My lesbian experience with topping without testosterone
Content warnings for this one: Text addressed at transfeminine folk; explicit discussion of sex and kink, including sexual experiences, intended as informative rather than erotic but rich in detail; discussion of HRT, surgeries, genitals, gender feelings; reports of a lively sex life; discussion of low libido when perceived as a negative, and of girlcock as positive; corny 5th-grade humour.
elilla& how are you a top without testicles? How do you even have erections? I'm transfeminine, can I preserve my sexuality after HRT?
There are many complicating factors so let's start with a tl;dr. This is the stuff that I consider the most important, based on my experience and that of trans folk I know:
For sexuality generally:
- Be aware that you don't have to be sexual if you don't want to.
- Keep in mind that your new body may have a very different type of libido. Learn how your feminine body works, don't expect it to be the same as before.
- Have partners who make you feel affirmed and safe and desired (protip: t4t).
- Have sufficient levels of estrogen. (Most cis doctors won't give you this.)
- Keep in mind that your physical and mental health and general life satisfaction affect your libido too. I know, who can afford to be healthy in this economy etc., but it helps a lot to find some form of exercise that you enjoy doing regularly (it doesn't have to be intense or “sportsy”).
- “Follow the breadcrumbs”. If you want to have sex but the libido isn't there, fool around a bit even if you're not feeling like it, see if it shows up. Der Appetit kommt beim Essen.
- If you're kinky: Go deeper. Find new kinks. Break your own taboos. Avoid stagnation. Ride the curve.
- Do not frame sex as an obligation or proof of attraction or personal worth.
For transfeminine erections specifically: all of the above, plus:
- Do not frame erections as an obligation or proof of attraction or personal worth.
- Play with your soft genitals too (“clit mode”).
- Explore forms of sex that do not involve your genitals at all.
- In particular, try topping the traditional lesbian ways (hands/fists/dildos/straps/tongue), you'll probably love it.
- Consume t4t material and positive erotica that helps you see your genitals as affirming of your gender. Surround yourself with people who give you this security.
- Consider body mods, surgeries, jewellery, custom lingerie etc. that help you claim ownership of your genitals.
- If you're on cypro, switch to other forms of T blocking.
- Erection meds and topical T are options.
- I'm using this list item to reinforce the recommendation to do exercise.
No, it's really that dramatic. It's really that fast.
Do you take cypro by any chance?
Yes, how did you know?
Cypro is more systemic in the body than most blockers. Anedoctal reports including mine suggest that it's harder to keep erections under cypro compared to other ways of blocking testosterone, even under comparable T levels. If you want to preserve erections, consider switching to bicalutamide, estrogen monotherapy, or GnRH blockers if you're lucky enough to have access to those. (These alternatives are also safer, so also consider them if you're indifferent about erections). Or just do what I did and cut off your gonads lol
Conversely, if you're dysphoric about erections, cypro may be your ally. But try not to use it for more than a few years; work towards SRS for a definitive and safe solution. Most people only need a very low dose of cypro to completely and utterly block androgens; try 5mg/day plus estrogens, and if that's good enough, try 5mg every 2 days; only increase if needed.
I'm a top and on cypro, is it hopeless for me in the meanwhile?
Absolutely not. I was on cypro for 2 years and kept merrily fucking butts. Was a bit more of a challenge, but that just made it more satisfying to find ways to make it happen anyway.
I started HRT and I think I'm ace now.
Well do you want to be ace? If you like it this way, you don't have a problem, you have a shift in identity. Enjoy!
If you had a reduction in libido that you perceive as a loss, and you want to feel sexual again: most people experience a change on the type of libido when they switch hormones. Though this isn't an absolute, testosterone seems to incentivise spontaneous libido, and estrogen responsive libido. It's hard to know how much of that is psychological from the social roles of “man” and “woman”, but it definitely felt physical to me, and I know a large number of both trans men and trans women who report similar experiences—though by no mean 100% of everybody I've met; keep the sexual diversity of people in mind, exceptions aren't rare and you may be one of them. Moreover this binary isn't absolute, comprehensive, or static; everyone in the world will have oscillations in libido amount and flavour, depending on the situation, state of the body and mind, connection with the partner, Venus retrograde, Gods know what else. For example, for promiscuous people like me, it's an almost universal experience that new partners bring out spontaneous libido, already during the hunt.
Can you describe what the shift in libido felt like for you?
Unter testosterone, spontaneous libido was urgent, almost like having to pee, or having to crack your fingers when they're tensely uncomfortable. It would happen without rhyme or reason (I recall getting hard for no reason in the midst of trying to understand math textbooks (and I don't even like math (ok δ looks kinda fuckable but…))).
Under estrogen, my responsive libido frequently needs to be fed before it can exist.
“It's when you only want sex after the sexy stuff starts happening”.
I'm now on transition year 7. On a typical weekend I have some lover on my bed and unless it's a brand new girl I won't be actually like, feeling sexual towards her, or looking forward to sex all the time. I'm doing my own thing dealing with life stuff, or we're chatting politics, or we're just hanging out and chilling. Truth to be told, I'm kinda aware that people expect sex from me (given how I present) but often I feel kind of lazy about the idea of having to set up all the gear for anal sex, thinking today maybe I'm not in the mood, and so on. No crave.
But then she will, say, sit on my lap without warning, touch my lips to attention, then give me that huffy shallow breathing that bottoms do as she brings her mouth close to my ears and murmurs: “choke me, Mistress”… aaand 5 minutes later I'm in bed pounding her.
Because most people I date have the same type of libido, that works the other way, too; when I'm the one feeling horny first, that usually means blowing some sparks towards my lover and blowing up the fires and waiting to have a good stable flame going on before we're cooking. Or if. I'm writing this after having 4am sex cos I randomly woke up horny next to the week's lover; I enjoyed without hurry the soft pleasure of big-spooning their body and exploring it without holding expectations on whether they would correspond or not; I would be genuinely satisfied with either outcome; as it happens, they did react in the body language of sexual pleasure, which in turn made me hornier, which changed how I played with their body, and so on, one tiny little notch at a time… That's responsive libido. Sometimes I'll just lie with a girl on the sofa all evening weaving in and out of highly sexually charged cuddling back to soft little hugs and forehead kisses as we browse memes together. The embers never catch into flames but that soft horny is so comfy and cozy anyway. I love those evenings about as much as I love fucking ass for an hour nonstop. If you learn to enjoy all sorts of experiences, you're never frustrated.
Wait—if both you and your lover are having a responsive-type libido on that day, doesn't that generate an impasse?
I mean, yeah. Dear Reader, I bid thee welcome to the †Lesbian†Bed†Death†.
Ok I couldn't resist the chance to explain why LBD exists but like, I don't like the negative framing, again: There's a whole universe of things you can do together as lesbians, you don't have to care that sexytimes isn't happening. You can garden together! Read comic books lying on her lap! Play little gay visual novels from itch.io and voice act the characters! Mask up to ambush local nazis! Bake cookies for one another! You know, girl things?
Ok, I get it, you've been thirsting over one another online for 6 months and you travelled to be together for one precious weekend and now nobody is feeling like sex and it feels like a bit of a shame. In this situation you can do a bit of that exploration and see if you can get the feedback loop of horny started. I've seen people call this “following the breadcrumbs of your libido”; going through the motions a bit, chasing an inkling of what you intuit will feel good today, until it hits. (I personally think of it as “making offerings to invite in the demons” rather than breadcrumbs, but you do whatever metaphor works for you.)
And if you're kinky: ride the curve. Hike the heck up that escalation curve. Even if you don't feel like it at first, do it consciously, deliberately. Once you strike the right nerve that gets her to shake with pleasure, your responsive libido will… response. It will response so much.
All this talk of bed death and baking but you seem horny online all the time though??
That's mostly a persona; both an aspect of my history and my identity, and a political positioning. I've been hypersexual since I was like, 11, and much of my life centred on navigating the various stigmas and ostracisms involved with that, both from conservatives and liberals. At this point I'm done masking. At the same time, after 40 and on estrogen, I've calmed down significantly. “Don't you have sex with like 4-5 different people per month?” As I said: calmed down significantly.
(See? That was my persona again, so well-practised at this point that it comes naturally. In a lewder period I do have that many partners or even more, e.g. the past four months or so; but I've also had periods with little more than vanilla-ish sex with known lovers once or twice a month, e.g. most of 2024. This has to do with mental and physical health too.)
No but seriously, most of the time when I'm hornyposting I'm not actually feeling aroused, it's just my aesthetik. Besides, presenting horny on main is a major way that I find new lovers in the first place. Responsive libido works online too, so when the right type of girl replies with the right type of comment to a kink text, it heats me up immediately, and we build from there.
Fairly rarely, estrogen does give me spontaneous libido, but it's not like before where I would like, have to take care of it in the next 10 minutes or get frustrated and lose the chance. Rather it's a seemingly random but low-burning, quiet, pleasurably painful type of horny that does not demand an orgasm and does not go away with one (so masturbation feels unsatisfying and pointless) but it like, colours my entire day, makes me scratch the walls craving some unspecified depravity. I'm not the only woman who calls this state being “in heat”. It's highly distracting, like, I cannot weave at all. I love it. My “heat” lasts maybe 5–6 days in a row for me. I can't induce it on purpose nor make it go away.
🤔Is any of that libido variation some sort of hormonal cycle?
Maybe? But I doubt it's from HRT. Back in the day I've experimented more than most trans women with inducing hormone cycles, from very high E2 doses to zero exogenous, with various doses and timings of P4; but could feel no clear unambiguous correlation with libido states. E2 does make me slightly more prone to crying and P4 affects my sleep in ways that are hard to define, is the best I can say I noticed cycling HRT.
How do I know if I'm ace or if I have my libido blocked?
Sometimes people ask “how do I know if I'm really trans?”. I find that question to be a red herring. “To be”, the copula verb, is a philosophical landmine, anything can “be” whatever you want it to be, or not, it's playing with words. (Like when fascists go “Can you just define what is a woman—” a woman is my throbbing cock is what she is). The question isn't whether you “are” trans, it is: do you want to transition? If you do, then the question becomes: how?
Same rationale for whether you “are” “really” ace. Who cares? If you're enjoying life without sexual cravings, nice! Have fun with all the extra time.
“I don't know what I myself want, though”—yes, of course, we've all been there. There's no magic trick there, you have to pay attention to your body and your emotions and explore and experiment out of your comfort zone and observe how it feels. Just don't get so attached to identity labels that you start forcing yourself to fit them.
(I didn't set out to reminisce so much when I decided to write this FAQ but since I'm already here, might as well. Hopefully telling about how my sexuality (re)developed can give people a reference point or a contrast to understand their own process? Or maybe I just want an excuse to write about my #journey. Too late now, buckle up…)
Immediately upon transition, I was convinced I must have become nonsexual. For the first time since childhood I wasn't yearning, and it felt kinda good. Refreshingly peaceful. I was pretty ok with that development. I had other things in my mind anyway, Gods know that first year navigating all the traps of gender and identity and the medical cistem was… a lot.
But that “peaceful” was always a “kinda”. There was some footnote to it, some restlessness I couldn't quite place. It took time for it to grow into discomfort, but the discomfort pushed me to go out again…
See, the thing is, I had been a top, and promiscuous, and dominating, and sadistic. These alignments didn't really go away; I just unconsciously distanced myself from all that because, like, even if I know rationally that there's plenty of women tops, dommes etc., these things are still socially associated with masculinity, so it felt like I would regress, would be seen like a man if I admitted to any of it. I didn't think that with words, I felt that instinctively, without realising it.
Another parallel: Some three months ago I got into powerlifting. I can now deadlift 95kg at 5 reps, and though I'm doing this for strength and not looks, my body changed faster than I expected to put on visible muscles. Not a lot of muscles, mind you, but moving in the “Vi-from-Arcane body” direction is feeling incredibly gender right now. I'm into it. And, after all this time doing high-femme outfits, I found myself trying out a sleeveless vest-and-dress-pants combo, profoundly enjoying the way that I can now pull off a soft butch bodyguard look without feeling like it makes me look like a dude. (Having D cups help).
And I had to square these euphoric feelings against how hard and unhealthily I had dieted in my first transition year to lose every bit of muscle I could, how I always felt bad about a muscular frame, how even years into transition I only went back into muay thai with trepidation, afraid of looking like a guy if I got strong… What a joy it is, to be secure enough in my gender that I can now admire muscles in myself as much as I admire them in other women.
Every aspect of my sexuality was like muscles, or like wearing pants. Each little part of it had to be reclaimed, slowly and with much effort.
At the beginning, I felt like asserting to be a woman was already asking for a lot. I couldn't possibly also expect other women to be interested in me, that would be too much. I felt like the very caricature of the trannie predator, this middle-aged, phallic, sexualised monster who chases women in female spaces. N.b. I emphatically do not hit on women except in contexts like, dunno, queer parties after they return my smiles; but it felt like I could be that. Maybe deep down I was secretly her? The #problematic type of trans girl? So all of my problem aspects had to be buried deep. I felt like, as a woman, I would be decidedly unattractive; I was convinced transition meant my sex life was over.
“After all, who would ever be interested in an older, tall, dominating yet maternal, lesbian futa top?”
That was definitely a belief I had.
Of course I started attracting the interest of women pretty much immediately, cis and trans. (And enbies, and femboys…). I would go online and see terf op-eds from the UK and think women now hate me forever. Then I'd tremblingly, terrifiedly, talk with women IRL and they'd be all like, “hey so I wanted to buy one of those egg vibrators want to go to the sex shop with me?” and “let's hang out at my place, I can cook vegan for you?” and “oh the sofa is too uncomfortable, why don't you sleep in my bed?” and I'd be like, she can't possibly be hitting on me, right? This is normal for girls, right? She's sleeping so close that I can feel her soft oscillating breath on the skin of my lips but I bet this is just what girls do, it doesn't mean she's like, into me, that's impossible… 💦
(Actual example.)
(No, I didn't act on it.)
I was so happy when my body started changing that I started posting selfies, and unexpectedly they got swamped with feminine thirst, which led to a cycle of exhibitionistic affirmation, and soon to my first few t4t lovers. And slowly, slooowly, all these sweet femmes managed to convince me that I wouldn't be considered a “man” if I bound a girl in ropes and made her come with a magic wand, with the argument that they wanted me to do exactly that, which was kind of a hard position to challenge.
Having this mutuality of desire was crucial to reconnecting with my libido, because what I'm trying to get at here is— I'm not vanilla. Even before transition, doing the same type of basic-ass penetrative sex with the same person bored me to death. To be sexual again I needed to feel free to explore my taboo/problematic/cringe perversions; luckily, turns out plenty of girls are into that.
So you see, for me my loss of libido was tangled up in all sorts of gendered trauma and social pressures and anxieties and whatnot. And that wasn't visible to me at all. I had to fool around and try out stuff, and I needed a ton of time and a ton of support. My broken heart was only ever healed thanks to the power of love ♥
Good for you, sister! But my problem isn't the libido; it's that I'm a top and I can't get hard anymore. You seem to have it easy…
Ok so even after I was sexual again, for a good couple years more I was convinced that my body didn't work for genital penetration anymore. I had this entire identity where I was like, “yeah I don't have working hardware, and whatever I'm not into it anyway”. At this point I had learned about dissociation, which let me understood why, before transition, I had to picture myself somewhere else to be able to have penetrative sex. And, thanks to BDSM I already had experience with my hands, with toys, with my tongue; and, now as a girl, doing other girls with those tools was more pleasurable to me than I ever imagined possible. I was, at long last, a lesbian top; it felt too good to be true. (It still does.) Who cares about boring old penis in hole anyway?
And I don't think that was wrong, mind you. I don't even think my “ace year” was a misunderstanding or anything, not really. That's who I was, at the time. People who met me at that place met me as such.
Then on one memorable evening I had a visit from this girl with a 100% submissive personality, intensely bottom urges, and a particularly attractive, perky round butt, and at some she was just lying there butt up and… yeah. T at unadvisably low levels, cypro all over my system, transfeminine dysphoria, eventually no testicles—e por si mueve. Girlcock does not care, none of this matters before the might of “Gosh I wanna fuck this butt”.
I was promised horny hormones and you keep doing this lovey dovey trauma healing woo, come on give me the deets, how do I hack the body
The trauma healing woo is crucial, ok? But without further ado:
- Ideal E2 levels vary from person to person but for most people it's somewhere between 300pg/mL to 900pg/mL. If your SHBG has gone up, you're doing too much; increase E2 as much as you can while keeping the SHBG zero or minimal.¹ Having enough E2 isn't important just for sexuality but to keep your energy levels and clear mind in the absence of testosterone. Most doctors won't prescribe you enough estrogen, so unless you're lucky enough to have access to a trans-literate clinic, you'll have to DIY. Injections are to be considered the first-line choice for most transfem people; they give good levels and work well for almost everybody. Other methods that worked for me or people I know are a relatively high dose of gel (or, better, spray) on testicles, lower corner of jaw, and forehead (in that order of preference); or combining transdermal E2 with sublingual/buccal pills.
- Progesterone might or might not affect libido. Some people swear by it. I thought sometimes it did help me feel horny, and sometimes I couldn't feel any difference. I take it anyway, but when I forget to take it or experiment with a break, it doesn't affect my sexuality unambiguously. Nothing that isn't utterly overshadowed by, say, cute girl in a mesh top smiling at me at the rope meet.
- Some trans women will stay in the “upper female” testosterone range on purpose, to have more spontaneous libido and energy; or apply T topically on the genitals, for erections. This won't affect your feminisation if the rest of your HRT is well managed. (If you do topical T, please inform your partners of that.)
What about sexual medication?
Vasodilators like sidenafil and tadalafil work fine for trans women who want erections, but doctors often deny access to them. Fortunately cis men DIY those so they're relatively easy to find.
Bremelanotide reliably stimulates libido for many people (regardless of hormones or genitals). But I can't see a sex life depending on it; would be very awkward, having to take a shot 2 hours before every time your gf wants sex. I recommend it as a party drug at best. The brand-name product is only sold as injections, but on the gray market you can find a nasal spray, too.
You're into herbs, right? Is there any data on herbal treatments for erections that work without T?
Anecdotal only, no concrete research either way. My best results have been with maca.
With all these complications, how do you keep consistent erections?
I don't. A lot of the time during arousal I'm soft, or half-erect. Even when erect, it comes and goes.
Mira Bellwether, in the zine “Fucking Trans Women” (which you should definitely read if you haven't yet), has called girldick “temperamental”; when she wanted to coax her cock into topping, it would stubbornly refuse; then when she was least expecting it and not at all prepared for anal sex, it popped up rock-hard and aching with lust… this has been my experience often, too.
How do you top while soft, then?
First of all, I take it as fundamental that penetrative sex is optional and a bonus to me. Most lesbian tops rely on their hands and dildos and straps, and I have all these options, plus, sometimes, delicious live cock. Sometimes I'll bind, domme, top and/or hurt a submissive girl all while I'm fully clothed, without stimulating my body at all; I find that to be a very rewarding type of sex when the mood calls for it.
Remember too that penises are homorganic with clits. Soft girldick is just a big clit. It has the fun nerves and everything, and can be played with in all the ways you'd play with a clit. Get them to tongue it, put a vibrator on it. Sit on their face.
If at some point I want to incentivise my cock into an erection, for example for a photo, I have to play with the responsive libido until she shows up. If I'm alone, for example, this usually means written erotica or browsing flirty DMs. I consider neither penetrative genital sex nor orgasms to be “goals” during sex; I find goal-oriented sex productivist and spiritually unsatisfying. There’s nothing that kills the mood faster for me than feeling like I have to perform.
But if I want to get harder with a bottom, maybe I'll fuck something that doesn't require a full erection, or an erection at all (mouths and lubed thighs work great). Or bring out the wand vibrator and tease us both. Or switch to some other type of play and explore different flavours of arousal. Breaking a taboo or crossing a line that turns a kink up a notch makes me hard basically 100% of the time. Even straight people talk of “heating up the sex life”, right?
Conveniently, the process of softening up an ass for penetration also makes me horny, so teasing and lubing and edging and fingering a bottom will both make them easier to fuck, and me harder. Most of the time. If it doesn't, hey, that's what lesbians invented dildos for.
One complication is that with intermittent erections you can't rely on condoms very much—I've had one too many close calls where a condom almost slipped off mid-penetration. I've tried using a cock ring to ensure they're held in place, but it wasn't enough. Now I use internal condoms (often sold as “female” or “vaginal” condoms), which work great for anal sex, too. I also consider it fundamental for promiscuous people to do PrEP and regular STI tests, doubly so if you're into anal.
Do you get pain during erections/penetration without testosterone?
I've seen reports of it but I don't. I mean sometimes a very hard erection has a pleasurable degree of background ache but that was the case before transition, too. I think experiencing intense pain may have more to do with disuse than atrophy or hormones; or else it's individual variation.
Do you get ejaculations without testosterone?
Nope. Sorry. Wish there was a way to have big showy money shots for the aesthetic value, without androgenisation; but as far as I could research, there isn't.
Transfeminine folk will still produce ejaculate for, dunno, two or three years after starting HRT, tops? then it starts steadily drying up. Girlcum is therefore a precious delicacy, to be treated as a treasure (sweet and unscented, clear and thin, delicately intoxicating…). These days I will cum maybe between a couple drops to a small stain on my panties, and it tends to come more as a leak in the minutes after I'm finished with my reverberating multiple orgasms, than as a triumphant jet during the orgasms themselves. The amount of liquid people produce seems highly variable between individuals, and also within the same individual depending on type of HRT and how long they've been on it.
Do you get atrophy without testosterone?
I was never the dick-measuring type, and I'm not sure whether mine has reduced in size or not. The glans definitely seems smaller, giving it a slender tip; but the shaft remains as thick as I remember it being. Somebody once called this pattern—thin and easy at the tip, until you reach a suddenly increased girth—my “knot”, which made me feel very positive about it. Generally all the transition changes I had with girldick—the feminine glans; the larger, darker raphe; the increased skin sensitivity; the softness; the neutral scent; the sweet taste—were crucial in making me able to see my cock as “mine”, as something different than boycock; a process of body reclaiming that culminated in the orchiectomy, which fully removed any dysphoria I might ever have felt about penetrative sex.
At any rate intermittent erections will reduce the effective size some of the time, so girldick is unlikely to be the type to satisfy a size queen. (Why do you think the Goddess gave us bigger fists…?)
All that sounds surreal but I'm not like you, I could never be like that…
That's how I felt about all those cool trans women, too. For like a decade. “They're too awesome, I wish I could be trans too, what a shame I'm not trans if I was trans I could transition.” Even now this life still feels surreal for me myself who am living it. But hey, there's a top shortage out there, and your hard work is sorely needed! And your soft work too, for that matter! Comrade, thirsty bottoms want you to do your part for the community! o>
Feedback
1: People have asked where are these numbers from. Several sources:
- Widely used E2EN 15mg/14 days protocol seems to solve “stalling” lack of feminisation issues for many trans women who came from lower levels of E2 from transdermal or pills. That protocol generates a curve from 300 to 600pg/mL on most bodies.
- Dr. Power's experiments on how much E2 people can take before free% levels start to drop (between 300 to 1000pg/mL for the large majority, N in the hundreds).
- My own experience (wildly successful both in bodily feminisation and mental state, but only after I changed to spray and upped my levels over 300pg/mL) and that of people I personally know.
- Cis woman pregnancy levels as a ceiling of how high a fem body may go in natural conditions (over 7000pg/mL).
Higher levels also have the benefit of acting as monotherapy to compensate subpar blockers like spiro, and potentially compensating for tricker androgenic pathways like adrenals, post-SRS spikes, and the backdoor.
