Mira Bellwether

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Mira Bellwether
Born(1982-03-31)March 31, 1982
DiedDecember 25, 2022(2022-12-25) (aged 40)
New York City, U.S.
Occupation
  • Author
  • illustrator
  • sex educator
LanguageEnglish
SubjectTransgender sexuality
Years active2010–2022
Notable worksFucking Trans Women

Mira Bellwether

trans-exclusionary feminism
.

Bellwether's work has served as an influence to trans writers, journalists, and scholars, particularly in the field of transgender sexuality. Her death in 2022 was met with grief in the trans community, in which her work had attained a "mythic status" according to Kai Cheng Thom in Xtra.[7]

Early life and gender transition

Mira Bellwether[a] was born on March 31, 1982.[8] Her mother, Tammy, was a hospice nurse; her father, Terry, was a respiratory therapist. In her youth she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, a disability that would frame the rest of her life.[4] Raised in the U.S. state of Iowa, she began playing dress-up with girls starting at the age of six, ending when her parents moved to a more rural area in her teens. Describing herself later as "the smallest, slightest boy [she] knew", Bellwether experimented with women's clothing and makeup—drag, in her words—while at the same time exploring her sexuality.[9] She left Iowa as soon as she was able to.[4] As of 2010, she described herself as "a trans dyke and student ... a femme, a queer, a dork, a cocksucker, and lots of other things".[1]

Fucking Trans Women and sex education

In 2010, living in Iowa at the time,

bottom surgery.[12] Bellwether emphasized sex acts possible with flaccid penises or not involving penises at all,[13] writing that "almost all sexual discourse on penises" was "on erect penises, hard penises, penetrating penises".[14] Bellwether emphasized this point throughout the rest of her life. She told Autostraddle in 2013:[15]

One thing that I really tried to capture in FTW was that there are all sorts of ways to pleasure trans women. I gave a lot of time to soft penises for this reason, because in sexual literature they are almost completely ignored, and if they're not ignored, they're treated as defective or at rest or, even worse, an object of pity or scorn.

This attitude subverted prevailing associations regarding inability to become erect.[16] Lucie Fielding's Trans Sex (2021) cites Bellwether on this topic among others.[17] Fielding later said of Bellwether's influence on her, "Her work is stating that our bodies should not just be tolerable or accepted, but that they are there to be joyously experienced", crediting Fucking Trans Women as "a huge lightbulb moment" in her own gender transition.[4]

Bellwether coined the term muffing in Fucking Trans Women to refer to stimulation of the

sex advice column with Slate.[23] Bellwether likewise continued to promote muffing as an affirming form of masturbation in the years following the release of Fucking Trans Woman.[24]

Fucking Trans Women is heavily colored by Bellwether's own experiences as a disabled trans woman. Sexual health scholars Riggs et al. write in an editorial, "To speak of Mira Bellwether ... as a powerful trans advocate also requires speaking about Mira as a woman who lived in the context of a health-care system that failed to meet her needs."[25] Writes Sloane Holzer in Them:[4]

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.

Personal life and advocacy

In her 20s and early 30s, Bellwether moved numerous times around the U.S. to cities including Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco, ultimately settling down in 2016 in New York City with her husband, who had read Fucking Trans Women for advice on dating his first trans girlfriend years prior to meeting Bellwether.[4] In 2020, the two launched a GoFundMe seeking funds for Bellwether's planned vaginoplasty.[26]

Bellwether was a strong critic of

biological essentialism for equating male-ness with having a Y chromosome in order to argue that "the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion".[28] In the essay "On Liking Women", Andrea Long Chu objects to Bellwether's association of Solanas with lesbian feminism[29] and argues that, by associating trans-exclusionary radical feminism with second-wave feminism, Bellwether incorrectly implies that it is a relic of the past.[30]

In 2015, Bellwether advocated for the release of an Illinois trans woman who was arrested after checking in to a

transgender sex worker but took no credit.[4]

Illness, death, and legacy

Bellwether was diagnosed with

stage four in September 2022. On December 19, 2022, two weeks into a hospital stay, Bellwether was admitted to an intensive care unit, where she had a massive stroke; she died on December 25 beside her husband and sister.[32] Her death led to grief within many trans communities.[7] Bellwether's widower subsequently proclaimed March 31, 2023—Bellwether's birthday, and also International Transgender Day of Visibility—the "First Annual Mira Bellwether Buy a Trans Woman a Pizza Day", pizza in the trans community often serving as a placeholder for any sort of care.[33]

Trans author

tweet that Fucking Trans Women had "changed the landscape of trans and queer sexuality" and "saved countless trans people and opened their eyes to what their bodies can do and be".[36] Kai Cheng Thom in Xtra Magazine wrote that "Bellwether profoundly transformed the conversation around trans women and sex, to the extent that her zine has attained mythic status among us: We tell each other about it as though we are passing on community lore to one another."[7]

Riggs et al.'s December 2023 editorial in Women's Reproductive Health highlights the "outpouring of tributes" for "the late and great Mira Bellwether" as showing "how her words gave trans women and their lovers a voice to speak about desire and pleasure, when no one else outside of trans communities was speaking about trans women as desirable".[25] Holzer's profile in Them, published several months after Bellwether's death, begins, "Few people have done more to expand our understanding of women's sexuality than Mira Bellwether".[4]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Bellwether gave the full name Miranda Darling Bellwether on the inside back cover to Fucking Trans Women,[1] but otherwise, including on the zine's front cover,[2] went by Mira; she is referred to as Mira in coverage of her death.[3]
  2. trans women
    .

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b Bellwether 2010, inside back cover.
  2. ^ Bellwether 2010, front cover.
  3. ^ White 2022; Kish 2022; Thom 2023; Holzer 2023.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Holzer 2023.
  5. ^ Rosenberg, Tilley & Morgan 2019, p. 965.
  6. ^ Variously:
    • Pfeffer 2014, p. 597. "Fucking Trans Women (Issue #0) broke ground by centering trans women's perspectives and experiences around sex and sexuality—including instructional guides on actual sexual practices."
    • Zaber 2015. "Originally published as a zine FTW was the first book (or at least the first I can find that gained wide recognition) to address the sex lives of trans women."
    • Burns 2017. "Fucking Trans Women [is] widely considered to be the first and most in-depth guide to having sex with pre- and non-op trans femme bodies."
    • Thom 2023. "When Bellwether first published [Fucking Trans Women], there were virtually no sources of sex education devoted to trans women's unique needs and experiences."
  7. ^ a b c Thom 2023.
  8. ^ Bellwether 2022; Riedel 2023.
  9. ^ Bellwether 2010, p. 61.
  10. ^ Bellwether 2010, p. i.
  11. ^ Bellwether 2010, pp. i, 70.
  12. ^ a b Tourjée 2017.
  13. ^ Fielding 2021, p. 77, citing Bellwether 2010, pp. 7–8. See further Bellwether 2010, "Soft Science/Soft Bodies", pp. 26–32.
  14. ^ Fielding 2021, p. 77, quoting Bellwether 2010, p. 7.
  15. ^ Nadler 2013. See also Burns 2017 and Holzer 2023.
  16. ^ Rosenberg, Tilley & Morgan 2019, pp. 964–965.
  17. ^ Fielding 2021, pp. 77, 93.
  18. ^ a b Burns 2017.
  19. ^ Fielding 2021, p. 93. "Folx have probably been muffing each other for ages, but the term was coined by Bellwether in Fucking Trans Women and popularized through her extensive guide to the practice therein." Citing Bellwether 2010, "An Illustrated Guide to Muffing and the Inguinal Canals", pp. 15–25.
  20. ^ Hill-Meyer 2022.
  21. ^ Valens 2019a.
  22. ^ Fielding 2021, pp. 93–94.
  23. ^ Stoya 2022.
  24. ^ Nadler 2013; Burns 2017.
  25. ^ a b Riggs, Rosenberg & Ussher 2023, p. 493.
  26. ^ Phillips 2020.
  27. ^ Chu 2018, p. 53.
  28. ^ Chu 2018, pp. 50–51.
  29. ^ Chu 2018, p. 51.
  30. ^ Chu 2018, p. 53. "In [Bellwether's] version of the story, feminism excluded trans women in the past, is learning to include trans women now, and will center trans women in the future. ... The ... problem with an epithet like TERF is ... the erroneous implication that all TERFs are holdouts who missed the third wave, old-school radical feminists who never learned any better."
  31. ^ Kellaway 2015; LGBTQ Nation 2015.
  32. ^ White 2022; Kish 2022.
  33. ^ Riedel 2023.
  34. ^ Specter 2023.
  35. ^ White 2022.
  36. ^ Valens 2022b.

Sources

Academic sources

News sources and magazines

Sources by Bellwether

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