A Funny/Terrifying TMI Transition Anecdote for Pride Month
Every so often I remember I originally made this blog over a decade ago, under a different name, in order to seek out and later answer questions about Trans Stuff and I really kinda got away from doing that. Anway, as I'm writing this, it's pride month, and yesterday someone was talking about weird assumptions people make about trans people's sexuality, I shared this little story, and enough people had strong reactions that I dunno, maybe this should be out there to raise awareness not to trust doctors to know what they're doing. I need to do some preamble here for clueless cis people, feel free to skip down to "the anecdote" if you know this.
So people who haven't dealt with this stuff personally tend to have one of two wildly inaccurate ideas about what a trans woman even is, and no clue that any other trans people even exist. First, you've got the people who straight up do not understand that trans people actually exist, and just think "trans woman" is some sort of alternate term for "drag queen." Still horrifyingly commonplace, but no, if you are ever in a situation where a trans woman stands in front of you and takes all her clothes off, you will in fact be left looking at a naked woman, surrounded by the same sort of clothes any other woman might take off in front of you in this weird thought exercise. You aren't suddenly going to be looking at Robin Williams.
The other weird idea people have is that oh yeah, we go get The Surgery. You know where you walk into an operating room looking like some rugged manly man, and a crack team armed with scalpels and I dunno, magic wands or something go at you like they're dicing an onion for an hour or so, and out walks the most perfectly feminine supermodel like it's a totally different person. This also does not actually happen.
What you actually tend to have going on (emphasis on
tend, this is not universal!) is some girl who thanks to the cruel whims of fate had the wrong hormone mix for the first however many years of her life, which tells her body "hey, hey, do all that boy body stuff! With the hair and the acne and the smells and the rectangular slab body structure and the outward-sticking between the legs situation!" which all kinda sucks if you're a girl, and what really sucks is that wrong hormone mix is like pouring sugar in the gas tank of your brain and really messes you the hell up. But then at some point hey you figure out why your body feels all weird and wrong and people keep looking at you and assuming you're a guy and that isn't sitting right with you, so you go take a thing or two that tells your body "hey, stop making that mix of hormones, that's the wrong ratio, distribute this mix around instead!" and after a while with that biochemical fix going on your body stops doing the boy body stuff and starts doing the girl body stuff, and a SHOCKING amount of that stuff turns out to be "hold the button to charge this skill" and not actual permanent structural formation. Like your feet end up shrinking and your waist cinches in and you get the whole delicate clavicle area, it's wild.
So yeah, like 95% of everything, physically, is just that HRT is basically magic. If anyone ever seems to just look like a guy one day and a girl the next, it's not because of some kinda miracle surgery, it's that her body totally just naturally went all gorgeous supermodel on its own due to HRT and she cleverly hid that from you for a whole by having terrible posture and baggy clothes on. Honestly, it's also kind of shocking how much THAT can do, but that's a whole other ramble. The last 5% is facial hair, which kinda needs to be purged with the cleansing flame once it gets going, and that whole between the legs bit. And just to soapbox real clear here, I wanna stress that breasts are
not on this list of exceptions, because weird bigots are so committed to misinformation on that point. They'll like pay for studies about how women on HRT for 18 months have pretty damn flat chests, and... I mean yes. They don't just instantly show up all at once, they grow slowly over... well honestly your whole life? Gotta give that a bit more time. And of course trans guys have to get those particular bits of fat pulled out but totally get to grow facial hair all regular.
So that just leaves the whole below the belt situation, and... OK that DOES change quite a bit with the whole HRT thing, but if you're only doing the HRT thing, you are most likely going to have a personal junk situation atypical for your gender. For a whole lot of people, this isn't actually a problem. Most people, it seems, actually think that's cool and sexy (although it may not seem it because the exceptions are very loud and awful). And of course some people are really not cool with it just as far as our own personal between the legs question goes, because hey you've got a set of blueprints for how your body should be shaped and they weren't followed properly at first, and you want to get all of this corrected to factory settings. If you're cool with what you have going on their, just kind of imagine if it was flipped to configuration B and how that'd be pretty freaky. Or maybe even configuration C. That one happens to trans people surprisingly often and doesn't have a lot of fans.
Fortunately, there's surgical stuff you can do to deal with that, and a lot of us jokingly refer to it as
The Surgery to make fun of people with that second misconception I covered. It really isn't anything like most people think either. Long story short everyone's got this internal structural thing that's just kinda this curved in upside down Y shape, and if it's pitched forward you're an outie and if it's pitched backward you're an innie. So you you just kinda have someone open you up and poke around in there and twist that bit to the desired angle, do some other weird arcane flesh origami, and then your body goes "ohhhh! NOW I get what you were asking for when you switched up the hormone mix! Hang on!" and gets to work changing up textures and secretions and muscles and you're right where you'd be if your hormone mix was correct from the start. Which is honestly just a super rad science fact if it's relevant to you, and I guess sort of existentially terrifying if you're a weird bigot. ANYWAY, that's a thing, and I'm unfortunately in that small percentage of a small percentage of women where I'm trans and I am very unhappy with the angle that upside down Y came to rest at. And there aren't a lot of surgeons who know how to tweak that and American healthcare sucks and only lets you even consider going to a handful of those.
The Anecdote
So my insurance says the one doctor I can see for The Surgery is this guy conveniently in my home state, but I ask around and people are iffy and I do some preliminary talk and my main doctor does not like his answers, and then oh hey he lost his license to practice because turns out he was kinda self-taught and didn't really know what he was doing and, yikes. So OK option #2 is this woman who lives KINDA FAR FROM ME, and I have to take a train down after getting up at like 4 AM and it's a whole exhausting journey only to literally take 2 steps into her home/office and have her just kinda scream "no fatties!" at me and insist I leave, which is apparently also a dodged bullet because huh, she was getting sued for malpractice around the time.
I had to wait a bit for option #3 to appear on the table. Brand new surgical team starting up a new program in Boston. Cool. Nice to have some new blood in the game, because again, there's like... a couple dozen people with these particular flesh origami skills in the whole world. I don't live anywhere near Boston either, but there's no option 4, so I took another day trip up to talk to the three surgical amigos. They all seemed pretty cool and friendly, which is nice because if you're naked from the waist down sitting in those gynecology stirrups basically giving a job interview, you don't want it to be weird or something.
Anyway I'm all pretty on board with this until I'm talking to surgeon #3, because surgeon #3 has a very weird question for me. I don't recall the exact phrasing, but it was something to the effect of
"hey, so are you sexually interested in men?"
I am not, for what it's worth, and I don't have any particular problem telling people that, so I can totally see a timeline playing out where I just said "no" and proceeded to the operating theater, but this is
kind of a weird thing for a surgeon to be asking. Either he's hitting on his potential patient here, which is all kinds of inappropriate, or there's another question he's really trying to ask that he's too awkward to come right out and ask directly. So I pressed him on that a bit, and again, I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but roughly, his response was
"right, so, there's the standard surgery where you end up with a perfectly normal functional vagina, but there's also this kind of new 'zero depth' procedure where it's there cosmetically, but isn't in any way functional."
Are you screaming right now? You should be screaming right now. Dude here was so nervous about asking a woman a personal question of a sexual nature that he decided to just be real vague and tip-toe around it, which in
most situations is very understandable, but here, the question he was too uncomfortable to ask was if I wanted to be physically capable of sexual activity or not! And the question he decided to ask was just whether or not I was straight!
That is very much not an equivalent question!
At the very least, the most incurious person in the world with enough of a general idea of the whole concept of sex to have the wherewithal to consider whether I was straight
should be aware that lesbians exist. And I would hope if you are aware that lesbians exist, you are aware that there are things a woman might enjoy interacting with that particular anatomical region other than, specifically, a penis attached t a man. I am trying to keep this a reasonably non-explicit post here, but to quote just a couple of the horrified comments I got sharing this little story over on Bluesky earlier- "WOMEN HAVE FINGERS" "And tongues. And sometimes other appendages" "And there are some women who have a penis" That last one in particular is something I could see it being very easy for a lot of people to forget, but when your actual job is to turn women who have penises into women who don't have penises, and you're in the middle of talking to just such a woman, and making her take her pants off to see what materials you have available to work with for your upcoming crafting project, it is very weird for you specifically to be forgetting about that particular fact. Which you are presently staring at (although OK to be fair I may have had pants on for this particular talk).
Now, as it happens, I
am asexual. I don't currently have any plans to interact in such a way with any bits of the anatomy of anyone, be they man, woman, or nonbinary. So I guess making this sort of wacky mix up would be less horrific for me personally than anyone else going to this particular surgical team, but I dunno, I'd kinda like to keep the option open? Like to class this up with a metaphor, I know I don't enjoy doing the fighting game inputs with an arcade stick over here, but I've never had a chance to try a hit box. One of those might actually be way more comfortable for me? There's also various single-player options we're not even bringing to the table. Like there is a whole industry specialized in various peripherals that I do not presently have the port to plug in. Maybe don't go sealing over that panel on me in case I want to mess with those later?
But yeah, just the whole idea here. It's like... imagine if you went to see a dentist, and right before he gasses you up, he asks, "hey by the way, do you enjoy raw carrots?" And you say no because you don't like the specific texture or whatever, but you totally love celery and cucumbers and daikon and such, and then you wake up an hour later and
you have no vagina!
So yeah, I did not get that surgery done by that particular trio that day. Aside from that massive horrifying red flag, there's also the fact that when I said this was a new team, it turned out this was a
NEW TEAM. Between the three of them, the number of vaginoplasties they had performed was... zero. I know everyone has to start somewhere, but like, I don't want to be anyone's trial run.
Also, I did want to share this story because I am not the only person in the world to have been asked this question in this context, and it feels important to me that people in my position know to watch out for that, and make it very clear that you do in fact want the standard procedure, and not the one where the coyote just paints a tunnel on the wall and calls it a day. But I also hope I'm not scaring anyone out of anything. I personally am
CLEARLY CURSED when it comes to this sort of thing, or there's some huge transphobe in my insurance office just actively seeking out the worst possible options and making sure they're all I have access to, but statistically, there is in fact a lower rate of regret with this particular surgery than any other surgery of any kind. More people come out of going to see the junk inversion surgery with a huge grin and two thumbs up than they do with like... knee replacements. So you almost certainly won't have an experience like this. Even if you go to that doctor I had to take a train to see, she apparently usually does pretty good work. This team in Boston probably worked things out. I haven't heard any horror stories. The one guy probably doesn't ask if you're into guys anymore.
But yeah. Back in the 80s you couldn't get any treatment at all as a trans woman unless you were explicitly straight and you had a future husband lined up, and
clearly, we've got doctors still being trained to this day with that sort of framing in mind.
#trans
#transgender
#surgery
#queer
#queerphobia
#transphobia
#bottom surgery
#gender affirming care
#transition
#pride month
#I still need this done btw so if you take out of state health plans and aren't super fatphobic hit me up please
and using vidya references while trying to be coy about how he might want to like, maybe dildo the hell out of his that there new vagina? Vomit.