Mira Bellwether, a writer, sex educator, and passionate community member, revolutionized our understanding of trans women’s sexuality through her groundbreaking work “Fucking Trans Women” (FTW), a zine that meditated on trans women’s sexual culture through the lens of her personal experiences. Despite its slim 80 pages, FTW’s scope is vast, ranging from personal stories to diagrams of sex practices specifically for trans feminine bodies to reflective political essays. The breadth of the material encourages rereading, while the precision of Bellwether’s narrative often astonishes.
Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Bellwether left the state as soon as she could, spending time in Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco, before eventually settling in New York in 2016, where she lived with her husband Callan until her passing. Bellwether was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition at a young age, and her writing about sex and sexuality was intimately tied to this social reality. She was tenacious and endlessly curious, always focused on sharing new, accessible ways to move through a hostile world and still find pleasure.
Throughout her life, Bellwether fiercely advocated for the kinds of care and relationships she wished to see in the world. Beyond her published advocacy, she called out the precarity facing trans women, drawing attention to the issue that healthcare for trans people is synonymous with hormone prescriptions and little else. Bellwether also emphasized the importance of building trans community networks and consciousness-raising.
Bellwether explicitly advocated for sex that incorporates the effects of hormone therapy on trans feminine people’s bodies, finding joyous value in rewired nerve endings and flaccid penises. Her commitment to determining one’s own capacity for pleasure is an idea that she intimately connected to political autonomy. In a society that saps trans women’s agency over our bodies, Mira knew that to own her sexuality was to reach toward a state of “being in possession of myself.”
Unfortunately, the zine’s association with muffing, a sexual practice involving the use of the inguinal canals for stimulation and gentle penetration, began to take on a life of its own. Despite the transmisogynistic incredulity that belittled muffing as a bizarre sexual practice, the work was never concerned with anyone adopting a singular model of trans sexuality. Bellwether wanted FTW to be a community cookbook for and from other trans women, about sex, and consciousness-raising.
Despite the truly substantial amount of praise Mira and FTW have received in the months since her passing, a crucial element of its mission remains unfulfilled. Throughout the zine, Bellwether stressed that this work was only a starting point. Despite multiple calls in the work for submissions and reader contributions, very few came. In the face of terrifying political violence against trans people, pleasure can and should be part of the collective future worth striving toward — a struggle Mira understood and named over a decade ago.
Mira’s words on pleasure and dignity in sexual existence are still prescient today. She believed that we owe FTW the force of our action. At the very back of the zine, there is
