The V-Word by Amber J. Keyser

football game, we decided that it was time to finally take the plunge. We parked behind an isolated church, got into the backseat, and immediately we fell into each other. We ripped off our clothes, kissed each other deeply, and before I could process what was really happening, we were each having our very first penetrative sex. It was sweaty and awkward. Kenny Chesney was crooning on the radio. It felt fantastic in the tactile sense but I was emotionally detached from the experience. After we finished, we got dressed, and she drove me home in complete silence. She transferred to another school a couple of months later, and we never spoke again.
    Everyone at my school seemed to suspect that I was queer. Even after word broke that I’d actually had heterosexual sex, people knew I wasn’t straight. I got teased and bullied by the other kids, mostly by the athletic and popular types. One boy in particular—a pudgy, acne-riddled member of one of the less successful sports teams—was relentless. I did my best to avoid interacting with him, yet somehow my very existence was enough for him to seek me out. If I was going to be queer, then he wouldn’t let me be happy.
    But then, one spring evening as I was leaving a late jazz band practice, he approached me in the boys’ room. As he slowly moved close to me with balled fists, I thought I was about to get the beating of a lifetime. I started shaking, and just as I started to cry, he kissed me. It wasn’t a romantic kiss. It was barely even a lustful kiss. But finally, after years of simultaneous denial and hope for a moment like this, it was happening.
    Neither of us spoke a word as we went into the farthest stall from the door. With only spit and the lubricant from his condom fighting the friction, he thrust himself into me. The pain was immediate and intense. I didn’t think sex was supposed to feel like this but I had limited knowledge of the mechanics of anal sex. Maybe it was supposed to hurt the first time. I’d always heard that was true for a girl’s first time being penetrated so why would it be different for me? I found it difficult to stay quiet enough not to get caught but that proved irrelevant because it was over almost as quickly as it began.
    For the second time, I thought I had really lost my virginity.
    For the second time, I feigned joy, all the while feeling detached.
    Over the next several years, I had sexual encounters with a number of folks, both male and female. Accepting my queerness made my sex life better but something still felt wrong. I went away to college, and on a small liberal arts campus far from home, I found the language to understand what was so different about me. I learned that transgender people really do exist, and not just as drag queens or fetishistic transvestites paraded on the trashy daytime television shows. In this brand-new world, I learned that even though my birth certificate says male , I didn’t have to be someone I’m not.
    I came out as trans during my first semester on campus. As my understanding of myself grew and my identity evolved, I found myself in a community that embraced me for who I was. When my friends’ parents would meet me and later ask whether I was a man or a woman, my friends often replied Does it really matter? or That’s Alex Meeks.
    But while my social circle began to recognize me as feminine or transcending gender, some things still weren’t right. I felt like partners were having sex with me as they would with a man and I was not bringing my true identity into the bedroom. I only knew how to have sex like a man . I didn’t know how to view my genitalia as anything other than masculine. Even when I slept with chasers, people who fetishize trans bodies and experiences, I still felt that I was being viewed sexually as a man. I felt doomed to eternal disconnection from my body, emotionally absent as I experienced physical intimacy and pleasure.
    But