Mira Bellwether (March 31, 1982December 25, 2022) was an American author, artist, and sex educator best known for Fucking Trans Women, a single-issue zine in which she wrote and illustrated all articles. Described in Sexuality & Culture as "a comprehensive guide to trans women's sexuality", Fucking Trans Women was the first publication of note to focus on sex with trans women and was innovative in its focus on trans women's own perspectives and its inclusion of instructions for many of the sex acts depicted.
Early life and gender transition
Mira Bellwether was born on March 31, 1982. 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. 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. She left Iowa as soon as she was able to. 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".
Fucking Trans Women and sex education
In 2010, living in Iowa at the time, 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. (Bellwether grew frustrated in subsequent years as, despite issue #0's popularity, submissions for issue #1 failed to materialize.) The zine (sometimes abbreviated FTW) explores a variety of sexual activities involving trans women, primarily ones who are pre-op or non-op with respect to bottom surgery. Bellwether emphasized sex acts possible with flaccid penises or not involving penises at all, writing that "almost all sexual discourse on penises" was "on erect penises, hard penises, penetrating penises". Bellwether emphasized this point throughout the rest of her life. She told Autostraddle in 2013: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. Lucie Fielding's Trans Sex (2021) cites Bellwether on this topic among others. 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.
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. The zine in turn popularized that act. Muffing has since received coverage in Autostraddle, Playboy, Broadly, and The Daily Dot, with Fielding promoting it in Trans Sex and Jessica Stoya's sex advice column with Slate. Bellwether likewise continued to promote muffing as an affirming form of masturbation in the years following the release of Fucking Trans Woman.
Fucking Trans Women is heavily colored by Bellwether's own experiences as a disabled trans woman. Writes Sloane Holzer in Them: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.
Personal life and advocacy
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. In 2020, the two launched a GoFundMe seeking funds for Bellwether's planned vaginoplasty.