It upsets me that even here in the fabulous 21st century, masturbation still bears stigma. If you spend your weekend doing the bodybuilder up in Accounts Receivable, you can brag about it at the coffee station Monday morning, even if you kept falling asleep before coming. But if you spent the entire weekend alone, giving yourself the most excellent orgasms, are you going to tell your co-workers why you're beaming so brightly? Unless you work at Good Vibrations, it's not likely.

This is something to get politically angry about. For starters, "masturbation" is really such an ugly word. I tried to do some etymology research before deadline, but my OED is in the shop. The only thing my backup dictionary tells me is that there is an adjective form: masturbational. Use it in a sentence this week! I promise, however, to find the culprit who foisted this awkword on us and expose him or her as a cryptofascist.

Most of us are probably too familiar with all the myths about masturbation -- the hairy palms, the going blind, how it's not as good alone. (If you're not familiar with the myths, put this paper down right now and call your parents, your clergy, or someone else's parents or clergy. Try not to stay on the phone too long, and then come right back to finish reading the column.)

Here's another myth, with which you might not be familiar: for a lot of transsexual-identified people, there has long been this unwritten idea that if you ever actually engaged in sex for pleasure, maybe you are not so transsexual after all. To wit, if you actually admit to your therapist and/or physician that you have touched your genitals to get off, you run the risk of being refused further medical and psychiatric treatment. For many years, a transwoman who admitted anything but absolute revulsion for the organ everyone keeps calling a penis feared the denial of services.

Surely, it is much less common these days for a trans-identified person to actually be refused such help solely on this basis, but it has happened. As a young tranny, learning this was enough to make me feel even more shame about self-gratification. It wasn't enough, apparently, that god hated me, my parents were disappointed, and that I'd become infertile, depressed, and blind. Oh, AND a transsexual. And a girl.

But you know what? I masturbated anyway. And I did it, a lot -- partly because of the adolescent hormonal deluge, and partly because They wouldn't let me drink coffee.

It is interesting to me that the way I learned to take care of myself most successfully is much more "female" than it is "male." If I had tried to explain this distinction to a shrink, years ago when this situation was of great concern to me, I think it would have looked like I was trying too hard to be "like a girl." God forbid I should experience pleasure without a good dose of inadequacy. I masturbated, and lived to masturbate another day. And somehow I managed to overcome the idea that if I did, I wouldn't be enough of a girl.

Imagine this a future in which I don't have to choose to call my thing a clit or dick, and I don't have to feel shame about getting some really great sex from the person I know best over the weekend. I think it's possible, especially in our burgeoning trans communities, to talk a lot more frankly about sex in the multiplicity of ways we experience it, because for the trannies I know, sex is always interesting, often queer, and usually fabulous.

Sex, Etc.

* The great Dorothy Parker had a bird she named Onan, because he kept spilling his seed on the ground.

* "Steps In Overcoming Masturbation" is a brilliant document published by the Church of My Parents, and is available in various places on the net. Try http://www.moonmac.com/Mormon_masturbation.html, or type "Mormon masturbation" into your favorite search engine. Learn, as I did, how to keep your church membership unsullied!

* Onan.com apparently has nothing directly to do with masturbation, at least in the ways I have known it. It is, however, a website rife with double entendre fun. ("Onan engines come emission certified and ready to install without modification.") Enjoy!!