As bottom surgery looms I find a growing sense of calm

There are not many more than 30 days to go until my surgery date.  People ask, “are you nervous?”  The answer should be ‘yes’, particularly for someone who is scared of needles, blood, and doctors and who abandoned a passion for biology because it inevitably led to medical school and more blood.  But the answer is not ‘yes’.  Instead, there is only calm.  Silence.  It is as if the air itself has stopped vibrating.  There is a quiet space around me.  Do you remember sitting in a warm room on a summer’s day, bathed in sunlight, the windows and doors closed, the air just slightly dense and syrupy, but not enough to make you move, to get up and change anything.  Soporific.

That is how my life feels right now.  Everything seems to be falling into place.  A judge has released enough of my own money to ensure that I can pay for this operation, which is a cataclysmic relief, and something which my wife fought hard to stop.  I find pennies on the street wherever I go.  That sounded materialistic when my date yesterday afternoon, my first from a dating app, said she finds the signs in birds or a butterfly which landed on her hand two days prior.  With conversations like that, I think we will get on just fine.  She was much prettier in person than she was online.  I learned a new word by reading her ad: “fuckboy”, but in Italian.  She explained that she used her worst photos to keep the dirty guys away.

And here she was with not a dirty guy.  What am I?  I have no idea anymore.  And that cutting loose of “am-ness” is curiously liberating.  I don’t have to be anything than good.  To be nice.  So many people don’t like ‘nice’ because it so often lies on top of something really skanky.  Self-described ‘nice guys’ often prove to be the opposite.  When I applied to a prestigious and cut-throat graduate programme in finance, I was asked on the application what would set me apart, what I would bring to the school.  I wrote, “I am nice.  I don’t if you have much of that.”  I ended having pillow talk with one of the admissions staff after I got in, who told me that the admissions team had an awful lot of fun with my application because of that statement.

Do you know that beautiful view of a woman when she is close to you and glowing with erotic bliss, and she is feeling playful and teasing, and you, like all men, are feeling ever-so sleepy?  And there she is, flirting with you energetically, saying things like, “are you a ‘nice’ boy? do you want to show me what a ‘nice’ boy you are?” and she is playing with herself and then letting you know what she tastes like, what you both taste like, because she brings her fussy and delicate fingers to your mouth and teases your lips with them.  And then when you oblige by kissing and licking them, says “you are a nice boy!” and cooes before snuggling into you.

Pretty much everything feels like that to me right now.  Something is happening with my relationship with women.  Something else is happening with my brain and what attracts me.  I have previously written that I am increasingly attracted to the girly-girl types, the ultra-feminine, soft and gentle and dainty and laughing women.  This is new for me, and perhaps because I am crowding into a space that I used to be attracted to, the more masculine woman, I seem to be going for opposites.

Only I lost my “girlginity” to someone who is absolutely not that.  She was apologetic about it, wishing she was more feminine.  But I didn’t care.  I cared about her energy.  And when she said she wanted to throw me onto her bed and tear my clothes off, I got all hot and bothered and said, ‘yes, please.’

In other words, I am finding the beauty in so many people in so many different ways.  And this noticeably really different to me—I can feel it in my body.  It is a truism experienced by this one ex-man that men are visual.  I believe this is backed up by science, and certainly by porn consumption.  [Incidentally not something which was ever part of my life—I found it too explicit!  Go figure.  The only “porn” I ever consumed was the kind I write, mildly kinky stories].  What I have noticed is that I am less visually inclined.  I used to wonder about attractive women who were out and about with less attractive men, or my friends who dated “ugly” guys but found them hot, and I think that this is going on with me—that oestrogen reaches this too—that every cell in our bodies is regulated by oestrogen, including all the cells of our brains.  And to think that I am at year 2 of a ten-year cycle of what it takes the body to replenish all cells…I can wallow in that, it feels good.

A few nights ago I went out with a gorgeous older woman.  Older than me that is.  By a decade.  She is elegant, cultured, always impeccably dressed, and has such tiny wrists.  There is nothing more elegant than a tiny wrist.  We are tuning into each other.  She likes to play bridge.  I can’t imagine anything worse.  But she wants me there, wants me with her friends.  On display, being shown off.  But I am afraid that as bridge is not my thing that I will play badly for someone who I am beginning to care about.  So, I asked instead if she might play bridge with her friends and that I could just cook for them, serve them, make sure they had drinks and were comfortable.  Butler, maid.  She is not from the kink scene, but I think she is taking to my submissive energy.

I found myself touching her and she opened up to me as I did, saying that she had never been with a woman before, but that I somehow represented everything she needed.  I used to be scared by such talk and would try to regulate things.  But that makes no sense.  We have to let our partners self-regulate.  And the more people I make out with, the more I realise how insecure everyone is, and how much better the world would be if we were all comfortable in our sexuality, and more importantly in our need for love, for the particular love that we need.

I signed up for my first dating App the other day, an adventure in waiting.  I hadn’t expected this, but it follows me around.  I set it up in California, but then the first practical place I could actually meet someone happened to be at home in Italy, so I went on a date.  It was painless to set up, and I probably am way too open with strangers, but I’m still here, she didn’t kidnap me!

I am afraid of clingy partners, of them wanting more than I can give, wanting intimacy faster than I can give it.  And I know that I am guilty of the same.  I feel that way whenever I am with a domme, and since I have only really had two, that is what killed the first time around.  Live and learn.  But how to handle it on the receiving end?  We get to this point with a person because we like them and we allow it…so why does it turn so sour?

Right now I can’t figure that out.  I don’t want to try.  I just to want to be.  And this is part of my calm.  I spent an hour on zoom yesterday with a shaman, one I have worked with before, who is part of my transition “doula” team.  I have to find a new word for it, but she is helping with shamanic journeying and working with ancestors.  My new name is all ancestral, and we are working together to get the blessings and to ensure the wellness of those whose names they are…and also to commune with those whose name I did not take…in particular, the witches.  I shall work with the witches in other ways.

I don’t doubt any more that I am a woman.  I am a trans woman, but I am a woman.  That means more woman than anything else.  It also means that my life experience is different.  It also means that I approach cis women with a state of innocent curiosity.  Readers will know that this state is one of the backbones of my life.  This transition process is creating avenues into this deep self that are pure happenstance, but profoundly centring in terms of who and what I am and what I aspire to be.

My date of the other day slotted right in to this energetic dynamic and began to teach and share things about being a woman that I just soaked up.  That her instinct would tell me that I would like these things.  And that I have so little ego about this, is refreshing to me.

This translates into so many things, but especially play.  Romantic play.  Bedroom play.  I am a baby.  But less and less in the fetish sense.  More in the sense of romping around and innocently playing with each other’s bodies, kissing and touching, exploring, giggling, and playing until suddenly, “ooh, oh, that feels good.”  And nibbling, and biting, and scratching, and pulling each other’s hair.  Talk about fun pickup lines.  A woman walked up to me the other day and said, “I like to wrestle.”

“Me too,” I said never having done it, “would you like me to get you a cup of tea?”

One of the main things on my mind is to honour this transition process.  To mark it with ceremony.  A sex change operation for this trans woman is the most important milestone.  There have been so many others and will be so many more.  I want to mark it with real ceremony.  There is a before and after.  I am leaving the antechamber of my womanhood and taking up the mantle.

When we talk about second puberty in trans circles, it really is a second puberty.  The wild ride with my body, my libido, my moods, my emotions…they are all so familiar and yet also alien, because this puberty is not the one I went through the first time.  Not familiar because of difference.  Not familiar because male puberty was an act of violence.  It felt like being slowly poisoned.  I can remember working in fast food restaurants to make money when I was a teen, and feeling the greasy air and how it was affecting my skin, making my clothes smell of stale cooking fat, and how I longed to scrub myself clean afterwards.  Hating to go to work.  Necessity creates bad job satisfaction.  Puberty did the same thing to my body—and it was desperately sad for me to see myself change in ways that I never wanted, to hear my voice change, to crack, to break, and then be gone forever.  

Through will I found other jobs.  I switched to fashion.  I didn’t smell and I got to work with pretty clothes.  I began to model.  Being objectified gave me out of body experiences.  Being in front of the camera was very similar to being in sub-space.  Everything became quiet.  Almost as if I wasn’t there anymore.  But in a way I was, even more present.  I could feel my soul closer to the surface.  That is the same I get after being whipped.  My human body can’t speak.  It craves closeness with the whip hand.  But I can also feel my essence, my soul, directing my body.  The mind is gone.  It is not rational.

This is the growing sense of silence I have as I approach surgery.  Maybe it is a zen-like state.  The woman who whipped me to bleeding recently, stopping because I hadn’t said a word [it took just over 6 weeks for the marks to disappear], told me that I was able to step out of my body, and that made it really pleasurable for her to whip me, because she could use her full talent.  I look forward to seeing her again one day.

There was a moment of clarity in life recently.  The situation was a sharing circle on a women’s retreat.  I felt this power coursing through me as I spoke of the adversity that gets in my way as a trans woman, and that rather than finding it discouraging, or a sapping of my energy, I find instead that it makes me stronger, more motivated.  There is nothing that can stop me now, nothing that can get in the way of me stepping into myself as a trans woman…and whatever obstacles I face, I find they make me more clear and more certain, and happier about the course I have chosen.

Happy Valentine’s Day!