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My Penis, Myself

I didn't need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.

Photo: Dan Winters. Groomer: Dark-green Dale Figueroa.

Photo: Dan Winters. Groomer: Light-green Dale Figueroa.

Photograph: Dan Winters. Groomer: Green Dale Figueroa.

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On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.

In the automobile outside the doctor'southward office afterward, I aptitude my torso in half and bawled, my confront against the dashboard, my swain petting my back to console me but confused. Isn't information technology good news that they tin exercise it? — like: At all? And obviously, yes. Information technology was. Growing up without ane, I'd thought or maybe convinced myself that mine would grow in later — to the extent that when I see a woman in tight pants, I still ofttimes instinctively think, Where is her penis? — but my period at 12 aptly, agonizingly bled to death that increasingly implausible dream of reconciling with life, with God, that he wouldn't make me similar this and leave me like this forever. So the news, 28 years afterwards, that the agony was going to exist over — abundantly over — was a bit much to take in.

I fixated instead on the information that a pert little average-flaccid parcel was not an choice for me. (If I even wanted that.) (And did I?) When I'd asked the surgeon how large my impending penis was going to be, he could only guess, pointing to the reusable water canteen in my hand, a metal cylinder nine inches in circumference: "Smaller than that."

I was so different from everybody else already.

I was already always so different.

Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to take. "Well, I volition dear you no matter what, sweetie," a cis female all-time friend of mine said when I told her I was transitioning, years before — "as long as you don't get a dick." One flatly demanded, "Don't get a dick." It was, another transmasculine person I used to know said, disgusting, insane to want and to have a surgeon make a sensate phallus out of your arm or leg or somewhere and Frankenstitch information technology to your body, to go and then far out of your mode to opt in to a tool, perhaps the tool, of so much suffering. Almost transmasculine people didn't go one. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named later not getting i: Original Plumbing. I saw transmasculine support groups shut downwardly and go silent more than once when someone brought up the procedure, and after, when I was that someone, I was twice invited to go out "with other people who might want to talk well-nigh that." Whatever magical spectrum of unicorn gender expression was otherwise being embraced, information technology concluded firmly before needing a socially, culturally, politically, historically, personally, emotionally, medically complicated dick.

Simply I did. And I couldn't outrun information technology any longer. Literally: The solar day I gave in and admitted that for me information technology was penis or death came afterward a last-ditch bout of deprival in which I drove ane,400 miles in three days only to have to admit, devastated, at my destination that I couldn't avoid information technology anymore.

So there I was then, finally, showing upwardly to online specialized transmasculine back up groups for people seeking or recovering from phallo, between hours spent hustling to phone call (six) surgeons' offices about consults and my PCP'south role (19 times) for referrals and my insurance company (17 times — that I wrote downwardly, anyway) for the necessary authorizations. And hither they were, these trans and nonbinary people of many races and locations, coming together to try to concur 1 another'south questions and fears about which donor site on their trunk to use, and how the site had (or hadn't) recovered, and how much sensation they had ("My whole dick feels similar a behemothic clit!" i elated guy described his rare, very all-time-case outcome once to widened optics all effectually), and what size testicle implants they got if they got testicles (which are optional) at all, and which surgeon they went to and when could you go back to piece of work and who in the earth took care of you, and did anybody else have this or that or a whole series of fistulas or strictures around their new urethral hookup that rerouted their pee and is also optional, and did anyone else only leave their urethra where it is? Once, a pre-op 52-year-old Black homo who was struggling with money and his disability and insurance asked if having a penis was really going to make a divergence, save any of this pain he was barely surviving, and I watched as the post-op group members calmly assured him that, yeah, information technology would. If he could just hang on, hang on, hang in in that location.

"It gave me a piffling more promise," he told me afterwards, "to keep going."

"I would rather have died on the table than non had the surgery," ane Korean American guy with swell sweaters responded (and, similar everybody here, gave me permission to repeat), to a chorus of nodding Zoom heads.

It has happened at least once that someone did die. I was fully ready to, by which I mean I'd just spent most the terminal of my savings, which I'd burned navigating the emotional-mental-social-medical-legal-farthermost-marginalization mindfuck shitshow of transitioning, on a burying plot merely in instance. One of the nodding heads in the group belonged to a nonbinary white person who was still horizontal in recovery from having had, a calendar week prior, the worst happen, which was that later their procedure, in which all the fat and peel had been stripped from their left forearm from wrist to nearly elbow, along with major nerves, an avenue, and veins, and then shaped into a tube and connected, in conscientious layers, to skin and blood vessels and nerves in their pelvis, their new penis had failed.

It died. On them.

Simply here they were, already getting ready for their surgeons to harvest a whole other part of their body inside the month with nothing hesitation. Because those three days they'd had their penis, they said, before being rushed into an eight-hour surgery that couldn't relieve it — the feeling of it, fifty-fifty just for one moment, even however bloody and painful and packed with stitches: worth information technology. And I understood that immediately when, after a yearlong surgery waiting list and a deep quarantine and an anguished prerequisite COVID test I would either pass or lose my date over, I woke up final December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a xl-square-inch hole in my thigh where I'd been skinned downwards to the musculus, I could of a sudden feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was.

There'south a scene in Disney'due south original Dumbo when the child elephant's mom cradles him in her trunk and sings to him, exuding love. Quietly, but wholly. Every bit a kid feeling utterly unheld by this world, I hated it.

As a grown man in a hospital bed, chest loosely draped with a gown in a low-lit Dec room, I looked downward in the direction of a penis I'd assumed would be covered in bandages — simply then at that place it just was. Laid out at an angle toward my left thigh, propped on a dark-green cloth. And I, awed and heartful and weeping, sang that song to it.

Ba-by mine, la na na naaaaaaaaa.

I don't know the words.

Baaaa-byyyy mine, na na na    naaaaaaaa.

La, laaaaaa, la — na na na naaa,

La na na naa, infant of miiine.

While I'd been sleeping, ii microsurgeons, a reconstructive urologist, a surgical beau, and a surgical resident had, among other things, cut a seven-past-half-dozen-inch rectangle out of my right inductive lateral thigh. They'd taken all the skin and fat, plus one large nerve and some veins attached to the muscle, and connected the skin to itself in the shape of a phallus. Then they slipped the whole matter nether two of my thigh muscles, pulled up out of the way with a steel retractor, dragged the phallus across my groin under the skin, and pulled it back out into the world through a hole cut in the peel over my pubic os. They connected the new penis's nerve to one of the nerve bundles in my native penis, which some people call a clitoris (embryologically, the cells are the same), which they'd cutting complimentary of its ligaments, then skinned, then tunneled up under the pare and out to the landing site of the new penis, the base of operations of which they joined to the base of my pelvis, putting me all together with sutures, some finer than a human hair.

"That penis," Dr. Bauback Safa, ane of the microsurgeons, said when he came by after to see me — to run into us — "looks perfect."

He was talking mostly about blood menstruum. He did not hateful that, with its fresh stitches and a round, bloody hole at the pinnacle where the peel would eventually shut together, it would expect like any other penis at the spa. Simply also, it was a lovely shape. Dr. Safa had correctly estimated that the width — which can be debulked with further surgery but is initially determined by peel and fatty thickness — would country on the very only not spectacularly girth-y side. The length I had been able to pick. Each surgeon I'd consulted with had asked what I wanted, then nodded mildly and written it downwardly, informal as a waiter. My instinctive answer was long, even though I knew it would be that long all the time: While neophalluses tin be implanted with erectile devices that modify their stiffness, they do non change their size.

"That'due south a lot of all-solar day D," I'd said to the reconstructive urologist, Dr. Mang Chen, during our pre-op visit the week before. (He gave sort of a friendly, unfazed shrug.) I'd been maxim it to myself, besides, for months as I waited for my surgery date, wondering why I wanted so much, questioning if I should take less by some, by half, indeed like your average, unremarkable soft penis at the spa (listen: I'm Hungarian; I'grand essentially made of hot springs). While the more common option of using flesh from forearms, which are mostly slimmer, was barely viable in the case of my apparently bizarrely fatless ones, it was technically however possible, and though that site hadn't felt right to me fifty-fifty before I was told information technology would make an appendage without whatever substance, I considered it anyhow.

I second-guessed myself constantly. I'k asexual (yes, you can exist asexual and accept a boyfriend), and what that means for me is my penis was just for me. So what was fifty-fifty the point of having a lot of it? Was I greedy? Crazy? Weeks before my process, I got a cake of dirt and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I'd been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for information technology. One night, I woke upwards from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the large dick.

And then I did.

And it was perfect. Not in the way I'd been trying to be perfect most of my life — catalogue-prepare, ideal to anybody else. Information technology may not accept looked perfect by the assessment of every San Franciscan in the gray-white city outside my hospital window, and information technology was articulate to me that it was — that I was — distasteful to some of the hospital staff, even though, with the preponderance of phallo surgeons in the Bay Area, they see multiple new penises every single calendar week. Ane of my surgeons asked me at some betoken if I'd desire to follow up later with surgical girth reduction in case this hither wondrous member we had conjured from fucking nothing into warm, space-displacing reality wasn't yet the fit that would stop the deafening five-alarm bereavement scream that had ricocheted around my insides incessantly since birth.

But the screaming had stopped. In its absenteeism, I couldn't read or watch TV, which felt overstimulating and loud. I listened, yet, to the quiet. Breathing.

For five days, I lay in a hospital bed without moving. No visitors: COVID. Every day, twice a day, someone came and injected anti-coagulating pig-intestine derivatives into my abdomen so I wouldn't die from a claret jell, my belly becoming a graveyard of needle-punched bruises. Three times a day, I ate, increasingly impressed and concerned that none of it was exiting my colon. People intermittently emptied my giant catheter bag. Occasionally, a team came and jostled me onto my side for a bit to forestall bedsores, each time the pain like existence stabbed everywhere at once despite the on-demand Dilaudid and consistent Oxy. And in one case an hour, to ensure the vessels were thriving, a nurse came and put a pencil-size Doppler rod to my penis to check its pulse, and nosotros listened together to my blood coursing through it, an ultrasound-heartbeat swoosh.

It was alive.

Some people want it all

But I don't! Desire nix at allll

I practice know the words to this vocal.

If it ain't you, ba-by

If I ain't got yous, ba-by

After my discharge, which included a grueling automobile ride wearing mesh hospital underwear packed full of gauze to go on my penis propped as close to perpendicular to my torso as possible, I spent the showtime hour in bed singing summit-book falsetto Alicia Keys to my penis.

So you can imagine my centre-stopping horror when I woke upward that very kickoff night to find that my penis — propped and carefully angled so equally not to kink or impairment the claret vessels that had been relocated through my leg and groin to sustain it — was cold.

I pressed a finger to the pare and allow go, watching the color return. It's supposed to happen rapidly — but, a brief certificate from the urologist'southward office said, not too quickly. What was the right speed? I texted the microsurgeons' director of transgender services, a nurse named Logan Berrian, but it was one a.m. I Googled frantically, though I was already well aware of the dearth of available useful information about phalloplasty. Was the room just cold? How cold was also cold for my penis at this stage in its life? Did I need to go to the emergency room back over the Bay Bridge in San Francisco? Have a surgeon awakened and brought in? My right leg was in a full brace from hip to shin because my blood vessels, unlike about people's, had turned out to require deep dissection of my rectus femoris musculus to excavate, and moving around was slow, difficult, also scary, often bleeding-causing agony. I pressed a finger to the peel once again. And once more, watching. Blood was returning. Claret was flowing. I spent the side by side vii hours watching over information technology, as if information technology were a troubled newborn, making certain.

"Information technology'southward okay!" Berrian texted me back at 8 a.chiliad. It's merely an emergency if it's cold and the "colour is changing to a white/blue/grayness/purple."

On belch day five, I woke up with a half-dozen-foursquare-inch pool of blood seeping through three layers of bandages from the donor site ("Fine, cypher unusual," came the text dorsum), which during surgery had been covered with sparse skin shaved from my other thigh with an instrument like a motorized cheese slicer, then laid over and stitched into the edges around the exposed muscle of the donor hole. On twenty-four hours vii, blood soaked through two boosted layers of bandages and another of gauze. ("Looks skillful," the doctor said when I had my friend emergency-drive me back to the metropolis.) Every morning, I got up, after trying to slumber perfectly still on my back with my penis propped and my hips and my legs agonized fire, and hobbled with the help of a cane to the toilet, where I used one hand to keep my penis level and the other to reach over to the sink and fill a bowl with warm water, and then slowly, gently wash my genitals. Still, my whole lap smelled unrecognizable, non-human seeming, like a cross between hospital air and a livestock barn. ("Everyone freaks out near that," a different nurse said over the telephone, laughing a lilliputian, when I asked if I was okay.) For more than thirty days, my donor thigh oozed fibrinous fluid from wet holes, which became big, open carmine gashes where the skin graft hadn't taken. ("It'll close. It's just like whatever other wound," said Dr. Andrew Watt, the other microsurgeon, at my quaternary weekly mail service-op engagement — to which I'd responded, "Is it?") My other leg, the ane the graft had been taken from, had dried blood ever flaking from the sometimes burning, four-by-seven-inch skinned site trying to regrow itself, and at some indicate my penis started to carve up a scrap from my body.

It was a tiny gap, the littlest hole, between the base and my pelvis at the underside where the stitches hadn't closed, small compared with many people's wound separation, equally it's called, which happens "xc percent of the time" and is cocky-resolving. Only it was so distressing that I generally just refused to wait at or touch it for two weeks, the panic spreading harsh electricity through my whole torso, fifty-fifty worse and for much longer than the time I stood alone in my kitchen, hyperventilating, belongings my penis level in one hand and my phone in the other as I Googled, "What does gangrene olfactory property like?"

"The whole process is abiding trunk horror," Berrian said at i point — subsequently he'd told me that the penis-tip discoloration I was worried nigh might only be sloughing tissue that's dying off, which is also fine. And this was a recovery with no complications that required surgery. The overall proportion of phalloplasties that need surgical revision, while lower for some surgeons (including mine), is about one in two. The highest number of corrective follow-up surgeries needed by anyone I know personally is 12.

This is what some people practice for their penises. And though phalloplasties that survive a couple of weeks tend to survive, menses, through all manner of regular penis life and and so some, I was hysterical over the possibility that mine wouldn't. If information technology died, I felt certain, I would die. I had pushed myself up confronting the absolute limits of enduring life without it, and I wouldn't go back to before.

I couldn't go back to before.

1 day, in that start week out of the hospital, I stood with my leg in a brace and my weight on a pikestaff, thudding the tip of it rhythmically into the floor while listening to upbeat Billie Eilish. Information technology was the closest thing to dancing I could do, just I understood then, for the first time, that what dancing is most is that Our. Bodies. Are. Spec. Tacular.

Some other mean solar day, I lay on a couch staring into a shaft of sunlight coming through a window, listening to "Tin can't Observe My Way Home" on repeat, tears quietly streaming. The sensation was strange so a little scrap scary, but I think the feeling I was feeling was what people hateful when they say calm.

At other moments, I was and then overwhelmed by floods of repressed rage and grief that all I could do was open my mouth and start screaming.

When you release an creature you've been keeping too long in a cage, a therapist of mine used to say, it tends to sally snarling. "Information technology all comes swirling out later on surgery," oliver flowers, a caregiver with T4T Caregiving, an all-trans caregiving service, texted later I reached out one night in despair. Barely able to motion, I tried breathwork and meditation and a soothing bedtime-story app before, out of desperation, I started making up lyrics to "The Sound of Silence" (How-do-you-do, penis, my new frieeennd), cry-singing out my struggle through an ballsy that ended upwards probably 17 verses long. "And then many of united states of america accept had to put upwardly walls of protection to go united states to this point, then the intensity of the feel breaks information technology all downwards," flowers said. I don't employ the words trauma or torture flippantly; I know from both. And you don't escape iv decades in a body that feels simultaneously dead and like an eternal wellspring of desperation without either. "It'south just that we've had to hold in then much for so long — and this process frees usa from that … but not before feeling it all."

Around twenty-four hours 50, I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd thought nearly killing myself. The kickoff story I ever wrote — in my head, edifice bondage of memorized sentences, same as I etch to this day — was about committing suicide by walking into the Atlantic Ocean. I hadn't yet started kindergarten.

Able to movement around a little ameliorate, I done my bathroom sink. Not the whole bath — just the sink. And though I have ever run a tight bathroom, I stood dorsum and beamed at it, at myself, as though I'd simply discovered penicillin. Well-nigh every time I fabricated myself a plate of nutrient, though I'd been feeding myself (and sometimes additional adults/husbands) for decades, I said, often out loud, "I did that!" Everything was a phenomenon. Everything was different now that I lived this being I'd been violently and thoroughly socialized to believe was an impossibility. At solar day sixty, my open wounds finally, unimaginably, closed.

In the beginning, the nerve connection growing in slowly, I could feel my penis in my hand, equally I incessantly had to concur it while limping effectually my flat, or against my wrist as I hunched over to remainder it in that location similar some kind of penis sommelier, freeing my fingers. Simply information technology couldn't experience me.

"I'one thousand always bashing it into things," I told someone early on on. Afterwards it was healed enough that I could finally stop propping or holding it, I'd walk up to the kitchen sink to exercise dishes and bash my penis into the cupboard knob. Raising my hands to gesture while I talked, I'd drop them back into my lap and punch myself in the dick — which, earlier long, I definitely felt. For a while, I was most comfortable relatively nonconstricted (I see you, Jon Hamm), and I sent a barrage of texts to a guy I knew with similar endowments asking where he put his, spiraling almost how I was never going to fit into any pants or underpants or, ultimately, club. One twenty-four hours, I rounded a tight corner into the tea aisle at the grocery store and, misjudging my proximity to a display table, knocked a wine bottle over with my dick, feeling a hot flush of embarrassment that I didn't know the dimensions of my own body.

Ane dark in the shower, though, my right thigh, finally in one slice but nevertheless unfamiliar, caught my attention. I had a (trans) friend who said once that his reaction to seeing thigh phalloplasty scars was "That's a nice penis. But look at your leg." I looked down at it: a raw, raging pink rectangle, scaly from the hole-punching machine they'd fed the skin graft through, flesh made mesh to comprehend the exposed muscle, and another long line of scar like railroad runway angling toward my groin. And information technology struck me, immediately and only, as another incredibly specific matter I got to dearest about myself, and I collapsed into the wall, sobbing.

It's interesting to see how you're dissimilar," a friend of mine said ten months after the surgery, when I went to visit him.

Information technology was possible, of course, that I was going to wake upwardly different—in a bad mode. Some of the best men I know don't have penises, and enough who exercise are hardly role models. I've been on the corruption/harassment/condescension/denigration/objectification/crimes end of enough penis-havers to have worried most information technology, however far dorsum in my consciousness. I had a partner once who terrorized me about his sexual "needs," and some time earlier starting to transition, I spent an afternoon on mushrooms crying against his dick, silently telling information technology I knew it wasn't its fault. It was probable I was going to wake upward more me. And I feared, from my near scared place, that would mean more harmful.

"There's a gentleness," my friend said virtually me at present. "It was always in that location," he added, having known me for many years. "It merely wasn't … first."

No. It wasn't. But when penis is self, every bit penis is a gift to cocky, information technology'southward a gift, also, to others.

A few months prior, I'd sabbatum on the couch with my fellow having a contentious and difficult conversation. At any other point in my adulthood, I would take shut down hard with defensiveness. That day, though, even still healing, wounded and cleaved and terrified that my leg would never really piece of work again, I stayed soft and open and kind.

You, he said, eyes broad, are beingness so generous.

I was surprised too. Every bit a kid growing upwardly in the Midwest in the 1980s, I never could have known, just somehow must have believed, that there was a way a human being could, even frightened and unsure, stay grounded in love for himself. No affair how unexpected or unaccepted that self was.

A few years ago, a yr after I started transitioning, I sabbatum at a cherry light in my motorcar, which I was getting prepare to sell, and thought suddenly, What kind of a man doesn't have a car? A conventionalities I didn't even know I'd absorbed from somewhere (an early episode of The Love Connection, I am near positive) was floating around my consciousness, wreaking insufficiency. A year after that, I joined a gym, wondering if now that I was teeming with testosterone, I might savour gym workouts (answer: no. Every few minutes, the personal trainer I signed up with directed me to practise an practice, and every time, I idea, Why? Why would I do that?). One 24-hour interval, after my trainer had me pick up some dumbbells, I expressed doubts that I'd be able to printing them. "You picked 'em up, y'all gotta put 'em up," he said so automatically that I asked, "Is that what masculinity is?" (He laughed, surprised, before responding, "I guess and so!") Allegedly, masculinity isn't the sound of my vocalism, because though its pitch (130 hertz, any that means) is "within the normal male range" (whatever that ways), the overall event, an actual medical md told me one time, is female person considering I talk like such a girl.

Information technology's not a penis that makes someone a man, either. And a vagina does not make a adult female. Almost people who are having phalloplasty, though, do go their vaginas removed during the process. Broadly, I become it: I could not have gotten my boobs cut off fast plenty, and I spent weeks before my 2022 hysterectomy up belatedly in bed, hot and sleepless, fantasizing almost the moment the medical-waste-disposal squad at UC San Francisco would batch-incinerate my uterus, which swirled with dysphoria like nausea from the depths of my soul. Simply simply equally you might feel an automated no if a doctor offered to cut one of your salubrious artillery off for you, when I thought virtually cauterizing, excising, and sewing closed my vagina, my whole body cringed: incorrect.

"Do you have to get rid of your vagina?" I'd asked the commencement phalloplasty recipient I'd ever met when he came over to my house for macaroni and cheese one night before my get-go consult. He'd generously offered to share his surgery experience, and I'd maybe surprised myself by request just definitely surprised myself with my response when he said no: I involuntarily fist-pumped.

Using plastic-surgery methods that were adult because so many people's faces were blown off during the First Earth War, the showtime phalloplasty was performed in the 1930s. A couple of decades subsequently, trans-surgery centers started opening at several American universities. But in the '80s, most of the university surgery centers airtight or went individual, and by 2000, the going rate for a phalloplasty was $80,000, greenbacks only. Those surgeons often held "a very rigid view of what our transition should be," says trans elderberry, activist, and policy consultant Jamison Green; they aimed to make good, regular straights out of us, and it was known in the community that if y'all weren't 1, you'd better lie about it. They excluded people who had given birth because real men, Green says, "wouldn't permit themselves have kids." One transmasculine pioneer, Lou Sullivan, wrote long letters to Stanford's clinic for rejecting him because he was gay.

"I've been trying to just live without a penis for a very, very long time," I wrote in a journal after my first consult in early 2020. "No 1'due south holding me back simply me." But that cliché isn't truthful, is it? That'due south a survival adaptation of the oppressed: to take on responsibility for their own suffering and then they don't give up confronting incommunicable odds or lash out in means that further endanger them. The midwestern state I grew up in even so explicitly excludes trans health care from state insurance coverage. This year, more than 100 bills in 35 states targeted trans people's access to civil and medical rights. In 2020, to get phalloplasty covered in the smashing(est) state of California, which has legally mandated state trans health coverage since just 2013, in addition to the usual bullshit of spending a part-time chore's worth of hours and energy getting and then wrangling insurance and doctors' offices and prerequisites, I needed letters from iii separate medical professionals, not counting my 3 world-class surgeons, declaring that I wasn't insane. Currently, there are only about a dozen phalloplasty teams in the whole country — mine started putting their globe-grade skills to phalloplasty utilise partly because they could get paid for information technology by insurance — and upwardly until recently there was still at least i surgeon who wouldn't let patients to proceed their vaginas, not because it was medically impossible but considering he didn't think information technology was right to have both.

"The pain is non just that I've been ignoring myself simply that I still am," my periodical entry continues. But it isn't true, either, that the attempt to erase my existence originated with me. One day, lying on my couch in quarantine before surgery, I watched a Ben Stiller–Eddie Tater movie recommended by HBO Max — until the point when, apropos of absolutely nothing, a character makes a joke almost a real-life trans guy who, in real life, was brutally raped and shot to death. Shortly after that, Hulu recommended a Keanu Reeves–Winona Ryder movie from 2018, in which Reeves's character says trans people are deluded untouchables. While I was recovering, I watched a Jennifer Lopez rom-com from the aforementioned twelvemonth, happily zoned out like a normal person until 29 minutes in, when she does a bit where she tells a guy someone is trans(masculine); the joke is that the guy used to have sexual practice with that trans person, and now that he knows he fucked one, he is disgusted.

Months later, this latter scene popped into my head while I was making hummus and made me cry. I become letters like this in some form every solar day. In a break from working on this story, I turned on a hotel Television set, and within minutes Chandler on Friends was proverb he finds his transfeminine parent revolting. This is a recurring feature of this show, which I watched all through my teens. Seven months into recovery then, I felt, like all the other times, the pocketknife of it through the center of my chest: You are not welcome here.

As I had with my penis length, I second-guessed my "unique surgical goals" (Okay only what if I did but let them sew up my vagina?) from the moment I knew they were possible, but the morning I walked into the hospital, I trusted my instincts. If there was annihilation I had learned in transitioning, it was that what was right for me was rarely what, co-ordinate to my patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation, "fabricated sense" — which, plainly, could merely be to live equally a sexually bachelor beautiful-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies. Information technology's impossible to clear and maybe fifty-fifty to know exactly why my vagina is integral to my power and my personhood. "I cannot await to be more masculine so I can be more feminine," I used to write in journals as I started transitioning and realized, though I didn't quite understand why, that was what I needed.

An intuitive once told me that in a by life I was a priestess. Any it is that made me this, given, finally, the remarkable chance to embody it, which technically has been available since decades before I was born, I stopped withholding myself from myself, even if much of the world is aligned confronting who that is.

I've never seen or heard of a book or bear witness grapheme or fifty-fifty some other person who is an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina. But after I got out of the infirmary, standing in the bath washing my hands, with well-nigh of my torso, much less my genitalia, well outside the mirror's frame, I looked upward and suddenly, for the first time in my life, recognized my own face up.

Non anybody does. Sometimes I get misgendered — sometimes even past people who are trying their all-time. Just last week, someone at the photo shoot for this article misgendered me repeatedly, not noticing at kickoff, so, after I'd corrected him, blasphemous himself, apologizing sincerely. I took a moment outside, letting the loneliness sink in. Only days prior, I had been misgendered and responded, in a difficult-dying habit, past blaming myself — if only my voice were deeper; if simply I were less femme — instead of the systems that had worked to erase me and people similar me for centuries.

This time, I refused to internalize information technology. There isn't, I breathed deep, anything incorrect with me. I got myself ready and walked on set and stood, well-nigh nude, compassionate and angry and proud. Any was happening around me, I was centered, in my body and in the shots I could see on the monitor, beautiful, accurate — perfect. Days before my penis'south starting time birthday, the warmth and weight of it lay confronting my vulva, each supporting the other, holding me.

My Penis, a Honey Story