Mira Bellwether

Mira Bellwether[lower-alpha 1] was born on March 31, 1982.[7] Her mother, Tammy, was a hospice nurse; her father, Terry, was a respiratory therapist. In her youth she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, a disability that would frame the rest of her life.[4] Raised in the U.S. state of Iowa, she began playing dress-up with girls starting at the age of six, ending when her parents moved to a more rural area in her teens. Describing herself later as "the smallest, slightest boy [she] knew", Bellwether experimented with women's clothing and makeup—drag, in her words—while at the same time exploring her sexuality.[8] She left Iowa as soon as she was able to.[4] As of 2010, she described herself as "a trans dyke and student ... a femme, a queer, a dork, a cocksucker, and lots of other things".[1]

In 2010, living in Iowa at the time,[9] Bellwether self-published Fucking Trans Women #0, intended as the first issue of a zine about sex with trans women. Finding submitted materials insufficient, she chose to make the zine a solo effort and number it "#0" to leave room for a "#1" featuring others' contributions.[10] (Bellwether grew frustrated in subsequent years as, despite issue #0's popularity, submissions for issue #1 failed to materialize.[4]) The zine (sometimes abbreviated FTW) explores a variety of sexual activities involving trans women,[lower-alpha 2] primarily ones who are pre-op or non-op with respect to bottom surgery.[11] Bellwether emphasized sex acts possible with flaccid penises or not involving penises at all,[12] writing that "almost all sexual discourse on penises" was "on erect penises, hard penises, penetrating penises".[13] Bellwether emphasized this point throughout the rest of her life. She told Autostraddle in 2013:[14]

One thing that I really tried to capture in FTW was that there are all sorts of ways to pleasure trans women. I gave a lot of time to soft penises for this reason, because in sexual literature they are almost completely ignored, and if they're not ignored, they're treated as defective or at rest or, even worse, an object of pity or scorn.

This attitude subverted prevailing associations regarding inability to become erect.[15] Lucie Fielding's Trans Sex (2021) cites Bellwether on this topic among others.[16] Fielding later said of Bellwether's influence on her, "Her work is stating that our bodies should not just be tolerable or accepted, but that they are there to be joyously experienced", crediting Fucking Trans Women as "a huge lightbulb moment" in her own gender transition.[4]

Bellwether coined the term muffing in Fucking Trans Women to refer to stimulation of the inguinal canals with fingers, testicles, or both—a practice she discovered by accident while tucking.[17] The zine in turn popularized that act.[18] Muffing has since received coverage in Autostraddle,[19] Playboy,[17] Broadly,[11] and The Daily Dot,[20] with Fielding promoting it in Trans Sex[21] and Jessica Stoya's sex advice column with Slate.[22] Bellwether likewise continued to promote muffing as an affirming form of masturbation in the years following the release of Fucking Trans Woman.[23]

Fucking Trans Women is heavily colored by Bellwether's own experiences as a disabled trans woman. Writes Sloane Holzer in Them:[4]

The innovative determination it takes to survive in the world as a disabled person is evident in FTW and all of Mira's writing about sex. She was tenacious and endlessly curious, always focused on sharing new, accessible ways to move through a hostile world and still find pleasure.

In her 20s and early 30s, Bellwether moved numerous times around the U.S. to cities including Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco, ultimately settling down in 2016 in New York City with her husband, who had read Fucking Trans Women for advice on dating his first trans girlfriend years prior to meeting Bellwether.[4] In 2020, the two launched a GoFundMe seeking funds for Bellwether's planned vaginoplasty.[24]

In 2015, Bellwether advocated for the release of an Illinois trans woman who was arrested after checking in to a Des Moines, Iowa, hotel with an ID bearing a male gender marker.[25] Bellwether's other advocacy for trans women included supporting Camp Trans and speaking out for access to transgender hormone therapy. According to her widower, on at least one occasion she bailed out a transgender sex worker but took no credit.[4]

Bellwether was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2021. The cancer returned at stage four in September 2022. On December 19, 2022, two weeks into a hospital stay, Bellwether was admitted to an intensive care unit, where she had a massive stroke; she died on December 25 beside her husband and sister.[26] Her death led to grief within many trans communities.[27] Bellwether's widower subsequently proclaimed March 31, 2023—Bellwether's birthday, and also International Transgender Day of Visibility—the "First Annual Mira Bellwether Buy a Trans Woman a Pizza Day", pizza in the trans community often serving as a placeholder for any sort of care.[28]

Ro White of Autostraddle, obituarizing Bellwether, said that "Writing about trans bodies in a way that centers playfulness—or really, writing about trans bodies at all—was revolutionary in 2010, and it's still revolutionary today."[29] Ana Valens, who had frequently written about Bellwether's work, credited her career to her, writing in a tweet that Fucking Trans Women had "changed the landscape of trans and queer sexuality" and "saved countless trans people and opened their eyes to what their bodies can do and be".[30] Kai Cheng Thom in Xtra Magazine wrote that "Bellwether profoundly transformed the conversation around trans women and sex, to the extent that her zine has attained mythic status among us: We tell each other about it as though we are passing on community lore to one another."[27] Holzer's profile in Them, published several months after Bellwether's death, begins, "Few people have done more to expand our understanding of women's sexuality than Mira Bellwether".[4]