Stop forcing yourself to be okay with everything.

Desire without consequence and the political economy of sex in the T4T scene

by Tara Knight

The T4T scene keeps wrapping itself in this fantasy that being horny, visible, and endlessly open is some kind of liberation, and I am tired of pretending that fantasy has not turned a whole generation of trans women into emotional and sexual infrastructure for other people’s lives. This culture is built on being online all the time, being legible all the time, being fuckable all the time. Desire here does not just happen between people. It moves through posts, thirst traps, soft launches, screenshots, gossip, reputation. Everyone knows who is wanted this week. Everyone knows who is drifting out of the spotlight. Everyone knows who is getting DMs and who is sitting in silence. That constant visibility creates a market whether anyone admits it or not.

I benefit from that market. I have reach. I have desirability. I have a voice that cuts through the noise. My body and my mouth and my work pull attention. That gives me insulation that a lot of other girls never get. It also means I see exactly how warped the system is, because I can feel the difference between being valued and being circulated.

Once desire becomes something that can be counted, compared, and displayed, it becomes a form of power. Attention turns into currency. Sexual access turns into leverage. Being wanted publicly becomes a way to control the room. From that point on, care stops being distributed according to who needs it or who gives it back, and starts being distributed according to who keeps the flow of desire moving. Girls with high sexual currency can be inconsistent, careless, even cruel and still be adored. Girls with low currency learn how to bend themselves to stay included.

Trauma makes this system brutal. T4T spaces are full of people whose bodies were never allowed to be private. Sexual trauma, medical trauma, racialized surveillance, family rejection, institutional violence all train you to treat being wanted as a form of safety. When you grow up like that, hypersexuality and constant availability do not feel like choices. They feel like the price of not being abandoned. Patriarchy taught us that our bodies are up for use. This scene simply put prettier language on the same demand.

That is why the dominant ethic here is desire without consequence. Wanting something gets treated as a moral permission slip. Taking becomes normal. Damage gets waved away as the cost of doing business. If something collapses, the person who caused the collapse gets to say it was always weak. That logic makes it possible to hurt people while feeling righteous about it.

You see it in how polyamory and open relationships actually work in these spaces. On the surface everyone has the same rules. In practice the girls who already have attention get even more. They have orbiters, backups, options, a crowd waiting to catch them. Vagueness protects that power because it keeps doors open and responsibilities blurry. The girls with less attention learn to be accommodating. They accept being one of many because the alternative is being alone. They swallow jealousy, loneliness, and fear and rename it personal growth. Over time they get quieter, smaller, easier to replace.

Relationship anarchy takes that imbalance and removes the last brakes. When nothing is defined, the person with more options always holds the wheel. One person can drift while the other waits. One person can take while the other hopes. Emotional labor flows upward toward the person who is harder to reach.

I heard this logic spoken plainly in Boston once in a way that made my skin crawl. A trans woman was joking about sleeping with people who were already partnered. She did it deliberately. When someone asked about the fallout, she said that if the relationship fell apart, that was on the couple. I was not one of the people hurt by her. Hearing it was enough. That sentence carried the whole ideology. Her desire mattered more than other people’s stability. The scene would protect her because she was wanted. Harm became someone else’s problem.

That same logic shows up in smaller ways every day. Sexual availability works like rent in these spaces. When you are open, horny, and accessible, you get messages, invites, check-ins, attention. When you slow down or pull back, the noise drops. People do not yell at you. They just disappear. The market adjusts. What you thought was care turns out to have been access.

This is why being okay with everything is the unspoken rule. It keeps the flow going. It keeps bodies moving toward the people with the most clout. It keeps anyone from naming how uneven this all is. Refusal gets treated as dysfunction because refusal interrupts circulation.

Older trans women notice this pattern and leave. They do not do it loudly. They just stop offering themselves up. They get tired of being used as emotional and sexual infrastructure for scenes that never stabilize. I have written about that exile before because it is not bitterness. It is recognition.

I am going to be honest in a way that makes people uncomfortable. I have wondered whether after voice training I would go stealth. Not because I am ashamed. Because being visible in this culture means being public property. It means every relationship is watched, discussed, ranked, and metabolized by the scene. Wanting privacy starts to feel like wanting air.

Sex under patriarchy moves power. It decides who gets forgiven, who gets used, who gets centered, who gets discarded. That does not disappear because everyone involved is trans. When a culture treats desire as a moral excuse, it recreates the same hierarchy with new faces.

So I am saying this with my whole chest. Stop forcing yourself to be okay with systems that eat you. Stop translating your exhaustion into personal failure. Stop letting people take from you and call it politics. If a relationship model requires you to feel smaller, quieter, and more replaceable, it is serving someone else’s freedom at your expense.

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