Last year, my daughter came out as trans.

I’m on a bunch of support groups for cis parents of trans kids, and I could have written about this there. I mean, I have written about various aspects of this experience there. But there are other aspects of it that get more confusing for me that I cannot talk about in vanilla spaces, because I do online domination work.

And if you are not familiar with online domination work, it involves a lot of male-identifying people who like to be erotically humiliated for presenting as feminine. (Did I say that politically correctly? Basically, a lot of guys want to be treated like sissy whores who like to be fucked in their boy pussies or girl pussies or gurrrrl pussies and have their little clitties leak and get locked up in chastity.) Not to mention the guys who want me to order them to be topped by “shemales” or “tgirls,” I guess partially because they think it’s hot and partially because they feel it’s humiliating? (Although I have never quite understood why they don’t just call actual trans women instead of me, a cis woman.)

It also involves talking to a fair number of people who start off telling me they identify as men who just like dressing up as women for funsies, but then gradually start revealing more and more that it goes beyond just dressing up, and that sometimes (all the time?) they feel like women. I generally prefer these callers because I don’t personally find anything humiliating about being feminine, although the first kind are admittedly fun to talk to because it’s pretty easy to humiliate someone with common femdom tropes, and you have to be more intellectually engaged to have a sensitive erotic experience with people who are sort of struggling with gender issues.

(Plus, I do just like telling people to gag on cock. It’s fun to say. Try it.)

I’ve had kind of a journey with my feelings about sissy play (which is different than erotic feminization—I have actually always had kind of a thing for male androgyny, probably thanks to a formative sexual experience involving Tim Curry and the bathtub faucet).

I used to think sissy play was misogynistic and gross—like parodying the most stereotypical aspects of being a woman. Then I saw it more as just being an erotic kick. Most sissies I talk to don’t seem to dislike women at all and don’t label themselves as women or men. Erotically, they tend to label themselves as other and generally enjoy the idea of being different and beneath both “men” and “women.” They are almost invariably nice to me both before and after they come, assuming I let their little clitties come at all. Everyone knows sissy clitties belong in chastity because they cannot satisfy women!

Then, after my kid came out, and I started delving into a lot of trans literature and spending way too much time on Reddit, I learned? realized? that sometimes-sissy play—as well as other forms of erotic feminization—can be a gateway to recognizing oneself as being trans. Kind of like, “Wow. This is hot. I feel hot looking like this. But you know what? I kind of like this outside of just feeling hot. Maybe I want to feel like this more of the time or ALL of the time. Also, I’ve always felt this innate desire to be paid less than my peers for doing the same amount of work, take on a lot of emotional labor, and join the PTA even though it’s just a scheme to force me to sell wrapping paper to my friends and family.”

Then I started secretly pathologizing all of my feminization customers, wanting to ask them all kinds of personal questions about how they identified and why, which I could not really do, because they’re not talking to me for therapy (most of them anyway). They’re talking to me because they want to get off—and rightfully so—they are paying for a service. Plus, it’s kind of hard to have a serious conversation about gender identity with someone talking in a little girl voice asking nicely to lick up her own cum.

Then sometimes my thoughts would turn to my kid, and I would immediately shut that shit right down because my kid is a virgin angel and la la la I do not want to hear anything stating otherwise. Yeah, she picked out the pink anime thigh highs, and I’ve randomly seen them around her room, but anyone can like pink anime thigh highs. Right? It doesn’t mean you’re feeling anything sexual while wearing them…and fuck Ray Blanchard and TERFS and autogynephilia bullshit that says that trans lesbians are just all fetishists who are hot for themselves as women. (Cis women are hot for themselves as women too. I get way more turned on thinking about me being an object of desire than actually desiring anyone else. Men are gross. But maybe I’m also just a narcissist.)

But then I admit I also talk to a lot of obvious fetishists on a day-to-day basis.

I think.

Unless they are all secretly trans women so deeply in the closet they don’t realize it.

Okay. Maybe 50% of them?

It’s not my business. I have all kinds of fantasies that do not reflect what I want in reality–and maybe some that do. I have absolutely no idea how many of my callers have kinks and how many are dealing with gender dysphoria and/or if there is an overlap between some of them.

This has sometimes put me in a weird place regarding guys (I’m going to call them guys because they call themselves guys) who want to explore feminization fantasies with me.

One, I have at times ended up defending sissies to other online Dommes. In fact, I got in a giant fight about it to the point that I ended up dropping out of all of my sex worker support groups because I felt like so many other online “Dommes” were really kind of transphobic, whether they realized it or not.

(I also have questioned whether I’m also a little transphobic, for a variety of reasons, but that’s a different essay, and I am obviously trying to work on those feelings. I think most cis people are probably at least a little transphobic whether they realize it or not—especially if you went to high school when the height of amusement at pep rallies was the football players dressing up like cheerleaders and mincing around the gym with pom poms.)

Two, I was conflicted because the right wing shitbags are doing everything in their power to portray trans women as deviants and predators. And that affects my daughter, who is completely not a deviant, unlike her mother. (She tells me I dress slutty.) So, I admit that sissies make me cringe a little. See Contrapoints for this. Sidenote. I’m basically in love with Natalie Wynn. I guess she would call it a parasocial relationship.

Like I think it’s totally fine that you want to call your penis a clitty and your asshole a girl pussy and dress up in frilly-panties and have me call you a good girl for getting fucked hard by a big thick dominant man while my friends all watch and laugh at you. (Which is, of course, how all dominant women enjoy spending their time. I can’t count the number of Fridays this year I’ve spent laughing at sissy clitties with my friends while we all wear latex dresses and strap on harnesses and uncomfortable five-inch heels.)

It’s certainly no weirder or worse than the couple I saw with a staple gun stapling her tits, every boring rope scene I’ve seen 10,00 times, computer programmers in kilts wielding floggers and attempting to look intimidating like they didn’t just spend all day playing obscure tabletop games and eating Doritos, or Jerry Falwell Junior’s DEFINITELY NOT CUCKOLDING relationship with his wife and the pool boy. (Such a stereotype, but they really did meet him at the pool.)

But just like…can we keep it on the down low—unlike Jerry Falwell Junior? Can we not tell Ben Shapiro about this? Or Blaire Fucking White. (Blaire knows. I’ll bet Blaire would have been calling me if I’d been doing this 8 years ago.)

Because I want my kid to be safe. And not fetishized—unless she wants to be. I want people to think of my kid as a fine upstanding citizen and not the, if not proud, then comfortable degenerate who is her mother. Because I have the privilege of being a white cis woman. It’s only my reproductive rights half the country is trying to take away. I do not show my face. And most people I know do not know what I’m currently doing for money (totally out of my own free will because it’s kind of creative, I like talking about sex, and it pays more than any jobs I could ever get with my graduate degree) because people are judgmental. In fact, one of the reasons I haven’t in depth talked about this before is because I’m afraid of people finding out what I do and saying that’s why my kid is trans. That I “messed up” my kid because I live an “alternative” lifestyle, even though I have largely protected my kid from 99% of this information because NO kid wants to know anything about their parent’s sex life.

So, it’s weird. I feel conflicted. I believe in being non-judgmental when it comes to sexuality. And it hasn’t stopped me from doing feminization or sissy play—although I did have to take a break to process my feelings. In some ways, it’s made me more sensitive to the people I talk to. It makes me a little sad that most don’t feel they can share these fantasies to people they aren’t paying. (Although, to be fair, they are often looking for something very specific and repetitive that even engaged dominant partners would get bored of talking about all the time.) But I also have to put up this barrier between my real life and my “fantasy” life. I now have a rule that I will NOT discuss fetishization of trans people. I never liked it, but now I absolutely cannot tolerate it.

My job is not to provide actual therapy to people. Although I do provide unethical “therapy” meant to separate you from your money.

Feel free to schedule your session today.

My Kid is Trans. I Do Online Domination. It’s Confusing.