Gooning Part 1: The Seeking

*Part of the Practicing Woman series on Gooning. Part 1: The Seeking | Part 2: The Opening | Part 3: Harm Reduction*

*This series talks honestly about porn, sex, and some pretty intense experiences. I'm sharing it because gooning is touching a lot of people's lives right now — surveys suggest something like one in four people have tried it — and almost nothing exists that takes it seriously, written by someone who's actually been there. I couldn't find anything like that when I needed it. So here it is.*

I've been looking at porn as far back as I can remember.

In middle school, my friend and I got caught because the dial-up connection we used turned out to be one that charged by the minute. I'd told him not to use that one. The bill arrived and I learned two things: that desire has consequences, and that mine was already running considerably ahead of what I could explain to anyone around me.

By the time I was a teenager, I'd found the erotic stories about control, about being consumed, about disappearing completely into something larger. I didn't have language for why. I just knew that regular pornography left me feeling like I'd eaten something and was still hungry, while the other stuff felt like it was reaching toward something real.

I think about that kid sometimes. She was already looking for something specific. She just didn't know what to call it yet.

The real world offered nothing that pointed anywhere useful.

Growing up in a body everyone around me read as male, the concept of bodily autonomy simply hadn't arrived for me. That there was a line around myself, and that others would need to respect it — this had not occurred to me. I knew you shouldn't injure people. That was about it. In my fumbling attempts to navigate desire and connection, I did some things that weren't okay, and some things were done to me that weren't okay, and I didn't have the frameworks to understand either category at the time.

I remember being on the wrestling team. I was the second biggest person on the team. The biggest person would regularly grab my breasts and make comments about them. It wasn't until I transitioned that I understood that had been sexual assault. I just hadn't known it was possible to name it that way.

I didn't have sex until I was twenty. I had no idea how to express that I was attracted to someone — every time I tried it went badly, and eventually I just stopped trying. So I held it all in and waited for people to be obvious about their interest in me first. Which mostly meant I ended up in connections with people I wasn't particularly drawn to. Or I'd find this spark of intensity with someone because we were both really bad at relationships, run toward that spark, and unhealthy dynamics would follow. I didn't know how to locate what I actually wanted, let alone say it.

In my twenties I'd occasionally see sex workers, and a few times hooked up with men through apps like Grindr. Some of it was about finding sexual connection, though I couldn't find whatever I was actually looking for through any of it. With the sex workers especially, I realised the conversation mattered to me as much as anything physical — I needed somewhere I could be a little more myself than I usually got to be. Even that was partial. What I was reaching for was somewhere else entirely.

Technology was where I actually lived. Computer games through childhood and into my twenties — they were the one space where I had something like freedom to be myself, to move through a world without the constant management of how I was being perceived. I played obsessively, and when I started stepping away from them it was only because I was beginning to heal from things I hadn't fully named yet. By my early thirties my social life was primarily online — forums, communities, the kind of connection that comes from reading through posts and recognising yourself in what other people write, even when you're not actively participating. I don't know that I was really connecting with people. But I could feel like I was in community, and some nights that was enough.

It was in those digital spaces that I found erotic hypnosis.

I turned to it with a dedication that was hard to explain even to myself. I've never done it live — recordings only, always. I'd drop into states that felt entirely different from ordinary consciousness, and I kept going back. A decade and a half of that, working at it quietly, alone, developing a capacity I had no map for and no one to ask about.

Alongside that, I'd also developed a well-established edging practice — using pornography to deliberately extend arousal over time rather than moving toward release. That had been going on for well over a decade, too. So by the time I encountered gooning, I wasn't just bringing fifteen years of erotic hypnosis capacity. I was also bringing a long-established edging practice. The two things that gooning does — induction and edging — I'd been doing both, separately, for years without ever connecting them or understanding what I was building toward.

The spiritual world would probably look at what I was doing and see a person with a porn habit. I understand why. But that framing misses something real. I was building capacity. Not deliberately, not with any guidance, just through repetition and attention and a body that kept reaching for something it knew it needed. The concentration required to drop into those states. The ability to follow a voice into altered consciousness and find your way back. The tolerance for intensity. These are things traditions spend years trying to cultivate. I was doing it alone, in my bedroom, with no recognition that that's what was happening.

I only understand this in retrospect. At the time, it was just what I did.

In my early thirties I entered the kink scene in Sydney. It was one of the first social spaces where I felt I could start to be myself, and I dived right in. I'd go to parties at least once a month while figuring out I was some weird tranny, working a government office job where everyone seemed to have two and a half kids and a white picket fence. Just being in a space where people were fucking openly made me feel more normal. The place felt like home enough that I'd even sometimes end up crashing with the core crew in an old brothel turned sex club, catching a few hours' sleep on the one dry spot on the cheap mattress before the trains started and I could go home, simultaneously disgusted and turned on by where I was sleeping. I learned rope. I learned hot wax and impact play and how to hold space for someone genuinely letting go.

What I was looking for was a dominant. Someone genuinely worthy of my submission — not a role, not a scene with a negotiated end time, but the real thing. I tried, once or twice, including one shorter relationship where that was the shape of what we were reaching for. But the people around me who wanted to connect with me weren't safe for me to let go with — some because of where they were in their own lives, some because what I needed might have been genuinely difficult for any human to provide. Every attempt made the craving sharper rather than quieter.

There's a particular exhaustion that comes from a life spent managing other people's comfort. Trans women know it so well that it deserves a post in its own right. Others carry similar things too. Every interaction carries the low hum of calculation: how much of myself can I be here, how much is safe to show, what do I need to contain so the other person isn't overwhelmed. It doesn't always feel like effort because it becomes so automatic. But it is effort. Constant, relentless, invisible effort.

I had never, not once, in any relationship or space, had actual permission to put that down.

At thirty-eight, after three years on the waitlist, I finally had gender affirmation surgery.

The night before I left, my friends gathered under a marquee in the garden — blankets spread on the ground, everyone settled in close. They gave me a group massage, hands passing over me one to the next, each person pouring their wishes for the surgery and for what came after into the touch. There was an altar at the centre of it, the theme transformation — people had brought objects from nature, seed pods and flowers and branches, pieces of art, things that carried the feeling of change. A particularly twisted, knobbly branch caught my eye. I still have it on my altar now, along with a seed pod and a piece of someone's art from that night.

As a community we're still building what ritual looks like around transition — most of us didn't have anything handed down, so we're making it as we go. This felt like one of those moments of genuine invention.

My surgeon was a trans woman. She is known for her work, and before I went in for surgery she looked at me and told me that the women she operated on were special. Not as a pleasantry — there was a knowing in the way she said it, a weight behind the words that made clear she meant something real by it.

If you hold transness as a spiritual lineage rather than just a medical category, then a trans woman performing surgery on another trans woman is transmission on one of the deepest levels possible. She had spent years navigating her own body and her own life in ways I was still learning. Something of that moved between us in that room that made her words come true.

I had spent most of my life chasing the most intense erotic experiences I could find. What I hadn't understood, until I woke up from surgery, was that I'd been trying to access everything through a dial-up connection. Now I could plug the fibre optic cable directly into myself. Everything I'd been reaching for had been available at a completely different resolution all along. I just hadn't had the hardware.

Seven weeks later I was at Tropical Fruits.

Tropical Fruits is a New Year's queer festival in the Northern Rivers — several thousand people, a community that has been gathering there for decades. In 2023 it almost didn't happen. The 2022 floods had hit the region hard and for a long time it wasn't clear the festival would come back. But people who had never helped before showed up and helped. The community pulled together in ways that communities sometimes do when something that matters is genuinely at risk. And they got it across the line.

I should say something about dance floors before I go further, because it matters for what happened next. I had never really been able to connect with one. Decades of being bullied about dancing had left me in an activated state the moment I stepped onto one — body braced, aware of being watched, unable to let go and fully drop in. Dance floors were places I survived rather than places I inhabited.

New Year's Eve, one of the stages had four trans DJs back to back. I was there for all of it. It was my first time with MDMA on a dance floor, and something cracked open in me that night that I am still feeling the consequences of. I had been around electronic music before — heard it, been in proximity to it. But I had never felt it the way I felt it that night. The music went straight into the new body and found something there that hadn't been accessible before. By the time the sun came up I knew something had changed.

The next night was different again. New Year's Day, the party where everyone who had made the festival happen got to finally let loose. The people who had carried it through the flood recovery, who had shown up when it wasn't clear there was anything left to show up for, all of them on the dance floor together. Most of us stripped down to underwear. No management of how we were being perceived. Just our bodies, and the music, and each other.

I remember at one point a small group of other festival attendees — not part of the community, just other people at the event — did something on the dance floor that intruded on what we had built together in that space. I was deep enough in the trance state that the details didn't stay. What I remember is what happened next. The group saw it. Digested it. And without a single word spoken, without any discussion, we made a decision together about how to respond. A collective embodied decision in a split second, coming from the same place we'd all been dancing from.

I have been on dance floors since. I may never stand on one quite like that again.

Those two nights changed my relationship to music, to my body, to what I understood was possible between people sharing a space. And they happened seven weeks after I woke up from surgery with a body I was still learning.

In the low that followed — the return to ordinary life after something had cracked open — I was still recovering, in pain, mostly isolated, in a body I desperately wanted to understand. The thing I'd been circling for more than twenty years was about to find its way in.