Autopridophilia

Pyschosexual realness, trans alimony, and the Shia from Nazareth

You can fly!

Blessed are the fabulous. I love allies but for those of you who aren’t members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, I pity how dull you are. I can’t imagine what it’s like being such a conformist loser that you don’t identify into a group of letters. To quote a breaking New York Times editorial on whether or not we should still be snubbing family who voted for Trump, “Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums [sic].” So sorry/not sorry, if you’re not queer I’m afraid your name still isn’t on the list.

“Blessed are the fabulous” was the subject of my local Episcopal priest’s latest email. Good Christian that he is, he’s been reminding us religiously that Glasgow Pride is FAST APPROACHING. Last week’s missive tacked on something special to the yass qween announcement: a shout out to the Shia community for the parade they were having to honor a 7^th Century martyr. Similar to the one that stopped outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, this festival represents universal human rights, something Christianity knows nothing about. We queers of course support the Sunni community as well, but it warms the heart to have Father Pride remind us why we go to church. Shia liberation is queer liberation.

Glasgow of course has two Pride parades because Pride 1 fell behind on its bills so they had to set up Mardi Gla. Also, it’s important to have one in July to offset the misinformation that Pride is just in June—and to heal the exclusionary aftershocks of Mother’s and Father’s Days. Thankfully my priest attends both and doesn’t stop there. This year he hit Paris Pride and probably has a very full passport from decades of focusing on First World LGBT instead of boring things in his own diocese like homelessness, elderly outreach, and drug addiction.

“Blessed are the fabulous” cuts right to the heart of what the Beatitudes are about, or should be about if you’re practicing intentionality. The spurious list in Matthew and Luke about the meek, the hungry, and those who mourn obviously results from bad translators trying to impose systemic humility on us. What Jesus actually said was, “You are amazing. Everything you think about yourself, everywhere you touch yourself, is greater than anyone on earth. Thine be the glitter. Blessed are you in your pursuit of the greatest satisfaction of the appetites, for this is the kingdom of heaven.”

The true message of the Beatitudes comes to light in my priest’s passion for vestments and manicures. You should see the refined state of those lengthy talons. I just wish he would bring what I suspect is his true drag self more explicitly into his ministry. He does after all have a “101 Things about Me” page on his website, and they don’t call it a dog collar for nothing. Bring on the neon wig and, while we’re at it, the harness and the dog mask. Make the Eucharist Kinky Again.

Loving Pride nowadays is a modality, an operational oppositionness to all forms of normativity. It’s a special something you feel deep within and down below, where intimacy meets politics, where the eternally anal stage of psychosexual development resists conservatism. From ethical non-monogamy to getting turned on by Zohran Mamdani’s dad defending sticking a tire around someone and lighting it on fire to fight oppression, Pride is a fetish and we are here for it.

I derived the name autopridophilia from a term that Nazi TERFs latched onto as if it was a bad thing. I am of course talking about autogynephilia, the condition the majority of our trans sisters have which links their identity to how titillated they are by having sex with a woman as a woman. Many kink femmes for instance find it sexy to photograph themselves in lingerie in the changing rooms of department stores. Likewise, the Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Long Chu discovered how hard she could get by watching sissy porn and thus realized she was in fact a horny woman whose anus is a universal vagina. Her poetry and journalism explore the idea that to be a woman is to be a blank-face with an open mouth, the vagina a mere bonus hole that gets pounded. Blessed are the porn obsessed, for they shall spill their seed.

Lest you think the fabulousness stops with Long’s wong, a judge in Brighton has finally given our community the win we have been waiting for by ordering a cis woman to cover half of her trans wife’s vaginoplasty and other life-saving procedures. After years of working in finance and funding the family’s international lifestyle, the trans wife had no choice but to dish out £160,000 on her transition, as well as £14,000 in a month on clothes and nails and another £13,000 on tattoos. Anyone who thinks she should cough up alimony or child support when she was denied the pleasure of breast-feeding her kids has no pride. By contrast, no one understood the need for a spending spree better than the genderfluid Offspring of God.

If you’re wanting to learn more about our peerless joy or are just poly curious, my faith leader will be giving LGBT themed tours of the hallowed house for the rest of the season. In addition to a mural of the Shia prophet from Nazareth, whose long hair proves biological sex is a construct, there are free Queer Liberation fist badges available for all ages at the entrance. I’m currently fundraising to have the trans wife in Brighton’s testimony carved over the front doors: “You marry a trans person. You live with a trans person. You benefit from a trans person. They are suicidal and you support them.” The erotics of persuasion, so affirming, so divine. Only the fabulously exceptional are capable of such exquisite manipulation, an emotional gift we naturally share with Jesus. The Way, the Truth, the Pride.