Enter the electro-sadist.  Yes, every woman in my life comes to dominate me sooner or later

We choose what we wear based on the day we expect to have ahead.  This choice for a man is easy.  For a woman it is progressively and substantially harder…in part a function of self-image, but also the burden of social expectations.  It is my sense that the challenge for a trans female are even greater.  I am not complaining.  Getting dressed, thinking about getting dressed, trying a million things on and leaving the bed strewn with the rejects, is fun.

Sometimes I dress to disappear.  Especially when I am running errands.  But there are times when I am going to be looked at, on stage, usually in a way that I would consider trying, or judging…and I am finding myself in those moments choosing increasingly wispy, short, sexy clothing.  Not vulgar or trashy.  But vulnerable.  And anyway, it is summer, I have great legs, and I want to show them off.

But it is like this.  Instead of choosing clothes or an outfit where I might just blend in or hide, I am choosing not just clothes that do the opposite, but also clothes that are ultra-feminine, that make me look fragile…and I am finding that when I put out this more vulnerable energy, even feel it as what I wear is so often a reflection of how I feel, people, male and female, young and old, react to me differently.

For one, I think I look a lot less like “a man in a dress” when they can see my body.  Especially when my boobs are clearly real, and perking through a very light fabric.  And yes, everyone stares.  And I am okay with that because it makes me feel present, as if to say, ‘yes, they are real, and because you see them, you know what I am—a trans woman’.  If they are a startled that is their problem.  But, people seem to be more protective of me and more gentle towards me when I dress this way.

I shared my painful experiences at the hands of my beautician, she who shocks me so.  Bad joke.  But with electrolysis, there’s pretty much nowhere else to go.  It just hurts.  The last time I went she asked if I was a masochist, and I thought, ‘you’d have to be to put up with this experience’.  But I am definitely not a pain slut.  And she probed it.  At the time I thought nothing of it.

Today, back on the electrocution table, I wasn’t sure that I could be quite so innocent about it.  Today I was wearing a silver collar and a short white shift dress with an embroidered bodice, very summer, very light, very girly, and very ‘sexy’ I was told when I walked into the salon.  

A few minutes later I was naked on the table and she was at my you-know-what with the machinery, a little pen-like thing with a gold wire at the end which carried a jolt of electricity to the hair.  It hurt like hell, much more than previously.

Does it hurt?  “Fa male?” she asked.

“Si,” I said through the towel clenched between my teeth.

“You don’t seem to be able to take it as well today,” she chided.

“I can take everything better on oestrogen.”

“Yes, women can take much more pain.”

“As a man, I would have run from this place, never to return.”

“Some days are harder than others.”

She had switched needles from silver to gold in order to deliver a larger charge to the hair.  She offered to go back to silver.  I declined, I wanted it over.  But the hairs on my perineum were very full, numerous and close together, making the whole thing a challenge.  

I watched what she was doing for a while, cauterizing a hair, watching it shrivel, looking at a sea of them, recognising that each one of the was going to be painful, cause an involuntary muscle spasm.  She strayed out of the required zone.  Well outside.  I let it go on for a while.  I wouldn’t have said anything, but it was so painful that I had to.

“We’re out of zone over there,” I noted.

“What, and you want these?” she asked dismissively, giving the errant hairs a flick.  

“Not really.”

“It would look weird that around your vulva you are clean and then you have these stragglers.”

“It hurts.”

“Some of these hairs act like “mother hairs” and they can reseed the ones around them, like weeds.  We have to get them all.  You will be hairless like a baby.”  I don’t think my readers need to speculate much on the impact of her words.  I lay back and sang to the Queen.

“We’re going to switch to laser.”

“Oh my goodness.  That was so painful.  Much more painful than electrolysis.”

“Yes, but they work well together.”  And she gave me various suggestions about how to make it less painful.  Reduce the intensity but do it for longer.  That sounded good.  She also suggested a numbing cream, but I never seem to remember its name, and as we proceed, and I am still alive, I think I should feel this pain.  It is a measure of what I am prepared to bare to be as female as I can become.

In the end, the laser was much, much less painful than it has been in the past.  Much.  I commented on this.  And she said, “progress.  There are fewer hair follicles now, and so it will hurt less and less each time.”  But I also suspect that she was being gentler on me than last time.  After all, a client who comes each week almost and spends several hundred euros on electrolysis is good business, especially a client who will come at any time asked.

“Are we done?” I asked hopefully, and she left me to rest.  But when she came back, she said, “turn over, we have to get it from the back too.”

And I am going to say that I wonder if what happened next was an indication that when she asked if I was a masochist she is not a little bit of a sadist.  She spread this liquid on my crack and sack and spent quite a lot of time back there, to the point of it being pleasurable.  And then she had me spread my cheeks for her in a particular way and then she ran the soft, round head of the laser up and down between my legs.

“This will also rejuvenate you,” she said, and I thought of the genital and anal bleaching that some people do.  It felt good and painful at the same time.  And this, on the first day in almost a year that I woke up with morning wood—I was aroused.  And oddly enough, this is my “period”, the full moon, but it does seem to be changing a bit since progesterone.  Horny means fertile, and so I may have shifted again away from being a red witch (bleeds with the full moon) to a white witch (bleeds with the new moon).  In my case, the ‘bleeding’ is spiritual and energetic.

As I rolled back over she pinched and caressed my side-belly, a part of me that has grown a bit of late, the effects of the hormones.

“This is nice,” she said, continuing a frequent thread of conversation, my changing body.

“I’ve gained so much weight.”

“It looks nice.  A woman has curves.  Its water.  You don’t have any cellulite.  Just keep working out.  But your body is changing.  I can see it now.  You have to take care of your body and to present yourself as beautiful now.

What followed was a nose-hair waxing.  Ouch!  Eye-brow plucking and semi-permanent colouring—this time they used “blonde” which in Italy would elsewhere be called chestnut or dark brown, but at least it was not black like the first time.  This time, even I thought it looked good after and my kids only noted it this time, but didn’t tease.

I commented to the woman who did a lovely white gel manicure on my toes that her boss was probably a sadist.  And just then, the boss-owner walked in and winked away, took my chin in her hand turned my face this way and that, with the eye of an appraiser, and said, “not bad,” before walking out.

As I sauntered out into the bright light of an Italian early summer day, I couldn’t help but feel as if I had just left the seraglio, been prepared, doted on, made beautiful, made ready for another day.  I felt curiously strong, as if an energy river was carrying me along.

And all I could think about was that this was a small pain on the path to the greatest gift that modern life can give me, a physical transformation that will be a critical marker on my path to greater openness, greater suppleness of being, of a body which is congruent with my own self-sense.

I am a trans woman, and every day, I look more and more the part. And yes, at times it feels good to just trust someone to do the right thing for you, even when it hurts–even if she’s an electro-sadist. It is submission.

The most powerful lesson of all? The more ‘me’ I become, the more in tune with ‘me’ the universe seems to be. To embody nature as a being of instinct, in a state of permanent surrender, well this seems to be working for me, because everything, and I mean everything, is just getting better and better.