Few people have done more to expand our understanding of women's sexuality than Mira Bellwether. A writer, sex educator, and passionate community member, Bellwether is best known for creating Fucking Trans Women (commonly shortened to FTW), a groundbreaking zine that meditates on trans women’s sexual culture through the lens of her personal experiences. Bellwether considered the work, first published in 2010, a “how-to manual.” Centered on embodiment, creativity, and collaboration, the zine is a rallying cry, championing all the incredible possibilities contained within trans women’s bodies and their lives.
Bellwether passed away on December 25th, 2022, following complications related to lung cancer. She was only 40 years old. Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, by Tammy, a hospice nurse, and Terry, a respiratory therapist, she left the state as soon as she could. Throughout her twenties and early thirties she moved frequently, 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. The innovative determination it takes to survive in the world as a disabled person is evident in FTW and all of Mira’s writing about sex. 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, she 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; toward the end of her life, Bellwether drew attention to the issue that healthcare for trans people is synonymous with hormone prescriptions and little else. It also took the form of her involvement with Camp Trans and other trans community-building groups. “And there was all the stuff she didn’t take credit for, like bailing out a trans woman who got arrested for sex work,” Callan tells me via email.
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. After describing the hot contours of a hookup, she pivots, giving us the stunning line, “All I could do and all I wanted to do was be in myself, in my body, and feel what was happening to me.” Mira wrote in FTW that she was influenced by old copies of Drag magazine. She saw in this shared history ways for contemporary trans people to “make strategic alliances, write our own stories, make our own media.”
While FTW never became a bestseller, every trans person I know is familiar with it. Callan read the zine years before meeting Mira. He was nervous about “fucking it up” while dating his first trans girlfriend, so he sought out advice from other trans friends. They pointed him toward FTW and it served as a guide, as it has for so many others.
Ana Valens, an editorial strategist who specializes in trans sexuality for the entertainment publication The Mary Sue, became curious about FTW after seeing a sex education comic reference the zine. Valens heard from friends that it was “the gold standard for trans sex education” and sought out getting a copy. She tells Them that FTW provides “a level of recontextualizing the trans body that is still missing in most sex education.”
When Lucie Fielding, a therapist, sex educator, and author of Trans Sex, first became curious about transitioning, a therapist recommended FTW as a necessary text. Fielding was “on the cusp of wanting to explore gender,” curious about how hormones and transition would affect her sex life and sexual capacity. Reading Bellwether’s writing “was a huge lightbulb moment,” she tells Them. “Her work is stating that our bodies should not just be tolerable or accepted, but that they are there to be joyously experienced.”
Bellwether explicitly advocates 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, Mira was interested in documenting what the sexual sensations of being a trans woman felt like. According to Callan, she often suggested “eroticizing what we’ve been taught to find most shameful about ourselves.” Mira argued that all “sexual experience is an education in progress,” rejecting the narrative that “spontaneous” sex is somehow superior to sex that involves communication and mutual education. Again and again, Mira emphasized that in order to have good sex “we have to acknowledge our bodies, come to terms with them as they are, and be able to inhabit them.”
Bellwether’s 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 — whether through legislation or violence — Mira knew that to own her sexuality was to reach toward a state of, as she termed it, “being in possession of myself.”
I read Fucking Trans Women for the first time in 2020. My roommate was digging through a stack of old boxes when she stumbled upon her copy, holding it overhead in victory. At that point in my life, one of the few ways I could be present during sex was by putting all my attention into my partner’s pleasure. My relationships crumbled against the wall I had built up around myself. Mira’s words seemed to speak directly to me, acknowledging how difficult our sex lives as trans women can be, while also heralding the joy of being touched in ways that didn’t induce dysphoria or shame. FTW dared me to inhabit my trans body at its most vulnerable. It helped me locate the unique pleasure of being in a body that I had been taught was inadequate.
The zine’s message of self-possession through knowledge is still potent and relevant to this day. Yet in the wake of its publication, one of the techniques described in the book seemed to drown out the work’s broader importance. Muffing, a sexual practice which had not been named in a formal way prior to FTW, involves the use of the inguinal canals as an externally accessible “pocket” of tissue for stimulation and gentle penetration. (By gently pushing one or both testicles into the inguinal canals, a trans feminine person or their partner can reproduce a feeling of penetration without relying on anal sex). To accurately describe the act, Bellwether drew diagrams and illustrations by hand before photocopying them into the work.
Unfortunately, the zine’s association with muffing began to take on a life of its own. Early on in Valens’ transition, she heard people joke about how “If you want to have sex with trans women, get into muffing.” Despite the transmisogynistic incredulity that belittled muffing (and by association FTW) as a bizarre sexual practice, the work was never concerned with anyone adopting a singular model of trans sexuality.
“She wanted FTW to be sort of a community cookbook, but for and from other trans women, about sex,” writes Callan. “Part of it was consciousness-raising and part of it was her being a voraciously curious DIY bio-scientist fascinated by what bodies can do.”
Mira’s words feel especially poignant because amid sexual fetishization and inadequate medical care, she sought ways to transmute that shame and difficulty into joy. This makes reading FTW feel more like a conversation than an exhaustive medical text on trans people. “She hadn’t intended her writing to be a monument, just an opener for everyone else to join in,” says Mira’s little sister, CJ, via email. Mira herself acknowledged toward the end of FTW that “the goal of this project has always been to collect stories and knowledge, not to authorize some and call those The Whole Story.”
Despite the truly substantial amount of praise Mira and Fucking Trans Women 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. According to multiple people who knew Mira, both at the time of FTW’s publication and in the decade plus since, this was the response to the work that made her the most incensed. It seemed to be easier for the zine’s readership to treat the work as gospel than it was to do the kind of messy reflection she had done, the kind of work she was daring her audience to do. Mira’s frustration around this unrealized piece of the project led her to publicly advocate on social media for more intra-community dialogue. She wanted to see the kinds of conversations and care networks that could make the seemingly impossible task of writing one’s sexual life a more imaginable reality for future trans women. Even when it required confrontation, Mira writes in FTW, trans women will “fight for what we want and what we need, sometimes with handbags and heels thrown at cops, sometimes simply by talking to each other.”
The day after beginning work on this piece, I had a laser hair removal session in preparation for vaginoplasty. The process can be supremely dysphoria-inducing – genitals clammy and numb from lidocaine, while a medical technician applies the dull sting of a laser across a bodily region that often feels rife with stigma. While on the exam table, I glanced up at the wincingly bright light aimed at my crotch and was met with a familiar name. The Mira 50 LED is, at its core, a source of illumination. I’m not terribly supernatural, but I know from my conversations with Callan that Mira Bellwether was. I was being called to witness my body’s capacity for sensation by a woman whose most beloved creative project expected us all to do the same.
I believe we owe this zine the force of our action. It’s the very least any trans person could do to honor her memory. Mira’s words seem perpetually prescient, something she heard so frequently that she jokingly gave herself the nickname Miranda Cassandra. She knew all too well how important it is to fight for dignity in sexual existence.
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. At the very back of the FTW, underneath the call for reader contributions, there is a small mission statement. “Fucking Trans Women is a zine for trans women & our lovers, whatever their identities. If you have something to say, say it! If you have something to add or contribute to this project, submit it! We want you just as much as you want us.”
Mira loved trans feminine people and everything we were capable of with a tenacity that is rare, even among the most devoted. No one else but you is qualified to write the story of your trans body. Whether it gets published or not, sharing it is an act of love.
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