There is no safe sex. There is no safe life.
Fucking, transitioning, and resisting the state all require admitting risk into your life.
I had to get a gonorrhea shot not too long ago.
Dealing with gonorrhea was a pain in the ass — the intramuscular injection hurt, and my arm stung for days. The antibiotic dose was heavy — a whopping 500 milligrams of ceftriaxone, as the once-standard dose of 250 milligrams no longer works for all patients (a not-so-ironic consequence of antibiotics being so heavily overprescribed).
Blasting my body with that much medication left me exhausted for a week. I had to stop having sex until the infection cleared up, and inform all my recent sexual partners about it. Some of them got frightened by any talk of disease and didn’t want to meet up with me anymore. One couple even thought that I was accusing them of getting me sick, as if unknowingly transmitting a virus was an action for which they could be blamed (it is not). Since I’d been using condoms, I was a little surprised the transmission had happened, and that made me unwilling to jump into bed with unfamiliar partners for a while.
Through all this hassle, though, I never felt one iota of shame. Why? Because I understood that the kinds of sex I enjoy comes with risks, I had taken steps to…
