How To Be Normal About Polyamory

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Edouard Frédéric Wilhelm Richter1, The Jewel of the Harem, 1877

This article is a continuation of two separate threads that I’ve been working on. In one way, it is a follow up to How To Be Sexually Normal, while also being a follow up to the two articles I have written on C4T friendships and relationships.

Polyamory has been under attack for around five years now. This is a very different thing from when some conservative outlet says that “heterosexuality is under attack”. Heterosexuality is the norm. Our society and all contemporary others on this planet are built around it. If heterosexuality is under attack, and I hope that at least heteronormativity is, then it is well defended. Heterosexuality is Hochosterwitz Castle. It sits protected on top of a 172-metre-high (564 ft) rock, with fourteen fortified gates leading up to it. It is well stocked on food and water, and willing to do some trickery should supplies ever start to look low. Were polyamory a castle, it would probably resemble something like Château des Baux. Baux is a little castle, that only ever protected a tiny town. It lays in near complete ruin, after the trebuchets of family feuds and wars of religion took their toll, until finally, some king who had never even seen the place decided to ensure it was unlivable. The attack on polyamory has been different from that on trans rights, gay rights, and women’s rights. There are no legal structures to attack. Polyamory had never been successful enough to garner anything that could be stripped away. So, instead, the attack has merely been on its reputation.

This might be due to a lot of reasons. Gen Z is having 17% less sex than millennials did at their age, who themselves were having 13% less sex than Gen X did. The emergence of mutual online surveillance via social media, and the gossip and opinion making that comes with it, has played a big role in this. There’s also a lot more that we can occupy ourselves with than Gen X had. If there’s nothing good on TV and we don’t have a good book on the go, we can scroll, play video games, talk to our friends online, watch something via torrenting or streaming it, read substack (hello!), or flick through a dating app with an algorithm designed to keep us using the app for as long as possible. We can do so much that isn’t going to a bar to find a hookup or even having sex with those already around us. There’s also the increased political polarization between women (usually acceptably liberal) and men (increasingly fascist). Polyamory just doesn’t make as much sense in a world where people are having far less sex than they were thirty years ago. Yet people are told that we should want sex, and that having sex is a sign of our social value. So, it makes sense that if you’re having a hard time dating, you might begin to view polyamorous people as hoarders, as greedy, as selfish, as taking away from your dating pool. I’m not here to tell you to be polyamorous. I am not trying to convert you to it. In fact, I think if you know yourself to be a jealous or controlling person, you should stay away from it. Hoard your boo. It’s fine. Instead, I want to talk about why so many trans people benefit from polyamory early in their transitions, and why cis partners of trans people might have to learn to live with that and perhaps learn from it. If this article does more than that, that’s on you. I hope it is joyful.

To put my cards on the table, I’ve been living in two polyamorous relationships for the past seven years. Before that, I was in a technically open, but realistically closed relationship for two years. And before that I was in a monogamous relationship that my girlfriend forcefully opened for three years. Except for some shorter relationships of under a year here and there, and some stretches of being single, that more or less amounts to my adult dating life. Before that first girlfriend forcibly opened the relationship, she had cheated on me. If I had to guess, she probably cheated more than once, but I only know of the once. This is, realistically, the norm in monogamous relationships. Between forty and seventy percent of long-term relationships involve cheating. It scared me. It made me a lot less trusting and a lot more paranoid. It radically changed how comfortable I was with the idea of non-monogamy. It made me way more against it. Then, a year later, she demanded we open the relationship. Because I loved her, I agreed. It was that or break up. I wasn’t given much choice, and I chose the wrong option. I only got more upset, more paranoid. She swore that she’d tell me when stuff happened. But I had no way of trusting that was true. And I got to witness a lot that strongly suggested that it wasn’t. A decade later I am still recovering from the various wounds of that relationship. My body still breaks out in hives if I see her picture or hear her name. So, I promise, this is not an article about why you should be forced into polyamory.

But I am going to tell you about the benefits that polyamory can deliver early in a trans person’s medical transition. From this point on, I am going to presume that my reader is a cis woman who is dating a trans woman. But I believe this article will be useful to cis4cis lesbians and trans4trans lesbians as well. First, what is polyamory? Afterall, it is important to define terms, and there’s a lot of bullshit going around about polyamory these days, from all sides. There are people who pretend it is satanic and there are people who pretend it is salvation. Instead, polyamory is an arrangement. That is all it is. Polyamory means that there is a standing relationship between yourself and at least one other person that allows you to continue romantic and/or sexual activities outside of the relationship you are currently in. Often this is divided into two categories. There are open relationships, where the arrangement is only sexual and excludes romantic attachments. Then there is what is usually called polyamory, which is allowing sexual and romantic attachments outside of the relationship structure. Within these broad categories there is a massive variety of options, which very annoying people have come up with very annoying typologies for. Are you a throuple? Is it hierarchical? Do you do relationship anarchy? Is it kitchen table? Does it count as a polycule? Who is your nesting? Are you fluid bonded? Suck my non-existent dick! These exhausting questions are mostly an attempt to get around asking the actually important questions and are shortcuts around having an actual sit-down conversation about the specific rules, boundaries, comforts, discomforts, and red lines that any successful negotiation about any major step in a relationship requires. What matters is your arrangement with your partner and if you are still comfortable with that arrangement.

What isn’t polyamory? Well, polyamory definitely isn’t permission to cheat. And yes, you can still cheat in polyamorous relationships. It is called lying about not sleeping with people. Likewise, polyamory is not a sexuality. You know how I know that it is not a sexuality? Because no one is solely attracted to other polyamorous people. You cannot be polysexual. And besides, we’ve pretty much agreed at this point that sexuality is a term that denotes what gender/s someone is attracted to, and not more. Lastly, polyamorous is not an identity. You are poly if you are in a poly relationship. If you leave that relationship, you are not still poly. You are single. It is completely fine to only want to be in polyamorous relationships, but that isn’t because you were born for them. No one is born for any one social structure. Social structures, because they are invented, and non-biological, are not something one is born for. Dyslexics are not people who were born with a disease that attacks the ability to read. The capacity to read is not biological. Instead, dyslexia is a poorly named vague type of brain that happen to struggle with a lot of what makes reading easy, like shape and pattern recognition. Likewise, a poly person would presumably be someone who is naturally more prone to wanting different sexual partners. Except, as I already pointed out with my cheating statistics, that is literally everyone. Monogamy is a social construct and not one that is very easy for us to perform. The only thing that has changed to it in the last hundred years is that now it binds both primary genders, instead of merely one. So no, you are not any more naturally polyamorous than the rest of us. You just like to feel special. Polyamory only works if it is a choice, if it is talked about openly, and if rules are negotiated on a one-on-one level, without pressure or resentment.

Someone I was chatting to recently told me “my wife pointed out to me that […] I had told her about my decision to transition and my desire to have a non monogamous relationship on the same day. I hadn’t actually registered it myself, but she saw the two things as connected long before I did”. To my mind, there are two excellent reasons why a trans woman who is relatively early in her transition might want to open the relationship or explore polyamory. The first reason is the most obvious, the physical. Despite what the “tranny” Pornhub category would have you believe, trans feminized bodies are not basically women who happen to have a fully functional ‘male’ appendage which behaves exactly how you might expect a male appendage to behave. Hormone replacement therapy remaps the erotic zones and pleasure points to more closely resemble where sensitivity would be on a vagina. This can be incredibly confusing, since, it is not immediately apparent where say the inner labia is on a penis (it’s a combination of the balls and the taint, just fyi). Having your entire nervous system adjusted is wildly disorienting. In addition, the body begins to start treating itself as female. That is, erections become less common, less hard, and ejaculation commonly stops nearly entirely. Arousal becomes less visually induced, and touch, smell, taste, and emotional involvement become increasingly central to the process. Not only for the trans woman experiencing these changes, but for her partner, there can be intense emotional upsets. Neither party knows what to expect. Both parties often want to retain as much of their previous erotic life, to prove that the changes are skin deep, to prove that there can be continuity. Sex becomes the locus of tension between what was and what is becoming. The cis woman wants to prove that she is attracted not only to women, not only to trans women, but to her girlfriend. It can be a lot to ask of yourself to love a girl who is not even close to completely formed, who is phase shifting, painfully, unstably, between genders, who might still look like a man to you, who is a woman to you, who asks you to love her, to eroticise her, and who can do neither to herself. Likewise, the trans woman wants to prove contradictorily that she is both a woman and that things can carry on exactly like before. She wants you to know that she will not fail you. She will keep fucking exactly like she has. You might tell her she doesn’t need to. You might tell her your open to a lot of changes. You might even say you’re excited for them. Chances are, she will not listen. She’s afraid of losing you. She wants desperately to prove that you aren’t losing anything, that she can still be how he was.

Needless to say, this makes for an incredibly bad atmosphere to discover yourself and change. It also makes for a very bad atmosphere for the cis woman. She might not want things to stay the same, but she certainly doesn’t want a sad and anxious animal, jittery like a hare on the front lawn, ready to bolt at any moment, in bed. If you do keep things monogamous, it will take incredible communication. It will take you learning how to interact with a trans body. It will take your newly-girl-friend an immense amount of vulnerability to let you in on what she actually wants, for her to even realize what actually feels good to her now. A shift to openness, to polyamory, hell even to threesomes, can be an incredible way of taking the pressure off. It allows the trans woman to relax and not try to make it ‘the same as before’ because the situation is clearly different from before and thank gosh not just because of her gender. Instead of both of you trying desperately to prove that what used to work can still work, poorly articulating desires, not knowing how much openness to new things is so much that it will scare the other, you can delve into newness together. It can be exciting. And it doesn’t have to be all on you. This nervous animal you now call your girlfriend, doesn’t need to rely solely on you to learn how her body works, on how womanhood works, on how having a femininely responsive body works. You can sigh a big sigh of relief. She can discover with others, alongside you, or alone. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll take the opportunity to go out and discover new sides of yourself too. That way, when she comes back to you, changed with new desires and new pleasure points, you can turn to her and begin telling her of all your new pleasures to. She can say “do this to me” and you can match it with “then after, will you do this to me?” If she gets to change, so do you. And trust me, it is much easier to change when your partner is also changing. It is so scary to change when your partner desperately wants things to be the same. That might be her, or it might be you. And I get where that impulse comes from. Breathe it out. Breathe newness in. You deserve to find out what new pleasures hide among the dazzling confetti show haze of queerness. Smokey rooms of incense and overpopulated mattresses await you.

The second reason is the psychological. It may seem that I’ve already covered the psychological in my poetic waxing about experimentation and joy. But there is the other side to it, the dysphoria and the body shapes. Now, many will tell you that despite being five-foot nine inches I’m really in my soul a five-foot four tomboy trying desperately to make up the missing inches with a scowl and spunk. But, I am also a phenomenologist, and it is obvious to me that one’s size affects how one moves through the world. Body shapes and sizes, especially when they are in direct intimate proximity with other bodies of different shapes and sizes, are imbued with so many social meaning that you might as well be walking through the mist.2 A playful little push from a five-foot nothing girl becomes read as a violent act when the girl is six foot, even if she’d holding back, even if she’s trying to calculate exactly how much force to scale back so that it is still merely playful. Two bodies intertwined in sheets can only take on so many careful positions to make the size differential disappear. Twist the hip up and around, nuzzle into the armpit, try make yourself small, you want to feel at least as small as the cis girl you’ve been dating for years—and please, for the love of all, do not picture how comical you must look from above. Do not imagine yourself a pathetic man curled into a childish vulnerable position. Do not let the Judd Apatow cinematography into your head. Then, comes the actual sex. One body moves the other so easily. One body is so difficult to move at all. One is used to these motions. The other feels them as foreign and feels her smallness. The other feels the foreignness to the other and the largeness, the ill suitedness of her body to this diminished position. Maybe the two should just go back to the standard way, the way that worked for years until it didn’t. But neither party wants the bigger body sobbing into the soft white sheets again.

If you are a trans girl, and you have only been with cis women, and you are trying to love yourself, it can be overwhelming. Womanhood is already about shrinking oneself. That’s like at least 15% of what womanhood is. And if you’re a trans girl, you probably have a biological disadvantage in the whole shrinking situation. Sex with cis women can bring a deeply uncomfortable awareness of the way bodies differ to a forefront, to an immediate physical confrontation. Sometimes the trans woman will attempt to assert all that is positive about her body—all the strong, masculine traits that so many lesbians yearn for. Except, of course, that you have to navigate the ways you differ from other masc tops. You have to realize the past, the history, that is read onto you. You have to embody that you were not a cis woman who estranged and offput and traumatized by the demands of femininity that you adopted mascness, that you felt more comfortable in boys clothes, in sports, in gyms. You have to figure out how to adopt not a masculinity that is feminized, but a femineity that has masculinized, a mascness that is not read as ‘leftover’ as ‘residue’ from being a man. And even if you do this, you’ll still end up dating so many cis women who thought “a trans girl is good first experiment to see if I like women” who promise that they’re not seeing you as a man and yet socially treat you exactly how they treated their ex-boyfriend, but with better pronouns. The other option is to feminize so hard that you become nervous whenever you speak in a group, you wear such feminine outfits that the leftover masculinity of your body screams at you, makes you want to cry. You refuse all things masculine. You refuse your past as anything other than a clerical error. You try through will alone to assert that you are the perfect woman. And then, you realize, as so many cis women have before you, that that force of will is impossible to maintain. You realize that it will break you. No matter how much you try to ignore the size difference between your lover and yourself, you cry a little bit into the soft white sheets.

If a trans woman wants to learn to feel beautiful as a woman, the best thing she can do is to be sexually with other trans women. If a cis woman wants to learn, really internalize, that her girlfriend who was recently her boyfriend, really is a beautiful woman, the best thing she can do is learn to love other trans women as women. Having sex with trans women is an incredible way to realize the beauty in our own bodies, to destigmatize all that keeps us up at night, to break old habits, and to see the possibilities that extend forth. Oh, having a penis isn’t such a big deal, because look at how cute I find hers! Oh, I didn’t even think to look at that part of her body that drives me up the wall about my own! Oh, her lips do feel soft. Oh, I’m with a woman the same size as me. Oh, I find her beautiful. She finds me beautiful. Sex with trans woman, unfortunately for monogamous C4T couples, is possibly the number one thing that I’ve seen help reduce dysphoria in trans women across the board. I know of nothing, not even surgeries, as successful as T4T sex. I also know of nothing that reduces transmisogyny and discomfort among cis women as experiencing sex with multiple trans women, so that their trans girlfriend is not “the trans woman I’ve slept with” but becomes “my girlfriend, who has a body type that I am familiar with, which is not alien or one of a kind to me”.

The truth about polyamory is that it is a type of relationship, and like all relationships, it is more likely to fail than to succeed. If that wasn’t the case, most of us would still be with our high school girlfriend. Polyamory will not solve bad communication, jealousy, fear, incompatibility, lying, or even necessarily cheating. What polyamory offers is the chance to be able to explore all forms of human interaction that you wish to, with new and old people alike, for as long as you live. For me, the reason I choose to live in polyamorous relationships is because I never want to have to deny myself a connection with another that feels important and meaningful. I don’t want to have to have some arbitrary cutoff point where the possibility of interconnectedness must end, no matter how well we get along. That’s how you get affairs. And I do not want to ever have an affair. And I never again want to suffer the heartbreak and humiliation of realizing that a partner would rather go behind my back, and break our relationship rules, than have a difficult but ultimately human conversation about desire with me. To this day, I wonder how many fewer scars I would have if my first serious adult relationship had been one where we talked to each other instead of postured to each other—if she had tried to converse with me instead to control me. Looking back on it, she was going through a lot of changes, ones she struggled to voice. If you find yourself going through changes, please, talk. Talk about your desires. Talk about what your relationship should look like. Talk about polyamory. Talk about if you can do this. Be honest if you cannot. And be there for each other. Don’t force her. Don’t force yourself. Figure out a unique agreement that is right for you. Change is inevitable. You cannot stop it. But negotiating it, bearing your fears, and hearing your partner’s fears as fears and not as accusations, will make change more manageable. You deserve to discuss what you hope to find on the other side of that most recent horizon.

The following people are “founding member” paid subscribers. That is, they are people who decided that my work was not only worth supporting, but that they could afford to pay more than the rate I was asking. On both a financial and emotional level these people mean an incredible amount to me. I screamed aloud the first time anyone ever became one. I cried when a second person did. The least I can do is thank each one individually. They give me hope. Thank you to:

X Valentine, T S, i.m., Hopestill, Jane Oxabel and Rachel K

You have filled me with joy, and helped make this writing possible.