The following is an excerpt from Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom by Brandon Andrew Robinson.

On January 24, 2021, while I was eagerly waiting for the second season of Euphoria, I settled in to watch the special episode. “F**k Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob.” The entire episode focused on Jules – a trans character – in therapy. While watching the episode, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Did Jules really just say that to her therapist?

“I feel like I’ve framed my entire womanhood around men. When, like, in reality, I’m no longer interested in men,” said Jules. “Like, philosophically. Like, like, what men want. Like, what men want is so boring. And simple, and not creative.” Jules went on: “I just, like, I look at myself, and I’m like, how the f**k did I spend my entire life building this. Like… Like, my body, and my personality, and like, my soul around what I think men desire? It’s just, like… it’s embarrassing. I feel like a… a fraud.”

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The character Jules is played by trans actress Hunter Schafer, a white, skinny, blonde, conventionally attractive woman. During the beginning of Euphoria, Jules – a high school student at the time – is sleeping with an older white married man, a predator whom she meets on a hookup app. But eventually Jules starts dating Rue, a character played by Black actress Zendaya. As Jules starts dating Rue, Jules’s ideas around womanhood and femininity shift. Indeed, Jules uses the word fraud to discuss how she felt about constructing her womanhood around men’s desires – around heterosexual desires and dominant notions of white femininity. Jules’s use of fraud flips the concept on its head. Often, trans women are constructed as deceivers, as not real women, as frauds. For Jules, though, the fraudulent act is constructing femininity and womanhood in service to cis men’s desires, in service to cis heterosexuality. Jules’s revelation to the therapist evokes how heterosexuality limits and confines gender. It maintains cis understandings of the gender binary. It is boring, simple, not creative. It’s embarrassing.

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But outside of heterosexuality, gender can expand. “Femininity would always be this just, like, this, like elusive, distant thing, you know? Like unreachable,” Jules explains. “But, uh, but then, I think about beautiful things that are also broad and deep, and thick, and I think of… something like the ocean. I think, like… that I want to be as beautiful as the ocean. ’Cause the ocean’s strong as f**k. And feminine as f**k. And, like, both are what makes the ocean, the ocean.” Notably, Schafer cowrote the episode… This therapy session speaks to how notions of womanhood and femininity shift when they move away from appealing to cishet men, to heterosexuality. The ocean comes to represent this expansiveness of gender, which encompasses broadness, deepness, thickness, and strength within femininity’s reach. The simile of the ocean can work to reconfigure something such as broad shoulders or a deep voice as “feminine as f**k.” It is what makes the ocean the ocean. It is what makes a trans woman a woman. And it can expand our own thinking about gender and sexuality…

What, then, are the possibilities of gender – of freedom – outside of heterosexuality? In thinking through this question, especially in the last chapter, this book centers trans pleasures and trans desires in order to expand our thinking about gender and freedom beyond compulsory heterosexuality and beyond cisness. As this book will show, we must deal with how compulsory heterosexuality and cisness limit and constrain not only our experiences of sexuality and pleasure, but also our gender possibilities. That is, heterosexuality – as a political institution – maintains cisness. Gender liberation, then, will require its destruction.

Ultimately then, the time has come to think about trans pleasures and trans desires. Compulsory heterosexuality is thwarting pleasure. And if pleasure is a measure of freedom – that is, all people deserve pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment that is life-enriching – then compulsory heterosexuality is a roadblock to gender liberation. We need new ways of yearning and desiring outside of compulsory heterosexuality and its concurrent sexual labels that limit our possibilities. Another world – a better, freer world – is possible. These things are what I dream of and yearn for. I teach these things. I believe in these things. And I write about these things. My hope, then, is for this book to get us one step closer to another life – a more pleasurable life – a life of sexual freedom and gender liberation for all.

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