One Transwoman’s Quest to Manifest Pussy

Shakina Nayfack

Not many people get a second shot at virginity. It’s a particular blessing of the post-op transgender experience that I didn’t expect would weigh so heavily upon me. I feel like a teenager again, full of curiosity and a longing to participate in this super awesome thing everyone else says they’re doing. But along with my virginal naiveté, I also bring with me 18 years of sexual experience, and the spiritual and political consciousness cultivated alongside my evolution as a sexual being.

For thousands of years a woman’s sexual purity has been used to evaluate her moral standing and her value in the oftentimes non-consensual exchange of her body for goods and services. Dismantling both the mythology and the political economy of virginity is one of the great feminist struggles, and yet I find myself returning to a more conservative worldview–one I never held before–when I think of “losing” mine.

I remember being a teenager, and how I felt so much pressure to get rid of it. I spent so many years fighting to be a gay boy in a community that wouldn’t accept me, but I still didn’t have the experience of being gay sexually. What was I fighting for, I wondered, if I wasn’t putting my sexuality into practice?

My first time was in a sleazy hotel with angled mirrors on the ceiling, having unprotected sex with a shockingly unattractive man more than twice my age who cruised up to me in a beat up Caddy while I was smoking on the street. He rolled down the window and said, “I really want to ride that ass of yours.” I was 17. It was the 90s. I just wanted to get it over with… The sex, yes, but more so the seemingly righteous badge of honor known as getting fucked.

Since then I’ve had my fair share of lovers and losers. I’ve survived violence and embraced ecstasy, I’ve claimed and reclaimed my body through a series of “life lessons” and “learning experiences.” I’ve fallen in love and worked in porn (not that those things are mutually exclusive), but now, with a new physical form I feel a new sense of propriety. I’m not saying I’ve become a wait-till-marriage girl, though the thought has crossed my mind. But after everything I’ve been through to become the woman I am today—including the ridiculously painful endeavor of creating a vagina where once there was none—I’m not about to give it up easy.

When I contemplate sharing my virginity with someone, my feelings of desire are tempered by an equally profound anxiety surrounding the flood of emotions I know will surface when I finally welcome that person within me. I mean, I get emo for weeks over a finger and eye-contact, so I can only imagine the significance I’ll inevitably attribute to this highly anticipated moment. And yes, I’m making it a thing. I’m making it a thing because I think it deserves to be a thing.

Also, I find I can’t separate these musings about virginity from a comparable reflection on monogamy. I can’t, quite frankly, imagine having sex outside of a relationship, and that commitment is new to me, even if it’s always been a nice ideal I willfully ignored. Nowadays, thinking about having sex for the first time (again) fills me with hope and fear. Hope that the right man is out there, fear that we won’t be enough for one another.

I have no problem acknowledging monogamy as a social construct that goes against some of our most basic human impulses. On one hand there’s the question of attention, especially in our modern age, where we are accustomed to watching a TV show while texting, tweeting, and checking our email. Lust is a wonderous impulse. But there’s also a question of intention.

from George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” music video (Ironic, right?)

Physics has proved that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed, and sexual energy is no different. In the act of sex, when two (or more) energies combine, there is an undeniable change. You experience something that feels new, but in truth that different quality is a modified version of your own essence, altered by the mixture of another’s.

The question I’m grappling with now is one of dispersal versus concentration. And I know binary thinking is not a transfeminist value, but when I contemplate monogamy versus polyamory I think it comes down to how you want your sexual energy to transform. One path suggests that loving and/or fucking multiple people allows you to experience a wide breadth of human chemistry, and your inner consciousness (sexual and otherwise) can transform though a practice of casting energy outward. The other proposes that, by committing to a single intimate partner, you can experience both transcendental depth and expansive heights by way of a relationship grounded in an exclusive covenant. Both have their merits, both have their morality.

The more I talk about this openly with my friends, the more I learn that so many of them, gay/straight/queer, are in these open relationships, practicing creative polyamory, and I’m just over here waiting for a fucking boyfriend. It doesn’t feel radically feminist to want to belong to someone, and yet that’s exactly what I want.

Am I too jealous? Am I not progressive enough? Am I just wired for exclusive partnership?

I don’t want to taste all the flavors, but then again, maybe I can say that cuz I’ve already been gang-banged by Thai strippers.

Here’s the thing: I gave my pussy to Jesus.

For reals. It was a quote from the bible that ultimately gave me the courage to go through with my medical transition:

“But he said to them, ‘Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are those who were born eunuchs from their mothers’ womb, and there are those who have been made eunuchs by men, and then there are those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. (Mathew 19:11-12)”

“Am I not here, I who am your Mother?”

I am a Eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven, and to me that doesn’t equate abstinence, it means I removed my dick in honor of the divine feminine (Shechenah, Guanyin, Yemanja, Shakti, the Mother Mary etc.). I dedicated my vagina–and presumably the body and soul that goes with it–to the glorification of all things sacred, not the least of which is sex. That’s what I mean when I say #ManifestPussy!

The world would be a better place if straight men viewed sex as a way to contribute to a woman’s awareness of her divine nature; if all women awoke to their goddess capacity, and treated each other like the goddesses they are; and if people without sexual interest in women’s bodies still honored the sacred vessel that is the female form. The only way I know how to engage with that mission is to begin practicing it for myself. And yes, I also find joy in making the man I’m with feel godlike. I think in an ideal world our relationships are meant to bring out the divinity within one another, it’s just that we’ve been imbalanced in that dynamic for millennia.

So, what kind of sexual relationship is going to sanctify my pussy? Perhaps that’s a question all women should be asking. For me, it seems worth it to hold out for a one-on-one LTR. Maybe that will all change after I share my virginity with someone special, after I’ve “broken the seal” so to speak. Maybe everyone will be invited to the party. But right now I’m focused on singularity. Or maybe it’s a thruple: me, him, and the Holy Spirit. Really though, the valuable moment that presents itself now is the opportunity to contemplate these themes with fresh eyes, and a fresh vajay. That in itself is its own kind of purity.