There are many experiences that a transgender person goes through, and not all experiences are the same for everyone. A big topic within the transgender community happens to be the issue of having a love life.

Struggling with gender dysphoria makes thinking about being sexual with another person very unsettling. I am in disgust with my body parts that I don’t identify with, and that’s simply because of the fact that I don’t feel they belong to me.

Cisgender people do NOT understand how this feels, so it makes me very nervous to think about being a relationship one day. What if I get into a sexual relationship one day and I realize that I am completely turned off by showing my body to another person. Sex is appealing to me and I am sexually attracted to people, but I don’t ever see myself taking any sexual acts from someone else until my body matches my identity.

That doesn’t mean I am not romantically interested in people. I happen to be very shy around a lot of people for reasons that will not be discussed. A specific experience affected the way I interact with people. I know I could absolutely kiss, hug, cuddle, and be romantically involved with someone one day, but until I have my sex reassignment surgery, then I do not have any interest in giving myself to someone, no matter what type of bond we have.

It’s the fact that I don’t feel content with my body, and to the cisgender people who say that I need to learn to love the body I am in: you have no experience of what I feel about myself, therefore you cannot tell me to love myself when the parts on my body are not me.

In the future, I want to be sexually involved with someone because I view sex as something that has many different variations of pleasure, and I have always had my ideas of what is pleasurable in my mind. Right now, I don’t really think that me being sexually active in the body I am in is possible.

If you are in a sexual relationship with a trans person, make sure they are comfortable with being sexually active with you, and talk to them about the things like, safe words, dirty talk (if they like it or not), touching of private areas, etc. Sex can be fulfilling for a trans person but make sure that they are comfortable and do not feel pressured!