the rush of finding yourself
on transfeminity and submission. written by autumn and olive. mar 24, 2025
diving right into some fun topics on this blog i guess. i was listening to this youtube video while folding my laundry, and had a few thoughts about our own relationship to submission that we figured would be interesting to talk about.
Niki Christine, the video's author, asserts that the circumstances of your birth directly affect the expectations and roles ascribed to you. she focuses on the specific experience of a cis lesbian woman; it resonated with me nonetheless. growing up trans is isolating, especially when it comes to expressing sexual desire. being assumed and assigned male made it subversive for me to show my yearning for sexual submission. even when i found partners willing to fulfill that for me, there was still a massive sense of guilt much like Niki describes. in my case the thing that felt "correct" (as society told me) but not "good" (as i personally needed) was my gender itself.
this ultimately resulted in an extremely fractured sense of desire. on the one hand, there was the societal expectation to dominate women. there is a certain comfort that comes from performing a role that you are "supposed" to. there was absolutely a part of me that enjoyed taking a more dominant role in the bedroom—a part that has continued to evolve as we've explored our gender and lesbianism—but on the other hand, our craving to be on the other end of this dynamic tore us away from giving our all to it.
these days, our relationship with submission is still quite fractured. in sexual contexts, submission, pain, degradation, and bondage are all immensely freeing—so long as i trust my partner. i live for the feeling i get when a hot girl (whom i love dearly) does something fucked up to me. if you know the feeling i probably don't even have to describe it (but i will anyway)—how your stomach drops out, eyes widening; how your breath gets shorter, maybe even stops; how every thought melts away, save for how badly you need to submit; be a good girl, good puppy, good toy, good THING. it's addictive, and the people i love most are SO unbelievably good at getting me into that headspace.
discovering our transfeminity has also opened avenues to better explore our more dominant side. i won't be delving into the details of that here (maybe in a future blog post) but suffice to say, it's a very different yet equally as satisfying feeling. this is not to say that the dichotomy of domination/submission is the only way we experience desire. egalitarian sex is liberating in its own way—frotting fucking rules, for example. however, this framework is something that we find intoxicating, exciting, and immensely pleasurable. as our relationship with sexuality continues to evolve, we find ourselves discovering new ways to subvert heteronormative dynamics and find our own forms of pleasure. in essence, that's what transness means to us: defining our own modes of being—within, without, and beyond the binaries presented to us.