How do autistic butch trans women cruise?
“ If the Goddess does not exist, we must certainly invent Her”
Pat Califa, Public Sex (2000)
I never learnt how to cruise. My time in gay boyhood was a short-lived spark in the middle of a dysphoric teenage haze. The few times I was able to pick up boys felt juvenile, haphazard and small. Anyway, I felt safer in the arms of monogamous bisexual women I could let my gender slide to the side for, knowing that the pain of misrecognition could be handed away as an accidental side effect of generalised queer miasmatic attraction. For years I relied on this assumption that whatever gender I presented to a partner, there would be something they could hang their attraction on, even if it wasn’t how I actually saw myself. This continued throughout my initial transition, and whilst those cis bisexual women were incredibly important to me, the lack of enforced recognition of my womanhood was a crutch I relied on to keep myself safe in the face of overwhelming transmisogyny. I’ve been trying to work out why I slept with so few trans people in this period of my life — I think I was afraid that in coming up against someone else’s self-made, crafted gender, I would be forced to actually reckon with my own.
As I started to settle in my transness, I began dating another nonbinary person, initially flirting with them at a consent workshop I was delivering (I know), and subsequently building a life with them in a new town, a new social scene, a new career. Those were good years, despite the increasing weight of mental illness and a growing sense of gender incongruence with the futchy model of transfemininity I was presenting to the world. Towards the end of the relationship, my need for a more diverse set of sexual experiences, my growing lesbianism, and his growing transfaggotry led to a split in our romantic needs, and we amicably split up at the start of the pandemic (and when I say amicable, I mean I am cat-sitting for him this weekend).
And so, I was thrust into the world, albeit at a time of incredible fear and instability, in need of a rubric with which to cruise and be cruised as a dyke. And I started dating a lesbian, someone who I was forced to see my own womanhood in the reflection of. It’s hard to overstate how terrifying and generative this was for me, after a decade of not knowing how the people I loved and fucked saw me, my girlfriend, with certainty, sees me as a woman. This isn’t to say that previous partners didn’t see me this way (Ru in particular was always so kind and generous with my gender), but there was no getting around the fact that I know that Emily, when she fucks me, knows she is fucking a dyke. Into that mix went the culmination of my medical transition in the form of genital surgery, prompting a wholescale revision of my sexuality and gender. A curious outgrowth of this has been that, in no longer feeling like I have to perform a femininity in order to be seen as a woman, my butch side has leapt out of the closet.
And in the midst of this messy pandemic time, I’ve grown to love other dykes, the ephemeral looks of recognition and sweetness on the street, I’ve grown to love dykehood and butchness. That’s been a major shift for me, but I still have no script to work off. This is, of course, not helped by the fact that I am autistic, that social situations are a confusing jumble of intentions and symbolism and communications that frighten and overwhelm me. I have learnt, over the years, to mask a lot of this uncertainty with bravado and straightforward speech. I ask exactly what I want, preferring a clear no to a context-laden, messy yes. And yet cruising is all about that messy yes right? It’s about flagging and the way you hold your wrist and the side of your belt you hang your keys on. It’s about the intensity of the gaze and the brushing of the hand on an arm and the softening of your voice as you turn towards me. Each of these markers of affection envelop me in a kind, warm lesbian sexuality. These are the assimilable symbols though, which is to say these are the ones I can learn and master like stages of an erotic Krebs Cycle. What I will never be able to truly understand are all the smaller cues, the little slights of the hand that welcome in mutual queerness, the smaller inflections and tensions in the body. And I’ve never had a mother — at least not in the lesbian sense — I’ve never had someone to guide me through each of these ways of seeing and being seen. So I overcompensate, I wear a huge chain on my belt adorned with carabiners, I flag according to the lesbian hanky code (rightside red and black, obviously), I polish my Harley Davidson boots and wear a leather collar. Quoted in The Persistent Desire, Judy Grahn said that the “point was to be butch and get away with it”, which from my transfeminine perspective means: ‘to be read by those that I desire as desirable, and no one else’.
For the first time in my life I feel desired as a lesbian by lesbians, even if to a straight cisgender world I am optically assimilated into manhood. Passing, for trans communities, is often presented as a boolean yes/no statement — either you pass as the totalising male/female gender you now are, to everyone, or you do not. This doesn’t work for me because the ways in which I pass are so contextual and messy, particularly as these days I am passing more as transmasculine than as a trans woman. At a dyke rave last weekend I kissed a femme who proceeded to ask my girlfriend if I was her boyfriend. At the time I didn’t particularly care, but it has stuck with me all week because of the complete lack of context. Was this the butch he, the transmasculine he, or the cis-man he, or some messy combination therof? And why does one person calling me a ‘handsome boy’ sting, whilst if from another person’s lips it is a gleaming compliment. I have ‘boi’ tattooed on my leg, but it is a boyhood that is saturated with dykeness, resistances to sexuation and dominant gender modalities. I feel what the tenderqueers call gender euphoria for the first time in my life, and in a different affective context I would be called a detransitioner. I feel most at home in my body when the objects I adorn myself with say just enough to other dykes to make it clear that I am one of them, which I guess is another way of saying that I am safe.
Cruising, for me, is about that safety. The knowledge that by mixing together all those heady objects and affectations of dykehood I can finally say, clearly and forthrightly “I want you”. That you will look at my chains and silly armbands and patched jeans, and in that moment have an insight into that which I am so desperately trying to project into the world. I get jealous, you see, of the femme trans women, with the heels and makeup and dresses and you know I really tried to be that. I really wanted to use those cues of recognition to build an aesthetic life for myself in which my womanhood was at the forefront. It has taken me seven or so years to realise that I don’t much care for being a woman: that what I fell in love with at the first university women’s campaign meeting where I realised the word trans applied to my queerness, was being a dyke among dykes. It’s no small thing that my embarrassing Lacanian mirror moment happened just after I’d been fucked. And without the steady anchor of womanhood or more commonly legible femme aesthetic, I’ve been left somewhat unmoored from the dominant visual-erotic frame. What I have found a home in, is in the way I hold my body as I kiss into my girlfriend, the way she can break down my hardness to open me up, the way I can lean against a wall and have her touch my chest, slow. I’ve found safety in my mostly transmasculine family, in the way I hold myself in public without giving away the hidden softness of my boyhood.
Which brings me back to the importance of mutual recognition — it’s when I am seen for who I truly am, not some essential Real Self but a relational, handcrafted gender-sexuality of softness and butchness and boyhood, that I am allowed to bring forth all of my messiness. And cruising is that messiness, it’s learning when to pull that collar close into me, hard, and when to softly stroke a nervous femme’s cheek as she says she’s not done this for a minute. In cruising we have that relational production of subaltern gender roles brought to the fore, in a game of sorts, where that dominant erotic visual frame I feel so divorced from is deconstructed just a little. When I am seen as a dyke by other dykes, that is how an autistic butch trans woman cruises.
