I first came across Mira Bellwether’s iconic zine Fucking Trans Women in 2015, in the way that I imagine a great many trans femmes did in that hazy time when trans people and culture were just starting to explode, for better and for worse, into the mainstream cultural consciousness. I was 24 years old and in the early stages of transition. I had just started hormones, and was trying to figure out how to access sexual pleasure in a body that was both changing and socially stigmatized. A trans woman friend told me that I really ought to consider “muffing,” describing a mysterious sex act that sounded both thrilling and terrifying, and pointed me in the direction of FTW.
First published as Fucking Trans Women Issue #0 in 2010, reprinted as Fucking Trans Women: A Zine About the Sex Lives of Trans Women in 2013, and often abbreviated simply to FTW in online parlance, the zine remains a rare and invaluable resource for transfeminine folks looking for sexual healing and pleasure. When Bellwether first published it, there were virtually no sources of sex education devoted to trans women’s unique needs and experiences. While some progress has been made in the area of sexuality guides for transfeminine folks since, FTW still shines as one of the best of its kind today. While in cancer treatment, Bellwether died of a stroke on December 25, 2022, with her partner and sister close by. As that tragic news emerged, trans communities responded with a surge of grief for Mira’s passing and gratitude for the ways in which her work shaped—and continues to shape, our relationships to sex and pleasure.
“We tell each other about ‘FTW’ as though we are passing on community lore to one another. We share it as though we are sharing hope.”
I didn’t know Bellwether personally—we corresponded only once, briefly, via a Facebook comment thread in which she gently pointed out that I had embarrassingly misspelled her name in an article—though we shared more than a few friends and acquaintances. Yet, I was profoundly impacted by Fucking Trans Women, which was the first, and best, map to trans women’s sexuality that I have found to date, a sentiment that has been echoed many times over in transfeminine communities for years. It’s hard to find words to do justice to what reading FTW for the first time was like as a young trans woman—perhaps because before that I had never encountered any meaningful dialogue about my sexuality at all. Bellwether profoundly transformed the conversation around trans women and sex, to the extent that her zine has attained mythic status among us: we tell each other about it as though we are passing on community lore to one another. We share it as though we are sharing hope.
To live in this world as a trans woman is to be steeped in the dominant culture’s hatred of our existence and its terror of our sexuality. To the extent that we are represented at all as sexual beings, we are represented as predators and rapists, or else as a shameful and objectified fetish for heterosexual men. Trans women are disproportionately subjected to sexual violence, and the vast majority of medical professionals are incompetent, unwilling or both when it comes to supporting our sexual health. This is true today, and it was especially true before the mid-2010s. Beyond these vicious stereotypes extends a void around our bodies—a silence that swallows our humanity and, with it, our questions about what it might mean to pursue erotic pleasure for ourselves.
As a young trans woman on hormones for the first time, I felt my body changing in so many wonderful ways—and I also felt my libido dropping, my relationship to my genitals changing, my ability to access pleasure shifting. I was simultaneously intensely fetishized by men in private and repudiated in public. I asked doctors and counsellors how I could find my way back into my sexuality and was met with that suffocating silence. Trans women are always asking, in one form or another, how do we develop healthy sexualities? The answer we are given is that mainstream society would prefer us not to have sexualities at all.
FTW leapt directly into the black hole that has historically surrounded trans women’s sexualities—and it shone like a guiding star. Written in Bellwether’s distinctively unapologetic, funny and ferociously intelligent voice, FTW addressed trans women’s pleasure on our own terms.
Bellwether didn’t assume that all trans women have the same sexual experience, but FTW makes it clear that her mission was to offer skills and knowledge that trans women (particularly those who hadn’t had gender reassignment surgery) and the people who fuck us could apply broadly in order to have better, more pleasurable sex. The zine is refreshingly, unrelentingly practical and direct, clearly exploring questions of anatomy and sexual technique, such as how to pleasure a trans woman’s penis whether soft or erect (and whether or not the lady in question calls it a penis), how to safely deal with sperm as a trans woman who might produce it during sexual activity and how to perform the aforementioned and much-renowned muffing technique by gently stimulating one or both inguinal canals (the internal “tubes” at the front of the pelvis through which the testicles descend and which many trans women use for tucking).
Rereading it today, FTW’s clear and unwavering focus on the reality of trans women’s lives and bodies still makes me cry with its unabashed celebration of who and what we are. Here, at last, is transfeminine sexuality shown not as a symbol or metaphor, but as something real and alive. Bellwether writes, “Let the metaphors, the language, the analogies come afterwards. They are helpful, but I believe with great conviction that what I have between my legs is not a metaphor or an analogy, but something new and wonderful.”
“Bellwether believed that we could invent ways of fucking that we’d only dreamed of before. She made us believe in our possibility, our pleasure.”
I think that, on some level, only trans women can understand the depth of what this means: that Bellwether looked at her own body—at our bodies—and didn’t see a monster or a broken thing. She saw wonder and infinite possibility, in practical terms, that she shared with us. She invited us to explore our mysterious inguinal canals, to stimulate our underserved perineums, to play with the complex rich webs of the “PIG plexus” (pudendal, ilioinguinal, genitofemoral and hypogastric plexus) nerve branches woven through our pelvises and genitals. She insisted that good communication alone could not bring trans women the pleasure we crave, but that we needed deep self-knowledge and sexual skills as well. She believed that we could invent ways of fucking that we’d only dreamed of before, and she showed us how to do it. She made us believe in our possibility, our pleasure.
Fucking Trans Women brought a new standard to the way that trans women’s sexuality is talked and written about in queer and trans communities, paving the way for other transfemme sex writers and educators, many of whom cite her to this day. Bellwether gave us words when we had none. Rereading her work, I still feel that feeling of possibility blossoming in space where I once thought only pain would grow. FTW is one of those rare gifts, a piece of writing that’s changed the way many trans women experience our lives, and ourselves. It made more space in the world for us.
Bellwether’s work can be purchased at her website, fuckingtranswomen.org, and her loved ones have asked that pirated versions not be circulated. Donations to support her loved ones with funeral costs, medical bills and other expenses can be made here.
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