This is how it is. The girl talks and I sit across the table with my drink and listen. She's lovely, bright, bookish, and twenty-three. She tells me that she's non-binary, and we talk about how that's different (or if it is different) from her being bi. Her first and middle names are androgynous enough, and she likes that.
She's in skinny jeans and deck shoes, a mostly-unbuttoned men's dress shirt, a silver necklace with a pendant. Her hair is messy and looks like a pixie cut that's gotten away from her. She's strikingly lovely, yes, and I'm fortunate that she's there with me. She likes "androgynous" as a word. She asks if I think she'd make a beautiful gay boy, and I tell her yes.
The way she's dressed at the bar is...what? Eve Babitz died a few days ago, and I'm thinking the girl could pass as a California gay boy in the mid-1960s...or at least as the film version of one. I can place her in my head as a boy in a gay bar in some imaginary movie from the 1960s or early 1970s, as a gay boy on some black-and-white late-night-cable rerun of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip". That would make her a memory of a memory, wouldn't it? She's not dressed in 1920s gay Oxbridge undergraduate drag-- like Donna Tartt at Bennington c. 1980. She has a period California look, an air of effortless hedonism.
What she's telling me is that she likes having boys in her bed that will role-play with her. She can't decide what makes her more hot-- being with a gay boy who'll treat her as a boy to be topped, or being with a straight boy she can persuade to act as her gay boyfriend or-- better --her girlfriend. She enjoys being topped like a boy, but she likes dressing straight boys up and making them beg to be topped and taken, too. She probably likes that more.
Non-binary, she says, but she doesn't know how to get outside the terms of binary sex. Being with another girl is wonderful, she tells me, but dressing up and using strap-ons with another girl is just...Lesbian Classic. What she likes, she says, is making boys, gay or straight, lose any sense of their own boundaries.
She asks me if I know the word autogynephilia. I do know it-- it's a word used as an accusation in the Trans Wars. The angriest of the GC brigade use it against trans women. It's used to mean that trans women don't really see themselves as wholly or "actually" women, that they're simply fetishists excited by the idea of sex as a woman. The trans brigade reject the word absolutely. I've read some of the arguments around the word and don't know what to make of them. If you see yourself as a woman-- as "really" a woman --wouldn't you by definition be excited by the idea of having sex as a woman? And both GC and TRA types reject and despise anything that might be "just" a fetish.
The girl across the table tells me that she likes the idea of fetishes. She likes exploring fetishes, of focusing desire on things that have a kind of magic to them, of turning partners into someone and something new. Nair and make-up, she says. Depilate a boy, do his make-up, teach him to "rock a miniskirt" and beg to be fucked-- there's nothing like that, she says. Make him into a hot teen girl, she says, then be inside him while he begs to be your rag doll, to have his holes stretched-- there's nothing like that. Make him love the look and feel of dressing up, teach him that it's magic. And the same thing works the other way, too, she says: wear a suit and tie, have a gay boy top her while he tells her what he'd tell a straight boy he was teaching to be a gay bottom.
I raise my drink and grin at her and ask if what she wants isn't a kind of meta-autogynephilia. I know that there's a "forced feminization" thing that some dommes do, and there's something of that in what she wants to do with boys. I'm just not sure whether she sees the "humiliation" part of that as actual degradation for the boy or just as pedagogy. Does she want to teach straight boys that they can be excited and aroused by what it must feel like to have sex as a girl? Does she want a waxed, mascara'd boy in a miniskirt to fuck her not as a trans woman with a cock or a "trans-lesbian", but as a boy who's learning to derive pleasure from pretending (or being made to pretend) that he's a girl? When she gets topped herself, she says, she loves it that the boy thinks she's good enough at pretending to be a gay boy for him to fuck. I'd love to be a boy, she says, and have an older man make me dress up and be his girl.
She can tell me these things because...? Because I'm older and could never be the beautiful boy her fantasies require? Because I'm someone who looks like he can talk about these things with her and not be shocked or appalled? Because I'm quiet and I'm doing my own Freudian Analyst fantasy-- letting her pour herself into my silence?
I do like listening to her. I like it that she says she sees herself as "non-binary", but that she wants to live on the border of binaries. She doesn't really want to be someone/something who's neither male nor female. What she wants is to turn from one to the other and back at will, to have the sensations of sex as each...and to take others into a land of sex in funhouse mirrors. I like listening to her, and I want to hear more of her stories.
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