Commentary: Trans Love by Freiya Benson
"Junot Diaz's concept of decolonial love can be helpful. It situates our current binary ways of loving in our histories of colonialism and slavery, which involved treating people as things for our own benefit. It imagines other forms of love where we value ourselves and others equally. This includes imagining love with consent and care for self and others at its heart, where a critical reflection of power dynamics is ongoing, and where there is a commitment to never treat another person-- or yourself-- as property that somebody is entitled to in terms of a particular kind of relationship, or form of labor that is expected."
Trans Love is an anthology of poetry and writing by Trans and non-binary writers, edited together by Freiya Benson. The collection covers sex and relationships, non-binary love, faith and belief, family and friendships, and self-love. While I didn't glean a whole lot from the self-love passages (which is okay, because that's not really why I picked up the book anyway,) I fell in love with the passages exploring love outside of the binary, like the one quoted above. And, I've discovered partially through this book and partially through my own coming out process with my partner, that this perspective of love is not just meaningful to me as a person, but also to my writing.
I rarely write about romantic love. I write about familial love and love between friends. But perhaps my favorite love to write about is cosmic love-- the sense of joy we feel when we connect with something divine, be it the divinity within us or the divinity we find in sunflowers during summer or the sound of a stream in early spring. Yes, those kinds of love are important, but I always felt a sense of shame at feeling unable to write about romantic love. As if I am lacking as a storyteller because I struggle to write romance. Despite having dated and loved, despite being loved in return, and despite being married to one of the most loving and generous people I've ever met, romantic love on the page eludes me.
Why can't I conjure the sensation of romantic love that I have felt in my own life so many times? Why can't I replicate the electric sensation I have always felt in love? (Being an Aries, love is explosive for me.) With feelings as strong as these, how can I still fail to translate romantic love into my writing? The simple answer is that the version of romantic love in my imagination was binary-- limited and limiting. My imagined idea of romantic love reflects society's ideal of romantic love, which lives and breathes through binaries-- pairs, couples, twosomes, matches-- the holiness of Two, no more and no less.
Reading Trans Love revealed how my Transness impacts how I see and experience love, especially romantic love. I have lived in the tension between the version of romantic love I felt in my soul versus the version of romantic love that everyone else told me about. According to the straight, cis version of romantic love, everything is compartmentalized into categories that everyone is expected to fill neatly and easily. Boyfriend, girlfriend. Married, single. Together, not together. Friend, lover. One or the other. But according to my queer version of love, nothing fits into categories. The line between friends and lovers has always been blurred for me. The same can be said for how I see myself as a married person. Though I am happily married, I don't view my partner as my property, nor does he see me as his property. By constantly redrawing the lines in our love life, we stretch and bend boundaries to serve us moment to moment. The boundary between man and woman, for instance-- the plural versions of ourselves and our roles-- fluctuate. The boundary between watching and being watched, between seeking independence and seeking togetherness, between tradition and experimentation, between singularity and plurality-- all of these binaries that romantic relationships tend to polarize, we allow to blur and bleed together, like watercolor paints.
As I have explored who I am and who I am with my partner, I have rejoiced in stumbling upon realizations that the version of romantic love I grew up with is not the only way to love. By honoring my Queerness and incorporating it into our marriage and our togetherness, I get to reimagine what romantic love actually is. Trans Love helped me to find all kinds of fascinating, meaningful new pathways towards romance. Things I never imagined.
For example, Meg-John Barker wrote a piece called, "What Could Non-Binary Love Look Like?" It is from this piece that I pulled the quote at the top of this post. In their piece, Meg-John lays the foundation, answering questions like "What does non-binary mean?" and exploring the non-binary movement, especially as it relates to expressions of love. They gave one example from their own life that struck me more than anything else in this collection. Meg-John is a part of a Non-Binary Self Pleasure Group (NBSP). What is that you might ask? It is a regularly-meeting group of friends who get together to connect, talk, support one another, share a meal, and-- here comes the fun part-- pleasure themselves! Meg-John explained that the group is made up of non-binary folks sharing community together. At the beginning of each meeting, they check-in. They talk not just about their lives (work, friends, hobbies, politics) but also about where they are at consensually. Everyone can go at their own pace and honor what they want to glean from the gathering. If self-pleasure isn't for you that day, then that's okay! Then, they do an activity together. At one time, they played Betty Martin's game to explore consent, which breaks down touch and experiences into categories that push us to more deeply answer questions like "Who is this for?" when talking about pleasure. (I have never played this game, but if you have and you are interested in sharing that experience, I would love to hear about it!) After the activity, then comes 45 minutes of "freestyle" self-pleasure, where the members (depending on who wants to participate) step off into their own corners of the room/space and masturbate, solo-sex, whatever you'd like to call it. For those who don't want to masturbate, they can journal or rest or whatever helps them reflect and enjoy themselves.
Meg-John writes,
"As a rule, we don't watch what anybody else is doing because that would be a form of joint sex rather than self-pleasure. But the boundaries are somewhat blurred because, of course, we can all hear each other, glimpse each other and sense each other's presence."
After self-pleasure, the group gathers for a meal, shared by all who attend. They laugh, joke, and unwind, before saying their goodbyes until next time.
Meg-John asks us, "How is the group a practice in non-binary love?"
They explain that it challenges a lot of the binaries we talked about earlier, like together/not together, romantic/sexual, monogamy/non-monogamy, and partner/friend.
Here's my favorite part:
"The opportunity to practice being increasingly more vulnerable with people who are not 'a partner' in the standard sense has been a key part of weakening the self-criticism and self-monitoring relationship with myself that has marked my life to this point... In relation to those elements of decolonial love that I listed earlier, I think we share a commitment to care and consent with ourselves and others, to continual critical reflection on the power dynamics between us, and the relationship patterns we're prone to falling into... There is a sense of love expanding outwards, especially when we notice how interconnected we all are within the group, and how this connects us outwards to so many others in our wider non-binary, trans, and queer communities and beyond, across the world."
Not only am I excited to challenge the binaries in how I express love, but I am also excited to bring this new understanding of love into my writing. For the first time ever, I feel a sense of readiness to write romantic love in my work. I won't be writing the 1 version of romantic love I was taught; rather, I will be writing about the billions of possibilities that romantic love (and all love) offer us.