A version of this essay was originally published in Picnic Magazine's Spring 2025 issue.
I got a copy of the recently reprinted zine Napkin, by the multihyphenate artist Carta Monir, in the mail a few months ago. The last time I read it was in mid-2020, when I was maybe two years on hormones—the weird, intense, exhilarating time when you finally start to get the hang of being a trans woman, and some things about it become banal, and you start thinking more seriously about the possibilities your life might have, yktv. I read it in one sitting, and I was sort of constantly thinking about it for a couple weeks afterwards. I showed it to someone I had a crush on at the time, a cis dyke who had dated more than a few trans women over the years. This was in the middle of lockdown, so we sat on opposite sides of her porch to talk about it. Despite our differences, our astonishment was identical; I think a phrase she used was “unbelievably vulnerable.” Apt, and somehow an understatement. I didn’t exactly find a role model in this zine. It didn’t feel like I could emulate Monir’s life or the way she wrote about it, at least not until later. Instead, Napkin felt like a challenge, as a lot of other important literary works by trans women did at the time. What can you do, now that you know this is possible?
I’m getting ahead of myself. Napkin is a sort of sexual autobiography, with a structuring gimmick: For about a year, Monir handed out “comment cards” to people she hooked up with, with deceptively simple questions:
Was this your first time having sex with Carta? y/n
Is Carta the first trans woman you’ve slept with? y/n
Did you have an orgasm? y/n
Would you have sex with Carta again? y/n
Would you consider yourself a top/vers/bottom?
What is your gender identity?
How old are you?
Please write any additional comments on the back of this card.
You could read this as a joke—maybe about the insecurities trans people have surrounding the perceptions of others, which extend even into the bedroom. Finally, this will clear it up! It’s a setup waiting for a cruel punchline. But Monir is completely serious. She’s writing about the ways her sexuality changed since transitioning, and the experiences her partners have with her new body is, for her, an essential part of the picture. “I would feel uncomfortable writing about something so personal without giving at least a small voice to the people who are putting their trust in me,” she writes.
Her earnestness is rewarded amply. Here’s some of the comments on the back of the cards (reproduced in the zine):
You’re magical
Super hot, super sweet. Carta makes me feel great about myself.
brave little pillow princess with perfect moans
Tastiest ass ever!
Stay fierce. Pat my head more
Thanks for letting it be me
From reading the writings of trans women from Monir’s era, you might have a certain set of expectations about how sex writing “goes,” but Monir directly subverts these expectations. There is no agonizing over the intentions of others—a stark absence of neuroticism. The overwhelming feeling she has toward her partners is gratitude, which is sincere (i.e., it doesn’t emerge from her sense of her own inadequacy). In the way the comment cards express real curiosity about the way her body is being enjoyed by others, they both reveal her gratitude to her partners and are an emblem of her palpable confidence. This is an elegant reversal of much transfeminine writing about sex, in which the trans woman is trapped in infinitely recursive inner monologues about the encounter she’s having, or pursues self-consciously self-destructive sex as a form of catharsis or punishment. Monir doesn’t simply make many other trans writers seem like prudes; she makes them seem selfish.
The micro-essays that surround the comment cards are impressive not for their catalog of sexcapades, but because Monir’s candor lacks sensationalism. She makes one realize how much coy self-consciousness is built into even the most out-there sex writing. She handles topics like fisting, anonymous hookups, going on topical testosterone, and how her disability has affected her sex life with emotional lucidity and a matter-of-factness about mechanics that are rarely combined in a single writer. If you want to witness a vision of sexuality motivated by curiosity and cleansed of shame, Monir comes closer than most.
She shows us how she got there from an unpromising start. The opening essay in Napkin alludes to the sexual abuse Monir survived as a child and a numb, compulsive relationship to her own sexuality as an adult. “Most of my memories are of staring at a clock, or a calendar, or a spot on the wall,” she writes, “trying to last long enough to have done a ‘good job.’” Transition, as usual conferring the full benefits of normal subjectivity, seemed to help Monir realize that it was possible to want something from sex. Monir’s pre-transition fixation on Casanova and other “famous lovers” (to whom she felt “bitterly competitive” at the time) transforms, after starting HRT at age 25, to an interest in self-discovery. The sex act is no longer treated like a conquest, but as a field of possibility whose resources can be mapped and exploited.
This is a good lesson to learn from transition—because it splits you open, because it forces you to rethink everything about your life so far, it also reveals that it’s possible to subject yourself to a constant process of introspective refinement, with pleasure as the reward. Desire is not as opaque and unknowable as the psychoanalytically minded will try to convince you. It is something that is improved with attention and testing. Desire begets itself, sure, but it can do so in a positive way.
Monir’s self-awareness takes the form of a curiosity that leads her further down the path of her own inclinations. Napkin presents her post-transition sexuality as something that needed to be learned, basically, and her attitude toward her own experiences tends toward the didactic. She is perfecting herself, in a sense, and with the benefit of a lot of practice, she’s capable of ratcheting her self-scrutiny up to a high level of magnification—sometimes so high that it turns recursive and doubtful. Writing about faking orgasms with cis women, she rehearses the usual worries:
If a beautiful cis woman was taking the time and effort to go down on me, and looking expectantly into my eyes, it felt rude to ask her to keep going beyond a certain point. It felt even ruder not to have an orgasm, even if I knew I wasn’t going to be able to… [W]hen I’m with a beautiful cis woman, it’s hard for me to believe that she actually is attracted to me as a woman and not taking pity on me.
This is a problem that has presented itself to other trans lesbian writers as insurmountable (see the nearly identical scene at the beginning of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada), but Monir finds a way out. Instead of retreating into herself and trying to quash her own doubt, she reminds herself that she isn’t the only person in the room, and that she’s doing a disservice to her partner by thinking in this way. Her own thoughts are only necessarily half the picture, anyway. “Insecurity goes both ways,” she concludes. “Sex is ultimately a collaborative effort … Whoever I’m fucking, or getting fucked by, is most likely dealing with insecurities and intrusive thoughts I can’t even imagine.”
In this way, her writing moves back and forth between pleasure and patient disassembly of the psychic structures that surround it. She interrogates her fantasies, shares techniques she’s learned and preferences she’s ascertained, and lays out her sexual history as an object to be examined. These sections are written in careful, precise language that contrasts with the rosy, poetic style she assumes when she recalls a hookup with a man from Grindr, a delirious lesbian threesome, or the beauty of a lover’s asshole. Sex can be good, really good even, she seems to be saying, but it is also a sort of negotiation with the most basic questions of self and other. This negotiation isn’t a vibe-killer. It is a prerequisite for achieving greatness.
This is harder when you’re a trans woman, of course. At times, the specter of Monir’s pre-transition dissociation rears its head, and she finds it manifesting in unexpected places. At one point, she writes about how fantasy can play a part in how she experiences sex in the moment. “It’s difficult for me to have an orgasm just from the physical sensation of sex,” she notes. “Now, I’m often in the position of not being able to cum unless I fantasize about something, even when I’m having very hot sex. Is what I’m describing a kind of dissociating? It probably is.” She goes on to frame the work of warding off dissociation as a duty to her partners: “I only have one body, and if I’m giving it to someone, and accepting theirs in return, I want to be respectful of that gift,” she writes.
This intention could sum up the whole zine. Napkin’s central insight is that minding her own desire, and being honest with herself, mutually reinforces the care Monir wants to give her partners. Sex is a collaboration first—not a means of reinforcing individual ego.
Monir’s contribution to the trans literary tradition is to think about pleasure and transsexuality concurrently, and to frame transition as a process of arriving at a greater and greater capacity for pleasure, a greater and greater openness to experience itself. This is easier said than done, but Monir shows that orienting yourself toward it makes this kind of exploration less scary and more rewarding. And she shows what can be won. The ecstatic, rapturous stories interspersed through the zine read like snapshots of unmediated experience, of moments—not rare anymore, as she emphasizes—where Monir was really, truly present for the sex she was having. The moments in the zine that are truly pornographic are the fruit of a lifelong struggle with her tendency to overthink and repress.
Monir’s concept of sex as a collaboration has something utopian about it, so I’ve tried to write about it without mentioning a simple, obvious fact: Sexuality is central to the subjugation of trans women, and Monir’s work is one of astonishing bravery. If you’re a trans woman, you’re being told all the time what you’re into—by doctors, pornographers, feminists, right-wing demagogues—quickly followed by a moral condemnation of it. Trans women’s sexual lives have basically always been objects of obsessive scrutiny, used to deny us healthcare and legal recognition. It could be acknowledged more often that this kind of shameless slander exerts a downward pressure on the capacity of trans cultural production in general, but it’s also an efficient mechanism for frontloading shame around sex. Having a healthy relationship to one’s own sexuality is difficult when the expression of sexuality interpersonally or in art has the potential to serve as the tool used to un-person you. It’s unsurprising that under these conditions a lot of trans art tends to associate sex with shame—either flinching away from sex altogether, or attempting to transcend it through the depiction of wildly taboo or violent acts. Monir’s zine is one of the few pieces of trans sex writing that takes the approach of rejecting shame altogether. She does with honesty and humility what can’t be done with shock and gore—she makes sex seem more like itself again.
The late Mira Bellwether, the author of the 2010 zine Fucking Trans Women, was another great believer in the potential for demystification of trans female sexuality, and her zine confronted this problem much more directly, and in much more political terms, than Monir’s. Fucking Trans Women often reads like a fiery second-wave feminist tract, but it could not have been otherwise. Monir was writing with the backdrop of a self-assured trans culture that had already produced a lot of masterpieces. Bellwether was working from almost nothing—she comments numerous times throughout Fucking Trans Women that she was inventing concepts and ways of thinking from scratch. Bellwether had to be polemical, where Monir’s radicality is that she sidestepped what had become, in 2019, a rather loud discourse.
FTW begins with a simple call for conversation. “I wanted to talk to other trans women about how we like to fuck,” Bellwether asserts bluntly on page six of the nearly 80-page zine. “[T]he more we talk to each other and our lovers about how we like to fuck, the better off we’ll be.” She wields the collective first person at every opportunity; her intentions are communal from the very start. Her original intention was for FTW to be a recurring zine with more contributors, but what we ended up with is a sort of monograph on the subject that doubles as an autobiography. The future issues of FTW are one of the many great unwritten projects of trans literature, but “issue zero,” written and illustrated entirely by Bellwether, is a project similar to Monir’s: as much a portrait of an individual trans woman’s sexual self-discovery as it is a collective exhortation to do the same.
It is very much a zine, in the tradition of Riot Grrl and fanzines. The extravagant profusion of photocopied drawings, magazine cutouts, cartoons, and cut-and-pasted text on every page calls back to an earlier optimism in the resources of a DIY counterculture. In 2010, DIY was the recourse serious, uncompromising trans writing and culture had for making a mark at all—think of the early work of Sybil Lamb, or Samantha Jane Dorsett’s novel Troubled Sleep. Three years after FTW was published, Topside Press would form in a living room in Brooklyn, ushering trans writing into a new phase, with little more than a few ISBNs and a pirated copy of InDesign. FTW anticipates a lot of what made Topside’s ethos so pivotal—the sense that trans people are central, not peripheral, in any conception of an audience for trans work. Like the Topside editors, who gave grandiose, polemical interviews, Bellwether is consciously yanking her readers into the future, asking them to think and act differently in the name of better sex. This was the Promethean era of trans literature, and Bellwether’s optimism about her ability to change the world is palpable. “One of the best tools we have at our disposal for figuring out our bodies, for learning about them and coming to delight in them, is experience,” she writes. “I’m talking about starting from data and working toward conclusions rather than the opposite[.]” One realizes that this has rarely happened, that it maybe still hasn’t happened enough.
And so she sets out to show us how to learn about our bodies, and the unexpected places experience may lead. The “anatomy lesson” close to the beginning of the zine maps out the nerves running through the genital areas of trans women—pudendal, genitofemoral, ilioinguinal, and hypogastric plexus. These nerves connect to many areas you wouldn’t expect—the anus, sure, but also the perineum, the inguinal canals, the inner thighs. Penises themselves are not rigid and undifferentiated phalluses, but in fact are “spider webs” of nerves that branch and divert in patterns through the spongy flesh, creating zones of greater and lesser sensitivity.
Useful information. Although Bellwether doesn’t say anything to this effect, one thinks during this passage about how often and how coercively trans women are associated with our genitals—but the genitals themselves are left unexamined, their function assumed and their meaning fixed. Under a section subtitled “Nerves, nerves, nerves,” Bellwether observes that “it can be easy to overlook the delicate nature of these nerves and treat the penis like a hunk of meat instead of a delicate instrument. Because, well, the only way we ever see it is from the outside, where it looks like a sausage, not a spider web.”
Bellwether insists that this is a zine about sex and not language (nerves are elemental, existing before the idea of a penis), but the discourse of sex has already interceded at this point (the nerves are “delicate,” a quality that is “overlooked”). Of course it has. To write about sex, you have to define your terms; you have to agree on what sex is, or convince your audience of a new definition. This might be why Bellwether spends so much time writing about the potential for sex with soft penises, which is thoroughly outside the conventional definition of sex as such. It is a fact of significance (conveniently ignored by our enemies) that many trans women can’t get hard after HRT, which Bellwether reconfigures as an opportunity. “In my experience you’re more likely to be stimulating nerve endings and nerves much deeper in the tissue that might respond to completely different kinds of sensation than when erect,” she notes. Again, useful! And the exact kind of information that’s obscured by the dominant ideology of sex that informs even queer practices. Flaccid penises, she writes, are treated like “the punch line of a joke with no setup, no content, only mute assumptions and expectations that all cocks are rock-hard.” Being able to appreciate a soft penis starts with being able to imagine one, she seems to be saying.
There are less obvious discoveries here, too—adventures into the truly unmapped. Bellwether is remembered best as the popularizer of “muffing”—digital penetration of the inguinal canals—which she is enthusiastic enough about to write pages and pages on. I wouldn’t be the first girl to say that I don’t really get anything from it, but I wholly believe Bellwether’s excitement, and it’s hard not to admire the effort that must have gone into figuring it out. How unique the idea, how delicate the technique, how contrary to our expectations of how that part of the body is supposed to work. And I love the wonderfully defamiliarizing effect a phrase like “my cunts,” which Bellwether uses to describe her inguinal canals, has on the expectations of language. We are in truly alien territory here, and something can be brought back from it. What else, one thinks, is out there?
I’m deliberately misreading her, of course. As interested as Bellwether is in language, the ways we talk about how we fuck, her goal is to be above this sort of ivory-tower semiotic maneuvering. The advice in FTW is relentlessly practical. The point of muffing isn’t that it’s avant-garde; it’s that it works really well for her. She writes a lot about the patience it’s taken to get better at it and suggests that the hardest part might be showing someone unfamiliar with the practice how to do it.
Another piece of practical advice: Show your work. Bellwether borrows the rhetoric of consciousness-raising when she writes of learning to feel out her own needs. “[M]ost of the time I have no frame of reference for my body,” she writes. She exhorts her readers to talk to other trans women, compare notes, find what works, experiment anew, lift the veil. Sometimes, this tends to extremes:
Ask the person you’re fucking to play with themselves, and emphasize that you’re not necessarily talking about masturbation, but literally playing with their penis. Play around with your body, and keep conversation moving, and ask to play with their body as well. With permission, get your fingers and hands right in there and start exploring, touching, rubbing, and stretching.
How elaborate this is! I have never done anything like this, but knowing the possibility makes the world seem larger. And it seems like good advice, although I can’t imagine having the confidence to suggest it to a partner. Like Monir, Bellwether sees sex as a perfectible project, and she’s not afraid to treat it as something that requires practice before things get really good. It’s an ideal that she’s chasing, one that most people don’t even know is there.
Despite the tone that ranges from patient to strident, Bellwether clearly wrote this zine out of a rather personal frustration. She wrote it about herself, and her voice is clear on every page. “I want my lovers to get my body,” she writes, “and not treat it like a confusing math problem.” For all the disappointment that is layered onto the text like mortar, Bellwether’s approach seems to have paid off. My favorite passage in FTW is a long story, for once not overlaid on drawings and cartoons and magazine cutouts. It sits simply on the white page. She’s with her lover in a bathtub in the depths of Michigan winter, the window open and the snow coming in.
I think the two of us in that tub pressed against each other’s bodies must have looked very sexy and very beautiful. We talked and fucked and ran more hot water and talked some more. Between us there wasn’t much room for water. I told her about naming my cunts and then I asked if I could show her how to fuck them. Smiling, I faced her, put my feet up on either side of the tub, and then showed her where my cunts were. She pulled me out of the bath and into the bedroom, put me on the bed, and told me to show her again.
My new edition of Napkin comes with a short preface. Monir expresses some surprise that this is now her best-known work and makes a note of what has changed since she wrote it. Five years later, the zine has become to her a sort of time capsule of her sexuality in 2019, when she’d been on hormones for only about three years and was just starting to come into her own.
Three years! I almost couldn’t believe what I was reading. She was barely a year “older” than me in trans terms when I first read it. Upon rereading, this made sense to me. The sense of self-discovery is tangible, and passages that read to me the first time around as stridently confident now read to me like statements of intention, fronting for what she still doesn’t know.
This is one of the pleasures of getting older, and having been trans for longer. Certain texts that used to feel like impossibly distant, aspirational perspectives now seem like what one friend affectionately refers to as “early transition art.” The delirious heedlessness of early transition art makes it memorable—Napkin is certainly one of the most fearless works of literature by a trans person—and perhaps we are only really willing to think in detail about our own bodies and gendered lives in this way for a limited time. Certainly, the further I get into my own transition, the less I try to find the meaning, the telos, of my experiences. But it also serves as a reminder of what got us here, and what it felt like to be simultaneously new to the world and burdened with experience, figuring things out stochastically. I may, now, seven years into my own transition, never create anything this truly wild.
I also don’t think anyone could really write anything like either Napkin or Fucking Trans Women now, in general. In the shadow of rhetorical warfare and actual persecution, trans writing about sex has acquired a curiously contradictory character. On one hand, it’s common to read personal writing by trans women that strives openly to “justify” our sexualities against charges of abusiveness or decadence. I’m really not like that, I promise. On the other hand, much recent trans writing tends to clam up around sex, refusing to explain or interrogate anything, adopting a faux-blasé confrontational stance that just serves to occlude our own lack of self-knowledge. Yeah, we’re perverts, what are you gonna do about it? Something has been lost: the cautious, serious exploration that Monir and Bellwether offered up, oriented toward pleasure and happiness, that is honest about what we know and don’t know about our bodies. This is a kind of writing that could realistically only exist when trans writers could expect to mostly reach an audience of their peers. Our cultural production is now everyone’s business, and professional rabble-rousers trawl the internet looking for easy targets. The battle lines have hardened.
On the other hand, nothing can be fully undone. The trans literary production of the 2010s was on a radically different plane than what came before it, in large part because trans people, having found each other in large numbers in the 2010s, started to unbind the aggregated knots of our shame. Monir’s and Bellwether’s zines exemplify this. The grace and eloquence with which authors like Imogen Binnie and Torrey Peters deal with the confusing, awkward early sexual experiences of their trans characters is a parallel example. Sexuality in Nevada and The Masker is not peripheral, the way it was in the 20th-century memoirs, but central to the dynamics of plot and character in the way they are for everyone else.
In its manifestation in variegated and contradictory forms, and in the way it has a sedimentary structure as experience accumulates and knowledge innervates it, sexuality is in fact a microcosm for subjectivity as a whole. It is psychologically maiming to coerce trans people to write sex out of our stories in order to be taken seriously—and it’s a form of lying to assume that we know ourselves well enough to take sex for granted. We revisit these zines to remember that knowledge is a thing to be won. We will need to assert again and again that our bodies deserve the careful attention—tinged with the primal confusion of adolescence—that is the soil from which self-knowledge can grow.
Picnic is a New York-based literary magazine publishing fiction, criticism, and poetry by trans people. It is edited by Alma Avalle and Joyce Laurie.
