I’m a 22-year-old FTM. I will become a legal male this summer. WOOT. Useless hole but still no pole. My friends—all straight—don’t know because I don’t feel it matters. I don’t know any other FTMs, and I really don’t care to. However, I like men. I have never had a boyfriend. I go to gay clubs, flirt, dance, and make out with other gay men. But when I am up front about being FTM, I never hear from a guy again. My question is, when do I tell a gay man I have been flirting with that I am not a bio male? I don’t want to deceive them, but I at least want a chance for them to get to know me first.
No Pole, No Go
The first thing Buck Angel—trans activist, public speaker, and porn star—wanted to say, NPNG, was congrats in advance on becoming a legal male. The second thing Buck wanted to say was that hole of yours isn’t useless.
“If he isn’t familiar with my work, maybe he should check it out,” said Buck (www.buckangel.com). “I get tremendous pleasure from my hole. Whether a transman plans on getting a penis or not, there still has to be a time that he realizes that what’s between his legs does not define who he is.”
It seems to me that time—the time you realized that you’re not defined by what’s between your legs—had to have come before you began transitioning, NPNG, otherwise you wouldn’t be transitioning. As for how the guys you’re meeting in gay bars feel about what is or isn’t between your legs, Buck has some advice for you about that, too: “If he meets a guy and tells him about himself—which is the right thing to do—and he doesn’t hear back, then that wasn’t the right guy for him.”
If you’re not having any luck with messy face-to-face meetings/make-out sessions in gay bars, Buck suggests you consider online dating.
“If he’s looking to hook up,” said Buck, “here’s a site where he can start: www.ftmlover.com. He’ll see that there are tons—and I mean TONS—of men out there who are interested in guys like us!”
But before you start meeting those guys, NPNG, Buck thinks—and I agree—that you have to become more comfortable in your own skin. “Be proud of your body,” said Buck. “When you feel confident that you are a man, no one can tell you otherwise.”
And do you know what might help you feel more confident? Getting to know some other trans guys.
“There are many reasons that someone might isolate themselves from other trans and gay people,” said Ezra Goetzen, a mental health therapist and trans community activist. “Some folks identify as male-to-male, seeing their transition as a medical procedure rather than a path to a transgender identity. Others, due to the fabulously flattering cultural/media images of trans people in general, internalize the shame, indifference, and disgust—and they don’t want to be reminded of these feelings by hanging out with other trans people.”
Whatever your particular reason for avoiding transmen, NPNG, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
“Being isolated from other trans folks leaves little room to find support and role models for loving yourself,” said Goetzen. “And it makes getting invaluable tips on how to get laid safely and carefully harder.”
Getting married soon. We want to put a note in the invitation requesting donations to organizations fighting for marriage equality in lieu of gifts. Which organization is fighting the hardest/most effectively in your view?
Gonna Get Married
Freedom to Marry (www.freedomtomarry.org), National Center for Lesbian Rights (www.nclrights.org), and GetEQUAL (www.getequal.org)—and thanks and congrats, GGM!
I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on the male tendency when sharing “naughty” photos to go straight for a close-up shot of the penis. Representative Anthony Weiner’s tweeting disaster has brought to mind a number of recent cases where high-profile men—such as Brett Favre—sent other women similar shots in an apparent attempt to seduce them. However, the response I’ve heard from women to such offerings can be summed up as “Ew, yuck!” Do you have any insight on why some men think this sort of overture would work?
Totally Confused Female
Some men think this sort of overture works, TCF, because sometimes it works.
Before we get into that, I want to say a few words about Anthony Weiner: Nothing the gentleman from New York said last week made him sound like a man who hasn’t taken a picture of his cock at some point and sent it to someone for some reason. Nevertheless, I’m confident that Weiner is going to beat this thing.
Watching Weinergate unfold is like watching the voters-getting-over-politicians-who’ve-smoked-pot story play out all over again, only this time at warp speed and with sexting standing in for THC. With pot, we went from exposure resulting in an instantaneous resignation in 1987 (Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg) to a tacit admission being a survivable mini-scandal in 1992 (Bill “Smoked, Didn’t Inhale” Clinton) to a collective shrug in 2008 (Barack “I Got High” Obama). With dirty pol pics, we’ve gone from instant resignation in February 2011 (Representative Christopher “Craigslist Congressman” Lee) to a tacit admission looking like a survivable mini-scandal in June 2011 (Representative Anthony “Beat This Thing” Weiner). At this rate, we’ll be shrugging off the dirty pics of Rep. TBD sometime before Labor Day.
Getting back to your question, TCF: The cock-shot overture doesn’t work on most women, I’ll grant you, but guys who send cock shots aren’t interested in most women. They’re interested in the sort of women that this sort of overture works on. And the sort of men who think only with their dicks—and not all men are that sort—figure the quickest way to determine if a woman is that sort of woman is to send the cock shot. And one of the women you talked to about cock shots may have been that sort of woman, TCF, but told you, “Ew, yuck!” because it was clear from the “Ew, yuck!” look on your face that “Ew, yuck!” was what you wanted to hear.
Gentlemen: The existence of a handful of women who welcome cock shots does not give you license to send cock shots to all women. Cock shots are for women who have expressed a clear and unambiguous interest in receiving cock shots.
Speaking of Buck Angel: Documentary filmmaker Dan Hunt (Cruel & Unusual, Dangerous Living, Bear Run) has been following Buck for six years and now needs to raise $6,000 to hire an editor to help him shape his new film. Please join me in helping Hunt to finish Mr. Angel by making a donation via Kickstarter:
www.tinyurl.com/3d8wmtf.
Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.
@ Hunter: or maybe he’s an ass man. And thank god for them. I have nice breasts but I’m stoked when a guy doesn’t get caught up on them since I’m totally indifferent to them too.
@140/Kyle: that’s really misinformed. Even if you look at the DSM you’ll find that being transgendered is not considered body dysmorphia and the “treatment” is allowing the person to transition into the gender they identify with. Even if you want some harder facts, there’s preliminary evidence that there are neuoanatomical differences between a biological male who identifies as female, and a biological male that identifies as male.
That’s a different context than what I meant but yeah, sure. I like ’em. But just becaue a guy isn’t into breasts doesn’t mean he has a problem with women. Some women have pretty much nothing in the way of breasts, that doesn’t mean they’re not women.
Not wanting to sound transphobic, I’m a little concerned that fag hags could try to dishonestly satisfy their “if you’re gay, prove it” fetish by becoming FTM LOL.
Anyways, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I’m vegetarian but an USA-Peruvian bisexual writer and TV presenter called Jaime Bayly once properly said in an interview (like ten years ago for the chilean version of the spanish tv show cqc) that “women are like vegetarian food, they taste good but it feels like you missed a peace of meat” or something like that.
ROFLMAO
Whoever said to get involved with the genderqueer community, not the trans community – do not listen to them. The “genderqueer community” (which does not exist everywhere, but exists mainly in big cities full over overly academic, middle-to-upper class, white college students, mostly female-assigned and often having attended women’s colleges) thinks there is a fundamental difference between transsexual/transgender people and cissexual/cisgender (non-trans) people. It is more important to them what you were born with between your legs than what your gender IS. By which I mean, if they know you are a man, they still have a burning need to know what is in your pants. Which is really sad, cissexist, and a huge problem for stealth trans people. So avoid them at all costs. Try to find a confidential support group or an online message board if you want to meet other men who happen to be trans but are not “transmen” or genderqueer or some other “I’m not really a man because I am trans which makes me SPECIAL!” type of man. Do not, I repeat, do not go out and randomly meet trans people, especially genderqueer trans people, if you value your privacy.
156: Hunter 78,
You’ve never met a man who mentally bites his knuckles when a long pair of legs and well formed bunda passes by? I have, bless them, as someone who has spent most of her life dancing and therefore would be devastated to loose her legs and well matched backside, I appreciate differences in likes and dislikes. There is nothing wrong with a man with different tastes, and it is a good thing, in my opinion, seeing that not every woman looks exactly the same. You are welcome to disagree, though.
Take care.
#163: Obvious troll is obvious.
weiner should go because he spent too much time preening and sending. i bet he didn’t read the necessary papers to make wise political decisions. It is not credible to assume he was doing the voter’s business without interferring self-distraction.
I hate to ask this — and I honestly did try to translate the words and spend some time trying to figure it out — but can someone restate in plain English whatever it is that #161 said?
@166 GQbd
I’ll take a stab at it. I read it as saying that there are various groups out there that have very different views of gender. Some think the most important determinant of gender is what genitals you were born with. Others think gender originates in the brain, i.e. how you feel. Do you feel female or male or something other? KCZ is warning that some groups have militant positions and will not respect other people’s views or privacy concerning their genitals (they will out you).
Thanks. That makes sense. I couldn’t tell you whether there is a “genderqueer community” here in my mid-size city but even the gay community can be very parochial and controlling in their expectations of other people in the community. I’d laugh except for the hurt that I’ve seen it cause people who didn’t act according to the group’s likes.
Bingo.
I thought all of Anthony Weiner’s photos were hot, particularly the one in his jockeys. Penises absolutely fascinate me, and I think some are quite beautiful. In fact, my favorite kind of porn is videos of guys getting themselves off. Clearly I’m in the minority, or one of the few girls willing to be honest about it.
@170, Actually I once saw the uncut version of Caligula and it was those kinds of scenes that I liked best. Caligula is a hot movie.
And I agree with you about the boxer shorts photo, although I liked it more when I knew for sure who it belonged to.
@161 way to stereotype about ALL genderqueer folks. We’re a more diverse bunch than you’re giving us credit for.
@170 – “Clearly I’m in the minority, or one of the few girls willing to be honest about it.” Which do you think is more likely? That lots of women on Slog are lying about what they like? Or that tastes differ?
@144 You might still be missing the point (depending on the particular guy you’re talking to). Some trans guys don’t want you touching their “pussy,” they don’t want you calling it a pussy or thinking of it as such. They want to have sex with men as men. (Some transguys might be fine with everything you’ve said. People vary.)
My brother, before he transitioned, was acutely uncomfortable with people noticing [her] hotness as a woman… it felt wrong and uncomfortable and unpleasant to him. Since he started identifying as male he’s very comfortable being “objectified” and having his body admired. But if someone is relating to him and attracted to him as a woman, no matter how androgynous, that’s a problem for him.
It’s a complicated area and requires a lot of sensitivity.
@151 perversecowgirl
The interesting thing about that site is that if you click through the photos in the “top” category, they all look the same, as you said. But if you go through the “all” category the photos vary wildly, including a whole lotta “ew!” if I may add my rating. The “top” ones are boring but unoffensive. There are some beautiful ones in the “all” folder.
@92, you are right on! Being surgically mutilated and doped up on hormones does not make a woman into a man or a man into a woman. If someone thinks they are in the ‘wrong’ body, they have a MENTAL problem. Treat the mental problem. And as we see, the attempts to alter the body to fit the (confused) mind do not work on the target audience anyway. No one is fooled! It is a cynical ploy by the medical community to ‘treat’ mental problems by physical mutilation. Deal with the confusion – which is a mental problem, not a physical one. As the Senator from Minnesota once said, it’s easier to wear slippers than to carpet the world.
178– Don’t work on the target audience? The target audience is one’s self. The rest of the world is welcome to accept or not to accept as they see fit. There will always be tons of variety in what people are attracted to. You’re missing the stories of people who transition with surgery and hormones and go from being miserably unhappy all the time to as happy as anyone else– meaning that life has its ups and downs, but at least they have a shot at being comfortable in their own skin.
Mr. J: Interesting! I honestly can’t remember how I navigated around ratemycock those few times I went…maybe I was only looking at the “top” ones.
Hunter78:
Cis is a useful synonym for straight; it’s shorter.
“Cis” is not a synonym for “straight”. The word refers to someone who feels comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth – so basically, the opposite of “trans”.
@140/157: As I understand it, the theory is that there’s a part of your brain that has a “map” of your body, and if this map doesn’t match up with your actual body, you feel discomfort. This map is influenced by fetal hormones, so occasionally someone will have a male body but a female map, or vice versa, which makes them transsexual.
It’s possible that something similar is going on with body dysmorphic disorder: for instance, someone may have a mental map that they don’t have a left arm, and thus be so uncomfortable with their left arm that they feel the need to cut it off. I don’t think it has anything to do with hate: it’s a neurological situation.
@177: Cis has nothing to do with being straight. One can be cis and gay, or trans and straight. Cissexual just means that your body matches your mental idea of your body.
Note that ‘cis’ is just the Greek opposite of ‘trans’, as in ‘cisalpine Gaul’, and so ‘cissexual’ means not transsexual, and ‘cisgender’ means not transgender. Transgender is an extremely broad category that includes virtually everyone in some respect, since it just means anyone who doesn’t strictly adhere to or subscribe to gender roles. So ‘cisgender’ should mean someone who generally sticks with gender roles. However, it sometimes gets used to mean cissexual, which is unfortunate for those of us who like to draw Venn diagrams of these things. 🙂
@180 perversecowgirl
Also the “top” ones have that clonal porn look.
You’ve got to love that two totally separate conversations are going on, one about people struggling not to define themselves based on their genitals and one about dudes who define themselves by their dicks.
183– Brilliant. You summed it up perfectly.
I am on a campaign to promote clarity in politics. As a part of this campaign, it is clear that the political parties need to be rebranded. As the right wing has Liberalism a pejorative–despite the fact that Liberlism was an inportant formative idea of the USA and without which the USA may have never been founded as democracy for and by the people–liberals now prefer the term Progressive which is apt. We must now find term for the Right which fits and clearly demarcates the division between the two opposing positions. For the right there seems no better term than Regressives. The terms Progressive and Regressive clearly enunciate the dirrefrence between the two. Therefore, I promote rebranding the Right and the GOP as the Regressive party.
@178
what you’re saying is jus straight up, scientifically false. See my post above.
@186: Even with body dysmorphia, I suspect it’s easier to treat by changing the body, not the mind, just like with transsexuals. See what I wrote in post 181.
@144:
As a gay trans guy, I personally wouldn’t want to have sex with someone who would be uncomfortable with another dick in the room. I wouldn’t want my partner to get too attached to my genitals, because I’m…rather distant from them, myself.
Basically, I wouldn’t want you to be into me for something that I don’t see as a part of me. If you wouldn’t be into me if I were a cis guy, I’m not interested.
@Dan and Buck:
(1) Not all gay trans men are interested in bottoming. Especially not with *that*. I’m a bottom who’s willing to play either way, but I know guys who are strict tops and others who will only bottom the standard way.
(2) Not all gay trans guys feel comfortable in the trans community. You wouldn’t know this, Dan, but Buck should: the trans male community is very heavily dominated by 3 overlapping groups – straight guys, formerly (and some currently) lesbian-identified guys, and genderqueers. Those of us who are unambiguously gay binary-male-identified guys who fit in comfortably in the gay community have an incredibly hard time finding support in the trans community. And not all of us really want that support. It sounds like the writer may be one. And in that case, I’d advise him to just get to know more gay men.
@187
I… don’t understand. We’re agreeing with eachother and also disagreeing with the same person.
@189: Yeah, I wasn’t disagreeing with you, but a couple people (140 and 178) were criticizing transfolk by comparing them to people with body dysmorphic disorder. I do think there’s a case to be made that the two are similar and that people with BDD should be treated like transfolk as far as body modification, so I wanted to add that on to your comment.
I think you would actually be wrong on that point. It seems to me that you’re actually comparing three seperate things which are fairly distinct.
1. Transgender: the most convincing evidence that I’ve heard of for a neuroanatomical basis for sexual identity is the cBNST (central division of the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis – to be clear this is nowhere near the ‘map’ you mentioned.) which is larger in those that identify as male and smaller in those that identify as female (regardless of biological gender or sexual orientation). I have never heard of somatotopic map differences in transgender individuals.
2. BDD: again, the running theory doesn’t seem to be that there’s a somatotopic map defect in BDD patients. It seems that their body dysmorphia is more related to depression/anxiety/self esteem and considering that they respond to therapy and medication, surgery is not advised for them. (This is NOT the case for transpeople where surgery IS advised and they do not respond to medication/therapy). “Surgery and dermatology literature note that the treatment outcome of these patients is frequently poor, with patients often voicing dissatisfaction with an outcome that is objectively acceptable. In some cases, the patient is satisfied with the appearance of the treated body part but then focuses their dissatisfaction on another body area.”
3. Finally, what you were talking about… I have learned about something similar to what you’re saying but only in the context of parietal lobe damage due to say, trauma (this is where the ‘map’ you mentioned is). Sometimes these patients want to remove parts of their body because the part of their brain that understands it belongs to them has been damaged. Often what you see is called ‘contralateral neglect’ which means that the patient completely ignores the opposite side of their body to the damage. This is different from BDD, though.
What I don’t understand is No Pole guy’s need to meet gay men only. If you were more open to non-monosexual partners, you might actually find someone who’s attracted to you as a man *and* not mind the lack of pole.
@191: Thanks for the additional information! I’d appreciate any references or links; I’d like to learn more.
The part about surgery not curing BDD and the discomfort transferring to a different part of the body is especially interesting: if true, it does make BDD sound like a different phenomenon.
No problemo.
So the one thing I can’t find (I think because I don’t know the clinical term for it) is the part about the parietal lobe damage. Our prof told us about it as kind of an anecdote so it’s not even in my notes. The closest I can find is if you google ‘hemispatial neglect’. But that’s not quite it either.
The quote I found you about BDD is from a paper for doctors, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles… and it’s right out of the abstract.
The cBNST study is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10843… although apparently they did a follow up study showing that this difference doesn’t really show up until adulthood, so I guess the ‘gender identity’ search is still on.
Poster #15 here, back to explain/defend myself to #30 and #75…
First, Dan does not explicitly say, “These men are interested in the sort of women that the cock shot works on.” That is your understanding of it. But what he *actually* says is, “They’re interested in the sort of women that THIS SORT OF OVERTURE works on.” This sort (category) of overture is the explicit sort. I *am* the sort of woman who an explicit overture works on; therefore, I *am* in that category and have some authority to speak for the group. (Limited though it may be.) So, as such a woman (the kind that responds to explicit overtures), I can say: this particular explicit overture can be counterproductive, and thus, may not be the wisest opening move. A safer explicit overture (one that may net you more sex partners) involves words, not pics. These men are weeding out otherwise willing and kinky sex partners with no conceivable rationale behind it.
Now, there is another angle. If the goal of the man is merely to engage in mutual explicit sexting, then Dan is correct that the men are behaving logically and weeding out only those they don’t want/need. (That is, weeding out those women who don’t like to send/receive naked genital pics.) However, if the desired outcome is not sexting but SEX (as it has seemed to be every time I’ve personally received such a pic), then these men are not behaving logically. Again, there is no conceivable reason to weed out potential sex partners who don’t like cock shots, and thus, this weeding is likely unintentional. Therefore, given my assumption that these men are looking for SEX, my post makes perfect sense.
In other words, I see what Dan is saying, but I think he’s wrong. (Or, at the very least, wrong in whatever percent of these cock-shot-senders who are sending explicit pics because they’re looking for a willing partner for sex.)
I’m a student, and the mom of a 5 y/o so I have limited funds. I still chose to back Buck Angels documentary. It must be made!
Thanks for showing me how to donate to him, and thanks to Buck for being awesome!
Naomi Dahl
I am one of those 1000’s of guys that Buck talks about. Contact me if curious on DudesNude or Manhunt.
— CTBrianD