Cover of the graphic novel ‘Mauvais Genre‘ by Chloé Cruchaudet 

I read that sentence on the page of a yoga workshop the other day. “Addiction is the memory of pleasure”. Something clicked in my head. Click and release. I instantly understood my most recent human addiction. Maybe it wasn’t about love after all, or about the ecstatic feelings that I had. Maybe the purity of the heart has nothing to do with it. It may solely be due to the strong memories of pleasure engraved in my body.

My most recent addiction was a girl who used to be a boy. I haven’t written about her. I vaguely evoked a brutal ending somewhere at the beginning of the year. I couldn’t write about that as long as I was riding the waves of metamorphosis that are still spreading across my system. I know I’ll keep unfolding the layers of that brief and madly intense story for a very long time.

Saying that it’s the greatest human connection or the best sex I’ve ever had would trivialise it. It’s much deeper than that. She shook my core, she tainted my essence. She awoke a wide range of subtle sensations and emotions in my guts which had been numbed out for decades, or didn’t even exist before. I read in an article that people with sexual trauma often happen to have “emotional anaesthesia”. Like most girls, the integrity of my body has been violated at different levels more than once.

We spent only three months together, and it’s going to be four months that we ended it. But I am still absorbing the after effects of her, digesting the rushes of adrenaline in my blood and the rushes of cerebral pleasure. That’s where the addiction lies. My conscience doesn’t miss her, but my brain and body do. It’s taking forever to evacuate her from my system, like she was always meant to be a part of it and she’ll remain in my cells.

I won’t go into practical, anatomical or social considerations of what it’s like to date a transgender woman. It’s totally not the point. What I care about is how odd and complex, yet super logical and beautiful the combination of our souls and bodies was.

Go figure that frontal collision. What was the chance? An extremely feminine girl trapped in a male body and an assertive yet questioning & traumatised lesbian femme taking off each other’s clothes with all the passion and tenderness there is in the world. It was perfection made fuck. It was superbly absurd. Life-changingly sensual. There was so much love when we started. I don’t know where all that love went. Is it in storage somewhere between Paris and South America, or did it dissolve like our communication? I wish there was a place to claim lost love like lost property.

Making love with her resolved my sexual traumas without her even knowing about them. Therapeutic sex. I realised that I have no hatred or disgust of the male body. I only have hatred and disgust of male authority and desire, of men’s certitude that they are superior to me and can own me.

I verbalised my main sexual abuse to some of the people who were the closest to me, and they didn’t even acknowledge that I said something. I’ve been trying to resist judging or being mad at them. It is their right entirely. I’ve been trying even harder to resist feeling guilty that I spoke up. But all in all, if I could go back in time, I would keep my fucking mouth shut, because speaking up utterly screwed a number of my friendships despite my will.

I think I reached out for help and people didn’t answer – or maybe it didn’t sound like I was reaching for help. She helped me. She fixed me without knowing. It had been a mind fuck for so long, but the other day, I was in the elevator, and I suddenly understood that for the first time of my life, my approach of human sex was absolutely, entirely and magnificently FLUID and joyful.

I identified as lesbian most of my adult life. I now identify as pansexual. The potential objects of my affection are: everything that’s human, adult, consenting, and bizarrely beautiful.

All the knots and obstacles that were ever put on my intimate path gently dissolved in her arms. She’s been my biggest human adventure of all times.