Tag: men who love transwomen

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I didn’t choose to be transgender/transamorous

IMG_1062Actually you did. So did I.

What? Did you think it was some random selection?

Well, I have news for you: Everything happening in this physical “reality” is being agreed upon and acted out in a massive cooperative venture. And that includes choices you make about you, what you look like, your gender and more. In the same way you create your reality through the stories you tell (the thoughts you think) you have created everything else about you.

Now, you may think you don’t like the choice you made to come into the world as you are, but actually, you’re celebrating the fact in the eternal now that is your home.

Yes, you are an eternal being. I know, you probably don’t have any reference for that statement. Or maybe you do, and you rail against it because the reference refers to some kind of religious dogma you’d rather not think about. That’s cool because I’m not sharing dogma here. I’m sharing something you can easily verify with a little effort and guidance (guidance because you have to know what to look for).

Consider the possibility that you are eternal. What if this life was just one of an infinite number you have lived, many of which you have lived, and are living simultaneously right now. If that is the case (and it is), then it seems you as an eternal being would tire of experiencing every freaking life experience as a woman or a man or whatever.

Look a that again: If you are eternal, continuously, raucously, enthusiastically experiencing lifetime after lifetime AND you have had infinite numbers of experiences in the past, doesn’t it make sense that you’d get tired of coming into the experience only as a man or a woman?

Oh, consider this: There are no genders in that eternal state that is you. In that state, the original state from which you spring, you are all “genders” (infinite potential). If you are eternal, you have access to the amazing variety (i.e. infinite) of ways you could express yourself in physical reality. Also, presuming you are eternal, that means everyone (and everything) else is too. Along with eternity comes mastery of awareness and knowledge. Since you are not some closed-off being, separate from other experiences of other beings, you have direct influence upon other beings’ experiences. So all that interoperability between you and other points of being-ness has an infinite potential to generate variety….variety that you crave as an eternal being.

(are you beginning to get this?)

℘”What if this life was just one of an infinite number you have lived, many of which you have lived, and are living simultaneously right now.” ℘

So here you are, at the point of yet another life. You’re excited, thrilled even for another plunge into this framework that freaking fascinates you. You’re wanting to have a new experience though, one that will add to the immenseness of you. You’re also wanting to positively influence those other beings with whom you are in contact with and will continue to be once you in-personate yourself.

So, you choose an experience on the frontier of life experience. One that will push the boundaries of life experience for you and for others “affiliated” with you. These others (your family members, friends, lovers and everyone else you may encounter) have agreed to this escapade of yours and promise to make the experience interesting. But they are bounded by the stories you tell, stories which create experience after experience in your coming day-to-day journey that will be your life.

So you come into the world with an express purpose: to experience joy, “growth”, to have fun in the process, and to explore the frontiers of what it means to be you. Not you the transperson or trans attracted person. But you the eternal being having a life experience as a transperson or a trans attracted person.

This may make no sense to you whatsoever. You may have no reference to understand what you’re reading.  Many folks aren’t ready to hear this. But as I wrote above and in previous posts, with a little effort and guidance all of this can be verified by you.

But whether you choose to verify it or not doesn’t really matter. Your stories are predetermining your life experience moment by moment. And if you’re telling stories of suffering, mayhem, bad relationships, joblessness and such, that is what is stacking up to be delivered in your day-to-day life experience.

And that is why we focus on the stories you tell.

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Your circumstances match your stories

FullSizeRenderOk, in my last post I explained how most people’s life-experience-creation mechanism is operating on autopilot or default. Odds are good that you’re in the same boat: you don’t know much about stories and how they create your life experience. Heck, you may not even believe – let alone know – that you’re eternal or that you control your life experience.

Or maybe you do. I actually don’t now everyone who reads the stuff I write. But a LOT of people don’t. So the odds are, you’re among them.

And so you may be going through life ignorant that every time you complain about something you’re telling a story. And that story is creating circumstances which match your story. It doesn’t matter that it is something you don’t want. This is how the process works.

The good news is this mechanism comes with an indicator. We call it our emotions. Stories you tell that are not creating circumstances you want to experience cause you to feel negative emotion. Those that are leading to circumstances you’re wanting to experience cause you to feel positive emotion.

Now I want to explain what that means in terms of dating and getting what you want in that area and other areas of life experience.

If you’re telling the story that all men are chasers, it is not possible for you to meet men who aren’t.

If you’re telling yourself that your family disowned you and wants nothing to do with you, it is impossible for them to be anything other than what matches your story. In other words, they can’t change in the face of the story you’re telling about them. Yes, other people are part of your life experience and they, just like everything else in your life experience, is a result of your stories. That includes how they behave towards you.

I know, that sucks. But that’s what’s happening.

If you’re feeling shame, embarrassment, lack of confidence, insecurity, or fear as a trans person, you are telling extremely powerful negative stories, stories which are unconscious to you (you aren’t aware of them). But the feelings of shame, embarrassment, lack of confidence, insecurity, or fear you do feel are trying to alert you to them.

If you’re a trans attracted guy and feeling shame, embarrassment, lack of confidence, insecurity, or fear as a trans attracted person, you are telling extremely powerful negative stories, stories which are unconscious to you (you aren’t aware of them either). Others pick up on that shit. So they say things (like jokes and jabs) that further confirm your negative stories. They do things which indicate you are to remain feeling shame, embarrassment, lack of confidence, insecurity, or fear as a trans attracted person.

Those are just three examples of what is going on as you create your life experience as you go, and reap the benefits thereof.

So there is a purpose to suffering. What is it? It indicates the stories you’re telling are leading you to what you don’t want. Meanwhile, your life experience matches the stories you tell yourself. So there really are two indicators letting you know how you’re doing creating your reality: how you feel and what you’re getting in your life experience. If your life experience is sucky, you’re telling sucky stories.

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A transamorous man wrote a book about it!

19389783_10103249591703972_1511824224_n[Founder’s note: We did a podcast and YouTube interview with transamorous man (or Transam, as he calls us) Joseph McClellan, author of the new book Trans*am: Cis Men and Trans Women in Love, from ThreeL Media earlier this summer. But the quality was so bad, we decided to try again when he’s back in the states. In the meantime, his book has been getting some buzz and we wanted to be in on that. So Joe shared the following interview with us, which he did with Teadate co-founder, Michael Osofsky.] 

Can you describe a recent sexual experience?
I have been working in Chittagong Bangladesh for six months, so I live in something of a self-imposed sexual quarantine. My last sexual encounter was over my winter holiday when I flew to visit a trans women in the Philippines with whom I’d had a very enriching correspondence for a while. I stayed there for three weeks and it was a lovely experience. As for any sexual details, I will pull a page from Laverne Cox’s interview with Katie Couric and contend that the details are nobody’s business.

How has your attraction to trans people changed throughout your life?
The changes have only been subtle. Early on there was an element of exploring, experimenting, and accumulating experience to make sense of why I was attracted to trans women as much, or more, than I was to the cis women I was expected to love. Knowing that my attraction to trans women stirred up others’ curiosity and bewilderment, I asked myself versions their questions. Over time I figured out some reasons why I am attracted to trans women, and why I have a general respect for trans people. At this point it is somewhat old-hat. At least half of the people I consider my closest friends are trans, and I have been happy to settle into a kind of kinship and gratitude that trans people exist and that their lives have been connected with mine.

When did you know for sure you weren’t gay?
I really never dwelled on that question and found its reductionism kind of funny. As a kid I was always attracted to the feminine romantically, and while I may have had a vague presentiment that was more sexually open than my friends and peers, I had a pretty good idea about what attracted me and what did not and felt that the hetero end of the binary fit me better than the other label. These days I am grateful for the rise of the term queer since it refuses to go into such linguistic cages.

How do you know that you’re not transgender?
The terms cisgender and transgender are quite easy to distinguish. I always refer people to Julia Serano’s peerless book, Whipping Girl, for her explanations. To paraphrase, “cisgender” simply means that you do not experience a conflict between what others perceive to be your sex or gender and what you take to be your sex or gender (See Thomas Laqueuer’s book Making Sex about how difficult it is to make sense of a firm difference between sex and gender). “Transgender”, on the other hand, is to feel that others’ interpretive gaze toward your sex or gender does not match your own inner experience of those categories. So in my case, everyone has always just taken me for a boy/guy/man, and I feel no compunction using those broad labels for myself. In Trans*am I make it clear that I have no truck with the idea of a mystical “Manhood” that establishes me as cisgender; it’s just that I present my sex and gender in ways that are comprehensible to the limited number of conventional labels we traditionally use.

Are you transam by choice?
I’m of a mind that attraction is, at the most fundamental level, intuitive. So no, my initial and subsequent attraction to trans women has never required the conscious effort of choosing. However, not repressing that attraction and cultivating it to be an open transam is a choice. I like to use the example of a man who sees a girl he is attracted to across the room at a party. She is trans and he does not know it. That is an unchosen intuition. What he does after he finds out she is trans, however, is up to him.

 

What are the essential qualities and behaviors of masculine & feminine and which of these do you exhibit?
I have many philosophical reasons for denying the existence of “essential qualities.” Trans people certainly suffer when they “fail” to manifest the qualities and behaviors that others expect. The same goes for transamorous people. There are qualities and behaviors that we could conventionally call masculine or feminine, but I think it is very important not to believe that any quality or behavior corresponds to an unchanging essence. For example, at first glance I’m pretty masculine, athletic, I sport a beard, and people make assumptions about how those masculine qualities entail assumed masculine behaviors. I don’t have a problem describing someone aesthetically as masculine or feminine, but I think it is very toxic to give those terms a metaphysical significance.

What do you make of cisgender men who say they’re a lesbian trapped in a man’s body?
I may have even made that joke about myself, but I don’t think it’s a productive way to look at things. The “wrong body” paradigm is dying a belated death in trans discourse. Trans writers like Sandy Stone and Thalia Mae Bettcher have done an excellent job of exposing how that paradigm has a bleak history based on cis psychologists insisting that to be trans is to have a pathology characterized by feeling trapped in the wrong body. For generations trans people knew that they were expected to describe themselves in this way, so they did. Now, however, there seems to be a slow turn toward allowing people to simply describe their own singular experience of being a person with a certain kind of body who feels a certain way and likes certain things. I believe transamorous cis men—indeed everyone—should also try to look at things this way. A nuanced first person account makes a lot more sense and is a lot more relatable to others that absurdities like “I’m a lesbian trapped in the wrong body.”

Joemantage

 

What does it mean to “fetishize” trans women and what makes it a bad thing?
This is a serious ethical issue. In Trans*am I discuss pieces about it by the trans writers Christin Milloy, Charley Reid, and Princess Harmony. Men have a tendency to not appreciate the full humanity of a trans woman, but to treat her as a symbol of the exotic, the exciting, the transgressive, or whatever else. Or in the worst cases, they just think of trans women as pretty purveyors of a forbidden penis. This leads to unethical patterns of behavior and terrible feelings borne by the objectified, fetishized lover. The scholar Avery Tompkins has written some wonderful studies about the same issue pertaining between trans men and their cis female lovers. Tompkins points out how dissatisfactory it is, however, to suggest that anyone who considers transness an attractive quality is automatically a fetishizer. They argue that this leads to a climate of shame and sex-negativity that are at odds with queer politics. Transamorous lovers are afraid to articulate their attraction for fear of being labeled a fetishizer. One reason I wrote Trans*am was to try to weigh in on this. I have certainly been accused of being a “chaser” because trans women are my preference romantically and sexually. I have not been able to concede that my preference is pathological, and since I do not believe squelching my transamorous feelings is healthy, I have tried to think about how to make it ethical.

What advice would you give people discovering they might be transam?
My coarsest formulation is “If you don’t act weird about it, neither will other people.” That was always my ethos, but of course it assumes a level of privilege. But right now there is an unprecedented level of awareness about gender and sexuality, but that brings with it an imperative to engage and advocate. Don’t take shit from anyone. Study a little bit and learn arguments to shut people’s ignorance down. Value your trans partners and friends and tie your struggle to theirs. Celebrate that you are a little different and don’t let anyone tell you what you’re supposed to be like.

What changes have you noticed in your sexuality since you started meditating?
This is hard for me to answer, since I started meditating very young, before my sexuality had developed. From my teens until my early twenties I lived in meditation centers and did many long solitary retreats. I believe this had a profound impact on how I viewed trans people, since Buddhism teaches an aggressive anti-essentialism. When I encountered trans people, I was not encumbered by presumptions that they—or I—contained essences that I needed to worry about. As I’ve gotten older, and for personal reasons have become a less zealous Buddhist, I still hold those lessons dear, but I do not formally meditate very much anymore, with some regret. Lacking discipline and burdened with grownup problems like making a living, I find that really good sexual experiences sometimes bring me to the meditative place that I still value.

How has your sexuality been received by different cultures you’ve visited?
In Bangladesh, I don’t get to live my sexuality much, but I talk about it quite often in my gender studies and philosophy classes at the Asian University for Women. 80% of my students are Muslim, and I have been very impressed by how open and non-judgmental they are. Outside of campus, however, it may be a different story. If a trans lover happens to visit me here, I will definitely be aware of the gaze on us, just as I have been in small American towns. In Thailand and the Philippines, there is a lot of trans visibility, so the gaze is tolerable. In Brazil, there is a big problem with anti-trans violence, but I wasn’t really aware of it when I lived there. When you’re in a transamorous couple, you definitely feel the gaze differently in different places, but, in my case, my privileges and stubbornness have allowed me to hold my head up high and go about my business.

What’s been the reaction of your family and friends to your sexuality?
For my best friends and brothers, it has always seemed like something they’ve admired about me. Many of my friends have become sort of de facto cis-trans ambassadors from what they’ve gleaned from me and from the time they’ve spent with my partners. I don’t have the kind of relationship with my parents where we talk a lot about our private lives, but over time they got the picture of the kinds of women I like and they have are accepting. Nevertheless, I’m a little nervous that my book will be too-much-information for them. I’m grateful for these privileges though. I never felt like I had much to lose by being open, but I sympathize, to a degree, with those who do feel that they have a lot to lose.

If labels such as top/bottom, dom/sub, etc. are detrimental, how come they exist?
I don’t think there is anything at all wrong with these terms per se, but when they are automatically gendered they are problematic. The kink community is not guilty of this, but it is still the global default to assume that a man is (or should be) a top or dom, and that a woman is (or should be) a bottom or a sub.

If I identify as transam, how can I become fully enlightened when Buddhism advises us to stop identification altogether?
I presume in the same way that enlightened beings still use the words “I” and “me” and “myself” or call themselves Buddhists. Buddhism does not advocate the annihilation of language, but a realization that all terms are mere conventions, that they are not indexed to fixed essences.

What would you like to say to your critics?
Since the book is only newly released, the only thing I’ve had to contend with so far is resistance to a cis white man sticking his nose into trans issues at all, and the accusation that I am just contributing to the privileging of cis male voices. But the book is really about cis men who are attracted to trans women, not a study of trans women. The vast majority of the people I cite in the book are trans, and I am very much in support of a trans-driven discourse. I am trying to contribute to a specific niche. In my experience, and, importantly, in the experience of all my trans friends and lovers, there has been an obstinate unwillingness by cis men to analyze and articulate the ways that their lives intersect positively with their trans lovers. Many trans writers have addressed the subject, but at some point it seems to me that cis men whose lives are truly connected to trans women should attempt to engage and be accountable.

Joe’s book is available on Amazon.com.

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Free yourself from the shadows

llurk in the shadowsI’m a bit ahead of the curve on some of the work I’m doing. One is encouraging men to come out of the shadows of their trans attraction, into the bright warming sun of their transamory. The other is to encourage transgender women who persistently tell the story of “tranny chasers” and the struggles they face, to change those stories so they can live lives of joy and empowerment.

In both cases, both audiences are responding. But sometimes, my expectations get ahead of where people are.

Case in point: our Man On Fire Conference.

The Man On Fire Conference is the first-ever national conference designed exclusively for and about men who are attracted to transgender women; men with transgender children, parents or siblings; and men trying to figure out their unique part in the transgender phenomena increasingly dominating social consciousness. We’ve scheduled the conference for this summer.

After aggressive promotion via Craigslist and Facebook advertising, only three tickets have sold. What does this tell us?

I think many trans attracted men are still skittish about being seen in public as trans attracted. They aren’t too keen registering for an event, then coming to such an event in person. We’ve gotten at least 10 men who said they are interested. At least two men who are married expressed interest in going, but need to sort out how to explain the ticket and flight expenses to their wives. At least two other men complained about the price of tickets. We thought $35 was a reasonable price. But guys focused almost exclusively on the $150 at the door price (priced that way do encourage early registration). So maybe an in person event is premature.

So we’re considering changing the event to an online one, where men can participate in the comfort of their trans attracted shadows. We know there’s demand for what we offer. A lot of men are reading and watching our material. We know there are a lot of men out there who fancy transgender women. We know there is a lot of frustration, shame and pain being trans attracted.

We’re still searching for the right combination of things that will entice men out of those shadows and into the light. Maybe its the match-making service I’m piloting?

If you’re a trans attracted man reading this, let me know your thoughts on how we can better serve you. I’d love to hear your ideas.

 

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Get the girl. Easily.

IMG_0762So I’ve launched a new initiative to help trans attracted men get their girl. There are a lot of other results this initiative will produce, all of which will enormously benefit the trans community.

But the result I want to describe here is the one you men are most interested in: getting the girl you want and getting her easily.

I know how fucking hard it is to meet transgender women. I know because I’ve been there. I know all the elements which make being trans attracted hard. I know there is a pent-up demand among us men for a solution that will make it easier for us to get the girl. I know this because pretty much all the men who come on our shows express this desire. The women do too and I’m going to get to them, after I demonstrate success with a number of you guys.

Ok, about the new initiative:

There currently are five or so men who are participating in a pilot test. It is designed to produce circumstances wherein the men easily meet the perfect transgender woman for them.  The process starts by understanding the nature of stories, demonstrating through actual proof how those stories create physical reality, then creating new stories while practicing the art of storytelling so that transgender women come to the men….instead of the men having to go to where the transgender women are.

Of course, this story examination has several other benefits and challenges. It creates a kind of happiness, ease, and general satisfaction with life on earth. It creates better experiences throughout life, not just in the dating world. People who contribute to producing “negative” life experiences and drama naturally fade from one’s life. In their place come people who help create better life experiences, ones more in line with the life participants want. The challenges are that the participants have to confront their old negative stories and be willing and open to trying out something they may believe is bullshit.

All of this comes with a guarantee. It is absolutely guaranteed to work. What online dating site can make that claim? The test participants are not paying for their participation during the pilot, but the guarantee is there nonetheless.

Ultimately I plan to create a custom-curated exclusive community where trans attracted men and transgender women can meet under the best circumstances, circumstances where the man and the woman are on the same page about what a relationship is, what their relationship to that relationship is, an how to dance in that relationship in ways that every dancer gets what they want.

There’s a lot of potential for this to be life changing for participants, as well as life changing for the trans community. It could actually be the beginning of one of the most important changes the community has ever seen.

I’ll be sharing more as the pilot moves forward. Stay tuned.