Mx. Sly (they/them) is a non-binary writer, performer, arts producer and flight attendant. Originally from Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, they pursue contentment through incessant meal planning, doing Yoga with Adriene, making love like a beast, and making out in Naarm’s many laneways.

This essay is a reflection on the writing process behind TRANSLAND: Consent, Kink & Pleasure, which is Sly’s first memoir. TRANSLAND is an odyssey of kinky hookups, gender euphoria and a wandering quest through sensuality toward personal strength and self-reliance. It was released in Australia in late 2023, and is available anywhere major books are sold.

This essay contains excerpts from TRANSLAND.

Image by: Eff Pan

I’m standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of a skyscraper in Melbourne’s central business district. It’s dawn. The sun grasps the edges of the horizon like a hot chick hoisting herself out of a swimming pool in slow motion.

I wish this sunrise would last forever. I wish this sunrise would always be moving, but never get anywhere, like a gorgeous rumination on inertia in a Lars von Trier film.

That’s all I’ve got ahead of me today: I’m fighting atrophy, inertia and entropy.

I co-own the apartment I’m standing in with my ex-girlfriend, Kyle*. It’s one of those CBD newbuilds: an ultra-compact two bed, one bath. And she’s got the good bedroom.

Our sexual and romantic relationship was dead when we bought the apartment, but we bought the place together because the seller was motivated, rents in Melbourne were getting criminal, and it was the middle of COVID-19 lockdowns.

There were a few other reasons too. We weren’t ready to extricate our lives financially, Kyle wanted someone present throughout her decision to undertake medical transition, and lockdowns meant life wasn’t moving forward in most ways, so at least we were building equity. Most of the cash that went into the purchase was from her parents; the equity we’re building is weighted heavily in Kyle’s direction.

Kyle’s medication schedule is taped up on the fridge: oxycodone, a laxative, progesterone, cyproterone and estrogen. She’s recovering from a gender-affirming surgery and her mobility is limited. We have a well-worn pattern in place: she seeks to be her most authentic and financially secure self, and I assist, leaving my own desires and need for long-term security on hold.

While Kyle works on becoming who she wants to be, I live on just enough self-generated income to pay half the mortgage. I eat a lot of lentils. In between restocking Kyle’s antibacterial ointment and bringing her food, I’m writing a manuscript that is technically already late.

The manuscript will be my first book: a work of creative nonfiction that straddles memoir and erotica. I haven’t had sex with anyone (other than myself) in two years.

There’s a lot on my mind as I watch daybreak. The sun gets to her feet and wanders off. All that’s left is quickly evaporating toeprints on concrete. It’s time to face another day.

I make art about my sex life for a living. I’m a 35-year-old writer. I’m bisexual, AFAB, trans masc, and non-binary.

In the manuscript I’m writing, I use sex scenes as the primary device of character development. Storytelling through sex scenes. Revealing myself at my most intimate.

I write in the present tense. I write from sensory recall. I extract the sounds, smells, visuals and motivations for sex that happened years ago from my memory.

I have the kind of mind that can’t tell left from right or handle driving a car – but it’s also a mind that archives irrelevant sensory details for later use. I remember the edges of lovers’ nostrils, the shade of murky mustard on a skirt, and the feeling of a yin-yang ring on a finger that’s reaching inside me.

TRANSLAND: Consent, Kink & Pleasure (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023).

I write about life through sex because I trust life at its most base and instinctive: wants, needs, flesh and fluids.

I write like all the sex I’ve had is happening now – even though I live with my ex-girlfriend, am celibate, and my finances are strained and tentative.

This is the anatomy of a trans sex scene: ‘now’ is never just now. ‘Now’ is always made up of past experience, informed by present circumstance, with a view towards what one needs in the future.

The anatomy of a trans sex scene is time lost to the emotional recoil of the impacts of discrimination. It’s time lost to grief and rage. It’s the pressure transphobia places on otherwise healthy relationships. It’s the constant fight to carve out trans financial stability and trans happiness.

It’s the real moments of gender euphoria in intimacy when one really fucks as their true self, and it feels like existence has cracked open and been invented anew.

Within our tiny apartment, I draw on the archive of sense memory stored inside me and relive the sex my ex-girlfriend and I used to have, on the page:

I turn away from Kyle and slip on my black-patent-leather harness, with my hard fuck cock slipped through the O-ring.

His pouty lips touch the tip of the head of my cock, then slowly open, and his tongue flicks the indentation at the tip of my cock where a urethra should be.

“Holy shit, Kyle, that’s good.”

He opens his lips more. He slides his lips toward me and wraps his whole mouth around the head of my cock. He looks up at me, swirls his tongue around the head of my dick, and closes his eyes as he slowly slides more of my cock into his mouth.

“Oh shit, holy shit.”

His mouth releases its vacuum seal from my cock, and we lock eyes. Kyle’s eyes are wide. I feel so close to him.

Strangers jerk off to him daily, and I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve had sex with. We both, off and on, have tried to trade anonymous access to our naked selves for the sense that our gender expressions are sexy.

We’re both still genuinely surprised by moments of real intimacy. We stay in this moment, the smell of our bodies hanging heavy in the air between us, holding very still as we take each other in.

I write the first moment Kyle named herself to me:

“Could you try calling me ‘she’?” Kyle asks.

“Absolutely,” I answer.

I straddle Kyle, kiss her, lie her down on her bed, and lift her dress up to her neck. I go to town on her nipples, and she moans, twitches, feels every bit of it. Her nipples don’t numb to the sensation, and I love it. I could lick her nipples forever. My cock’s pressing into her stomach, and I can feel her lace-clad cock pressing into my thigh.

“Do you want to be inside me?” I ask her.

“Yes, I want to!”

I climb off her and lie back on her bed while she crawls to her nightstand. She slides on a condom and waddles back on her knees to my outstretched legs.

I spit on my hands and rub one palmful of spit into my labia, another onto my dick.

Kyle slips her cock into my cunt slowly, and I grasp my cock tight.

I’ve felt a lot of things slide into my cunt, and nothing’s ever felt as good sliding into me as when I can feel my own cock simultaneously.

She slides her cock in and out of me, over and over, while I run my palm, curled around my cock, up and down in time with her movements.

I can feel all of it, everywhere.

“I can feel this everywhere, and it feels so fucking good, Kyle.”

“I love watching you stroke yourself while I fuck you!”

“I love it too.”

I write with empathy for the past, awareness of the present, and compassion for the future:

I go deeper, slowly, hit her prostate, and feel her shudder around me. Kyle’s eyes widen, and her face flushes.

“That’s the spot?”

She nods, eyes wide, and I dedicate myself to watching her come buckets.

I curl my whole body around her upturned ass.

Every inch of me that’s touching every inch of her holds a world of importance, no matter the parts of our bodies or whether or not they are body parts we were born with. Our intimacy teaches us how to understand each other and how to see ourselves.

I press my face against her spine, kiss her skin, and think of us as line drawings scrawled hastily on the wall of a dive bar bathroom.

Somewhere, there’s a drawing of Kyle, her big eyes, her joyful smile, in a pink sundress holding a VR headset. Somewhere there’s a drawing of me with big tits and a dick poking out of the top of my jeans. Written in Sharpie up the length of the vein at the base of my shaft are the words “I love you.”

Kyle comes all over her stomach, all over her pillows, and all over the bed underneath us. We stay still, just breathing.

As she falls asleep in her bed next to me, I think about the question of transition, about what I am, and about who Kyle might be.

For so many of the trans and non-binary people I know, there’s a trajectory. Hormone replacement therapy, followed by approvals for surgery or surgeries, followed by surgeries and recoveries.

There’s also investing in a whole new wardrobe and spending the time, money, and emotional labour to change gender markers on IDs.

There’s coming out to friends, family, and colleagues.

It’s harder than puberty and a difficult process physically, emotionally, and financially – one the health care system, employers, and governments need to make easier and need to take more seriously.

I have deep respect for the toll it takes on people in my community. I have deep respect for the people in my community who know they need to go through that process because it’s what’s right for them.

I also feel deep frustration that, in the society we live in, gender is endlessly enforced as a binary, because it means conversations about transition and gender diversity are forced to form themselves around a fallacious duality.

I’ve heard cis people describe non-binary identity as being halfway between being a man and a woman, or being a bit of both. I’ve fallen into the habit of describing myself in those terms too, at different points, as I grasp for anything that’s recognisable, articulable, or validated by cisgender society.

But being non-binary isn’t about being a bit of both, because there isn’t a both in the first place.

As trans and non-binary people, even though we look at, subvert, and step outside of the gender constructs we were assigned at birth, we’re still using the clumsy language of binary gender to try to convey who we are because we don’t have a better language at our disposal.

I’ve had other trans and non-binary people talk to me about feeling like aliens, because how can our minds work the way they do if we’re really from this world?

One day we might have a better language at our disposal that can’t be leveraged against us. Until then, I use words like “trans,” “they,” and “them,” despite the complications they come with in cisgender society, because they’re words that assert the truth: regardless of whether or not I’m from this world, I am definitely real.

Kyle lies on her bed beside me. She talks in her sleep, and I hear her side of her dream conversations. She sounds happy. I listen to her and fall asleep, knowing that words fall short in describing identity now, and maybe they always will.

That doesn’t mean that we exist in agony, though. It just means that words are so much smaller than our souls.

I write despite the tense inertia of cohabitating with an ex-girlfriend: Kyle and I are civil, but we aren’t friends. We don’t have any common ground other than our shared past and our currently shared real estate.

I exercise my atrophying creative muscles by forcing myself to write two hundred and fifty words a day. Gradually two hundred and fifty words becomes five hundred words a day, and then a thousand.

This is the anatomy of a trans sex scene: using what I have at my disposal, even when it’s only memories and tenacity, to get to where I need to be.

Moving through medical transition give Kyle’s days momentum and trajectory. Writing trans sex scenes gives my days direction and purpose.

I stop disappointing my publisher. Lockdowns lift. Kyle is the first person to read the manuscript, and the only person who reads it before it goes to my publisher. She and I honor the sex and romance we once had by helping each other extricate our lives from each other.

I watch the sun climb out of the pool sopping wet and glimmering, every morning. Gradually, I need the dawn to stand still less.

Mx. Sly. Image by: Sly Feiticeira.

*Name and other identifying details have been changed for privacy.

TRANSLAND: Consent, Kink & Pleasure is available now from NewSouth Books in Australia and New Zealand, and Arsenal Pulp Press in Canada.