So this is from a comment on one of my YouTube videos.
“I saw your interview with Watts The Safeword and have been watching your channel ever since. I have recently discovered an amazing new humiliation kink that directly reduces dysphoria and I was wondering if you might be interested in making a video about it. The misgendering kink plus hormones has reduced my dysphoria down to almost nothing. Now, I smile when the shop assistant serves me and when I give my deadname to the doctor.”
So, misgendering kink or a detransition kink is not uncommon among folks who are trans.
I think that there are a lot of reasons that could be.
Answering why questions for things about sex and kink are very, very challenging because we don’t understand how the brain works.
And if you ask someone why they’re into something, they will give you their best guess but it is not necessarily likely to be the entire story of what’s going on or the truth about why they’re doing something.
So, I think that I am someone who is trans and nonbinary and I from time to time enjoy some misgendering kink or some detransition kink.
And what I enjoy about that is that it gives me a space to process the shame and the pain of what it is to move through this world as someone who almost always gets misgendered by people.
And that is an uncomfortable feeling.
A lot of what kink ends up being for people is a way to take our fears, our insecurities, our negative experiences, our traumas and process it in a safer container, to have someone who cares about us, can hold that space for us, and then we can find our way through those feelings by engaging with them more directly.
Kink is not therapy but I think both have a place.
I am not someone who thinks that like therapy is the only way to work through things or like that it is necessarily more valid of a way to work through things than another way.
For some people, they need a combination of both.
They need therapy that is affirming of their identity and helps them figure out who they want to be, and also a space to play with these more negative experiences that they have out in the world.
The experience that this person talks about, about like being happy when being misgendered out in the real world is something that works for some people.
For me, it does not.
For me, I only want misgendering kink when I know the person understands my gender and is doing it as a purposeful kink exchange.
If someone is misgendering me because they just made an assumption and they don’t know my true gender and they don’t really care to find out about it, that does not feel good for me.
That does not feel hot.
It doesn’t feel fun for me.
I think that everybody responds to this differently.
For some people, absolutely.
It could be the case that getting into this as a kink makes it easier to be misgendered in the real world, but that is not the truth for me.
For me, being misgendered in the real world still sucks and still hurts.
So the thing I will say about this is that whenever we are engaging with a psychological kink that is a long and access of trauma that we have or that is related to an area of oppression that we face, we have to be more careful than we might otherwise be because there can be a very fine line between a kink that we are using to process our hurt and our pain and a way that we are using kink to hurt ourselves.
And I think that sometimes it can be hard to know in the moment how we are approaching something and whether it is coming from that healthier place or not.
So if you are going to engage in something like a misgendering kink when you are a transperson who is dealing with being misgendered in the world, particularly right now when there is an ongoing trans genocide, just pay attention to when you are doing it.
Does it actually make you feel better or is this a way that you are like re-experiencing this hurt and this trauma over and over again?
There’s no single right answer here.
And even for the same person doing the same play with the same partner, it might go back and forth between something that is healthier and something that is less healthy or helpful.
So just be aware of it.
Keep checking in with yourself.
Keep checking in with your partner.
Make sure that you are doing this in a way that isn’t causing you more harm because like goodness knows the world is harming us enough already.
