When Lucie Fielding was growing up, she didn’t have a word for queer, much less trans. While studying sexuality, they started to feel free to explore their gender in earnest, with empowering, pleasure-rich and life shifting results.
Today Lucie is a therapist and author of the award-winning book, Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments. And she has important advice for discovering more erotic possibilities in our lives. Learn much more in this week’s Girl Boner Radio episode!
Stream it on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Spotify or below. Or read on for a lightly edited transcript.
“Discovering Erotic Possibilities, with Lucie Fielding”
a lightly edited Girl Boner Radio transcript
[Intro music…]
Lucie:
And that moment of holy shit, my body can do that. And just having that over and over and over again. And so the lesson is, and I think that this applies to all sorts of transitions, because our bodies are constantly in transition… There’s always something to learn about our bodies, and about how pleasure lives in our bodies, moves in our bodies, is experienced through and with our bodies.
[encouraging, acoustic music]
August (narration):
Lucie Fielding is a therapist, sex educator and the author of the book, Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments.
After we spoke, I couldn’t help but imagine what Lucie would have thought if she had encountered a book like Trans Sex early on. The fact that they didn’t seems to be part of what led to its creation.
As a heads up, you will hear a few examples of transphobia shortly here. Like so many of us, Lucie observed many such examples early on, well before they had the language for their own trans identity.
Lucie:
The earliest pieces of the journey start, like in the mid 1990s.
August (narration):
At that time, depictions of transgender people in the media shaped what, in many ways, the masses believed. And they weren’t good.
Lucie:
That was my first exposure, those images of like, The Crying Game and Ace Ventura Pet Detective, seeing them in theaters.
August (narration):
As a kid then, Lucie didn’t even know the word queer yet.
Lucie:
For me, it was I was a goth kid. And so that was my word for queer.
I think I often had this relationship to certain forms of masculinity that I just didn’t really gel with.
But seeing these images on screen of like a trans feminine person being forced to disclose that they’re trans, and then bombarded with either vitriol or a sense of revulsion, horror and even nausea. Like in The Crying Game and Ace Ventura, men are literally vomiting at the sight of a trans woman’s body.
August (narration):
Lucie told me she wasn’t thinking about these things consciously at the time, or have a grasp yet of their own trans identity. But seeing that…
Lucie:
…it did kind of hold me back, in that sense of well, why would you explore gender? Why would you explore certain aspects of how you embody gender erotically, when that’s how you get treated?
August (narration):
Some twenty years later, when Lucie was in her late 30s, she started training as a sexuality professional. They were attending conferences, hearing experts like Esther Perel, Emily Nagoski and Doug Braun-Harvey speak.
Lucie:
They’re really inspiring me. And at the same time, I’m feeling the shifts in myself, like, okay, maybe it’s okay, now to explore whatever this is this inchoate feeling.
And yet, I was still bedeviled with these questions of like, will I be lovable? Will my wife want to stay with me? Because I’m polyamorous, will other partners want to date me? Will I be fuckable?Will I be fuck-able, in that sense of like, what will fucking look like for me if I if I explore this?
August (narration):
Those images Lucie saw on the film screen in her youth continued to replay in her mind, but now they had something else: a sense of curiosity and possibility, coupled with increasing knowledge about sexuality.
Lucie also had a trusted therapist, with whom she was exploring gender in earnest. They also started taking in media with more positive and realistic depictions of trans people.
Lucie:
There was a there a zine called Fucking Trans Women, by Mira Bellwether, that was indispensable and my therapist at the time put me onto that.
August (narration):
Lucie also found Allison Moon’s body-inclusive book, Girl Sex 101, helpful.
Lucie:
I am a girl, so it was instructive for me for having girl sex. And these just blew my mind of what the possibilities were.
And then as I started playing. It really took starting with myself starting with exploration of my own body, and finding that even without hormones, before hormones, the ways that I was experiencing pleasure, my body started to shift.
August (narration):
Lucie recalls a vivid example of that shift.
Lucie:
[joyful laugh] I was on campus in my counseling program. And I had just done my first aerial silks inversion in the trees of the campus.
And it was just such a euphoric experience. And I just kind of collapsed on the ground. And I started having a 10-minute, full body orgasm.
August (narration):
Aerial silk is. form of aerial dance, by the way. Think Cirque de Soleil, only amateur style.
Lucie:
I do it because I love it, and I actually kind of suck at it and there’s like a freedom to suck at it.
August (narration):
Although that lengthy orgasm makes me think Lucie rocks at it, no matter the performance. I also love the image of her flying through the trees and landing in that kind of bliss.
Lucie compared that orgasmic experience like a second adolescence—the joyful kind, when you remember that some of the awkward parts can be fun.
Lucie:
And that moment of holy shit, my body can do that. And just having that over and over and over again. And so the lesson is, and I think that this applies to all sorts of transitions, because our bodies are constantly in transition… There’s always something to learn about our bodies, and about how pleasure lives in our bodies, moves in our bodies, is experienced through and with our bodies.
August (narration):
Lucie has learned, and continues to learn, a great deal about pleasure and what their body is capable of—and it all started with self exploration.
Lucie:
As Allison Moon writes in Girl Sex 101, so many of the things you can do with a partner you can do with yourself…and so I think it starts from self-pleasure practices.
August (narration):
For the first year of her “second adolescence” of sorts, Lucie set her sights on pleasure beyond the genitals.
Lucie:
I didn’t do so from a place of dysphoria, as in, I don’t like my body. I don’t like my genitalia, none of that. It’s like, I fucking love my body. I love what it can do. But I wanted to start from this idea of, what happens if I completely approach my body from a beginner’s mind?
In the same way that I would approach a new partner’s body from a beginner’s mind. Like even if I’ve performed oral sex on a number of vulvas in my life, I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, that is a vulva. I’m going to do the same thing that I’ve done all these other times on this new vulva.’ No, I’m going to ask.
And we’re going to follow both verbal and nonverbal cues about like, what feels yummy to you? What kinds of touch do you like? What kinds of intensities?
August (narration):
Lucie started those practices with her own self-pleasure experiences, and then also in partnered erotic play. And she had a lot of fun in the process.
If you heard all of that and are thinking, wait. What exactly is sex that de-centers genitals? Here’s an example. Lucie pointed to a lesson they learned from sexological bodyworker Betty Martin.
Lucie:
She talks about as one of the primary lessons, kind of reconceptualizing our hands as pleasure. Because we normally think of our hands, we grasp things, we take things, if we’re in an erotic context, we’re giving pleasure with our hands, right?
August (narration):
But get this. Most of us have as many nerve endings in our hands, as we do in our lips and our genitals.
Lucie:
There’s so much pleasure to be experienced through our hands. And so she asked the question, you know, who is this for?
August (narration):
So going back to the oral sex example…
Lucie:
I can engage in oral sex from a place of, I am focused on my partner’s pleasure. Or I can really just say, I would really love to go down on you because I love the entire sensory experience—the senses and the smells, and all these things.
August (narration):
That’s not to say that all of Lucie’s experiences were easy breezy, as far as letting go and enjoying. Her learning curve to more pleasure and ease required something you may relate to.
Lucie:
I think that there’s a lot of times and I’ve certainly had them, where—and I don’t think that this is a trans experience; I think that that I think most bodies will experience this in some way shape or form in their lives—this sense of like, apologizing for your body, explaining it away.
Some feature of your body that you, you know, you just anticipate because of the cultural scripts that are attached to it, and like, what good sex is and what bad sex is, and how certain parts are supposed to be used, and whether they’re supposed to be used.
I certainly had those moments where, as I was negotiating, like, well, what are we going to do today? I’d say, “Oh, I don’t have a vulva.” You know, apologetically. And there’s nothing to apologize for.
My parts, I call them my clit. And they are magnificent. And I know a fuck ton about my body. I probably know more about my body than most cis people know about theirs, and how to experience pleasure through it.
[music]
August:
That is magnificent. You actually made me think of a time when I had intense erotic pleasure in my hand. And it was so shocking, because, again, as you said, we don’t think of our hands in this way.
Do you remember a moment where a part of your body surprised you or you explored a different part of your body that is not considered by society, a sexual part?
Lucie:
Oh, God, I can think of so many. The earliest one was like the nape of my neck, having that touched in certain ways, or grabbed in certain ways. I had a partner once the first time we played. It was like, they weren’t choking me so much, but the kind of like the Wii
between the thumb and the index finger, kind of like the way that that kind of fit the V of my collarbone, and the kind of pressure of their palm against – I think it’s my breastbone. And thinking about, Oh, my god, that felt so containing and holding, and really yummy. And it didn’t even have to go into like, breath play for it to just kind of feel really special.
August (narration):
A few months ago, Lucie was talking to a friend, someone who’s also into kink play, and the collarbone came up again.
Lucie:
She was talking about someone biting her collarbone. And she said, “You got to try it.”
August (narration):
So the next time Lucie played with someone, she asked them to take that nibble.
Lucie:
And oh, my god, it was orgasmic. It was so fucking amazing. I mean whoever knew you could bite that area. Whoever knew? I’ll tell you: disabled folks know, kinky folks know, trans folks know, queer folks know. Why do we know it? Because we’ve had to imagine into possibilities and think about different ways of experiencing pleasure in our bodies.
Like, you know, in the kink community we have, you know, concept called pervert-ables. It’s when you go to a kitchen store, and you pick up a wooden spoon…and you’re not going to use it to cook! You may be, as a friend called it last night, using it as a kitchen switch.
August:
Yes! That you’ve, you’ve had to be creative if you’ve had to find workarounds. There’s both, of course, incredible challenge and disparity or unfairness. Right? And sometimes you have to give yourself the permission that the community around you perhaps hasn’t. And then there’s also this form of privilege in having this breadth of knowledge about your own body, more so than someone who just thought I’m just gonna go by what society says because it kind of matches up with me. And then you don’t get to explore all of this.
Lucie:
Yeah. That’s the thing about, you know, like, when we talk about how, you know, structures of oppression or privilege harms those who are privileged in various ways. Part of it is like, because you’re not asked to think about something like I think it’s Jessica Fern in Polysecure who talks about you know, like, polyamorous folks, we’ve had to answer the question, why are we polyamorous? What do we get out of it, right? And so with my monogamous clients, I will often say like, what do you get out of monogamy?
You know, it’s funny. It doesn’t make you more or less enlightened to be polyamorous. Like, you’d have to be poly-ier than though to think that. But what is your why? What do you get out of monogamy? How does that serve you?
When we interrogate these cultural scripts, these stories about our bodies and our sexualities and eroticism and pleasure that we’re handed, we can dream all sorts of different ways of embodying eroticism.
August (narration):
If you, too, want to stop apologizing for a particular body part or feel as worthy of pleasure as you actually are, Lucie, recommends distancing yourself from the cultural scripts around sex. From there, you can start questioning them. You can ask yourself:
Lucie:
Does that serve me? Is that the kind of world that I want to live in, you know, where I am letting someone else tell me what is desirable or what is pleasurable?
August (narration):
Then comes what Lucie calls “embodied re-visioning. In Trans Sex, they wrote: “To engage in embodied re-visioning is to leverage the distancing brought about by the mystifying mode…to revise one’s understanding of one’s sexual body.”
Lucie:
Maybe one of the things you do is, you think about the names you use for your parts. And this goes for cis people and, and trans folks, by the way, because, like how many vulva owners you know have strong opinions on cunt versus pussy, for example?
And then a second thing is like, okay, what energies and intentions can I bring to my body, to my partners’ bodies? Because you can do so many things, from different energies and intentions.
What my friend and colleague Princess Kali calls the kernel kink. It’s that shift in ‘what do you want to feel during this activity?’ It’s almost more important than ‘what activity are we going to do?’
August (narration):
Or you could put it this way: How do you want to feel by the end of the activity?
Lucie:
Do you want to feel strong? Do you want to feel broken down? Do you want to feel adored, do you want to feel worshiped? Do you want to feel humiliated, punished? Whatever you want to feel is good, or is negotiable.
August (narration):
You can also think about different intentions or energies with respect to particular body parts.
Lucie:
So for example, my colleague sex educator Jamie Joy in Philly, he talks about bobbing versus swirling in oral sex: you Bob, a penis and you swirl, a clitoris. But who says? Why can’t you bob a clitoris? Why can’t you swirl a glands penis? No one says you can’t.
And it turns out that if you bring that different energy and intention to those parts that some a lot of yummy things can happen.
August (narration):
Thirdly, take a page from Lucie’s experience and decenter genitalia—or another part of your body you tend to focus on during sex.
You could try this as a one-time experiment, as ongoing play or as something you dip into on occasion. You could say:
Lucie:
Okay, I’m going to focus on like, the arches of my feet. Or, you know, I’m going to play the Three-Minute Game with with a partner.
August (narration):
The Three-Minute-Game was created by Life Coach Harry Faddis in 1998 for a BDSM workshop. The game was inspired by a line from the poet, Rumi: “You must ask for what you really want; don’t go back to sleep.”
It started with two questions:
“What would you like me to do to you for three minutes?” and “What would you like to do to me for three minutes?”
Betty Martin, the sexological bodyworker we mentioned earlier, adjusted the questions to:
“How do you want me to touch you for three minutes?” and “How do you want to touch me for three minutes?”
And there are countless ways to spend those minutes.
Lucie:
Maybe I like cat-walking on my forearm. Maybe that’s pleasurable. Or maybe I like a really hard scratch – or whatever. So you find out those kinds of sensations.
We are polymorphously perverse playgrounds of wonder. And as soon as we recognize that our bodies are capable of so much pleasure, erotic joy and imagination, so much opens up.
August (narration):
“Polymorphously perverse playgrounds of wonder.” I love that phrase.
By the way, the term polymorphous came from Sigmund Freud, of all people—the founder of psychoanalysis who’s known for his sexist and heterosexist views. Some people chalk those views up to “the times” he lived in. Anyway, it wasn’t all bad.
Polymorphous describes the idea that any part of your body can be an erogenous zone—not just the genitals. As Lucie put it, a beautiful concept.
She added that feeling less apologetic and more joyful about your body can start with figuring out what pleasure truly feels like for you.
Lucie:
A lot of folks don’t know what pleasure feels like in their body.
August (narration):
If that resonates with you, Lucie suggests considering this: Chances are you know what a negative sensation feels like in your body.
Lucie:
So you have some embodied awareness. Let’s use that as a base. And then let’s build out from that and let’s find pleasure that way.
August (narration):
In other words, use what you know of dysphoria—those feelings of distress—to get to euphoria.
Lucie:
…instead of just like, well, I’m going to resolve dysphoria, because like, my, my feeling is, and, you know, like, I think that this goes for so many experiences. It is not sufficient for sex, for play to be simply not distressing or not painful. Right? It has to be pleasurable. And if it’s not, why the fuck are we doing it?
August:
I love that so much. And as you were sharing that I was thinking of how many words we have for the pain in our body. The doctor will ask you, “Is it a burning pain? Is such a stabbing pain? Is it an ache?”
We have all these adjectives. And pleasure in the body, so many people are like, “It feels good. Orgasm.” You know, those are kind of where we learn to go.
Lucie:
So what’s interesting about the examples you used as those are all images. And those are all sensation images—body sensation images. And so what I would do with that is, okay, let’s sit with that. Let’s sit with that image that you’re experiencing…and just like, honoring it, inviting it in. And then and letting it kind of do its thing.
August (narration):
If you struggle to come up with descriptors for how erotic pleasure feels in your body, consider how you feel during other pleasures.
Lucie:
Like, I love food. I love project cooking. And I love like savoring a bite of food. Sichuan food is some of my favorite because of that hot numbing sensation that you get.
I love that feeling of like, an entire quadrant of my tongue just fell asleep. That’s really pleasurable! I want to sit with that. And that’s what you do. You sit with those moments.
If you’re running—and I don’t run, except to run away from things—but I hear from people who actually enjoy running that like, you can run to a goal. Or you can notice like, I’m running at sunset and oh my god, the sky is beautiful. Or I’m running barefoot and the grass is dewy and tickling the arch of my foot.
[birds chirping]
August (narration):
Once you can see and describe pleasure in other parts of your life, it might be easier to notice and experience it during sex.
And all of your efforts to explore pleasure and discover more in your sexual self can benefit your whole self. Lucie knows this well, from experience.
August:
How has all of that work in your own life impacted you beyond sexual embracement and sexual pleasure?
Lucie:
You know, it helps me radically dream more. One of my favorite queer theorists, Jose Esteban Munoz, talks about the present is a toxic place for for queers. He describes it as a prison house, the here and now, because it’s steeped in pragmatism.
And I think a life steeped in image and story and sensation and movement, of connection…they allow us to dream, to distill a future from something beautiful. And I think that that’s what it’s given me, is so much hope, even in the midst of these last two years where hope, connection and touch feel very precarious. I would say the last six years have felt that way for many of us. But it helps me hold onto hope and it helps me dream and to recognize that better worlds are possible. And that the worlds that we have are redeemable. They can be tended and thus bear fruit again.
[encouraging, acoustic music]
August (narration):
Part of Lucie’s dreaming led to their book: Trans Sex.
August:
Do you remember the moment, or the moments, when you decided to write your book?
Lucie:
So the book came from a lot of pleasure, but it also came from a lot of anger. And I wonder if you had similar experiences, co-writing With Pleasure, you know that sense of like, this is a book about pleasure. It’s a book about embodiment. But it comes from a lot of pain, too, and a lot of painful experiences. And I think rage can be clarifying sometimes.
August (narration):
Here’s one example. Lucie recalls times when she would be sitting in an inclusive workshop learning about different types of sexual desire one day. Then soon after, they’d be sitting in a doctor’s office, hearing the myth that estrogen therapy causes quote/unquote, “sex drive to drop off a cliff.”
The ways members of the media treat and describe trans folks have also fueled that pain and clarifying rage.
Lucie:
You know, if you look at so many interviews with figures in the trans community, by like a by some cis journalists…it’s like, you must prove to me that you are that you are trans, or that you are a woman. You must explain this to me. And so experiences like that just shook me to my core. And so that moment of rage helped me then say we can dream better. There can be different ways of being, and being with.
And lastly, I would say experiences like this. I learned very iteratively and I write very iteratively. And so like I would kind of workshop some of this stuff over the years and, and as like I start turning to thinking about like, what’s next? I think about workshopping that. What sticks and what kinds of questions do I get? How does that enlarge my imagination?
August (narration):
The answer to that, in my opinion, is powerfully. Trans Sex is such an important, impactful and wonderfully written book. Since I spoke with Lucie, it was named the winner of the AASECT Book Award for Sexuality Professionals. Congratulations, Lucie – so well deserved.
To learn more about Lucie Fielding and their work, visit luciefielding.com. That’s Lucie with an fielding dot com. Lucie is also active on Instagram: @sexbeyondbinaries.
[acoustic chord riff]
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Thanks so much for listening (or reading!).
[outro music that makes you wanna dance]
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