Like so many queer and trans people, the story of my sexuality begins with pain, shame and isolation. When I first started having sex, I felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me—something broken about my body, my self, my ability to give and receive pleasure and connection. I want to tell this story because I want all the others out there to know: You’re not alone. I want them to know what’s possible. I want them to know that this story has a happy ending.
The first time I tried to have penetrative sex, I experienced an intense, splitting pain in my pelvic floor that ripped through my entire body. It felt like getting punched in the stomach from the inside while also being clawed by wolverines. It felt like my sex life was ending before it began—and at the time, that seemed like a punishment from God for being a sexually deviant teenage gender freak.
I couldn’t talk about my experience with most of the people in my life. It was the late aughts, and there weren’t a ton of folks around me who could helpfully discuss the intricacies of sexual intercourse with teen trans girls. Also, it was embarrassing. I was raised by a conservative Chinese family, Evangelical Christian on my mother’s side. I couldn’t even say the word “genitals” without wanting to shrivel up and die, let alone “anal penetration.”
So I carried on with life. What else was there to do? I kept trying to have sex and every time, the pain was still there. I did manage to talk about it with some friends, mostly while drunk. Gay friends. Queer friends. They tried to be helpful. They told me it was normal. I just needed to be with a partner I trusted. I needed more practice, more experience. I needed to use poppers. I needed to learn how to relax. I tried all those things. I tried them for years. Always, the pain was still there.
I learned to deal with it. To let the pain happen as my partners came inside me. I learned to smile at them through it. I didn’t want to break the illusion, lose the relationships. I wanted to be loved.
In my early 20s, I started to medically transition, and went on hormones. I lost sensation in my genitals, and my libido dropped. The doctor said it was normal, that I just needed to get used to it. That conversation was extra difficult, because the doctor kept on referring to my “penis.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it a penis. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to call it. I didn’t want to call it anything. In fact, I wanted to never talk about it. I wanted a different body, one that wasn’t so fucked up by sexual trauma and violence, a body that didn’t betray me.
In the nearly two decades since my first experience of that awful pain, I’ve trained and worked as a sex worker, a clinical social worker specializing in sexual orientation and gender identity, and a Somatic Sex Educator providing hands-on bodywork for erotic healing and growth. I’ve talked to dozens of trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people about their genitals, their anuses, their pelvic floors—as well as their sexual histories and surgeries, their scars and survival strategies. What I’ve learned is that I’m not alone: many trans people go through life with stories of pain and shame, humiliation and longing, loneliness and loss. It shouldn’t have to be that way. Trans people are capable of healthy, beautiful and joyful relationships with our bodies, wherever we are on the multidimensional spectrum of sexuality and gender. We just need support that is attuned to our specific bodies and stories, our specific needs.
Genital and pelvic-floor pain during sex, sometimes called genito-pelvic pain, is an under-discussed yet extremely common experience among the general population. Though research is limited, the studies that do exist indicate that significant numbers of trans people report genito-pelvic pain—more than one in five. Furthermore, trans people’s specific concerns when it comes to genito-pelvic pain can vary widely based on their specific genital structure, as well as experiences with hormone therapy and/or gender-affirming surgery. Genito-pelvic pain is most often treated with physiotherapy, education, counselling, medical techniques or with an integrated approach that combines the above, with research showing that treatment can help many individuals.
Yet there is an extreme lack of genital, anal, pelvic and sexual health information available for trans people—an exacerbated aspect of a general lack of sexual health and education for society at large. What does exist is often heavily focused on STI prevention (a notable exception is the late, great Mira Bellwether’s legendary zine, Fucking Trans Women). While STI prevention is important, it doesn’t address topics like painful sex, genital or pelvic numbness, genital dysphoria, pre- and post-surgical experiences and—critically—pleasure and erotic happiness.
Sex therapist Lucie Fielding writes of her own journey through transition and sexuality in her book Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments: “I learned that sex could be transcendent, that I could be multi-orgasmic and polymorphously perverse, and that I am indeed fuckable and fuck-able. I learned how to find immense pleasure in my body and I learned that my body is capable of so much more than I had imagined.” All of us should get to find our own version of such embodied transcendence.
Mainstream medical and healthcare approaches to pelvic care can be hit-or-miss, particularly when it comes to the specific needs of trans people. Notably, approaches that specifically engage pleasurable touch as an intervention in genito-pelvic pain are excluded. Alternative methods, such as Somatic Sex Education and Sexological Bodywork, attempt to fill the gap by integrating holistic sex education, somatic techniques such as guided breath and movement, as well as client-led genital and pelvic-floor massage. It’s worth noting that because these modalities include client-guided pleasurable touch, they exist within a legal grey area in many jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S., as a result of anti-sex-work legislation.
In their book Pelvic Pain Clinic, Somatic Sex Educators Caffyn Jesse and Shauna Farabaugh write that “While some medical diagnoses lead to immediate and effective treatment, other diagnoses […] have no specific effective treatment available through a doctor’s office.”
When trans and gender-diverse patients suffer from pelvic pain, they write, “the failure of the medical community as a whole (thus far) to educate itself on gender variance regularly compounds the challenges people face in seeking diagnosis and receiving effective treatment.” When I first read this as a Somatic Sex Education student, something lit up inside me—I saw myself in those words. It was the first time I’d ever had my own experience represented as something that happened to others. It wasn’t me that was broken, it was the system.
Holistic approaches to pelvic and genital care can fill in gaps that trans people frequently experience in the mainstream health system. A core practice in Somatic Sex Education is simply supporting people to examine and “map” their own genital and pelvic anatomy using words and terminology that feel right for them.
So many people, trans and otherwise, rarely or never really look at our genitals or anus. And so many of us struggle to feel or sense clearly where pain, numbness, tightness or looseness, and pleasure live within our physical tissues. Building the mind-body connection and dispelling reflexive shame about these specific areas of the body is often a transformative experience. Feeling able to talk about our bodies, to make specific requests and name boundaries with medical professionals are powerful skills that may lead to more effective and less traumatic experiences of medical care. Similarly, empowered communication with intimate partners can result in fewer experiences of painful sex, as well as more experiences of pleasure.
We can also learn how to give pelvic and genital care to ourselves and our loved ones—some of the most important and profound healing can happen at home and in the arms of a partner. Touch, pleasure and at-home care strategies can shift the way trans people experience our bodies, including the genitals and anus.
As a Somatic Sex Educator, some of the most beautiful moments of my life have involved giving genital and anal massages to support clients in healing from trauma and pain: it’s a sacred ritual of establishing trust, inviting empowered choices and watching them open and blossom into pleasure. I’ve also taught clients to massage themselves, so that self-pleasure and masturbation can become self-healing.
It’s been almost 20 years since the first time I tried penetrative sex and felt like my body was being ripped apart. In that time, I’ve just heard story after story about trans people and the way a transphobic, sex-negative, body-shaming culture has hurt our relationships with our pelvises: our genitals, our bodies, our selves. The older I get, the more outraged I become. How can this be the world we’re living in, so full of unnecessary suffering and isolation? Over time, it’s become increasingly important to me that we continue creating a counter-culture—one where all our bodies are honoured, we all get to heal and no one is forced to carry their pain in shame alone.
I know that’s possible: Because it happened to me. I did find a community of sex workers and witchy queer sex educators that held me and helped me heal my connection to my pelvis and to sex. The most simple but profound techniques changed my life: I learned how to use somatic techniques to release the tension in my pelvic floor. I learned how to use breath, movement and self-touch to increase pleasure and reduce pain during sex. But even more important than that was learning how to claim my power and choice: my ability to ask for what I wanted and set limits on touch that I didn’t like.
These days it’s not so much that I never feel pain, but that I found my voice and know my body so well that I’ve had incredible pleasure, incredible sex. I used to be so ashamed I couldn’t even say the word “genitals” out loud, and now I teach sex-ed, in rooms full of strangers, all the time.
I used to hate my body for how it let me down, and now I love my body because my body is me. I kept going, kept looking for the answers, and I found them in the arms of witches and whores. So you see? My story does have a happy ending. With a little help from my friends, I gave it to myself.
