I have an absolutely huge deficit of touch in my life. In my daily life I have almost no touch of any sort let alone touch that is satisfying, appropriate and nourishing. In addition this deficit stretches across almost my entire life since shortly after I was born.

Although I've been aware of this touch-deficit for many years I've recently done a bunch of therapy to help me focus more closely on the place of touch in my life. Through this therapy work I now clearly understand that my touch-deficit has come about through a combination of three main elements: developmental trauma i.e. simply not being held enough as a baby and being frequently abandoned, being assigned male i.e. baby boys shouldn't be coddled, which led to quite extreme abandonment, and living in a social landscape in which men's touch is read as dangerous.

I recognise that as a result of these major elements I don't have a good repertoire nor much experience around how to get my touch needs met - and, further than that and much more seriously, I find it incredibly hard to even be able to identify what those needs are or how to specifically and concretely meet them.

I've painfully learned too that I have been quite compulsive around touch - reaching out to simply take touch without consent, including even in situations where people have explicitly asked me not to touch them. I've come to understand that my trauma around lack of touch is so intense that I have been unable to face the risk of getting a "no" from someone if I ask for consent. To avoid the risk of "no", then, I have often just reached out and taken touch.

I've managed after some years of work now to unpick that compulsion and to unwind the trauma-response patterns that were sedimented in my body and which drove the compulsion. I'm now in a much better place around the abandonment trauma, and I'm able now to hear and feel "no" and to neither compulsively take touch nor dissociate and pretend "that's ok".

With this new spaciousness around my own touch-trauma I'm now ready to start really learning and experimenting with everything around incorporating touch into my life in a totally new way. And in starting on this I've come across another element of our shared social life.

My dear friends who were assigned female and subject to femininity socialisation, some of whom I've done that compulsive non-consensual take, are alerting me that, because of their own touch-trauma they really don't have much space to hold my experimenting and exploration. The common femininity trauma around touch is pretty much the opposite to mine i.e. far too much touch, invasive touch, and so on. As a result many people assigned female get intensely triggered around mistakes or clumsiness around touch i.e. when it's less than 100% perfectly consensual.

Further, in the face of aversion-reactions from people to my touch I myself get intensely triggered. It sends me into despair, grief, and an almost paranoid sensation that I'm "contaminated" in some essential way. While this is certainly more potential learning for me, it's clearly not very wise, nor very kind - for me or my friends - to pursue my experimentation and exploring in such a volatile and hair-trigger environment.

For example, in my latest experience of touch-trauma with a dear friend, I was being playful in a very innocent-child way and sought to draw them in to that play. Although they and I have held our trauma responses really beautifully, and relationally everything feels clear, it's an enormously edgy relational moment which has drawn my friend non-consensually into a lot of inner work, while I feel that there's no space for me to simply play.

Two obvious courses are possible. One is that I explore only with my friends assigned female who feel very spacious around touch. I am already doing this.

Another course is that I explore with people who were assigned male and who thus are far more likely to share with me a significant touch-deficit as well as all the related issues and experiences around that gender assignment.

This second course is immensely attractive to me for several reasons.

It prompts me to add a further dimension to existing friendships and a reason to connect with yet-unknown people about the whole area of touch, masculinity, our experiences, the politics of gender, and how we might together address the harms we experience around touch.

It's also attractive because it disrupts a dominant pattern in our binarised world: men look for a whole bunch of basic human needs to be met by women. This arrangement not only puts a huge load on people assigned female. It also leaves people assigned male really disempowered around their own needs. Indeed it is my desire to find my own agency and to become empowered to meet my touch needs which is motivating me here, so of course seeking support with other people who experience a similar disempowerment really makes sense.

This feels like an immensely desirable and rich reason to connect with other people who suffer from masculinity socialisation. The prospect of being able to share deeply, from our experience of that socialisation, about such an intimate yet entirely ordinary human need as touch is always attractive to me. My few experiences to date of this sharing shows me how deeply validating it is to have my needs acknowledged, and to have my suffering recognised because it is shared. And talking over the whole area - the dissociation, the discomfort, the pain and dissatisfaction, the trauma-triggers, and the experience of others getting triggered - feels like such a relief and such an experience of kinship and siblinghood.

A part of such contact and sharing could also be acknowledging and addressing the harms we've brought to others especially people assigned female through non-consensual touch. Part of unwinding my own touch-trauma has been acknowledging and doing what I can to heal some relational harms that I've created.

What I have discovered through my own exploration so far is that, while of course relational harms need to be addressed, without addressing the source of my own trauma around my own needs all I had previously managed to do was behaviour modification i.e. managing to stop myself compulsively reaching out.

But in any case I want to do a great deal more than simply not cause harm to others. I want to meet my core human needs and for my close people to fully and effortlessly meet those core needs simply because all our needs are important and we contrive collectively to meet them in each other and together.

Another reason that connecting with other people assigned male around touch is its political potential. To me there is a great dearth of really intimate insider accounts of the structure and experience of masculinity, and very little really critical insider analysis of it analogous to the fabulous work second-wave feminists did into femininity. As a result there is very little information available in our culture to anyone about what it's like to be gendered male and the personal impact of masculinity socialisation, how masculinity as a social structure is fabricated and maintained, or how masculinity relates to other major social formations.

Sharing with others assigned male about touch can potentially add to collective understanding about masculinity overall, since touch-trauma is such a widespread experience. This can lead to shared political projects, for example making this information widely available and collaborating with others working in similar areas.

Sharing deeply with others about our experience, disrupting patterns of conventional masculinity, and working together politically are all highly attractive in themselves. But perhaps most significantly such shared exploration potentially also leads to personal relationships and networks in which we learn to meet touch needs with each other, and where we could explore touch pleasure and incorporate touch pleasure as an ordinary part of close friendships alongside the others other areas of rich sharing.

My inspiration here is what I hear of very rich relationships that some of my friends have inside their intersectional-feminist-queer networks. The inspiring friendships are those which span everyday life-together, practical life projects, personal and spiritual growth, emotional support, political activism and community development. While I certainly do have friendships of that nature with some close people assigned female, there's a level at which their and my experience diverge along gender-binary lines and, as I discuss above in relation to touch, we have different needs around growth and healing in some specific areas.

I notice that I simply don't have any friendships with people who share my gender socialisation that are similar in complexity, richness, depth and breadth to my other friends. I wonder about the extent to which I and my friends assigned male are simply complying with masculinity socialisation by not exploring what is possible among us.

Clearly there's a gap there in my own life that can be filled - and I want to fill it, both because I love connecting deeply and also because I have core unmet human needs that may potentially be met through such connecting.