I want my vagina on my own terms, my own pace…to savour its arrival

Life doesn’t always work the way we intend.  Does it ever?  As an “explorer” variety is the spice of my life.  That is true of every aspect of it.  That can drive some people crazy.  Some have said that it means I am never satisfied.  Maybe.  Or just curious.  Perhaps wanting more is not wanting more, its just to keep moving.  To progress, to grow, to develop.

That’s all a very destination-oriented set of ideas.  But the process is what makes this way of being enriching. Because in exploration, everything is always new.  A vagina is a destination, and a very important one to this trans woman, one who doesn’t quite feel trans enough, woman enough, in this enough, until that comes about.

Over dinner last night a friend said to me, “I know how badly you want one,” and I could see the ache of empathy in her eyes and thought, “how could you know that I feel it so intensely?”

My lawyer has said to me that I need to focus on this part of my life, and she is so right, to savour the changes taking place in my body, to observe and feel the world around me.  Divorce is very much getting in the way of that, as it crowds out much waking thought in ways that are only unproductive.  It has also has the bizarre effect of accelerating my transition process.

This is not desired.  An explorer needn’t get there quickly.  A flaneur, someone on walkabout.  That is how I wish to find my vagina.  But that isn’t likely to be possible.  My wife challenges my desire to transition “so soon” and “surely I can wait for the children to finish school”.  I’ve been waiting my whole life.  But this line fits with her inconsistent threat that I had “better transition” as if to say any of it had anything to do with her.

My kids have informed me that she thinks we haven’t divorced yet because I am still wanting to hang on to her.  I think they know how pathetic that is.  They have met and enjoyed the company of several of my girlfriends.  Her nastiness and gaslighting, fundamental dishonesty, and also rejection of me for finally coming out as the trans person she already knew before we married has given me all the ease in the world to step away without guilt.  Boy, it sure is fine to write that sort of thing.  Mmm.  It feels good through all of me.

As a loyal person, one who has slave and submissive tendencies, whose giving love languages are acts of service and gifts, I would have never walked from her.  I would have always tried to make it work.  Her comprehensive rejection should hurt, but it doesn’t.  It is a relief.  I am free without guilt.  And I am able to no longer be with someone who was disgusted by my sexuality—what was I thinking?!  I should have left her years ago, the first time she said it, only I’m not like that.  And I’m okay with that.  And I am really okay with not having guilt.  Is that why I have to pay so much?  That the post-mortem of our married life is so much better for me that the exit tax has to hurt?

And in the meantime, her lawyers take perverse pride in calling me a man, treating me like a man.  And I know, rather, I am a freak.  Everyone says to sir to me.  A man at the till the other day said ma’am and then corrected himself and said ‘sir’, and I said, “that’s okay, I prefer ma’am,” but he kept right on ‘sir-ing’ me. But this is a really good sign. It happened again at the airport today. I get a mix of ma’am’s and sir’s, sometimes they don’t seem sure, or they think first ma’am, and then correct themselves to sir. Why would you do that with someone like me who is without make-up, most clearly with genuine breasts, dressed every inch female? Surely you know what’s going on in the world?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the social need for the binary.  Why does it even exist?  The haunting smile of the woman who asked me to spank her in a night club is very much still with me.  I have never struck a woman, in passion or in anything.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  She might have been trans.  Do you know what I mean.  There is something magical about a trans woman who nipped it in the bud and was able to change the course of her physical development before it went down the wrong path that is absolutely sublime.  She had that even if she was not trans.  And I am sorry I didn’t give her the spanking she so clearly wanted.

Her boyfriend was in the other room.  But I guess that has never stopped me.  I don’t like men anyway.

My vagina ache is real.  I went to dinner with a foot-domme who is also an FSSW the other day.  She asked me to pick her up from her appointment.  We went out and had a lovely meal.  At one point she looked at me with the kind of empathy on her face that is always very triggering for me and said, “I know how badly you want a vagina.”  Yup.

So many other people tell me know.  And I am dumbfounded by it.  I wanted have started this process without that destination.  Let’s dig in.

One family member, looking through the lens of masculinity said simply, “don’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s so final.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

A few months later we picked up where we had left off.

“But you don’t even like men.”

“Who said vagina equals cock in vagina?”

“Well?”

“Well, nothing.”

“But isn’t that the point?”

“No way.  I don’t a man near me ever.  I already know the woman I want to penetrate me.”

“What, with a strap-on?”

“Yeah.  I even know the model.”

“Really?” he asked laughing nervously.

“Yes, I can see the expression in her face as she looks in my eyes and fucks me nice and slow.  I am going to cry my eyes out.”  Then we both laughed.  For quite a while.  You know when the oxygen goes out of a room?  Well in this case it was laughter.  And it bubbled along, punctuated by silence, pottering, we were hanging out around his dining room table, and then it would come back again.

“It’s the vulnerability.  It’s the most important part of all.  The final flourish.”  Maybe he understand.

A woman friend who is in the sex industry said, “but it won’t even be real.”  I was astonished.  It’ll be real enough for me.  My doctor also tells me that over time, the brain figures out what it is, and the tissue it is made of gradually becomes more and more like a natal vagina.  But she is right, it will never be the same.  There are, however, doctors who are growing vaginas for women with a rare disease which seems them born without vaginal canals.  An Italian doctor has grown vaginas for two women, a young one and one in her 30’s…both have gone on to have a normal sex life, and one has gone on to have a baby.  He uses stem cells.  The method was invented by a US doctor.  My doctor, my “kitty” doctor as I like to call her (she came up with it), does not use this method, but uses a method which is right now what seems to be the next best thing to a natal vagina.

What can you do?  Yes, I wish it were real.  But I wasn’t born with the right bits.  So, I’ll take the best I can get.

Another woman, a doctor, said, “it’s like having a deep pelvic wound for the rest of your life.”  None of my women friends regard it as such.  But with a lifetime commitment to dilation (you have to put a long rubber truncheon in there on the regular, I guess she has a point.

My favourite therapist has asked me about just having a vulva, no vaginal canal.  Much easier operation.  Much shorter recovery time.  But I want a kitty.  One of my nearest and dearest says, “but vaginas are gross.”

I am beginning to wonder if they are just testing my commitment.

I had dinner with a long-lost writer friend the other day and she said, “boy, are vaginas a pain in the ass.”

“Kind of like sports cars?”

“If you say so.”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re just a lot of work.  Always acting up.  You have to look after them.”

“Yes,” I say, admitting to feel starry-eyed.

When I sat with Ayahuasca, and felt the choice that lay before me, did this on the night before I found the true and deep courage to come out, or more than, to finally accept myself as a trans woman, I had to accept the good with the bad, the weak with the strong, the range of sensation, feeling, discrimination, male gaze, the horror and the joy.  With every passing day I know that I am more and more on the right path.  It is a weird path, no doubt, but I don’t even know male me anymore.  He is lost, gone.

And yet, he is still a part of me.  Only the part that has stayed is the little innocent boy that got left behind when puberty struck…and now finally, he can come home, come home to the mommy he never had, the mommy that he needed, the mommy that I am, the only mommy I can be as a trans woman, the mommy to myself.