Transgenderism and BDSM

When I decided to do something about my transgenderism after the Berlin Wall fell, I went to a prominent BDSM support group in Washington, D.C. I did this because of the mistaken notion that I got from my one course in Abnormal Psychology which gave the impression that transgenderism was a fetish disorder. I did not find what I was looking for in this support group, BDSM know as little about TSTG as anyone else. They were tolerant of crossdressing but seemed never to understand it.

I did strike up a friendship with a mistress in the group who was an expert with the single-tail whip but our mutual interests did not include BDSM and transgenderism. She was a writer and our daytime dates consisted of going to art museums, a house that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda lived in for a time in Rockville, MD and the artist colony in Cape May. Our nighttime dates involved attendance at BDSM support groups and clubs in D.C. and Baltimore. I was fascinated by BDSM but never tried it. But I was fascinated by it, at least what I saw in “respectable” BDSM gatherings. She patiently explained each of the “scenes” as they are called in BDSM and taught me a lot about the culture. We eventually split and I stopped observing the BDSM community.

Several years later, still perplexed by what they taught in Abnormal Psychology, I read all the science pertaining to transgenderism and some on BDSM. It took me a while to understand what was really going with each phenomenon.

I found that I could not blame my Abnormal Psychology professor because of the longstanding unsubstantiated belief that transgenderism was motivated by sexual arousal and was a fetish. At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, declared that those who practiced what we would now call transgender behavior, should be declared to be “transvestites,”  Although the Latin roots of the word transvestite are neutral, Hirschfeld assumed that transgenderism was a fetish and the word transvestite got the connotation that such people crossdressed because they enjoyed the accompanying sexual arousal. There was no scientific basis for assuming this motivation and coining the word may have had more to do with the viewer than the phenomena. Although we have subsequently replaced “transvestite” with “crossdresser” and later “transgender person,” the stigma of sexual arousal motivation still remains among the public and many mental health professionals. The near-past “autogynephilia” notions of Blanchard align with this early characterization.

Bondage equipment and Rachel X.

The key to understanding the relationship between sexual arousal and the phenomena of transgenderism and transsexualism is to realize that sexual arousal is learned. Most teenagers who use the Sears catalog, Playboy or pornography do not realize, nor care, that they are conditioning their nervous systems to respond with sexual arousal to the stimuli that they are viewing and hearing. The science is well established that both male and female nervous systems learn to respond with sexual arousal to stimuli that have previously been presented and paired with sexual arousal from masturbation or other sources. This is known as Classical or Pavlovian conditioning or learning (Pavlov paired stimuli with meat powder which came to evoke salivation after several pairings). Novel and intense stimuli are learned with greater speed than other stimuli because, by themselves, they provoke physiological changes that can be paired with sexual arousal. Now what does this mean for transgenderism and BDSM?

For transgenderism, the scientific finding that sexual arousal is learned means that sexual arousal can also be unlearned. Most all transgender people get sexually aroused when they first present in their preferred gender behavior category which is incongruent with their assigned sex and behavior category. After all, most have been conditioning themselves since puberty to be sexual aroused to the trappings of the opposite gender category than they prefer. Besides, the wearing new clothing stimuli are novel and evoke a physiological response by themselves. But with exposure, this arousal decreases. For many, it is not enough to maintain transgender behavior. Most transgender people report that their transgender behavior makes them feel more calm and happy and that it does not provoke sexual arousal anymore. I described how I felt when expressing my transgender behavior as a pleasant “floating” experience. Sexual arousal decreased during expression of my transgender behavior and eventually now has disappeared altogether. This unlearning process is accelerated by the fact that the transgender person while crossdressed is bombarded all at once by stimuli that used to provoke sexual arousal. Psychologists use a similar procedure to allow their patients to unlearn fears by exposing their patients all at once to situations that once were fearful, termed “flooding desensitization.”

BDSM involves exposing a “submissive” to stimuli and situations that evoke sexual arousal. Novel stimuli are involved in provoking this response such as result from bondage, pain or humiliation. The submissive usually works with a “dominant.” The “dominant” starts with a weak stimulus such as tying the hands of a submissive (bondage) but needs to increase the intensity in succeeding “scenes” of the stimulus because the weak one is no longer effective. The tolerance of the submissive to these stimuli can be built up with repeated exposure to advanced bondage techniques such as Shubari (a Japanese tying art form) and suspension. Organized BDSM groups emphasize that BDSM should be (1) safe, (2) sane and (3) consensual. There is a bit of play-acting between the dominant and submissive in BDSM “scenes” which may last for only a few minutes or much longer. The dominant is most often guided by what the submissive wants, a practice known as “topping from below” if the submissive is too obvious about what they want.

There is a typical career path of a BDSM participant. They usually start out as a submissive but, as the stimuli desensitization increases and their knowledge increases, the submissive may become a “switch” in which they are submissive in some scenes and dominant in others. Finally, the submissive may become a dominant or even a teacher of BDSM technique. Organized BDSM support groups meetings typically feature presentations on BDSM technique from a dominant expert in that technique.

There is no reason to believe that transgenderism is an outgrowth of BDSM. Amateur dominants that practice crossdressing techniques are very rare. In the support group I observed, there was only one submissive, and no specialized dominant. Although it is very common for for-profit dominants to provide humiliation services. The clientele of such for-profit dominants is predominantly non-transgender and is in search of humiliation rather than transgenderism. Most transgender people reject such services, saying “I do not need someone to force me to crossdress.” While there are sometimes special interest subgroups in BDSM support groups, their membership is usually quite small compared with the larger group and it is not clear whether their interest is in TSTG or humiliation.

No doubt that there are some TSTG who have an interest in BDSM. Given that most people respond to BDSM stimuli with sexual arousal, it would be surprising if there weren’t. But I have encountered no wholesale tendency for members of BDSM groups to become transgender or transsexuals based on my experience and the literature.

So the relationship between BDSM and TSTG is that both involve unlearning of stimulus/sexual-arousal relationships, not that one causes the other.

Tags: BDSM, bondage, crossdressing, featured, mistress, S&M, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul