In public, I'm a woman. My official documentation lists me as female. My blood hormone levels are female. My body has become feminized. My thoughts, emotions, and sexuality have always been female. If, in public, anyone were to treat me as anything else, I'd be upset. I'd consider it an act of defamation & aggression. If my husband were with me, he'd likely beat the shit out of whoever it was or cow them into an apology, depending on if the offender were male or female. Yet in private, in the bedroom, my husband will use all the most hurtful words & phrases that a cruel society will use to refer to someone like me. Faggot, sissy, pansy, freak, cockwhore, tranny cumslut, nancy boy, queer….all of them. And, in spite of myself, in spite of all the pain & abuse Ive suffered in the past at having these insults hurled at me (& hurling them at me myself having internalized society's judgment), I'll become sexually excited. That's why he uses them. He knows they excite me. He knows they give me pleasure. I've sexualized this abuse over a lifetime to be able to deal with it, to extract some joy from the cruelty. I feel guilty about that. I feel I shouldn't allow it. Intellectually, I know its regressive and dangerous and self-disrespecting. It's politically wrong. But you can't argue rationally with your sexual wiring. I should know that as well as anyone by now. Still I can't help but feel that what I do by getting sexually excited by such cruel terms is as unthinkable as a concentration camp survivor becoming sexually aroused by Nazi sex fantasies. Or a black person having plantation or lynching fantasies. I know that, in my case, the linking of abuse to sexual pleasure was a coping tool that enabled me to survive. The survival of such feelings are a legacy I wish I could've avoided, but it's now too much a part of me to extract. It's another aspect of myself that I wish I could change, can't change, and will just have to learn to accept. Maybe the best revenge I've gotten on society is learning how to turn their hate into ecstasy. The orgasm can be a liberating and revolutionary act.