Are trans women able to orgasm?

The most divorced men on the internet don't think so. Guess what?

There’s another myth going around about trans women that I’ve hesitated to talk about because it makes me pretty uncomfortable, which is that trans women are not able to experience sexual pleasure. I’m uncomfortable addressing this because trans women are already hyper-sexualized, and I worry that talking about how we can totally have orgasms just feeds into it. This is especially ridiculous because another anti-trans myth is that trans women are all perverts engaged in some unbelievably complicated role play for the purpose of satisfying some twisted fetish. Which sounds exhausting. 

I suppose it makes sense, in its own way, that anti-trans obsessives would want to think of us as literally unable to be satiated. And for the share of them who spend their days ranting about how depraved and disgusting we are while they spend their nights looking for casual encounters with us, it probably makes them feel better to imagine that nobody could make us cum. 

But of course, that’s ridiculous. Trans women are no less capable of experiencing a climax than anybody else. For many of us, reductions in depersonalization and dissociation that come with transitioning make sex more satisfying. And studies have shown that the majority of trans women who have bottom surgery find their sexual experiences more satisfying afterwards, with ease of orgasm largely unchanged.

Complications for bottom surgery do exist, and are worth considering. Another study found that 29% of trans women struggle to orgasm after bottom surgery. This is no different than the female norm, where one in three report difficulty. And even post-surgery trans women with low sexual function reported high life satisfaction and low regret rates, because contrary to the myths, trans people want things other than sex. 

One prominent transgender surgeon, Dr. Marci Bowers, recommends that young trans people consider waiting until after the initial onset of puberty to allay any concern of post-surgical complications. But other recent studies have shown no difference in ability to climax between trans women who had puberty blockers and those who did not.