Transmyscira: There Is No Safeword in SFSX

Transmyscira: There Is No Safeword in SFSX

For my birthday this year I treated myself to a seven inch dildo in bisexual pride colors.

It’s one of my favourite toys in my collection now, but the first time I used it the feeling of contact with my prostate was so intense that I could only keep pressure on it for a second at the most before being completely overwhelmed.

That’s exactly what reading SFSX in trade for the first time was like. It amplified every part of my life being reshaped by HRT into an unbearable intensity that stretched out what should have been an afternoon read into a week-long journey punctuated by crying fits.

When I finally got Tina Horn’s sex work dystopia in my hands (thanks to a friend’s insistence that I check it out), I was immediately lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that it seemed like I knew who everyone involved in the comic was except Horn.

A forward by Morgan M. Page? Merch design by Jacq the Stripper? A variant cover by Katy Skelly? Even an issue drawn by the artist who drew my first published script in comics? I felt personally targeted before I even got to the first page. I just didn’t understand what I’d been personally targeted for or by until it was way too late.

I never really stood a chance either. The opening raid on The Dirty Mind — the ultimate fantasy of a BDSM club and queer porn studio that forms the physical heart of the series — already tore me to shreds. It was giving me a vision of a world that I’d stood on the threshold of for years, now being ripped apart. At the same time, in the real world iconic places I’d always dreamed of visiting like The Stud were being shut down in the face of the pandemic and SESTA/FOSTA. Which still felt like an open wound. And yet, I wouldn’t find out until much later how close to biographical that sequence was for Horn, who worked for Rentboy when Homeland Security and the NYPD raided them in 2015.
I did, however, recognize the exterior shot that Michael Dowling drew of The Dirty Mind, converted into “The Pleasure Center” by the comic’s authoritarian regime as a re-education and torture facility. Dowling clearly based it on the iconic San Francisco armory that BDSM porn producer Kink.com occupied from 2006-2018, which amplified my tortured nostalgia into oblivion because of what a unique, ambivalent, and ultimately beautiful place that building holds in my heart.

Kink.com, which displayed an exterior night shot of the armory in front of all their videos, was the first studio that I ever saw film scenes featuring trans women performing with cis women under the dubious series title “TS Pussy Hunters.” Despite the less than flattering title, the series produced a lot of imaginative and wonderfully hot scenes that gave me my first affirming view of my own sexuality as a queer trans woman and helped set the precedent for Brie Mills’ groundbreaking Transfixed series for AdultTime and the rapid expansion of trans women’s participation in mainstream studio porn as performers and directors.

It’s been a long journey to get to the position that trans women performers can achieve in porn now and an example of what that journey has looked like came from Chelsea Poe, a trans performer. On Twitter, Poe openly reflected on the seventh anniversary of when she first filmed in the armory and how, at the time, it seemed unimaginable to people that a trans woman could be a conventional bottom in BDSM due to industry gatekeeping. Which seems a world away now that she’s well so well established in the scene, alongside Natalie Mars — the breakout trans performer of the moment — known at least as much for her fetish work as more conventional studio fare.

Lack of visibility in BDSM porn was definitely a barrier for me in being able to imagine myself in those spaces. But beyond visibility, trans women’s participation in BDSM and leathersex — whether in the context of a romantic relationship, casual play, or a client-provider dynamic — can carry its own unique challenges with it. It can make finding a partner who we can connect with on a deep level feel a lot like seeking a trans-competent therapist.

For me, that meant finding another trans woman as a partner who could not only affirm my gender and understand my body, but also could tease out fetishes in me that, to me, play dangerously with taboos that trans women face — in a space where I had complete trust in her to navigate it with care.

So getting to see a Black trans woman character like SFSX‘s Sylvia fully immersed in that world and having a lovingly queer leather family is an incredibly powerful thing to get to experience. Especially because she’s allowed to be beautifully sexual, have a penis that’s drawn with care and affection, and is even depicted getting fisted.

It’s astounding, just truly astounding.

So seeing the building I dreamed of shooting and being shot in for years not just closed down (as it is in real life), but occupied by a viciously misogynist and homophobic government using it as a torture facility? To say it was heartbreaking is an understatement. But I understood the necessity of that acute and specific pain.

In her introduction, author and sex worker rights activist Morgan M. Page called SFSX a consensual slap in the face, and that’s exactly what it is for anyone with a stake in sex work, porn, public sex, and online freedom of speech.

Which is to say, everyone, no matter how much they want to disassociate themselves from some of those concerns.

It’s not a competition to determine who feels the sting the sharpest. We all feel it in our own unique ways and mine was as a trans woman cartoonist who came into my sexuality through porn, and a sex work client on the cusp of starting to shoot my own porn and claim a leather identity for myself when I read it.

That slap didn’t just sting and make me feel just how much this world is hurting that I desperately want to immerse myself in. It refracted me into almost all of the major characters in a way that I’ve never experienced before. Trans Girls Hit The Town’s Cleo and Winnie gave me an incredible way to see myself and my sisters through either one as time goes on, but I could see pieces of myself in each of the characters — and that challenged me in startling and difficult ways that are going to stay with me for a long time.

Sometimes it’s pleasant and bittersweet, like Avory/Simona describing all the skills that she developed in sex work that would be incredibly useful in the civilian world — if she had any way of accounting for them that didn’t involve disclosing how she got them. I don’t have direct experience with that yet, but a lot of what she describes, like video production and editing are skills that I started picking up and honing for drag that I’ve now started transferring into making porn and juggling between the two. So I get it. I can see the path ahead of me.

Other times it’s incredibly painful and startling revelations about my past  — like the parts of myself I see reflected back by Denis, the non-binary character unable to feel pleasure because of a device implanted in them by the regime’s most vicious and talented torturer. On the night before the climactic attempt at rescuing Sylvia and Avory from the Pleasure Center (while everyone is pairing off for sex), Denis tells Sylvia “I don’t know how it feels to get turned on anymore, or come. But I do know how much I want to make you feel good.”

That sent me spiraling into a revelation about the lies I told myself about my sexuality while I was socially transitioning, prior to HRT and sleeping with cis women and AFAB non binary partners who couldn’t conceive of me as anything but a man in bed (even if they said the right name and used the right pronouns). Instead of confronting the ways that I was disassociating during sex with people who were never going to meet my needs, I convinced myself it was okay to just think of myself as a kind of service top.

That’s not what played out between Denis and Sylvia, but it’s the kind of revelation that can result from metabolizing the work of someone who has the kind of vast and tender vocabulary for sex, desire, intimacy, and consent that Tina Horn and her collaborators put on full display in SFSX.

The two characters who I think about the most often in relation to myself are Avory’s former clients: George, who she married in order to escape persecution by the regime, and Nick, who she enlists. As much as I’m nominally a sex worker, my experience and positionality within sex work is still far more on the client side of the exchange, so the pair serve far more effectively as a marker for that positionality than any of the sex worker characters do. George is a fascinating deconstruction of the savior myth, of a client falling in love with a sex worker and “rescuing” her in a narrative like Pretty Woman.

Instead, Avory and George share an intimacy that was forcibly consummated into marriage to protect the pair from the regime, placing stresses and burdens on their relationship that didn’t exist prior to the raid on The Dirty Mind. It’s a fascinating piece of storytelling that’s allowed to live in a messy ambiguous space that neither falls into the cliche nor closes off the relationship into a coldly transactional one. It’s one of the most clearly visible ways that Horn shines through as a deeply necessary voice in how sex work is portrayed in a medium where depictions of it have been dominated by the likes of Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin, and Chester Brown for decades.

The savior fantasy is far from anything I want for myself on either side of the dynamic as a baby sex worker who frequents other queer sex workers, but I do relate deeply with George. As someone who started out as a shy and reserved client who fell hard for a provider who took the time and care to open me up to a whole world of desires inside myself I never knew I could access or want for myself, that side of George is an easy fantasy to live in. And that’s even after he’s been horrifically tortured. He then heartbreakingly explains the difference between sadistic state violence and the love and trust necessary to make someone vulnerable to the kind of pain that Avory inflicts.

Nick, on the other hand, is the check on that beautiful fantasy side of George. Nick is the client who doesn’t manage his entitlement to Avory or recognize how much of her work is in managing and centering his emotions — even when he interacts with her outside of a client-provider context. Nick isn’t violent, abusive, or coercive. He’s just prone to the kind of self-centered behavior that it’s easy for a client to fall into when they take the fantasy space they occupy in a session for granted. In truth, we’re all prone to that.

It’s a key sex work skill to make a client feel like the world ends at the bounds of the session, but it’s a key responsibility of a client to maintain some awareness that it’s a fantasy that takes careful management to maintain. Especially at such a fraught time for sex work with the massive shift to online platforms today, the legal and regulatory precariousness of those platforms, and the hyper-competitive nature of a flooded market.

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