When I moved to LA and was single as a trans woman for the first time, I identified as a top. Well, I didn’t really identify as anything, but once people started asking if I was a top or a bottom or a switch — and I learned what that meant to the lesbians asking — I decided I was a top. All my prior sexual experiences consisted of me prioritizing my partner’s pleasure over my own, and most of the sexual experiences I started having followed much the same. But I also knew — as I talked to actual tops and bottoms — that I was more a top by default. I thought if I had a pussy instead of just the butthole I felt shame around, I might be more of a bottom.

My new job consisted of a lot of driving. I didn’t really listen to podcasts at the time, but I decided to try some out. I did some research on queer podcasts and started listening to Food 4 Thot. Most of the people I was first meeting in LA were cis queer women and most of them were boring, so anal wasn’t really a part of their lives. It seemed like it might be helpful to listen to a podcast where people with bodies closer to my own were discussing sex.

I didn’t get comfortable with my butt during this brief period of listening to the podcast. But now that three and a half years have passed, I see this as a beginning. I’m now at a place where I feel confidently a switch — where my topping isn’t by default and my bottoming isn’t shame-filled. I actually experience pleasure in sex, giving and receiving, in a wide variety of ways. I’ve come to understand my body, its potential to experience pleasure, its ability to literally open up when I feel safe.

As someone who now hosts a sex and dating podcast and sometimes receives DMs from other trans women on their own journeys to embrace their bodies, I’ve been reflecting on the impact Food 4 Thot had on me. It took a few more years, a bit more trial and error, the necessity of finding the right partners, but none of that would be possible if I hadn’t started to let go of shame. Sometimes the first step to love getting fucked in the ass is to listen to a bunch of other queers chatting about how they love to get fucked in the ass.

This brought to mind a lot of social ideas and norms about butts. I am, let’s say, a very curvy person and have been since puberty first hit. At the time, low rise jeans and tiny butts were in fashion, and I regularly got bullied for having a butt that didn’t fit those norms. I couldn’t wear low rise jeans because they didn’t fully cover my butt. I spent my formative teenage years feeling really terrible about my butt and my body and trying to make it smaller. I did extreme diets, watched The Biggest Loser religiously and joined Weight Watchers at an age that, frankly, should be illegal. I wasn’t even done growing, but here I was giving myself terrible headaches every day from not eating enough and silently counting my points in my head in the school cafeteria. No matter how much weight I lost, though, it never changed the overall shape and proportions of my body, and my butt was still “big.”

I never succeeded at changing my body and I didn’t become more confident, but something else did change. Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé became huge celebrities, and so did the Kardashians. The ideal body shape portrayed in the media shifted, and the things I had been bullied for became something that I was complimented on and praised for. People asked me for workout advice and straight men started hitting on me a lot more. Somewhere along the way, I realized that holding bodies up to standards dictated by media trends is completely absurd and unfair. Trends change over time, but there is only so much we can do to physically change our bodies — and we shouldn’t be expected to try to change to meet the standard anyway. We should all be allowed to love our bodies and our butts because they are all beautiful.

First of all, I just wanna say that I extremely relate to Katie’s memories of headaches and point-counting in the school cafeteria and wow, I wish I could eradicate the fatphobia that leads to CHILDREN having to deal with that. But this is not going to be a story about the ways in which society fucked me up as a kid and the ways in which I’ve reclaimed my hot fat ass as an adult. No, this is a story about WAXING MY ASSHOLE and how I think it’s a great idea if you wanna get into that.

It’s honestly a very short story. It goes like this: At one point in my life, I got my bikini line waxed regularly. I started out just taking a little bit of hair off around my thigh crease area, but it was 2009 and I lived in New York City and a lot of my friends were getting Brazilian bikini waxes, where the technician removes a lot more hair from the whole mons pubis/vulva/labia area and also removes all the hair around your asshole. It turns out I did NOT enjoy having less hair around my pussy (and these days I actually really regret those waxes because I wish I had a super thick super full bush and instead I have a pretty sparse situation, surely in part because I had my hairs ripped out of their little follicles from the root so frequently for so many years), but I LOVED having a smooth asshole. It just felt GOOD. The wax itself didn’t hurt in that area because I didn’t have too much hair to remove, and once it was gone it felt AMAZING. I haven’t gotten a bikini wax of any kind in YEARS at this point — truly possibly not for a decade now — but I still often think about simply getting my ass waxed, because I miss everything about it being smooth. Also I have a bidet now and I can’t even fathom how fucking excellent that would feel on an entirely smooth asshole. Fuck.

Because I am a lesbian caricature, my girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend is actually a professional waxer, and she currently lives five minutes away from us in the eco cottage in my girlfriend’s best friend’s back yard (okay I told you I’m a caricature), and we’ve become pretty good friends and I’m considering asking her if it would be weird to book an appointment with her to get my ass waxed. We’ll see. If you haven’t tried this, I strongly recommend it. Happy Anal August, amen.

One of my favorite stories to tell about myself is the time I got shot in the ass during paintball.

It was a glorious high school field trip in December. I was a hopeful teen, thrilled to immerse myself in the sport of hitting my enemies with balls of paint. I had a badass vision of myself striking my peers as if I was a spy on a mission. After putting on protective gear and receiving my paint-filled gun, I stepped out onto the battlefield (a forest). Within three minutes of being in the game, a paintball speeded through the air and violently came into contact with my left ass cheek. I screamed, hollered and whimpered for my poor ass. My peers laughed as my fantasies were shattered, and I went back to base in defeat. My ass had a lingering pain for the rest of the day — that pain was amplified each time I sat down. Later that day at home, I stared at the huge dark bruise on my ass, which became a reminder of my weakness.

Okay, time to be serious. Happy Anal August, y’all! I’ve always been more of a tits gal than an ass gal, but I appreciate and love all body parts nonetheless. I love using ass as a pillow to rest my head on. I also love to spank ass every once in a while during sex. It’s fun, exciting, and a great way to explore dom/sub dynamics in sex. I just recently started to use objects such as a leather belt instead of my hand to spank, and it makes the experience 10x hotter.

As someone who is obsessed with the sociological aspects behind cultural obsessions, pop culture’s fascination with asses fascinates me. It’s interesting to witness the shift from the stigmatization of big asses to big asses being a beauty standard. I’m not sure how that shift occurred, but I remember key moments of it like Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”. Another high school memory I have is going to stores to buy clothes and seeing racks of butt-lifting jeans for sale.

On the subject of puberty, I resented my ass because of the attention it got. Every comment a gross man on the street made about my ass made me feel more disconnected to my body. I used to carefully plan how I would dress so I could make sure I wouldn’t be harassed. I was told by a friend that my ass was a blessing. It felt like a curse.

Maybe I got a little too serious there. No one’s body should ever feel like a curse. Fuck the heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, transphobic, and homophobic society we live in that makes many of us hate our bodies. All asses are great asses, and that’s my Ted Talk.

I was planning to share an experience I had with my own butt plug, but instead I’m going to tell you about an encounter with a stranger’s butt plug that also relates to my own butt (stay with me).

I spent several years working at a sex toy store. Most of the time, I loved my job, but every once in a while, I would have unforgettably bizarre customer encounters.

The store had a “no returns” policy for obvious reasons, but if a vibrating toy abruptly stopped working, we would allow customers to exchange their malfunctioning toy for a new one. One fateful day while my coworker was on their break and I was at the register alone, a man entered the store and shouted (yes, shouted) that the vibrating butt plug he’d purchased last week was not vibrating. He said he’d charged the toy and used it once, but the motor would not work.

He approached the register with the butt plug (which was not in a bag or box) and tried to place the toy into my hands. I stepped back.

“Just a moment,” I said as I put on some nitrile gloves. “I’ll troubleshoot this toy, and if it turns out there’s some wrong with it, we can do an exchange right away.”

“WHY ARE YOU WEARING GLOVES?! HOW DARE YOU assume I didn’t wash this toy!” he shouted (yep, there was only shouting).

I explained that according to our store policy, we had to wear gloves any time we were handling a customer’s toy. The intention was never to stigmatize sex toys or bodies — the policy was for the comfort (and sometimes safety) of our customers as well as our employees.

“But I’m TELLING YOU I washed it. Don’t you trust me?!” he wailed. I explained our store policy again. And then he said something I will never forget:

“I would hold your butt plug in my bare hands.”

Reader, I had never met this man. I truly do not understand why this stranger wanted — needed — me to hold an item that had been up his ass in my bare palms. I also don’t understand why he needed me to know that he would gladly hold my butt plug if the situation were reversed. Up until that point, the only people who had spoken about or offered to handle my butt plugs were my partners.

I wish I’d been wearing a butt plug at work that day. I wish I’d been able to reach into my pants, whip out my butt plug with a victorious flourish and say, “Here ya go, boss!” But I’ve never worn a butt plug to work, so instead I was silent.

(This next part of the story no longer relates to my own butt, but I’m going to share it anyway because things took a wild turn)

“Why do you need to ‘troubleshoot’ the toy anyway?!” the customer whined.

I explained that troubleshooting was also part of our store policy for handling exchanges.

“This is ridiculous!” he yelled. “I’M NEVER SHOPPING HERE AGAIN!”

And then he threw the butt plug at me. Yes. A stranger. Threw his butt plug. At me. I had to duck out of the way to avoid a stranger’s butt plug, which was was sailing through the air towards my body.

The customer stormed out. Needless to say, he was not welcome in the store after that. Happy Anal August to everyone except that guy.

How I adore my ass — it’s 92% of the reason why I’m confident in this body. I love my butt. Please allow me to count the reasons:

One, magnetic field for hands
Two, conversation starter, hands that jiggle one cheek in an intimate hello
Three, conversation ender, sitting on faces/ the last thing you’ll see of me when I depart
Four, home of the lazy twerk that allows me to appear like I’m dancing even though my thighs don’t have to put in a work out
Five, explanation as to why I will never be able to enter the Witness Protection Program because its face is recognizable, even from space
Six, its portrait, resident in several people’s phones with my consent. Ah, consent and cheeks! No better combination than that!
Seven, built-in seat protection so all the world is a place for me to sit and recline
Eight, my confidence in swimming heightened because fat rises to the surface and so it will take quite a bit to make me drown
Nine, the squeeze grab that makes my thighs quiver and my throat forget it’s name
Ten, in my it’s heart is just the need to move to any and every beat that catches its ass-tention, and for that, I am thankful
Eleven, my homegirl (she’s gendered, I am not) is great, and it’s the best friend that when shaken just right, reminds me that I am THAT bitch and I better start acting it! And guess what? I do!
To the tune of a song in my head that I can’t identify: *ass!/ass!/ass!/ass!/ass!*
Thank you and the end.