Content note: This article discusses transphobia.

There are very few professions that let you know your clients more deeply than those who’ve known them their whole lives. My role of Dominatrix is one of them.

One of the privileges of my job is that I have access to the deepest fantasies of my submissives, often unknown by those closest to them: family, friends, even partners. The revelations that I’m privy to aren’t just limited to fetishes and perversions, but meander into the very core of their identities.

As a trans and pansexual Domme, I am uniquely positioned to interpret and decipher indicators of sexuality and gender identity, moreso than my cis-het Domme competitors.

Image: Courtesy of the author

I have a range of different clients, from all walks of lives. However, I have found that I attract a certain type of sexuality-curious and gender-questioning sub; they’re specifically drawn to me as a transgender femdom.

In fact, I’ve had many clients who have trusted me to come out to for the first time – as gay, bi, trans or non-binary. There’s a real weight of responsibility in holding these kinds of realisations from my subs.

That’s why I’m always very careful to strike a balance between affirming a sub’s gender and maintaining the Domme-Sub dynamic while in session.

‘Forced feminisation’ and ‘sissy training’ – or ‘sissification’, as it’s often known – refers to a practice where a Dominatrix will ‘feminise’ a submissive.

The process can be guided and instructional, or designed to be cruel and humiliating. It can involve dressing up, makeup, hairstyling, teaching of mannerisms and body movement, sexual technique, roleplay and much more. This suite of kinks has been common practice among Pro Dommes for many years, and is in high demand.

However, fully understanding the nuance of why sissification has been requested, and by whom, is something often misunderstood and mishandled by Dommes who have no personal experience of being trans or non-binary.

Cis Dommes may automatically assume that a sub who requests sissy training or forced feminisation is a cis man who wants to be humiliated, when actually the reality is far more complex.

My subs who request activities in this area broadly fit into two categories.

The first category is cisgender men who want a raw humiliation experience, by being made to dress up as the quintessential ‘sissy’. This goes further than just women’s underwear and clothes, and is instead the most saccharine, baby pink parody of femininity – complete with bows, frills, satin and lace.

The motivation for men in this category is often to evoke a shame that is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and to be completely antithetical to what society teaches boys and men that they should be.

The second category of people who requests sissification is anyone who – consciously or unconsciously – fits somewhere on a scale of gender non-conformity. In these instances, the feminisation process is more about experimentation than humiliation.

This could include people who are more comfortable in a feminine presentation, or perhaps want to explore their gender. In another life, some of these subs may have transitioned.

What makes things more complicated is that some clients, especially those from the boomer generation and upwards, grew up in a time of zero trans education. Sometimes this means they may not be able to differentiate in their minds the distinction between having a trans identity and being humiliated as a sissy.

Historically, there has always been a conflation of trans identities with deviant sexual behaviour. This has led many to be conditioned to feel like their gender identity was (or is) nothing more than a sexual perversion.

While things are improving in the modern day, anti-trans talking points that embody these same old tropes are still alive and well today – in the media, and at the highest levels of government.

The hangover of that rhetoric is that some trans people in older generations feel repressed, or remain in the closet their whole lives.

Image: Courtesy of the author

For those cis men in the first category, an intense forced feminisation experience is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I have one sub of this variety: a corporate executive who tells me that being forced into women’s underwear, and then severely humiliated by a bratty trans Princess, makes him feel alive in a way he’s never experienced before.

For subs in the second category – those that may be trans, non-binary or gender-questioning – it can be extremely regressive and damaging to be humiliated as a sissy for their feminine presentation.

A while back, in sessions with certain subs, I began to pick up on subtle signals of distress that, as a trans person, I recognised. It was clear that they wanted to be feminised but not made to feel stupid for it.

When I started to realise how many subs exhibited this more complicated gender configuration, I started to offer the option of a new form of gender-affirming domination.

This is an alternative to sissification or forced feminisation: the sub is feminised as part of the session, but not mocked for it. Once transformed, they will still be dominated and made to submit to me, as standard, but never humiliated for their chosen gender presentation. This allows subs the chance to choose which gender they would like to be during our session.

While it’s only requested by a section of my client base, I never could have guessed how popular this alternative service would be. I continue to receive new subs who come to me specifically to experience this rare form of encouraging, gender-affirming BDSM.

We’re living through scary times for trans people, with the moral panic against our community reaching frenzied levels.

Here in the UK, just in the last few years we’ve seen the removal of protections for trans people from the Equality Act, legal exclusion from single-sex spaces and the de facto legalisation of trans conversion therapy.

The attack on our rights is extreme and very real.

Paradoxically, the hysteria against us brings a huge increase in awareness and a (painfully) slow normalisation of the existence of trans people. With that can come the awakening of repressed and dormant trans identities, while the community continues to fight.

I know for a fact that many of my gender non-confirming submissives feel that our sessions are among the only places they can act out their true gender – judgment-free and under the supervision of a Domme who will not just subjugate them, but also understand the meaning of their gender exploration.

Providing this kind of unlimited gender playground liberates the submissive in a way that they’ve often never experienced before.

It permits them, just for a rare few hours, to be someone that society doesn’t allow them to be.