The End of the World, and the Beginning: On t4t Love

On the surface, my girlfriend and I couldn't be more different.

She is a self-identified clown, an exuberant performer with hair the color of cotton candy. When we go out dancing, she shakes her ass all night and kisses more girls than she can remember. I dress all in black and own an unreasonable number of Demonias, and at the club my resting bitch face is second to none. She listens to slut-pop, I listen to boys who look like they have consumption wail. She makes friends with ease and has partners all over the country. I am slow to warm and so far, she's the only girl for me.

We are inversions of each other. And I mean that as a play on words. In math, "inverse" means opposite in position, direction, or effect. In sexology, "sexual inversion" was a theory popular in the late 19th and 20th centuries positing that homosexuality results from an inborn reversal of gender traits. She and I have opposite effects, reversed traits.

But one thing we have in common is that we're both trans. Our relationship is trans4trans, or t4t.

The term t4t arose from early 2000s Craigslist personals as a way to segregate trans people from the categories of "m" and "w" and help trans people hook up. But the term has evolved beyond simply describing trans-trans pairings to encompass a whole philosophy of trans people relating to each other, strategies for making those relationships visible in a transphobic world, forms of art and erotica, and practices for creating networks of mutual aid and support. T4t goes beyond categorizing a partnership. It opens up an entire world of trans experience.

It opened up my world. Before being with her, I had only every been with cishet men (I am not counting one tragically closeted bisexual). While they all supported my gender identity, I always felt there was a limit to how well they could understand me. I felt a lack that I didn't realize existed before I was intimate with another trans person. How thrilling it was to be with her, the way she desired me the way I ached to be desired. How fulfilling, the way she recognized the challenges and triumphs of being trans in the world. How affirming, the way we looked out for each other, deeply cognizant of each other's triggers and highly attuned to each other's emotions.

It sounds like paradise. My elation at being with another trans person is echoed throughout countless blog posts, essays, and zines about the joy of t4t love. These stories are inspiring, and crucial in today's world that seems hell-bent on dehumanizing and erasing trans people.

But I confess, stories like that don't capture the full picture of what being with a trans girl is like for me. To explain what I mean, you have to understand: I fell in love with her before she transitioned. I fell for her the moment I saw her. She was dancing, manipulating her body in ways that made my heart pound in my chest. She had thick dark hair, eyes like jade, an easy smile, and a lithe toned body that I envied and lusted after in equal measure. And I could see a sadness behind her eyes that made me ache with desire.

The first four years we were together, we struggled to grow close. We texted each other almost every day, but barely saw each other. The first time we kissed I froze from anxiety, she had a panic attack and took kissing off the table for a while. We'd make plans, she'd cancel. We desired each other intensely and tried having sex multiple times, but neither of us could relax and she'd end up leaving in the middle of the night.

All that changed when, after much conversation on the matter, she decided that she wasn't a man. I supported this wholeheartedly, since I could tell she was unhappy. What I didn't understand clearly at the time was how much change lay ahead and the wild journey we were about to undergo together.

In the years since, she's undergone two pronoun-changes, HRT, and three surgeries. And being by her side through it all, I've come to understand something about t4t intimacy that I never imagined, which is that love between two trans people is as much about death as it is about creation.

Let me explain.

Like most great works of art, the movie I Saw the TV Glow invites many different interpretations. The film is about two high schoolers who are introduced to a mysterious TV show about two psychically linked girls fighting supernatural foes that eventually blurs into and subsumes their reality. The characters realize that they truly are the two psychically connected friends in the TV show who have been trapped underground, left to die. One, a transmasc character played by a transmasc actor, chooses to return to the TV show by burying themself alive and reemerging as their true self. The other, who has the body of a boy but who is truly a girl, chooses to stay in the "real world" and slowly die underground. At its core it is about coming out as trans. But to me, the movie is about the specter of death in the trans experience and the horrifying possibility of rebirth.

The first time I watched this movie with my girlfriend, she started sobbing 10 minutes in. And no matter how many times I see it, I can't stop myself from crying either. The idea of death of self as the price of realizing who you truly are hits both of us hard. The movie uses liminal imagery to convey the terror of living suspended between different states of being, that can only be ended by dying and coming out the other side. In coming out as trans, there is the suffocating fear that you could annihilate who you are, with only the slightest promise of what you could be to guide you. I think my girlfriend believes that in order to live truthfully, she had to destroy the part of herself that told a lie. When I described my love for this movie to her, she wrote to me:

"You wrote about love being destructive, I find that poignant and devastatingly accurate. Loving you and being loved by you in a way that I deem appropriate has forced me to confront the lies I told myself to continue existing inauthentically. I don't fear the destruction love has wrought."

She's not the only one who considers destruction to be necessary for love. Growing up queer, in a string of bad relationships with cishet men, I internalized a lot of trauma surrounding bringing my full self to intimate relationships. Cameron Awkward-Rich and Mil Malatino describe this in their essay, "Meanwhile, t4t":

"The more structurally disenfranchised, maligned, and abandoned the we is, the more angst, trauma, mistrust, and fear of abandonment we bring to t4t relationships."

They state that resolving this trauma and creating something better involves destruction, which might bring relief, pleasure, productive conflict, and a sense of being seen, if only partially. They write:

"T4t can offer so much: some measure of respite, a break from cis-centric optics and assumptions, a relation through which we might learn more about what we want to become, what we desire, how we want to live in these so often fraught body-minds, mutually actualizing touch, a little room to breath just a bit easier, perhaps. But it is also a crucible through which we come to learn just how opaque we remain to each other, just how intensively we've internalized the lessons taught by trans antagonism, just how difficult it is to see, love, want, fuck, support, and simply be with each other. Whether these tough recognitions are failures or lessons, though, depends on what we (fraught, imperfect, ongoing) do next?"

So what was I going to do next? I made, I continue to make, the decision to destroy the self-doubt, mistrust, jealousy, and fear that prevented me from loving and being loved by the person who mattered most to me in the world.

Dying and coming out the other side isn't easy. It takes time and patience, for both of us. But Ocean Vuong tells us, "to arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration."

I've learned, through being by her side going through the terrifying act of perpetual rebirth together, that t4t love is non-linear and infinitely mutable. As Torrey Peters writes in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones:

"T4t is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that's better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen."

"Meanwhile, t4t," by Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, by Torrey Peters