Postcards from Vietnam and many happy endings

The sexuality of a transgender m2f sapphic submissive

It was the eyes above the mask which covered her entire face.  Her gloved hands, gloves to the elbows, disappearing into the sleeves of her gown.  Her hair, hidden beneath a scarf.  She had removed her sunglasses to look at me, otherwise all of her skin would have been invisible.  The eyes.  Searching, curious, yet unmoving, observant, watchful, showing nothing.  A moment of silence.  And then she sped off into the throng.

The sounds came from everywhere, in all pitches, and at all heights.  Traffic, but also the thrum of activity.  Hammering.  The crackle of solder.  Cranes.  Cars.  Bicycle bells.  And mopeds.  Thousands of mopeds.  A symphony of chaos.

It wasn’t just the sounds that bombarded.  The smells of food cooking, garlic, herbs, fish, meat.  Grilling.  Good coffee brewing on nearly every street corner.  The smell of freshly baked baguette.  

Colours.  Billboards by day, neon at night.  Colourful clothes, cars, buildings, people.

I was in heaven.  When everything is surging into you, any thoughts of the rest of the world, your life, are soon gone.  It was perfect.  The hot weather, suitable only for the linen clothes I wore, loose, still elegant, hiding my figure, my body.  I was young then, engaged, filled with love and life.  Everything was perfect except for the absence of my fiancée, but she had gone to her family.

It was Christmas, and my family, in keeping with a many-year tradition of having Christmas in some place where none of us had ever been, had alighted upon Vietnam.  My mother, as she always did, had brought a suitcase of Christmas decorations, so that we could decorate some plant, some tree, some object wherever we ended up celebrating: a hotel room, a balcony with a ficus, a coconut palm on the beach.  It was always very creative.

My fiancée wasn’t ready for the onslaught.  Too much to ask.

I threw myself into shopping, buying some real treasures.  The best scissors I have ever owned, later stolen by said fiancée along with many of my clothes.  She and I were the same size.  I was so gutted by the loss of the scissors that I ended up making a trip back to Hanoi to buy another pair—a story in itself.  Patience is more than virtuous, however, as they now sell these scissors in my local garden centre in Italy, in the rundown seaside town of Margate in Kent, England, there is a scissor shop which also sells them.  I now have three pairs—the ones I went back to Vietnam for, and two more acquired recently.

I wonder if she still has hers?  I shall attempt to find out.  I hope that she will be my friend again.  Time has a way of doing that.  And even though she left me when it came out into the open that she was sleeping with a friend, we all managed to never do or say anything that caused permanent damage.

She lives just minutes from where I will have my operation just 72 days from now.  It is funny how becoming a woman seems to bring forgiveness with it.  So much of what I might have cared about or gotten worked up about is slipping away.  The aspect of me which is a people pleaser, what my dear friend la Dottoressa affectionately referred to as being a doormat, seems to be getting stronger in certain aspects despite my vigilant desire to cut it out like a carbuncle.  What seems to be growing is this feeling of empathy, this ability (if that is what it should be called) to feel what someone else is feeling, to see from their perspective.  That is never a good thing to have when one wishes to argue.

But along with this journey is what I am discovering is so primordial to successful social life, and that is boundaries.  I seem to be getting better at protecting myself and asserting my boundaries, walking away or putting my foot down when they are being crossed.  One of my children, who has boundary issues, I should ‘respect of boundary issues’ has fallen foul of me in this way and says ‘it is preposterous to suggest that you are a doormat or a conflict avoider.’  We had a long conversation about the difference between asserting boundaries and fighting.

Could this be something which comes with oestrogen, the feminizing of my brain?  When I first began transition, I wrote somewhere along the way that my brain had switched over.  It had.  But I had no clue that it would keep switching over, taking me deeper and deeper, until I barely remember what it was like to have man feeling.  I have had to put photos up in my house of me when I was younger, with my kids, as if to remember someone who isn’t here anymore.  And in a way, he is gone.  I miss him.  I miss his pain, his intense love, his intense everything.

And I wonder in part whether my joy in beating men comes from generating in others a feeling which I knew I loved.  Could that be it?  Because most of the time I just don’t like to be around men at all…yes, my long-time friends…but when I think of the changing composition of my friends group, the women are rising in importance because our relationships are deepening, and going places that friendships have never been before for me.

Boy, have I wandered off topic!

Even though I was with my family, I was never really there.  And this is a feeling that I think many trans people have before they come out.  To survive you have to place yourself into the world, almost observing yourself as a third party.  And you find time to do things, to be alone.  We all shopped all the time, but I found my way to a tailor and had myself several cheong sam made.  This is the tight-fitting silk robe that goes all the way to the ankles, but is slit to the waist on either side, and worn with contrasting pants.  They fit perfectly, and even then, they made it so true to the original, that they put in darts for my non-existent breasts.  Interestingly, even without breasts, the cut of the fabric made it look as if I had small ones.  And as a result, getting what I wanted also meant I could never wear it out.

I look forward to going back and having more of them made now that my body has a very different set of contours.

At one of the hotels we stayed in I booked in a massage.  When getting a massage sometimes I had to concentrate on not getting aroused, that would be embarrassing.  But this time, it didn’t matter.  She overwhelmed my defences.

I was lying face down when it started.  It was that kind of innocent touch that you would never expect to creep up on you.  I had never had a massage in Vietnam, so wasn’t sure of the protocol.  I was afternoon, I was a bit sleepy.  I had showered, was feeling calm, and her hands on my thighs and butt, and lower back, and inner thighs and between my cheeks just felt nice.  The little flick on my rosebud each time she passed seemed accidental, her caresses on my perineum equally so.  And she tapped me lightly with her open hand.  And then again, alternating massage with taps, swats, which became more noted.

“You like?” she asked.  She was very pretty, with such tiny hands, small bones.  Is it so obvious what I’m like?  I looked at her, in her eyes, and rested my head on my shoulder and watched her as she smacked my bottom and smiled again.  And again.  And I think she could see me melting away in my face, in my eyes.  And she smiled at me as she cupped her hand between my legs and massed me there, gently between the cheeks, at the base of my cxxk.

She had me turn over, and then bade me spread my legs.  She told me how big I was, how much bigger than a Vietnamese man.  She was used to men who wanted to hear that.  She slipped a finger inside of me and massaged with the thumb of the same hand.  I whimpered, and then she understood.  She reached up and pinched one of my nipples, hard, and she saw in my face my surrender.

She pushed another finger inside of me, and then another, and made me open my legs wide, and then her hand excepting the thumb, which stayed putting pressure at the base of my shaft.  And she would ball her hand and pull it and then straighten it and push it in, and she was fucking me.  I was out of my head and aching for it.

She did touch me.  There was a happy ending.  She cleaned me up.  I dressed.  I tipped more than the hotel charged for the massage.  We each pressed our own hands together and bowed to one other.  It was only the second time a woman had penetrated me.  I felt different for days after.

I returned to Los Angeles where my fiancée was living up in the Hollywood Hills.  She was working at an interior design store off Rodeo Drive.  Everything was perfect.  Always.  She was tall like me, and had a big old 4×4 that we barrelled around town in.  I’ll love her forever for shouting at the owner of a lingerie store in Hollywood who refused to make something for me because ‘we don’t make our products for men’.  After, she said to me, “I’ll just go back later and say its for me, and tell them your sizes.”  I didn’t want that, but I was very appreciative.

It didn’t occur to me that telling her about having a happy ending during a massage was going to upset her.  Maybe I was stupid.  Innocence can be genuine, and I never meant to do something bad.  So as we were driving around one day in her boat of a car, I told her of this time in Vietnam at the hotel.  She listened patiently until the very end.  And then she let me have it.

She was enraged.  Not the shouting kind.  The cold and controlled kind.  I think some men react defensively when faced with female rage.  I don’t.  I become submissive.  Silent.  Attentive.  Listening.  Really fucking scared.  She could see it, she could see how sorry I was without me saying it.  See how I would never do something that would knowingly upset her.  That I yearned to be a ‘good boy’ with every sinew of my being.  I apologized from my heart.  And she softened.  Completely.  She said, ‘just so there’s no doubt, in the future, don’t do it again.  Okay?’

And about 15 minutes later.  “Did you like it when she spanked you?”  I looked at her without answering.  There’s something that happens in my body when I get that kind of question.  My shoulders unhitch, my skin changes, the answer is evident.  It is like I have opened a window and she can see inside me.  “Or her hand inside you?”  I nodded yes.

“Do you know what pegging is?” she asked.  And when I shook my head ‘no’, her laughter splashed out like a fistful of diamonds scattered across a table.  I leaned across the car and placed my head in her lap; she stroked my hair as she drove.