Theories of the holy shit what did I just see back there on the street?
Because transmisogyny makes them so impossible to ignore, for at least the last 70 years transfeminized people have served as key material of Anglo-American gender/queer/trans theories, as laundered through anthropology, sexology, and uncited personal witnessing. The anaemic denial of this fact through snappy and surface-level distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ and between different transfeminized groups has made it functionally impossible for these theories to seriously account for transf* life, and this failure is highly productive, because it allows for the continued use of both ‘premodern’ ‘third gender’ and ‘postmodern’ transgenderism as lobotomized material for the theories of other people. The last century of gender theoretic development has revolved around slowly refining methods of extracting transfeminized peoples’ insight, forgetting and re-introducing them to their field over and over again to frame them as perpetual novelties, leading to a pernicious form of feminist amnesia that repeats over and over again.
1 . MARGARET MEAD (1949)
The work begins with Margaret Mead, the ‘most famous anthropologist of our century’ (Behar and Gordon 1996), who made her career studying indigenous groups in Samoa and New Guinea, then joined the larger anthropological effort to inform the US Government’s genocidal re-education campaigns against Indigenous American tribes. She later enjoyed a prodigious career as a public intellectual and shifted to more explicitly feminist writing which extensively influenced the movements of the 60s and 70s. Mead argued that essentially all sex-gender roles were culturally determined, and used the specter of the transfeminized homosexual-transvestite both to make that argument and to advocate for gender abolition.
This can be seen most clearly in Mead’s 1949 book Male and Female: a Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Mead chronologically traces individual gender development through an ethnographic-sexological narrative, beginning with ‘first learnings’ that a child receives primarily through observation. Then the family comes in, and the transvestite comes with it, existing as the primary motive (alongside Freudian sexual attachment) which motivates gendered socialization:
Too great softness, too great passivity, in the male and he will not become a man. The American Plains Indians, valuing courage in battle above all other qualities, watched their little boys with desperate intensity, and drove a fair number of them to give up the struggle and assume women’s dress. (Mead 1949)
Mead argues that “fear that boys will be feminine in behavior may drive many boys into taking refuge in explicit femininity,” but makes a distinction between this identification and what she calls ‘full transvestitism,’ the culturally-specific recognition of that status. This differential leads her to conclude that the physical traits seen as markers of ‘gender inversion’ are culturally specific, and that what is understood as physical sex (then existing on a ‘spectrum’ model) is therefore partially socially determined.
For Mead, gender must be abolished precisely because of the fact that she could even make this argument. As she says,
Only a denial of life itself makes it possible to deny the interdependence of the sexes. Once that interdependence is recognized and traced in minute detail to the infant’s first experience of the contrast between the extra roughness of a shaven cheek and a deeper voice and his mother’s softer skin and higher voice, any programme which claims that the wholeness of one sex can be advanced without considering the other is automatically disallowed.
The desperate need to reproduce these distinctions, to make sex clear and visible and obvious, leads Mead to ultimately argue for a gender abolition that rests on complementary sex-roles. The main benefit of this approach for Mead is the complete eradication of sex-gender ‘confusion’ and its incarnation in transfeminized people, so associated precisely because of their intense usefulness as a tool for undermining sex-gender distinctions. So Mead sees the construction of physical and social gender by using transfeminized people as a lens, but because of her own disgust she can only fix gender by unseeing it again, by displacing gender to ‘real’ physical sex and protecting herself by breaking the tool. This, unsurprisingly, leaves her exactly where she started.
2. BETTY FRIEDAN (1963)
The feminist theorists that came after Mead directly confronted this reversion to ‘complementary sex’ logics, most notably in Betty Friedan’s foundational work The Feminine Mystique. Friedan discusses the ‘paradox’ of Mead’s influence, the strange combination of her exposure of ‘the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature’ and her ‘glorification of women in the female role – as defined by their sexual biological function.’ In the middle, Friedan cites a page-long quote describing a point of ambivalent warning in Mead’s writing:
The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature… Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls… Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s” … Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the biological functions of women. (emph added by me)
...Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it…
...We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences? … If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement?
Friedan attributes this ultimate focus on sexual difference to Mead’s Freudianism: she argues that Mead’s need to approach culture and personality through sexual difference, combined with her anthropological understanding that ‘there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation’ (Friedan and Quindlen 1963), combines to cause her to inflate the cultural importance of the reproductive role of women. Friedan intensely rebukes this reification of reproduction as another component of the ‘feminine mystique’ (very close to the modern ‘divine feminine’), advocating for programs which enable women to reject the mystique and housewife status and to seek education and employment, to combat the problem ‘which had no name’ but takes shape through spikes in female ‘sex-hunger’ and ‘overt manifestations’ of passive male homosexuality, both understood as ‘children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers.’ In a paradoxical return to Freudianism, Friedan characterizes husbands unwilling to let their wives work as being seduced ‘by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother’ (the Freudian homosexuality-signifier), associating antifeminism with passive homosexuality with femininity which the aspiring feminist has escaped, learning to compete “not as a woman, but as a human being.”
3. THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRANSFEMINIZED SUBJECTS
As we can see, transfeminized subjects are frequently used as signs of system collapse, hypervisible enough to be easy examples and potent enough to rhetorically corrode existing sex-gender systems in preparation for the author’s own vision. Once a piece is published, these examples are usually then forgotten, assumed as scaffolding for the real theory; but the rhetorical strawmen of these transfeminized subjects still remain, trapped implicitly in the text, and they bleed into one another with every new addition to the corpus, every call to action invoking a new transfeminized archetype.
So far we have seen Mead’s anthropological-orientalist framing of ‘transvestitism’ among the anthropological Other and Friedan’s psychological framing of ‘passive homosexuality’ in the United States. The increasing visibility of adult ‘transsexuality,’ somewhat disjoint from the developmental sexology Gill-Peterson (2017) discusses because of its visibility in high-profile cases like Christine Jorgensen, was likewise framed for theory. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which described methods for observing ‘the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment,’ used an intersex woman named Agnes as an avenue to expose how everyday social facts are constructed. Agnes was an ideal exemplar because her insistence on getting HRT and being seen as a woman was considered psychologically normal: “Such insistence was not accompanied by clinically interesting ego defects. These persons contrast in many interesting ways with transvestites, trans-sexualists, and homosexuals.” Of course, Garfinkel was later notified that Agnes did not have an intersex condition, and he then noted that ‘this news turned the article into a feature of the same circumstances it reported, i.e. into a situated report.’
Anyways, now it’s time for yet another transfeminized subject: the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian feminist.’
4. JANICE RAYMOND (1979)
As with her predecessors, Raymond sees analytical power in her particular transfeminized group, arguing that “transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotypes in a role-defined society.” But she also has some concerns for ‘transsexual women,’ initially assumed heterosexual, none of which are particularly novel or interesting. Now that she’s writing in an environment dominated by Friedan’s mandate towards shedding femininity, feminist amnesia makes it novel to regurgitate Margaret Mead’s responses: that “male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex-role molding has wrought on men,” and that “men recognize the power that women have by virtue of female biology and the fact that this power, symbolized in giving birth, is not only procreative but multidimensionally creative” (Raymond 1979).
Her analysis of (new archetype) ‘transsexually-constructed lesbian feminism’ is much more interesting. While Raymond can understand heterosexual transsexual women as ‘reinforcing gender stereotyping’ by pulling primarily from medical archives already hegemonized by gatekeeping and passing requirements, the transsexual women in the lesbian-feminist movement achieved a certain degree of personal contact and visibility that undermined ‘hegemonizing’ logics. So Raymond uses three main arguments: an essentialist appeal to fundamental ‘maleness,’ a red-scare-esque appeal to transsexual lesbian feminists as ‘court eunuchs’ bent on monitoring and controlling feminist spaces, and finally, an argument that transsexual lesbian feminists are fundamentally epistemically corrosive to lesbian feminist spaces:
Whereas the lesbian-feminist crosses the boundary of her patriarchally imposed sex role, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is a boundary violator. This violation is also profoundly mythic, for as Norman O. Brown writes of Dionysus, he as the ‘‘mad god who breaks down boundaries.’’
Contrary to contemporary transmisogynistic discourse which frames trans lesbians as personal threats to women in lesbian-feminist spaces, this violation takes its form not in any particular act but in the act of passing, the deconstructive question this existence seemingly automatically places on lesbian-feminist spaces:
One of the most constraining questions that transsexuals, and, in particular, transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists, pose is the question of self-definition—who is a woman, who is a lesbian-feminist? But, of course, they pose the question on their terms, and we are faced with answering it.
Raymond notes with some frustration that this transsexual question has been discussed ‘out of proportion to their actual numbers,’ using up valuable feminist energy, and frames this as a symptom and crime of transsexual lesbianism itself. The trans question is transsexual women; like the theorists before her, she sees transfeminized people as a gaping hole in the gendered world, but now they’re inside her house, feeding “off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” and inherently stand to break “the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness,” to dissolve lesbian-feminism itself.
I want to stress two main points in all of this. First, Raymond understands studying transsexualism as a crucial tool for answering ‘the question of what gender is’ and ‘how to challenge it.’ Second, Raymond’s anxiety about transsexual lesbian-feminists moves away from specific actions and towards the ‘penetration’ inherent in their existence in these spaces at all, the understanding that transsexual women are inherently corrosive to lesbian-feminist movements. These two points are clearly linked. Raymond understands transsexuality as a form of epistemic gender acid, something that can be useful at arm’s length but is deadly up close. Of course, the transfeminized people she discusses were not necessarily invested in asking the Trans Question themselves; trans women attended lesbian-feminist events like Michfest before and after their trans exclusion policies, and regardless of ‘passing’ many people enjoyed a form of don’t ask don’t tell (Tagonist 1997). But within these spaces, the Trans* Question long predated the actual existence of transfeminized people – so once they arrived, the Question and person were fundamentally linked. Trans theorists have negotiated this association extensively, but that’s not the topic of this essay, so I’ll leave you with some sources (Stryker 1994; Stone 1992) and move to Butler.
5. JUDITH BUTLER (1990)
This work has been done already by Vivian Namaste (2020), who argues that “contemporary discussions of Anglo-American feminist theory, exemplified in Butler’s work, begin with the Transgender Question as a way to narrow our focus to the constitution, reproduction, and resignification of gender.” This singular focus on the ‘Transgender Question’ has made it functionally impossible for Anglo-American feminist theory to consider the outsized role of work, particularly sex work, in motivating the discrimination and violence against transfeminized people of color: “framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as ‘gender violence’ is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal nature-a violence at the level of epistemology itself.”
Namaste attributes this focus on featureless ‘gender violence’ to a crippling lack of empiricism, a lack of researcher-subject equity, and an exclusion of subject knowledges. She provides an effective power-based solution to this epistemic violence – that feminist theorists should talk with the subjects of their theory and give them some measure of power in the transaction – a sort of endpoint analysis which means she doesn’t need to consider too much of the internals of the system she’s challenging. That’s a good idea for her work, but with the benefit of history we can move differently. The next section synthesizes Butler, Friedan, Mead, and Raymond together to provide a functionalist analysis of the feminist theoretic use of transfeminized people. What are the benefits of using transfeminized people as an epistemic tool in feminist theory? What are the dangers of using this epistemic tool, and how does feminist theory manage those dangers?
6. PATTERNS OF EXTRACTION AND DEFENSE
Looking past Butler and further into the past reveals that transfeminized people have been crucial not just to the feminist theory of the past 20 years, but have served as exemplars as far back as the 1940s. The ‘Trans* Question,’ which frames transfeminized people as the most visible signifier and most horrifying symptom of social gender, has been cyclically used in a form of feminist cultural amnesia:
A transfeminized group serves as a hypervisible example to 'deconstruct' social gender
Transfeminized deconstruction bloats beyond itself, undermining 'sex traits' or 'femaleness' or some other foundational category of feminist analysis.
Reconstruction of gender as 'biological sex,' alliance between feminist theorists and men of all stripes by arguing that post-gender eradication of transfeminized people will (a) allow men to be feminine without becoming women or (b) destroy femininity entirely.
New-generation feminist theorists realize their predecessors have reinvented social gender. Return to (1).
As Margaret Mead’s work shows, the use of transfeminized groups to deconstruct both physical and social gender has been observed regardless of transmedicalization. This helical pattern has a few general properties:
Each cycle introduces a distinct transfeminized group, positioning it against prior groups as uniquely suitable for analysis, but simultaneously blurs the new group into the existing melange.
This "Trans* Queston" is almost entirely devoid of group-specific context and rooted in transmisogyny, which positions them as horrifying and visible symptoms of social gender.
Each "Trans* Question" initially exposes social gender, but constantly threatens to dissolve other categories or even the theorist's own writing as socially constructed, against the theorist's will.
Each new cycle demonstrates near-complete historical amnesia as to the relevance of transfeminized people in the prior theoretical move.
So the “Trans* Question” allows for the basic feminist move, asserting that gender is socially constructed, but if improperly controlled it stands to dissolve virtually any definition feminist theorists try to build. To be clear, I do not believe in the total deconstruction of categories – you need definitions, even ones you acknowledge as imprecise, to say anything at all. But transfeminized people probably have pretty solid ideas about gender, having to, you know, live with it. The alienated ‘Trans Question*’ has none of this insight, appearing instead as a gaping epistemic hole in the world, and so feminist theorists are forced to come up with complicated quarantining measures to keep the Question from spilling over.
What jeopardizes feminist theory’s use of the Question? One answer (among many) comes by looking at Mead, who concluded that physical characteristics seen as ‘sex traits’ were socially constructed by looking at the culture-specific construction of what she called ‘full transvestitism.’ In this case, the Question undermined sex when the social position of transfeminized subjects were seen as simultaneously normative and anti-normative, existing in some normative ‘social’ role while being understood as distinct from non-transfeminized subjects via another ‘natural’ axis. The fact that these splits were made differently across different transfeminized groups undermined the distinction between social and ‘natural/biological’ aspects of gender, and because the alienated Question provides no means of making anything solid out of any of this, Mead retreated to the womb.
So understanding that the Question allows for the deconstruction of gender, and that it overgrows when multiple (studied as) semi-normative transfeminized groups are cross-compared with one another, we can consider aspects of contemporary feministqueertrans theory that enforce the epistemic isolation and normativization/antinormativization of transfeminized groups. The knots this ties in feminist theories seem relevant both to the ‘why does trans theory exist’ question posed by Chu & Drager (2019) and to the challenges and limitations of applying queer/trans theory to groups outside the anglosphere (Chiang 2021, Savci 2021). I’ll discuss that more in another essay.
SOURCES
Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1996. Women Writing Culture. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press.
Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.
Friedan, Betty, and Anna Quindlen. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1st edition. Cambridge Oxford Malden,MA: Polity.
Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2017. “Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender.” Angelaki 22 (2): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.
Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. First Edition. William Morrow.
Namaste, Viviane. 2020. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun, 5th edition. New York, NY London: Routledge.
Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.
Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press Books.
Stone, Sandy. 1992. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2 (29)): 150–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150.
Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.
Tagonist, Anne. 1997. “Sister Subverter Diary August ’97.” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender.
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Renewable Energy
Ziratha, an intrepid young succubus researcher, finds the ultimate solution to the looking Succubus Energy Crisis: a device that brainwashes its subjects back into nourishing, delicious, easily-flustered virgins - even rough, experienced, punk trans girls like Vivi
This was a delightful commission from GrillFan65, one of my patrons, and features a very, very fun TF ;)
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“Wow. This is a succubus’s lab?” The crust punk trans girl looked around Ziratha’s research laboratory and sniffed. “I would have expected more candles. Magic circles. Maybe a few jars of goat semen or something.”
Ziratha the succubus rolled her eyes as the punk laughed at her own bad joke. “That’s a stereotype. You’d think humans would know better now. We’ve been living amongst your kind for decades now, and-“
“And succubi are simply people just like us, living perfectly normal lives, except for the whole needing sex for subsistence thing,” the punk interrupted. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard the history lesson before.”
Ziratha had to suppress a groan. Alongside her PhD research, a full-time job in its own right, she worked part-time as an adjunct making minimum wage. She’d forgotten what a good night’s sleep felt like. Half her blood was coffee. She was way too tired for this.
Unfortunately for her, this punk girl - Vivi - was the best shot she was going to get at seeing her research reach fruition.
“Anyway,” Vivi piped up, “hurry up and tell me why I’m here already.”
“You’re here,” Ziratha replied tersely, “because I caught you breaking a window at the back of the lab. Probably looking for something to sell. And because if you help me out, I can delete the feed from the security camera. Got it?”
“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” Vivi shot back. “HRT ain’t free, you know?”
Ziratha sighed. In truth, she didn’t hold the attempted theft against her. It was simply that the succubus really, really needed just one single research subject. One was surely all it would take to get the funding board to sit up and pay attention.
“So, c’mon,” Vivi insisted. “What do you need me to do?”
Ziratha took a very, very deep breath. “OK, let me explain. Firstly, what do you know about the SEC?”
Vivi sniffed. “Sounds familiar.
“The Succubus Energy Crisis,” Ziratha told her patiently. “We succubi depend on energy harvested from our sexual partners. You clearly know that much. However, what you may not know is that sexual energy isn’t a sustainable resource.”
“How’s that?” Vivi seemed more interested in scoping out Ziratha’s messy lab than in the answer.
“The amount of energy a succubus harvests from her partner is inversely proportional to their sexual experience,” Ziratha went on. Reciting this was practically automatic. She’d been over it a hundred times in class. “The potency of sexual energy declines after, well, sex. Especially sex with succubi. The more we take, the less they have to give. Sex with ‘well-used’ partners yields negligible energy - and furthermore, might actually kill the human.”
“OK.” Vivi laughed offhandedly. “So what? There will always be more virgins, right?”
“That’s what people used to say about coal and oil,” Ziratha pointed out. “As it turns out, no. Thanks to a declining birth rate, an increasingly sexualized culture, and a constant expansion of liberal sexual mores into untapped parts of the world, reserves are depleting faster than they can naturally refill. Humanity’s store of sexual energy is trending towards zero. Starvation for succubuskind.”
“Right…” Vivi said skeptically, before shrugging. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with me.”
“I was getting to that,” Ziratha retorted. “I’m working on a solution, OK? See, traditional succubic magiscience holds that the depletion of sexual energy following virginity loss is a spiritual-metaphysical phenomenon. In other words, completely and totally irreversible. But that’s bullshit!”
Vivi looked up sharply at the sudden outburst of passion from the succubus.
“Those idiots in the academy just don’t want to let go of their precious little doctrines!” Ziratha fumed. “They’d rather sink billions into pipe dreams than admit the textbooks could be wrong. I mean, the SuperCharm Collider? Seriously? It’s a joke! But once I get my funding, I’ll be the one who’s laughing!”
She let out a loud, rich cackle worthy of her demonic forebears.
“See, my research indicates that the source of this problem is purely neural-psychological,” Ziratha ranted. “In other words: if you can turn back the clock on someone’s mind, you can completely refill their sexual energy. It’s a perfect solution. Renewable energy for all, forever. But the Institutional Review Board won’t give me the damn funding for a proper set of clinical trials.”
“Hold up,” Vivi broke in. “Are you about to tell me that I’m your guinea pig? And… you want to turn me back into a virgin?”
Ziratha grinned, her eyes flashing behind her nerdy glasses. “Exactly! Behold my Transcranial Magical Stimulation Unit. Which I expect to be known more widely as: the revirginization helmet!”
Reaching over to her workbench, she picked up something that looked halfway between an old VR headset and a military-issue tin foil hat.
Vivi folded her arms over her battle vest. “There’s no way I’m wearing that.”
“It’s safe!” Ziratha insisted defensively. “I made sure of it. If it wasn’t, this would kill my entire career.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Vivi replied, unconvinced. Then, she tilted her head to one side, and a crafty, dirty grin slowly spread across her face. “Hey. How about you and I go someplace comfortable and find a solution to a different kind of energy crisis?”
“Huh?” Ziratha blinked.
Vivi kept grinning and winked.
“Oh, I see.” Ziratha smiled wearily. “You want to have sex.”
Vivi giggled and nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” the punk girl said, “but you look like you could do with a little top-off.”
Ziratha frowned. “Rude!”
In truth, though, she couldn’t be too offended. It had been a long time since Ziratha had fed properly, and it showed. Proper, nourishing partners weren’t easy to come by. Her deep red skin had taken on a slightly unhealthy pallor, her horns were nubs, and her tail was just a thin, dainty little thing. It was a far cry from the kind of overbearingly transhuman appearance succubi could have if they were permitted to glut themselves to their hearts’ content.
Admittedly, Ziratha wasn’t exactly playing to her own strengths. Instead of anything particularly alluring, she was dressed in the universal uniform of the overworked grad student: an old t-shirt, grey sweatpants and comfy sneakers, with a lab coat over top. Her hair was tied back in a hasty ponytail, her huge, round glasses made her look like exactly the nerd she was, and she hadn’t bothered with any makeup to hide the dark circles under her eyes.
Beneath it all, though, she still had a killer body. She was still a succubus, after all.
“What do you say?” Vivi proposed. She glanced pointedly at Ziratha’s chest. “Wanna turn those C-cups into something bigger?”
Ziratha was surprised Vivi knew so much about how energy levels affected succubi. “You’ve slept with my kind before?”
“Sure have.” Vivi’s smirk was infuriatingly cocky. “A few times. And don’t worry - they were never disappointed. I know just how to treat a girl - mortal or demon.”
Ziratha rolled her eyes at the lewd comments, but she was smiling too. This made Vivi the ideal test subject. It was what Ziratha had been hoping for when she’d first laid eyes on her. Vivi was tall, hot, and confident, and while Ziratha knew better than to judge a book by its cover, Vivi did look like someone with a certain amount of ‘experience’.
She was pure punk, top to bottom. Vivi was wearing a battle vest covered in patches and spikes over a simple, loose-fitting top, and beneath the belt she had on a pleated skirt, some torn stockings, and an impressive pair of boots. A lot of the skin she was showing was covered in ink, and both sides of her head were shaven, leaving her with a messy streak of hair that was dyed neon blue.
Ziratha would have been pretty shocked if Vivi had told her she was a virgin.
“As attractive an offer as that is, I’ll have to decline.” Ziratha didn’t bother to conceal her weary sarcasm. “You’re a guinea pig.”
Vivi rolled her eyes. “Fine. I guess I can think of worse things than getting my ‘sexual energy’ replenished - whatever that’s gonna feel like.”
“Great. Great!” Ziratha immediately started ushering Vivi deeper into her lab before the punk could change her mind. “Take a seat, please.”
She gestured towards a chair that looked like it had been ripped out of a hospital examination room, with all kinds of wires and machines hooked up to it. Vivi glanced at the chair dubiously, but still moved to sit down.
“What’s all this, huh?” she asked, settling.
“Just monitoring equipment,” Ziratha explained. “Taking your vitals, measuring neural readings. That kind of stuff.”
“Nerd stuff, got it.” Vivi winked. “OK. I’m ready, I guess.”
Ziratha could barely contain her excitement. This was it. Her breakthrough. Her triumph. But the succubus was too much of a scientist to count her chickens before they hatched. “Here. Put this on.”
She handed Vivi the helmet she’d spent hundreds of hours designing and building. The punk looked at the strange, ramshackle device even more dubiously than she had at the chair, but she did as she was told. Once the helmet was properly adjusted, the screen mounted to it hung in front of Vivi’s face, obscuring most of her vision.
Ziratha tapped a few keys on her laptop and the screen came to life. A few lights and indicators on the helmet started to glow and flash, and the whole apparatus began to hum as the large capacitors mounted to it started to charge.
“Hey, so, how long is this going to take, anyway?” Vivi asked. The punk sounded a little less brash and a little more uncertain now. “Is this, like, some kind of long-ass meditation thing? Because I have places to be.”
“No, don’t worry,” Ziratha answered. “It’s much quicker than that.”
The succubus tapped a few more keys, checked a few readouts, and then hammered the space bar.
There was a huge, bright flash, like an old camera going off.
Vivi went still and stiff for a moment, and then groaned faintly.
“What the fuck?” she complained. “What… was that it?”
“That was it,” Ziratha confirmed. Her tail was very straight, and her voice was thick with anticipation. “How do you feel?”
“My head is throbbing.” Vivi slipped the helmet off her head and blinked as her eyes readjusted. “You could have given me some real warning, you know. So, did it work?”
Ziratha glanced at her laptop screen. “According to the diagnostics, it should have worked.”
“How’s my, uh, energy?” Vivi asked, a faintly mocking smile on her face. “Any of your fancy instruments tell you that?”
Ziratha simply returned the smile. “Oh, I don’t need any instruments for that at all.”
The succubus reached out and took Vivi’s hand, and let her demonic sixth sense for energy tell her everything she needed to know. Her smile immediately became a wide grin. Oh yes, it had worked. Succubi could always tell when someone would make a good meal. It was no different from any other predator’s sense of smell, although physical contact made it far more precise. Right now, Vivi had the scent of a ripe, untouched virgin.
This was it. The breakthrough Ziratha had long searched for. Her invention was about to change the world.
Despite such heady thoughts, though, Ziratha wasn’t celebrating. Something else had caught her attention. There was something very strange about the way Vivi was reacting.
The punk girl was trying not to let it show, but she kept squirming and shifting in her seat. A distinct pink blush was showing in her cheeks, and Ziratha could feel Vivi’s palm starting to turn hot and sweaty as they held hands.
The succubus tilted her head. Now this was very, very interesting.
“Vivi,” Ziratha said. “How do you feel now?”
Vivi couldn’t seem to meet her gaze. “I-I’m fine,” she blurted out in reply. “It’s nothing.”
Ziratha wasn’t buying that for an instant. She had a succubus’s instincts. She could tell when someone was seriously flustered. Experimentally, Ziratha lent in closer and squeezed Vivi’s hand.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! Jeez!” Vivi’s voice was a little too strained. Under Ziratha’s watchful gaze, she twitched tellingly. “You’re just being kind of l-lewd.”
Lewd? Just by holding her hand? “Fascinating…” Ziratha murmured.
The succubus pulled away, allowing Vivi to breathe a sigh of relief, and inspected some of her equipment readouts more carefully.
“It clearly worked,” she said, as much to herself as to her test subject. “But there’s signs of something else, too… hey, Vivi. Remind me: you’ve had sex, right?”
In contrast to her earlier, cocksure attitude, Vivi now looked like a deer in headlights at the question. “W-w-well, yeah! Of c-course!”
“So your memory hasn’t been affected, just…” Ziratha murmured, before turning back to Vivi and clapping her hands. “I think I know what’s happened!”
“What?” Vivi demanded. “I mean, uh, nothing. Obviously. But what?”
“Just as I was hoping, my revirginizer helmet completely returned you to a virgin state regarding your reserve of sexual energy,” Ziratha explained. “But I theorize that it also affected some of your closely-related inhibitions, skills, and arousal responses.”
Vivi blinked. “And what does that mean? English please.”
“Well, do you remember being a blushing, nervous, inexperienced teenager, years ago? Remember how much ‘steam’ you had to blow off on a daily basis? Remember how it made you feel when a girl so much as looked at you?”
Vivi nodded, and waited for Ziratha to say something else. But when Ziratha just glanced at her significantly, the punk girl turned as white as a sheet.
“N-no way,” Vivi protested. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid so.” Ziratha giggled. “It’s all connected, it seems. Congratulations. In just about every way that counts, you’re a virgin again.”
Vivi turned from white back to red upon hearing the v-word said out loud. She made to stand up. “I-I can’t believe you did this to me. I gotta get out of here.”
“Wait, wait,” Ziratha urged. She moved to Vivi’s side and calmed her with a simple hand on her arm. “I should really run a few more tests. Just to make sure.”
The succubus’s nostrils flared. She was shocked at how potent Vivi’s energy now felt. It was palpable, even when they weren’t touching. She could sense it in the air. Clearly, she had to investigate further. All in the name of science, of course.
Vivi was back to looking flustered, but she still threw a mutinous glare at Ziratha. “Y-you’re crazy! I can’t believe I even…”
Ziratha swiftly decided that if the betterment of succubuskind wasn’t a good enough reason for Vivi, she’d have to resort to other forms of persuasion. She bent down at the waist, putting her face close to the punk’s, and made her eyes very big and alluring.
“Please?” she whispered, in a voice that was suddenly soft and intimate. “Won’t you stay with me?”
Vivi looked like her body temperature had just shot up ten degrees, and Ziratha noticed that she couldn’t seem to meet her gaze properly. The succubus was sure she wouldn’t have fallen for that five minutes ago, but now she was a total sucker. “S-s-sure,” Vivi managed, in a strained voice.
“Wonderful.” Ziratha licked her lips. The distinctive virgin-scent Vivi was starting to give off was just delicious. “These readings - and reactions - are extraordinary. And I’ve done nothing more than hold your hand.”
Vivi whimpered plaintively.
“I can’t help but wonder,” the succubus murmured, “what kind of yields you might produce with slightly more purposeful stimulation.”
Vivi’s eyes registered alarm but, before she could protest, Ziratha slipped closer and planted a kiss on the punk girl’s cheek.
Her reaction was as immediate as it was striking. Vivi let out a faint gasp and her back arched slightly, even though she was clearly trying as hard as possible not to show it. But even more striking was the intensified deer-in-headlights look in her eyes, like she was desperately struggling to figure out what this meant and what she should do about it, even as she was so devastatingly flustered she couldn’t even manage basic addition.
Ziratha’s nostrils flared again. This was amazing, and she was starting to become aware of just how long it had been since she’d had a real feeding.
“Wow,” she said teasingly, momentarily letting her instincts get the better of her. “Just from one little kiss, huh?”
Vivi whined indignantly. "I-it’s not… that’s… t-this is nothing!”
“Yeah?” Ziratha couldn’t resist a giggle. “It’s just so funny - you seemed so cocky before. So experienced.”
“I am experienced!” Vivi tried to insist. “I’ve f… um… fu… I mean, you know… I’ve had s-s-s-“
Ziratha’s grin just kept growing as she watched the previously fierce punk trail off, her blush growing steadily deeper as she struggled to bring herself to actually say it. The transformation was quite the sight to behold. She had to keep pushing Vivi further. She just had to. It was part of the experiment, somehow, she reasoned. The succubus took advantage of Vivi’s helpless spluttering to press closer still and put her lips right by her ear.
“Sex?” Ziratha breathed, pouring as much suggestion and seductive glee as she possibly could into that one, single word.
Vivi looked like she was about to explode.
“You see?” Ziratha drew back, smirking victoriously. “You’re not experienced. Not really. Not anymore. You can remember that you’ve had sex before - but that’s it. And you can barely even bring yourself to think about those memories, because you might get too worked up. Neither your mind nor your body knows how to handle it.” She giggled. “Typical virgin.”
“I-I’m not…!” For a moment she thought Vivi was about to start tearing up, but then the punk girl managed to rally herself. “Y-you’re just messing with me! That’s all! It’s your stupid little machine, making me all confused. T-that’s the only reason I can’t think straight right now. I’m not, um, w-worked up.”
“Yeah?” Ziratha challenged. “Then explain this for me, please.”
She reached down and rested her hand firmly on the big, unmistakable tent in Vivi’s skirt.
Immediately, Vivi went as white as a sheet. Clearly, until that moment, she hadn’t noticed the huge hard-on she was sporting. She attempted a protest, or perhaps an explanation, but all that came out was a few strangled, incoherent sounds.
“My, my.” Ziratha licked her lips again, without even realizing it. She was so very hungry. “You see? You’ve become so adorably excitable.”
Vivi whined as Ziratha started stroking her fingertips along the surface of her bulge. “Y-you can’t just… what the hell are you d-doing? This is harassment!”
“I’m a scientist, Vivi,” Ziratha chided, in a voice that made her sound anything but scientific. “After my experiment, it’s only natural for me to give you a nice, thorough examination.”
The punk girl let out another whimpered protest, seeming to sense Ziratha’s ulterior motive, but under the succubus’s ministrations that soon gave way to a weak, pitiful moan. The new virgin was like putty in Ziratha’s hands. The power, the energy, the scent - it was all intoxicating.
“In particular,” Ziratha decided, “I think it’s only proper that I get a reading on your, ah, endurance. I really think - I really do think - it could be very, very scientifically interesting.”
Science was increasingly slipping out of view. Ziratha’s gaze was set firmly on the huge tent in Vivi’s skirt, and it was getting harder and harder to think clearly. After a little teasing, that sweet, sweet virgin energy was coming off Vivi in waves. The laboratory was thick with its scent.
Vivi was still giving the succubus that achingly alluring deer-in-headlights look, but after a moment, her willpower started to wane. She nodded. Ziratha’s nostrils flared. That made sense too. What kind of virgin had the resolve to say ‘no’ to a succubus?
In exchange, Ziratha decided, maybe it was time to make good use of some of the inherent succubic talents she’d spent all of grad school neglecting.
Ziratha straightened up and, as Vivi watched, shrugged out of her heavy lab coat. As it fell to the ground, she reached up and removed her hair tie, shaking her head to make sure her hair cascaded down around her face. Vivi was all but hypnotized by the sight.
But that was only the beginning.
Next, Ziratha took her t-shirt by its hem and lifted it off over her head. She moved slowly, though, letting the helpless punk watching her savor the sight of her tummy and cleavage being revealed. The way she slipped out of her sweatpants was even more seductive. She made a dance of it, swinging her hips from side to side as she peeled them away from her body to expose her long, sculpted legs.
The striptease left Vivi with a little trail of drool escaping one corner of her mouth. She couldn’t seem to stop leering. Her eyes were shining like she couldn’t believe her luck, and the tent in her skirt was now marked with a growing spot of damp precum.
Underneath her clothes, Ziratha wasn’t wearing lingerie, merely a comfy sports bra and a matching pair of boxers. But that, she decided, was plenty to work with when it came to a virgin.
And from the look on Vivi’s face, she was right.
“Tell me,” Ziratha panted, “have you ever gotten a lap dance before?”
Vivi looked almost panicked as she shook her head.
“Great,” Ziratha purred. “Then I suppose this will be a genuine first.”
Effortlessly, the succubus eased her weight into the examination chair, and backed up inch by inch until her naturally huge, curvy ass was pressed right up against Vivi’s hard bulge.
Vivi squeaked like a mouse.
At this point, her every little noise and twitch was like a red rag to a bull. The newly-restored virgin’s scent was so thick in the air Ziratha could taste it. Her hunger was awakening instincts she’d never known she had. Moving to the sound of unheard music, she started grinding and gyrating like she’d been doing it all her life.
The effect the lap dance had on Vivi was nothing short of explosive.
The punk looked like every bit the virgin she now was. Her eyes were wide and practically bulging, and her mouth was contorted into a goofy, uneven shape halfway between an amazed grin and a look of desperate, anxious disbelief.
She looked like she was about to blow.
“C’mon,” Ziratha mocked, in a voice dripping with honey and brimstone. “You can do better than this, right, virgin?”
Her teasing elicited another strangled whimper that just made the succubus want to push Vivi further and further. She danced her way up the punk girl’s body and turned to face her, rolling her hips as she pushed her ass back out behind her to grind into her throbbing bulge.
“Be a good girl,” she teased. “Hold on a little longer for me.”
Vivi just nodded haplessly. Her eyes were scrunched up closed, and she was gripping the sides of the chair so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Ziratha could just imagine what was going on in her head. Baseball scores. Times tables. Whatever she needed to help not utterly humiliate herself.
“Let’s see if you can handle something a little more… direct.”
Ziratha arched her and straightened her tail, daring the virgin punk writhing beneath her to open her eyes and stare at her amazing tits. Then, she reached back and used her deft fingertips to unfasten Vivi’s skirt. Vivi let out a moan that was as much protest as eagerness, but it didn’t stop Ziratha from using the motion of her hips and thighs to slide the garment out of the way, and then pull aside her panties until her hard, leaking cock was completely exposed.
Zirath’s long, forked tongue lolled out of her mouth as she stared at it, dripping drool down onto Vivi.
She needed it.
“Good news, punk,” she breathed, shivering. “You’re about to get your cherry popped.”
“W-w-what?” Vivi exclaimed pitifully.
“It’s, uh, for the experiment,” Ziratha reasoned. She was frenzied as she tore off her bra and panties. “I need to sample, uh… and, well, get a reading on the volume of…” She rolled her eyes and licked her lips. “Actually, forget the science. I’m just hungry, and you’re ripe for the eating.”
“B-b-but!” the trans girl spluttered, as Ziratha positioned herself against her cock. “I-I don’t know if I’m ready yet!”
“Yeah?” Ziratha paused, bemused.
"I mean… uh…” A bashful look came over Vivi’s face. “It’s just… I maybe… I wanted it to be special. You know?”
“Oh my god.” Ziratha snorted a laugh, and grinned wickedly. “You are going to be just delicious.”
In a single motion, she dropped her hips and impaled herself on Vivi’s cock.
Immediately, Vivi’s voice shot up an octave, and she let out a girlish cry of absolute pleasure. Right after, Ziratha’s rich, gleeful moans joined the chorus. The succubus couldn’t believe how good the virgin’s cock felt. It wasn’t just the sensation. It was the sustenance. Merely being in Vivi’s presence for the last few minutes had made Ziratha fiercely hungry. Now, at last, that hunger was being sated.
Once she recovered from the initial hit, Ziratha started moving her hips and bouncing greedily on the end of Vivi’s shaft. With each bounce, the punk girl underneath her thrashed madly in a clumsy, instinctive attempt to meet Ziratha thrust for thrust.
She mostly failed. But the attempt, at least, was adorable.
As she rode the sensitive, inexperienced punk, Ziratha started howling with glee. She’d never had the pleasure before, but it was true what they said - there was nothing like milking a virgin. Her body was humming with energy, and every time she buried Vivi’s cock to the hilt inside her pussy, the sensation got sweeter and sweeter. Something about the flavor of a virgin’s energy was utterly transcendent, and it was made all more nourishing by what it represented.
Ziratha’s complete and total victory.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before Vivi’s moans started to peak, signaling that she was at the edge. Clearly, despite her memories, the virgin had absolutely no stamina. Ziratha wasn’t going to complain. The orgasm was the sweetest part of the meal.
“Go ahead!” Ziratha urged. “Blow your load already. We both know you can’t hold back anymore.”
With a cry of absolute, mortified bliss, Vivi exploded inside her.
Ziratha’s moans peaked too when she felt Vivi’s virile, nourishing cum paint her insides. It was better than anything she’d ever felt before. The power, the pleasure, the feeding - all of it. Ziratha could already feel her body priming itself to swell and change with the infusion of fresh energy.
The ecstatic rush of it made her greedy. She wanted more. She wanted it all. Ziratha squeezed down on Vivi and started riding her harder and faster than ever. Every bounce, every thrust, coaxed more and more sweet, sweet cum from the virgin’s cock, until Vivi was whining in blissful agony as she came down from the high of orgasm. Eventually, Vivi’s eyes rolled back into her head and simply passed out, her mind overwhelmed past its limits by sheer pleasure.
Ziratha kept riding her all the same. The succubus didn’t stop until she’d milked her for every last drop.
Eventually, though, once her hunger was sated, she slumped down next to the punk girl, giggling intermittently in giddy, light-headed glee. The succubus’s head was already filling with daydreams of fame and wealth when Vivi came to and pulled her into a hesitant, needy embrace.
“Hey, u-um,” Vivi whispered earnestly, in a voice that was anything but punk. “W-was it good for you too?”
“Huh?” Ziratha roused herself. There was something strange about the way Vivi sounded. No; about the way she felt. Ziratha had expected her to start returning to something closer to her normal behavior.
“I-I-I just, uh…” Vivi was once again turning bright red. “I-I thought it was really special. You know? Like, um, maybe we really have a connection.”
Ziratha seized Vivi’s hand again and, as Vivi stared at her hopefully, paid close attention to what she could sense from the punk girl. When the penny dropped, she started cackling.
“Oh my god!” she howled. “I can’t believe it. You’re still the same way. As fresh as ever.”
“What do you mean?” Vivi sounded defensive.
“I’m definitely going to need to hold you for some… oversight observation. Just to make sure.” Ziratha licked her lips suggestively. “But I can already tell. It’s like your brain can’t adapt anymore. Not just your energy levels. Your social skills. Your inhibitions. Your stamina. Everything.”
“What?” Vivi pressed anxiously.
“It’s the revirginization,” Ziratha pronounced. “All of it. It’s permanent.”
***
Mere weeks later, it was a very different Ziratha that stood upon the stage to make her big pitch to a room packed full of succubus leaders and investors. It wasn’t just the confidence - although she had that in spades, now that her Nobel prize was apparently all but assured. Her body had changed too. She stood taller. Grander. She exuded power and presence, and all of her body’s assets had gone from merely ‘hot’ to inhumanly mouth-watering. Her horns were a massive, knotted crown upon her head, and her tail was as deft as a whip and as thick as an anaconda.
All thanks to her favorite little meal.
Vivi was standing a little way behind her on the stage, and while physically she was unchanged, she seemed to have shrunk just as Ziratha had grown. She exuded a fragile, nebbish submissiveness despite all tattoos and piercings. She wore a choker collar bearing Ziratha’s name around her neck, and she was wearing a dress.
Ziratha liked her that way. And Vivi was no longer able to argue with the succubus.
“So, as you can see from our data, our early clinical trials have borne out the most promising of my invention’s results,” Ziratha was saying, as she rounded off her speech. “The regression to maiden status is, both psychologically and metaphysically speaking, permanent. The process isn’t damaging, but the subject’s mind naturally sheds its ability to develop new sexual skills or comfort zones, physical or social. Accordingly, their energy levels remain at peak capacity and potency - forever.”
Ziratha paused for a beat, letting the crowd of succubi sitting in front of her drink that in.
“In short,” she concluded, “they’re helpless perma-virgins. Isn’t that right, Vivi?”
Vivi blushed an incredibly deep red and looked down at the floor, but nodded.
“So!” Ziratha clapped her hands. “It’s safe to say that we’re ready to move into pre-production. Soon enough, each and every one of you could have one of my devices in your very own hands - assuming you’re willing to provide me with funding, of course. What do you say, ladies? A future of infinite, renewable energy awaits us!”
As expected, the auditorium was immediately filled with thunderous applause.
The age of the Succubus Energy Crisis was over.
The age of perma-virgin mortals and succubus dominance was about to begin.
---
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