it makes it impossible to be allies when you advocate for violence like this. Do better.
To clarify, what I am calling TERF-y is a comment such as this:
““You have to know by now that your commenter base isn’t going to be particularly charitable towards trans men”
I think we should scrutinize why it is ok to have a group of people say that it’s obvious that a commenter base isn’t going to be charitable towards trans men. A comment such as this makes me – as a trans man – nervous to post on this site or possibly write for this site. And having pushback to my nervousness against a clearly stated bias against trans men is disturbing to me.
I respect that people have had experiences similar to those described here that weren’t consensual and were misogynistic and terrible. I also respect that people are reading Milo’s actions as misogynistic and I apologize for not being more explicit about respecting that.
But to have these feelings about Milo and then make these generalizations about trans men is scary to me. There is so much rhetoric right now making trans people into monsters / sexual predators. And wow, the speed with which those ideas were piled onto Milo and generalized against trans men was disturbing for me to see. And the quickness with which I was also labeled as a misogynist (and that my comment also was used as evidence for wider misogyny within the trans man community) for claiming that there can be different ways that people approach sexual encounters is disturbing as well. And again, this isn’t an article promoting specific sexual practices, but instead explaining the messiness and fallibility of one specific person and his partners.
I don’t ever get into stuff in the comments but this has been really sad for me to see.
I’m sorry about that. I’m also a trans guy and I wasn’t trying to excuse the bias against trans guys, just discuss the reality of it. I don’t think it’s normal and I don’t think it’s okay. Also, I did like the essay and my own opinion is that while Milo shouldn’t have assumed his sex partner would’ve enjoyed being slapped during sex just because she was enjoying less extreme roughness, that’s not the same as slapping someone because you know they WON’T enjoy it, and this should be obvious. (I didn’t like the dating trans girls article that encouraged harassment.)
What I’m trying to say, badly, is that AS has to know by now that this bias exists, and is doing an extremely poor job of protecting their trans man writers and readers from it.
1) The comments are supposed to be a moderated space, but no one is coming to moderate them. The rules are pretty subjective, but some of these comments it would be hard to make a case for allowing.
2) New rules could be created to make this situation easier to prevent. We could easily have a higher bar for civility on personal essays, for example (maybe with a reminder before the comments on those articles).
3) Are the authors told that the commenters tend to react in this way? Are they given the option to turn the comments off on their articles?
4) Why are we getting so much dirtbag trans guy content and not any dirtbag lesbian content? I like the idea of the sex content going in a more messy/personal direction like this and platforming more dirtbags, but if AS wants to do that they should also be publishing this kind of article from women.
5) What if the sidebar comments stayed gone or at least became click-to-expand and I didn’t have to see a bunch of awful shit every time I wanted to habitually check the site. Would that be great? I think that would be great.
Ah wow thank you for clarifying your point!!
Internet dialogue is tricky and I appreciate you explaining what you meant.
Yes – there is a frustrating bias in comments and articles that can often portray trans guys in one light. Thank you for highlighting that.
It’s okay, and a lot of people in these comments ARE being legitimately TERFY. Thank you for speaking out against that.
i’m a femme bottom i love when a hot confident top butch or masc or transman grabs me, becomes daddy, -most of you don’t understand hot femmes NEED daddy domme. i’ve turned so many partners down because they are just too bottomy or unsure of themselves. please just do stuff to us and we are grown adults who can talk about what we do or don’t want later or in. the moment or even change our minds. women are not infants -we can role play and also hold our damn own. second of all a trans man or a butch may be daddy but the hot hot femme truly rules the relationship. toodles autonerdles