Sissies

What does the culture say about sissies? Google is your friend.

On the hashtag #sissy, Mistress Flash wants New impressive #paypigs #cashslaves #sissy #cuckold I only take on the best @underdeskloser @RTpig @RTmutt. TammiCD wants to go to work “like this”- pink miniskirt not covering his erection, suspenders showing. Ready2role_clothing offers handmade pink maid’s outfits, made to measure for men. Sissycdcourtney tweets about wetting self in public while wearing “sissy PJs”. I hope that is fantasy. There are dozens of tweets an hour, many of women offering sexual services.

Google’s definition offers noun, a person regarded as effeminate or cowardly, adjective feeble or cowardly. Synonyms are cowardly, weak, feeble, spineless, effeminate, effete, limp-wristed, womanish, unmanly, soft. I have decided that “soft” is positive in me. Here, a man being like a woman is ridiculous and disgusting. Which is hard, if you are a man who is like a woman. No wonder trans women assert we are women.

Wikipedia has an article: Feminization or feminisation (see spelling differences), also known as sissification, is used to describe the practice, especially in female dominance, of switching the gender role of a male submissive. The male in such a process is sometimes and informally known as a sissy.

Merriam Websters Learners’ [Children’s?] Dictionary: a boy who is weak or who likes things that girls usually like… a person who is weak and fearful. Given the pejorative tone of the whole, I find “who likes things girls like” offensive.

Then there are the sites of women offering sexual services. “Slaves wanted”!

I hope they have fun, but this is not for me. The first positive thing which might be for me is YO!Sissy Queer Music Festival Berlin. The Party Weekend for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transsexuals and everybody else. Let´s DANCE TOGETHER July … And on page 3, Sissy Spacek on IMDb.

Samantha is straight and single with a deep longing to be a little girl. The first picture here shows men having fun in fancy dress. The text has that eerie unreality I noticed with a schizophrenic woman: some of what she said was probably true, some obvious fantasy, but the bits in the middle are mind-bending. Watch it get more and more unreal here: If you’re a guy who dresses as a sissy, gets a thrill from wearing frilly dresses then being a guy comes easier, but to sissies it’s mostly not the case, there is most times a struggle going on inside. I know I have had many a struggle. A sissy can hide things well, but something always surfaces to the top, with me it was things you just can’t hide. There was and is the occasional bed wetting incidents, there is the real fear of using the potty and something that was more a problem in my late teens/20’s my small willy and inability to have sex. It may even be true, about the inability, but saying it is a sexual fantasy.

Sissy is not the word. There is nothing positive here.

M-F-M

I still think of reverting, M-F-M, and worry that a main reason for not reverting is that I would be admitting I had been wrong. In one of Wxhluyp‘s interminable debates, her opponent contrasted two opposites: Male v Female, and Male v Not-Male. Then there is the trans-exclusionist critique: the only real differences between male and female are anatomical; any other differences are cultural, patriarchal and oppressive. And there is the denied, oppressed and derided way of being male, the sissy.

Reverting would not mean admitting I had been wrong. I wanted so much to transition at the time, it was the most important thing in my life. Transition is always portrayed as intended to be life-long, but need not be. Transition could be the only path I could have taken to get to wanting to present male, now.

I am dissatisfied. How could I not be? How many are not? In my dissatisfaction, I alight on the most impractical, self-hating and self-judging act as a possible solution. How tempting: I am dissatisfied because I took that wrong step- reverse it and everything will be OK.

As before, there are two questions:

Am I female?
Will I be happier if I revert?

No to the first does not necessitate a yes to the second.

It feels that I have a fire in me which can frighten or offend others (again, this may be the common human experience) which I have not yet learned how to live with: I am unhappy whether I suppress it or let it out, and learning how to live with it is what I mean by doing teenage, or doing toddlerhood, now.

M-F-M. It is not what I Want. Trying to work it out rationally- am I deluded?- gets me nowhere.

Reverting II

Should I revert?

I was thinking of posting around being a Sissy, rather than being a trans woman. Now, I don’t want to produce continuous rational prose, but go where the writing takes me.

My constant monitoring and judging of myself is my own. I would be considerably less weird, as a man, in others’ eyes than I fear, despite my small breasts.

-What do you Want.
-I want to be Normal! I want just to fit in.

Onywye. This is part of the thought. I am a sissy: an effeminate or unmanly man, more a bottom than a top, sexually, but attracted to women rather than men. There are heterosexual women to fit us- As God made them, so God matched them- but in Western societies we are derided, and a lot of social control is around getting us to “man up”, or pretend to be, well, like men ought to be.

We are good evidence that gender, as constructed and idolised in the West, is a very poor fit for sex defined merely gonadally.

Blinded by shame, I step from “effeminate” (bad) to “feminine” (good), and follow the well-trodden path to transition. As a fetishistic transvestite, I find it pleasanter to imagine myself motivated by femininity than perversion. My desire for castration and vaginaplasty arises partly from a fetishistic fantasy- imagining it is a turn-on- and partly from a desire to believe I am a real transsexual, rather than a pervert.

Here I am constructing an argument, or a theory, rather than telling you what I feel is necessarily the truth- but putting it this way, I cannot merely dismiss it as ridiculous.

In an ideal world there would be a place for me as a sissy, and descriptive rather than derisive words. Perhaps, ideally, I should be working towards that world, out and proud and campaigning for equality, rather than trying to fit in. Fuck that. I have as much right to try to make my own way, to campaign for truth and justice when I feel able and to hide away and be a quisling when I feel capable of nothing more, as anyone.

-What do you want?
-I want never to feel uncomfortable, never to feel fear, never to judge myself.

I-

cannot–

escape the judgment of my insatiable inner critic. I might die to myself– more difficult than being born again- but she will never be satisfied. I have to stop listening.

I honour my past choices.

Transition was what I needed to do at the time. It was what I wanted more than anything else. Anyone who finds me disconcertingly or displeasingly strange, will find me so even if I stop taking hormones, wearing a wig, and speaking at a higher pitch than most people after their voice breaks. Reverting is just hassle, to no great benefit.

I got my first picture from Wikimedia, as usual: category Portraits of women holding flowers. Hoping to find a more fitting category, I deleted two letters- but that category does not exist. I searched further, and found only Asians, not Europeans.

Thoughtcrime

When Newspeak is introduced, thoughtcrime will be impossible. The sentence “Big Brother doubleplusungood” would be meaningless. Only orthodox thoughts will be possible. Our language accomplishes that purpose, now: just not so efficiently.

The way it accomplishes this is negativity. Words that describe those who do not conform are negative. A gay child in the 1960s would hear words like “sodomite” but perhaps not words like “gay”. That example shows we get better, but we still do not have a positive word for “sissy“.

The bus stop was immediately behind the taxi rank, and though the taxi rank was empty, the post office van was parked in the bus stop. “I’ll show him”, said the bus driver. He got out and scratched “Please do not park in bus stops as a slap in the mouth often offends” on the van’s bonnet. Later, we were having coffee. Sara, who is three, wandered away from the table only for a moment, and when we looked she had gone. “Easy come, easy go”, said her mother, and indeed no-one gave a toss. And- just after I noticed the used condom lying on the footpath, the jogger ripped my wig from my head, threw it in a puddle, and laughed.

I got less bothered by groups of loud drunks in the street when I labelled them “boisterous”. There are positive ways of seeing anything, which liberate both the viewer and the viewed.

AArgh! I am feeling disturbed and out of sorts, and

Where I am is perfect.

I have never made a single mistake, 

for I have got to this perfect place,

being loving and creative along the way

and blessing others with my presence.

I am perfect as I am:

what might seem a "fault" is beautiful if seen correctly.

Have you ever noticed those abrupt changes of gear in the Bible? The prophet is going great guns, God is wrathful and Israel is going to get what is coming to it, very soon and it can’t come quickly enough. And then everything is going to be Wonderful. God like an abusive parent or wife-batterer, swapping at random from rage to weeping declarations of LOVE and apology, with nothing in between.

Better find one, now. Get down the Bible- Isaiah should do: And indeed, as soon as I thumb through to Isaiah, I find this:

You will be like an oak with fading leaves,
    like a garden without water.
31 The mighty man will become tinder
    and his work a spark;
both will burn together,
    with no one to quench the fire.’
This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:
2 In the last days
the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and all nations will stream to it.

Remember that the chapter and verse divisions are Mediaeval French, not original. It begins to make psychological sense to me, if not rational or objective sense: there was I in my misery, not showered today until 3pm and playing spider solitaire obsessively, and beating myself up about it until I decided not to beat myself up. If that is what I want to do, then that is OK. Then I went for a walk and wrote my purple prose.

Hospital

-I woke in a world ruled by women.

I leaned forward, conspiratorially. “You like that, don’t you?” His face changed, a fierce joy in admitting something one does not, normally.

-They’re not aggressive like we are.
-Like we’re supposed to be.

And then S came back, and we talked of other things. I wanted to get back to this subject, but could not get him to talk of it, though I alluded to it later when we were alone. It occurs to me that if we do not have an accepted cultural way of expressing this, and are forced to find our own ways- there is no “Community”- I might find other ways of expressing it painful and embarrassing. Androphile and gynephile trans women can bicker about which are the real, or primary, transsexuals, and oppression by kyriarchy could divide us, rather than bringing us together. I have fear to overcome before I can empathise.

I walked along the North Bridge, and took photos of Calton Hill, and it seemed to me that I was monitoring all my movements, all my responses, like a spy in a foreign country. I must not express myself in my body-language. It seems this is my normal way of being, inwardly focused all the time, and it seemed to me a small child’s way of being, and I could just stop. I reset myself, into Presence. I am here, now, and OK as I am. The poison becomes the medicine.

I took my father out. We used his walking frame, designed for indoors only, and we walked out of the ward to the lifts, down to the ground floor, out the main doors and to a bench about twenty yards away, to sit in the sun. I love my father. I hate to see how he is fading away, his judgment impaired, his walking unsteady, and now he has had his third minor stroke. He broods, unhappily, about the past and gets disoriented. And- he is still alive, and I get to hug him, once a year or so. His stroke is the excuse for my current visit.

Then I took the bus back to Princes St., and spent some time trying to photograph the gulls flocking by the shopping mall. One picture worked. To the Royal Scottish Academy summer exhibition (no photography, unfortunately). There is a video of a woman’s face- “Study of a face perceiving itself”. She looks down, then glances up at the monitor, slightly to the side of the camera. She could be nervous or irritated. She is not beautiful or stylish, but she draws me in, and I am high on art. It is speaking to me directly, and moving me. There are eight discs of polished stone- gneiss, basalt?- on the wall, which are beautiful, and a sculpture of a mud-monster walking with thick legs and arms. His expression could be threat or perplexity. I got chatting to an Irishman, who agreed some of it is beautiful and immediate, and some just dull. A “Stewart’s Cream of the Barley” whisky bottle, with words blacked out so it reads “wart Cream”; and a metal tripod supporting a rock over a round metal bowl filled with water and, surprisingly, weeds and rocks- I love the contrast. When it swings- the man’s wife pulls on it, to my consternation then delight- it does so majestically.

Celebrating the male Mother

I need words, for how may I see without them?

I have something utterly beautiful, sweet, vulnerable, precious, fragile, creative, and I need to describe it. It is male: it is proper to, and the common experience of, some people with testicles. It is Feminine in the best sense of that word. It is well known, for we have many words for it: sissy or submissive, which I have put in my permalink in a flagrant attempt at attracting searches. Our words are contemptuous: “she wears the trousers in a relationship”, he is a “male lesbian“, he is a sissy.

Our sexuality is a part of this, and there are spaces for it, and we feel ashamed as we seek them out. The internet offerings are porn sites and professional dominatrix sites: it may be that there are fewer women able to make a satisfying relationship with us than there are of us, or they know and accept themselves even less than we do.

There is an ideal of manhood, the warrior male, and so rather than being seen as having an equal and alternative way of being male, I am seen as an inadequate male. Just as with homophobia, I internalise that, desperate to fit the ideal of manhood.

I am slightly different. I am a trans woman, a trans lesbian, and I see the continuity in the spectrum from men with no desire to transition who want a woman to wear the trousers. That perplexed and distressed me- seeing the maleness of my way of being, I wondered if my desire to transition was just a diseased fantasy (as if I needed yet another reason to wonder that). By the way, it isn’t.

We want a woman to wear the trousers. Or-

WHAT?

How may I put this positively? Casting around for positive role-models, at one moment I consider the camp gay male, but that is not it. That is not me. That is not this man I am thinking of.

-who want a woman who complements them, and allows their eldritch fey feminine to blossom and flourish.

My culture is deficient, and suffers for it. We need a way of delighting in this wonderful gift, or otherwise it becomes a curse.

Looking for pictures has been so difficult. Chopin seems to fit; but I cannot think of another, and looking under “fop”, “dandy” or “effeminate” does not seem to produce another, so I pick Georges Sand faute de mieux. This RuPaul quote is spot on: There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palate; their emotional palate, their physical palate. Is that changing? It’s changing in ways that don’t advance the cause of femininity. I’m not talking frilly-laced pink things or Hello Kitty stuff. I’m talking about goddess energy, intuition and feelings. That is still under attack, and it has gotten worse. But RuPaul did not seem to fit, following the drag queen tradition, normally gay. The gynephilia of my group feels intensely important.

Something has happened, which brings this into terribly sharp relief for me. I had lunch with Liz, and said that I have to be authentic, and self-accepting, and to integrate myself. I found it difficult to get the word authentic out without verbally putting ironic quote marks round it, mocking myself. But it is true, and saying it gets easier.

Autogynephilia III

I need not to feel crippling shame when I think of autogynephilia. This is my position now:

While some radical feminists say that the word “female” only has meaning in the context of reproductive organs (which makes me male) and that concepts of feminine and masculine are defined by patriarchy, and are unnatural and oppressive, I think most people see that the words feminine and masculine have meaning, and while there is a wide range of behaviours and overlapping bell curves, women tend to be more feminine than men. This applies even if what may be thought of as feminine or masculine is a matter of culture, rather than innate.

In that sense, I am feminine. People say that I am feminine. Around transition, they noticed that I had to put on an act to present male. I had a sense of burying the Real Me very deeply, and when I had a sense of letting myself out, my sense was that the Real Me was female. Or feminine, whatever.

If the theory of autogynephilia is correct, then I am a man sexually aroused by the thought of myself as a woman. But that would make me masculine. So the theory cannot be correct.

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The theory of autogynephilia makes the theory of primary transsexualism, “homosexual” or androphile M-F transsexuality, inconceivable. For the diagnostic criterion of primary transsexualism is gender dysphoria. Imagine that I am a man, falling down the slippery slope of perversion to living female full time. That would give me crushing gender dysphoria, the sense that my physical body did not match my gender identity. But I do not, now, have gender dysphoria. I can see that the sexual drive may mask or overcome other feelings, but “homosexual transsexuals” claim that gender dysphoria is overwhelming, and given that I am not sexually aroused all the time, I would have thought that it would be strong enough to overcome my autogynephilia by now.

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When I was considering transition, terrified by the idea of autogynephilia and certain that if I were autogynephiliac transition would be wrong, I had a naive understanding of paraphilia, a “blank slate” view. This was that the paraphiliac is by default a normal heterosexual male, in whom the sexual drive accidentally gets attached to something other than people of the opposite sex- shoes, asphyxia, whatever- and that in the case of the autogynephiliac it is attached to the thought of himself as a woman. With a little self-control, he could have overcome these desires and been a normal heterosexual husband and father.

But that does not fit the passionate, determined drive I and other lesbian trans women I know had to make men of ourselves. Often we join hyper-masculine professions. One was in the police tactical firearms unit. Some were in the armed forces. One was in the secret service, and one in a criminal gang. Of course the sex drive is strong, but that drive seemed strong to me. We sought to make men of ourselves to fit in, because we were inculcated with patriarchal ideas of manhood, that being a sissy was the ultimate shame.

Again, our transition to expressing ourselves female seems more of an identity issue than a perversion issue.

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I internalised a great deal of shame at being TS, and especially at the thought of being TS because of a perversion. I need to manage that shame.

If the blank slate theory is correct, and I could have been a normal male if I had not masturbated to perverted fantasies- other men manage it, why not me?- a close analogy as far as concerns guilt and shame is the person sick because of smoking. He has only himself to blame, you might say. But wait. There are still strong social pressures on many groups to smoke, and once one starts there are strong addictive pressures. I would not necessarily blame the person who has lung cancer because of his smoking, and certainly the consequence is completely unfitting if thought of as a “punishment” for the unwise actions.

Yes. The shame is the important thing for me. Considering all the above, I realise that I can say,

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

And, even, I have nothing to be ashamed of, even if my condition is a paraphilia acting on a blank slate heterosexual normality.

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I have transitioned. I can see that other ways of looking at this may work for other people. For example, if the thought of transition completely terrifies you, by all means take refuge in the theory of Crossdreaming. I can see that it would be reassuring to believe that your condition is merely a sexual fantasy. And if you are androphile TS, it may help you to despise and distance yourself from lesbian trans women.

Gosh, that is all heavy stuff. Here are some landscape paintings by Vincent: