What We Talk About When We Talk About Genitals

On subjectivity, genital preference, 'Rotting in the Sun', and the plight of the transfag.

The illusory goalpost of objectivity fell a long time ago. As a culture, we seem to understand that the notion of objectivity is a fiction that, in reality, only obscures the finer details of experience. Like any ideal, objectivity has historically been used as a tool of oppression. Within the world of academia, it was long considered unsuitable for Black scholars to work in African American historical studies: how could Black people remain impartial and logical concerning histories of American chattel slavery, failed Reconstruction, Jim Crow, while so evidently biased? While so prone to emotion, perhaps generally, as white supremacist logic would have it, but particularly in regards to these too-close-to-home topics? So, who, then, could retain adequate distance to study, analyze, and contextualize American anti-Blackness? White people, of course, who famously have no skin the game with concern to racism. This framework worked to uphold the long-held illusion of whiteness as the absence of race: neutral, natural, default, objective.  To anyone reading this, the ludicrous, oppressive, and racist nature of this reasoning requires no explanation, and yet in so many areas of analysis, the notion of “distance” is still prized as a hallmark of intellectual integrity. It’s a vestige of Western, anthropological thinking that attempts to veil the gaze through which the Other is constructed, and it leaves us all in the dark.

Rigorously accounting for and deconstructing our subjectivity may be the closest we can get to something like “truth”: still a Holy Grail that will remain forever distorted by filters placed by the unconscious mind. The only common ground we might reasonably hope for is the acknowledgement that there is none. For instance, in this moment, I am wondering if it is inappropriate or careless for me to invoke anti-Blackness as an illustrative example in an argument that, ultimately, is not about race. And in this line of thinking, I realize that my inclination to do so is likely shaped by a reluctance to immediately point to my own marginalization for fear it will discredit me for the very reasons outlined above. Even in my argument against objectivity, I am appealing to the authority of distance that I claim to dismiss.

So, while I may not realistically aim for immunity to this phenomenon, I will settle for cultivating a practice of awareness. None of this is particularly easy or comfortable for me to talk about, but I will base the following discussion on the assertion that I am the foremost expert on my own genitals and the experiences I have with and regarding them. We will build from there. I will discuss regressive masculinity, transphobia, and misogyny in the cis gay community, and these are issues that I am uniquely qualified to weigh in on not despite but due to my closeness, my subjectivity, my emotion. I have felt sadness, anger, rejection, hopelessness and indignation, and I bring all these big feelings to the table, as analyzing them has helped me diagnose what sicknesses infect my community and enabled me to imagine what kinds of futures I might hope for.  

In queer spaces, you will occasionally encounter the phrase “genital preference”. The genital preference argument basically asserts that there are cis lesbians and gay men who are disinterested in trans people not due to transphobia, but simply because a vulva and vagina or dick and balls (attached to cis bodies) are integral to their attraction to people. Immediately, I want to clarify that I am not claiming no one actually experiences genital preference; I’m sure many do. Of course, “preference” is not the end all be all, immutable, God-given concept that so many people treat it as, but that’s a topic for another time. The issue I take with the genital preference argument is that it is not supported by my empirical experience. On gay hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff, I find myself in high and consistent demand. On the gay side of relationship-oriented apps like Hinge, however, it’s often nearly impossible to get a match. To be very clear, it is demographically and sometimes literally the same cis gay men who indicate through their app activity that they want to have sex with me but would never consider me as a person to date. So you can see how I would find it difficult to believe that “genital preference” is  at the core of this phenomenon. Rather, this disparity seems to betray a social and cultural cause that is quite evidently rooted in transphobia. Cis gay men will not date transmen because there is no social capital to be gained in such a relationship, because transphobic rhetoric within their community may make them feel that dating a transman threatens the purity and validity of their homosexuality, because they never pictured themselves ending up with a transman, because they already came out and don’t want to have another hard conversation with their parents.

It’s vulnerable to share something like this: to publicize, to bemoan rejection. Some of my reluctance to do so is in anticipation of common internet reactions to this sort of sentiment, generally akin to, “Maybe you just suck”. And don’t think I haven’t considered the possibility. But if that’s the case, then I did not suck when I was living as a ciswoman, and if anything, I feel my personality and dependability has only improved while gaining to ability to move through the world as the gender that I am. The more benign but no less bothersome response is the faux-empowering, condescending, “Why would you want to date someone who doesn’t want to date you?” or the well-meaning but unhelpful “Well, fuck them!” And no, of course I don’t want to date an (un)consciously transphobic cis gay guy, but frankly I wish there were fewer of them for me not date. As for fucking them – well, that was never the problem.

I want to turn to the experience of transwomen in order to elucidate this topic, but not to equate or flatten it. Transwomen and femmes, of course, deal with the unique combination of transphobia, transmisogyny, sexism, and hyper-visibility. Within the lesbian world, there are some ciswomen (TERFs) who openly attempt to cast transwomen out of the fold of their community under the guise of ideology that boils down to unabashed bigotry. I don’t doubt there are also cis lesbians who denounce TERFism while privately reproducing the same material reality of trans exclusion. However, there are, too, lesbian spaces, physically and ideologically, that center transwomen’s inclusion and liberation as essential to the collective health of their community. Within the cis gay male community, the most insidious component of its rampant transphobia is perhaps the unwillingness to recognize trans-exclusion as a political and ideological project. Rather, it’s a subject —much like gay transmen ourselves— that is rendered invisible through the refusal to acknowledge its existence.

In the reception of Sebastián Silva’s new satirical, sort-of-thriller Rotting in the Sun, genitals have dominated the public discourse surrounding the film, arguably at the cost of exploring the subjects and themes of which the movie purports to be in exploration. Specifically, the movie, which follows the push-and-pull relationship between quasi-fictionalized versions of Silva and Jordan Firstman, contains a likely record-breaking number of penises shown on screen. The depictions are intentionally devoid of eroticism, and range from naturalistic, to comedic, to anxiety-inducing through the lens of Silva’s camera and character. Silva himself has lamented the public genital fixation.

It wasn’t surprising, but it was still baffling that people cared so much about the penises because it’s a movie that depicts so many elements of a rotting society. It deals with so many different subjects like suicide, death in general, social media, the alienation and obliviousness that comes with it, social disparity, abuse, gentrification in Mexico; I mean, there are so many subjects besides the sex and it seems like the explicit gay sex was something that everyone wanted to talk about.

You could argue Silva is obstinately naïve; you could argue he’s really attempting to sneak the alienation and gentrification vegetables in with the endless-parade-of-dicks cheese (sorry). But whatever the case, I have witnessed firsthand that the dick-centered discourse has turned off certain would-be viewers, hardly due to prudishness or puritanism, but rather disinterest in a film that appears outwardly to hinge its subversion on the depiction of cis, fit, able-bodied, mostly white men’s penises.

At the helm of this framing, however, is Firstman himself, who (perhaps still in character as the myopic narcissist) has focused most of his commentary on his evolving feelings about his body while shooting naked, and his promotion on collecting and posting Letterboxd reviews quipping about the movie’s dicks, as well as his own photos posing with censored penises. I find this unsurprising from Firstman whose Instagram “impression” of a gay man is a one-minute monologue about being obsessed with cock. Who still discusses vaginas more like a 12-year-old straight boy than a 32-year-old man, and certainly never with the suggestion that they might belong to anybody but a woman. And here’s the thing: I like Jordan Firstman, a lot. I often find him hilarious, sharp, and endearing. But I’m allowed to like someone and simultaneously feel frustrated with their behavior and what it normalizes and represents.

I like dick, too. In fact, I love it. Cis dick, t-dick, girldick, pussy: I have been known to greatly enjoy all manner of genitals. But what I won’t do is pretend that there is anything subversive about cock worship. If you don’t believe me, go look at the skyline or perhaps a gun. Moreover, the repulsion and/or phobia against vaginas that so many cis gay men still flagrantly practice is as normative, oppressive, misogynistic, and transphobic as it gets. And it’s not fucking cute. Collectively minded ciswomen for their part, queer or otherwise, have come to acknowledge that excessive vagina worship can veer into bioessentialism and transphobia if not handled critically, and vaginas actually are a site of oppression, sexism, and gendered violence. Something that also goes bizarrely unacknowledged by cis people, for all their obsession with trans people’s junk, is the fact that hormone replacement therapy radically alters the appearance and function of external genitalia, but I digress.

As for Rotting in the Sun, I enjoyed it. The filmmaking is cool and novel, the performances are good, the ideas ambitious. I find the fact that the two leads appear, in real life, to be existing in distinct realities with regard to what movie they made to be dynamic and fascinating, not bothersome. Yet I left the theater with a feeling of slight discomfort and melancholy at having to consume another piece of male gay media in which transmen do not exist. That feeling came from my subjectivity and I value and explore it for that very reason. I’m no proponent of forced representation, and it’s not the art that I wish to change, but rather the reality that shapes it. Then, at the very least, we’ll never have to hear another cis gay comic declare that the last time he touched a vagina was when he was born, and we’ll all be a little bit better off for that.

Love,

Damien