“T4T” is where trans folks can speak with each other directly, from the heart, without having to make ourselves legible to cis society. Here, we will tell stories that center our joy and our pleasure, our rage and our resilience, our quirks, our dreams, our love. Here, no experience or idea is too niche or too wacky — we care about what you care about. Read more from the series here.
The funny thing about the first time I tried role play is I never quite stopped.
It snowed that night. I remember thick flakes falling outside my window and the hush that follows such storms feeling especially dense, like a huge velvety white quilt had settled over the city. Entombed in my little room, a half-smoked joint perched on the nightstand, I asked my lover if they wanted to play pretend. The actual words might have been a little more like, “Call me Maeve,” who was me, of course, but also not (yet). From there, the fantasy unspooled unbidden —an unstable, confusing, euphoric rush of mannerisms and moans I recognized but couldn’t quite place. Somewhere in the mess of that moment I saw myself. I felt the person I was becoming. I heard her as those rounded gasps of joy cascaded from my lips and I realized I had the power to call to her, to let her know I was on my way. Meanwhile, here was my lover, at once spotting me on my journey while embarking on their own. There was such safety in that room — in the humid, heavy space between us — such care and unspoken understanding, as we helped guide each other toward ourselves.
I learned later that there was a term for this kind of support, this act of seeing in the dark: “trans-for-trans,” or “T4T.” The dynamic has existed as long as there have been bodies to defy the gendered expectations so often affixed to them. But as for when the language of “T4T” formally entered the culture, that would be the early 2000s, on Craigslist personals, where trans people turned to a once far less surveilled and commodified Internet to seek each other out for connection and sex.
T4T, as with so many (perhaps too many) facets of trans culture and experience, has exploded since those humbler times. Not only is the term now ubiquitous on mainstream dating platforms; it has more fully stepped into its broader resonance, accurately being used to describe relations beyond the romantic — and even the interpersonal. One need only take to Twitter to see “T4T” invoked to classify the bonds between certain superheroes, barbies, and even emojis. It feels like only a matter of time before late stage capitalism will force us to contend with a “T4T” content tag on Netflix.
Excluding that last, blood-curdling hypothetical, I don’t think of this popularization as a problem. Rather, I believe a more capacious understanding of T4T, one that describes a range of meaningful exchanges between trans folks, is deeply aligned with its essential meaning. For instance, I find few more accurate ways to describe the particular experience of reading Torrey Peters’ 2021 novel, Detransition, Baby, than as a literary conjuring of T4T. Hearing her words in my head felt like entering a T4T connection with the book’s narrator, even Peters herself. How else could we hold the beautiful and terrifying thing Torrey did with that text, which was to lovingly, if not exactly gently, hold up a mirror and dare us to look?
Personally, I find this way of reading her work — of reading so much trans writing — not just engaging, but genuinely healing. This is why, as an editor here at Them, I’m thrilled to launch a column committed to manifesting this feeling. With “T4T,” we will be devoting space every month to stories and perspectives that, at most, side-eye the cis gaze. Here, we will be unabashedly and, if necessary, illegibly trans. We will dive deep into our oceanic and/or cosmological fixations. We will dream and reflect, educate and process. We will hold space. We will recount the hottest nights of our lives, the sweetiest days, the moments that changed and challenged us. Through sharing these stories, my hope is to create a place for readers and authors where becoming feels just a little bit easier; where we can catch glimpses (or whole reflections) of ourselves as I did that snowy night.
Importantly, our goal with this project is to create a space to honor — perhaps even experience — something of what makes T4T so special, without romanticizing it. T4T can be an oasis, but it is not utopia. In the face of a crumbling society, rife with transphobic attacks both legislative and corporeal, where a genocide against non-normatively gendered people is already in motion, T4T cannot be tasked with more than it can hold.
At best, T4T dynamics are beautiful and nurturing. They help us to see ourselves clearly, to burn off some of the haze created by a society still clouded by the colonial fallacy of binary gender. More practically, they can affirm our right to abundance in ways we have learned never to expect from a government that offers only austerity and lip service. At worst, as scholars Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino warn in their introduction to the latest issue of Trans Studies Quarterly, the very conceptualization of T4T itself, when done uncritically, can occlude “the significant axes of difference, race chief among them, that characterize and trouble trans affinities and solidarities.”
With a column like this, rooted in such potent language, the stakes are high. So, too, is the potential for intimacy, for mobilization, for the transmission of genuine care, for finding out that, after all, in spite of everything, you are not alone.
Welcome. New installments coming soon.
