“I feel like my best sexual experiences have been with queer people,” Koty said, slowly sipping on their coffee in Caffe Strada. “With queer people, it has always been really fun, while the straight guys I’ve fucked, well, I didn’t feel like I could be myself. With queer people I feel like I can express my masculinity and assert that, like the way I hold them or touch them or feel them. With straight guys I feel like I have this pressure to conform to femininity. I mean, they are trying to fuck a girl right now, but I’m not a girl. And I hate that I fall into that feeling of acting within the binary.”

For my friend Koty Dailey, understanding the interaction between sex and gender has been a process. They were assigned female at birth, but Koty knew that something was wrong with this label, never really understanding or relating to that gender identity. From the ages of 15 to 19, they identified as a trans man. But for about a year now, they have identified as nonbinary and agender, another identity within the trans umbrella.

“I identify with agender in much of the same way as someone identifies as an atheist, you know? Like, it’s not my religion — and agender is not my gender. It’s just a label that tells people I have no gender.” Each specific identity can function in different ways, and Koty’s experience emphasizes this complexity. There is no one identifiable and unique definition of what it means to be trans, despite that many trans folks experience the same kind of misunderstanding and discrimination.

Koty is now a very sexually active person, but that wasn’t always the case. The discomfort of not feeling like they had the right body had made it hard to pursue sexual situations.

“I actually identified as asexual for a while. For me, that was just part of my fluid transition,” they paused. “That’s not to say that asexuality is a transition — that is just what happened for me. I think part of it had to do with my gender dysphoria.”

This transitionary period was a result of Koty’s discomfort at the thought of their genitalia not matching their gender performance — their conscious and unconscious display of gender. Their discomfort is also a reflection of the society’s uneasiness about genitalia that don’t match outdated idea of what is “normal.”

“You think when you come out as trans that it will be like, ‘Wow, now I get to be myself,’ but then there is so much focus on passing,” they said, referencing the idea of passing as a certain identity, such as a female or male.

This cultural infatuation with the binary — two “opposite” gender categories of woman and man — by ignoring the trans perspective, not only attempts to erase trans history but also mystifies the concept of trans personhood.

“Has anyone asked you specifically what your genitals are?” I asked, uncomfortable with the bluntness of my own question.

“People don’t usually ask me ‘Hey, what are your genitals?’ They ask what I was born as or what was I assigned at birth. It’s like their more polite version of asking. But I have had people think I am a woman and after we had sex, they will misgender me, but I correct them pretty quickly because, well, they are wrong.”

This perverse obsession with other people’s genitalia is generally asked for a specific reason: to figure how that person has sex and the potential roles they might take. In mainstream society, genitals, and therefore the conceived notion of gender, signify of who “wears the pants.”

Gender performance and sexual acts complicate each other in ways we don’t expect for both trans and cis folks. There are certain expectations — being on the top or bottom, how much noise we make or who is doing most of “the work” — which are all performed in a semi-unconscious way and formed through expectations of how sex and gender operate.

Koty simultaneously confirms and challenges these expectations. When sex is simplified to the binary, it is hard to visualize it from different perspectives where genitals aren’t naturalized. In these situations, sex is a journey of understanding — and accepting — the body, both your partner’s and your own. Koty’s experience of what it means to be trans is not the only viewpoint, but it is definitely a perspective that contributes to a larger conversation of what it means to be trans and how we perceive gender roles during sex.

Taylor Romine writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact her at [email protected].