OFM Lust:The Risk it Takes to Bloom

Once you’ve acknowledged and started to own your true gender identity, your relationship to self-pleasure changes. The body parts you have—the genitals you have—somehow feel incorrect. Or if not incorrect, they feel … misplaced. It can feel like the parts you should have are missing, or are invisible. But you feel them. Like a phantom limb after amputation. 

There was a year-long period when I couldn’t bring myself to go on a date, or to take a lover, not even a one night stand. The more I understood my gender-fluidity, I knew that I needed to focus on myself for a while. To learn to love myself, and what me felt and looked like.

As a female-bodied person who often feels like a boy, I decided during my year alone that it was time to explore the world of sex toys. I’d had a vibrator since college, but the shapes, materials, and sex-positive options had changed so much in the 10 years since I graduated. You could now walk down the street and see harnesses in storefronts in my mid-sized Midwestern town. This openness was equally intimidating and encouraging.

On a Monday morning, when I figured few people would be out shopping for things like dildos, I visited the local sex shop, Sophelia’s Boutique. I felt shy, exposed. With only one other person in the store, I felt like the shopkeeper’s eyes were following me. My cheeks flushed red and I kept my eyes lowered to the shelves. It’s OK, I coached myself.

 No need to be shy in this place. 

It took a minute to realize my embarrassment was fueled by shame. Despite my personal value of openness, the Midwestern ethic of keeping sexual expression behind closed doors stuck in my brain. It was a constant effort to remind myself that sex was good. Sex was healthy. And that all body types deserved pleasure and representation. And that my body—though I tried to deny and ignore it for years—was not a typical body, in the sense that it didn’t fit a strictly masculine or feminine appearance.

During ovulation and menstruation, my body felt intensely, almost obscenely female. This was the part that often felt incorrect. Incorrect because I could not control my masculine expression on those days. Even if I tried, my body seemed to laugh at me for doing so. 

During my year alone I decided to experiment during my luteal phase with dressing up in full makeup, dresses, skirts, tights, and heels, as a way to lean into the madness of my body. On the days right after bleeding, I’d go without makeup or accessories of any kind, wearing t-shirts, baseball caps, and straight-legged jeans. The few days each month when my menstrual cycle didn’t dictate my moods felt the freest. They were the days when I felt most in control of my fluidity.

Not only did I abstain from sex during that year, but I hardly saw my friends. I needed to know who me was before re-entering the world as that person. Whether that was necessary or not, it felt right for me.

After nearly an hour in Sophelia’s Boutique, where I took in all the options available to validate and honor gender-fluid bodies, I selected a realistic-looking, strapless, strap-on dildo, a flesh-toned packer that I could wear inside my underwear anytime I liked—even while bleeding—and a mini bullet vibrator to go with both.

With a deep breath to calm my anxieties, I set the toys on the checkout counter. I half-expected a quizzical look from the cashier, but I chose not to care. 

Purchasing these items in person was part of the process of healing my shame.

“We just got these in a month ago,” said the cashier with a friendly smile as she handled the strapless strap-on. “They’re so popular; we can barely keep them in stock. The design is super comfortable, and it’s made from a medical grade silicone that’s body-safe. I think you’ll really like it.”

I couldn’t help but smile. This stranger in the boutique had just normalized something for me that I’d never allowed myself to normalize. Something that was, in fact, perfectly normal. It was normal to explore both your masculine and feminine sides. It was normal to imagine yourself with body parts you weren’t born with. 

And here it was in front of me: the tangible opportunity to explore and validate those desires. I thanked the cashier and left the shop feeling lighter than when I’d come in.

At home, I gently washed and dried my new toys, then lay them on my bed, caressing each one as though a lover—or, more accurately, as though they were the missing parts of me that I’d been seeking for several years—exploring their curves, solidity and flexibility. Taking in the realistic, veiny texture of the strap-on, the weight of the flesh-toned packer. 

I put on a Spotify playlist for getting in the mood and lay down on my bed, running my hands over my stomach, chest, thighs—thanking my skin for each nuanced sensation of pleasure. I reached for the lubricant beside my bed and massaged myself to heighten my  arousal, then massaged the insertable bulb of the strapless strap-on and slowly slid it inside of me.

With the exposed end of the dildo emerging from my pelvis, I gasped in awe at seeing myself for the first time with something I’d imagined countless times before and never dreamed could be a reality: my own erection. 

As I gripped and stroked my solid cock, ripples of pleasure shot through me as though the appendage were truly my own.

I took my time, basking in the ownership of my body—its fluidity. Its varieties of pleasure and expression. Its electric field and its honesty. The body never lies. It’s just that we often try to deny its truth. But when I chose to listen to it, it in turn rewarded me with one of the most intense orgasms I’ve ever had. And not just one, but one after another after another.

As I lie spent and glistening with sweat against my pillows, I thanked the fluidity of my body. For the masculine expression of an erection and the feminine joy of multiple orgasms. And in my head, I thanked the sex toy industry for its embodiment of sex positivity and the self-love that it inspires in people of all body types and genders.