my weird dysphoria makes me feel unsexable (is that a word)

[eggsquisite]

my gender is strange, and i vaguely seem to change what i want for my body sometimes, but overall i think if i couldn't shapeshift and i had to choose one way for my body to be all the time, i think my overall quality of life would be best if i just had nothing in regards to genitals.


but i'm definitely not ace, and im afraid that nobody will like that. i mean it's not like im gonna go get surgery tomorrow, but in the future what if i decide to?
who's gonna feel attracted to me if there's nothing to be attracted to? who's not gonna mind that most of our sex time would be rubbing or something?

and even thinking about right now, it's probably already hard to explain that you have bottom dysphoria but still want to mess around, but who's even gonna stick around after hearing that you might not even want anything in the future.
it's just really hard to get excited for this stuff when all you can think about is how much of a letdown you'll probably be :p

[Heather]

Hi there, eggsquisite (what a fun handle!).

So, the way you're talking here sounds to me like the way I hear people talk who really don't have a good sense of both exactly how diverse human sexuality is and who also don't have a handle on the many layers of any given relationship or interaction that tend to exist between people.

There's really nothing or no one we can conceptualize on this planet where there isn't at least one -- and usually way, way more than one -- other person who is perfectly aligned with them. For example, loads of people have and want sexual lives without some kind of orifice involved. Plenty of people are happy to be in relationship with other people who don't always, or even don't ever want certain kinds of sex or even any kind of sex. Plenty of people have sexual lives that don't involve the genitals of one or more people in the relationship. All of these things are well within the realm of possibility.

Too, people don't tend to be attracted to genitals. In fact, most of the time when people first feel attraction to someone, they haven't seen them naked at all, and may not even know what kind of genitals that person has. Attraction to people tends to be about whole people, not about a given body part or sets of body parts. I mean sure, those people whose attraction seems to be centered on one body part exist, but honestly, those tend to be good partners for anyone to skip because sex with someone who is seeing you as a collection of parts and not a whole person doesn't usually tend to be great sex, to say the least.

I have also known plenty of people in my work and life who have bottom dysphoria and have figured out how to talk with partners about that and work out, in general, and from day to day, with partners what they do and don't want sexually.

It can be so hard to see all that though, especially if our whole sense of what people want comes from a not-super-diverse community, or from most media, or even when we aren't someone like me who talks to other people about sex and relationships all day for their living.

I think thinking of yourself as a letdown is more likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy than somethign that would actually happen when you don't think about yourself this way.

Would you like to talk about how you can talk about and negotiate any or all of this with a potential partner? Or to figure out what you want for yourself?