Although I was born into a female body, I lived as a male from the age of thirteen to my early twenties. To me, the feminine seemed to be an inherently violated state of being. Any pleasure I derived from my genitals I associated with fear and contempt. Masculine desires felt safer and more affirming. I came to believe I would never have an enjoyable sex life if I didn’t possess a male organ. Getting one would require an expensive and delicate surgery, which, even if it were possible, still would not allow me to ejaculate.
At a hippie summer camp, a teenager told me it would be fifty years before surgery would be developed to allow me to have that experience. It was infuriating. Our culture makes a big deal about sexuality, and I felt I would never have a normal sex life. It seemed so much of the world was not for me. After high school, I fell into a particular subculture of the trans community that was supportive in many ways but damaging in others. People were pushing BDSM narratives as the norm, although I had a bad experience with it. I watched people get involved with a variety of lifestyles, hoping these dynamics would bring them liberation but actually getting more entangled and confused. Many of my relationships involved emotional manipulation from people who had similar trauma to mine, which caused me to reverberate with the same trauma. Desperate, I decided to explore deeper and figure out how to have healthier relationships.
Eventually, I de-transitioned and returned to a female identity. It wasn’t easy since, in my community, I would get attacked and harassed if I claimed to be biologically female. I was told that I had been changed by my experience living as a male. In addition to the emotional effects, what if I had medically altered myself to a degree where I could never be seen as female again? I was struggling with fear and conflict when I discovered OM—Orgasmic Meditation a year after de-transitioning.
v attracted me because it's a meditative practice. I thought it would be good to slow down and get back to the basics of how my body worked. I'd had a lot of traumatic experiences involving my genitals, and the gentleness of Orgasmic Meditation was reassuring.
In my first OM, the big question for me was whether the stroker would have a radically different experience with me than he generally had with other women. In the Orgasmic Meditation space, the rules and steps of the container allowed me to be half-naked and still feel safe having a cis-gendered man see and touch the most intimate part of my body. In the noticing step, he told me exactly what he saw when he looked at my genitals, confirming that the people who had harassed me were wrong. I could still be female.
During the stroking, I had a lot of sensation in my body. I started to allow myself to feel pleasure and own my power as a person who can direct the experience, but I was also fighting my fears. After a few sessions, I no longer felt afraid that I had lost my femininity, at least during OMing, although I still had to cope with it while dating. With each Orgasmic Meditation practice, I became more tuned in to the feelings in my body and learned to make adjustments by telling my OM partner how to make the stroke feel better. Awareness of what turned me on during Orgasmic Meditation translated into helping me sense what was right for me in other areas of my life. I was able to feel my turn-on as a guiding force.
I had a relationship recently where the other person was saying my trauma symptoms were a sign that I was inherently submissive. It was not an okay way to view the world, to say the least. At first, I just nodded, going along with their observations. But I listened to my body and noticed there was no turn-on happening. I used to be trapped in trying to validate other people, but at that moment, I felt no turn-on. I realized I didn’t have to let this person impose their ideas on me. Ordinarily, it would have taken me two weeks to act on that understanding, but it only took me two seconds to say, “Actually, no, you’re wrong.” Orgasmic Meditation has been good medicine for me.
