I didn’t know how to wipe my bum. What kind of woman will I make?

Oceans of gratitude to all the women who are my big sisters

This isn’t a joke.  I recently discovered that I don’t know how to wipe my ass.  Every woman knows that you wipe your ass in one direction, from front to back.  Nobody ever told me that.  I never even figured it out, and so over the years, went with a windshield wiper approach, as being clean matters, but how a male-bodied human does something so basic, can be quite different (for excellent reasons) from how a woman does things.

I learned this as part of a series of educational videos I am being fed by my surgical team.  I guess I am not the only one to need to learn this.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t embarrassing.  But if I don’t even know how to wipe my ass, just imagine the lifetime of things I don’t now about what it is like to be a woman, what it means to be a woman, what it feels like.

This was a criticism levelled at me, of sorts, by my TERF bestie.  “You have no *@$%! Idea what it means to be a woman, you’ve only just crossed over.”  She was pissed at me for telling her off for calling a man a “pussy”, for slut shaming a mutual friend by calling her a whore for liking sex, and for various other things, including thinking that trans people are stealing job opportunities from women.  I am finding that I don’t have to agree with someone on such fundamentals and we can still be friends. Not always easy, but we have found where to bury the bodies on that one.

Her point with me comes from a very fertile place, and one which I have total sympathy with: she wanted to reference female suffering, but you can’t benchmark that kind of thing, and trans people have their own special kind of suffering—and judging by the sheer numbers who “unalive” themselves, it is no cake walk.  I respect the female suffering.  I embrace it.  I accept it and embrace that of it which comes to me.  Perversely, it is very affirming.

My “coming of age” process is coalescing.  The number of women already in my life who are excited to help me make this passage from male to female is hauntingly beautiful and so deeply appreciated.

When this bestie told me that she wasn’t sure she was “that kind of friend,” I was more than okay with her not being there.  I would have liked to hear her think out loud on womanhood and share with me, but her TERF views are exactly what stands between her and having this kind of intimate teaching relationship with me.

Learning to be a woman is going to take the rest of my life.  That so many women are welcoming to me in this regard is a source of such intense joy.  Who needs the others?  But more importantly, imagine the joy.  

When I joke, I say, “life as a man was getting too easy.  Let’s change things up and make it all more difficult.”  It is a bit silly.  But there is a positive truth in it too.  Not knowing is the foundation of mystery and wonder.  To have had an already full and complete life, and now to be able to embark on a totally new and fresh one, almost as a brand new person, is kind of mind blowing.  Of course, it is the same me, and yet, even what I am is changing from the inside.  But more importantly, so much of how we are relates to how society slots us in and treats us.  To deny the impact of such would be silly.  

When I was perceived as a man, everything in society was largely without turbulence.  My passage was as smooth like silk.  I am discounting the trans experience in that, which I write about plenty and is anything but smooth.  As a trans woman, however, and one who sticks out like a sore thumb, there is a lot of turbulence.  People are mostly polite, but I have to think about things in ways that I never had to before.  I have to be afraid for the first time.

On the London Underground the other day, across a crowded carriage, a very large man was looking at me.  By large, I mean tall and strong looking.  I guessed he was a Polish builder, excuse the stereotyping, but that is sort of what he looked like.  He was not openly lusting at me, but he had a particular intensity to his stare which any woman is likely to know.  I read that he was interested but wasn’t sure if that was purely positive.  When his gaze penetrated my eyes, I lingered briefly, and then averted my eyes down.  It was very confusing for me.  

I am not attracted to men.  I’m not used to being hit on by men, excluding unwilling sexual contact from men as I was growing up and under the age of consent.  I didn’t know what to do.  How to reject a man without hurting his feelings?  Was averting my eyes too submissive?  Would it be interpreted as a come-on?  I was afraid he would get off at my stop, the next stop.  That he might be interested, might be aggressive.  I am no longer a match for most men…even if I am tall, my body is eating away at my muscles at a brisk pace.  I have lost so much physical strength and bulk too.  My personal trainer is struggling to understand why I actually like this but is settling into acceptance now that she sees the blood work I do for my hormone doctor and realises that getting me to work out on my shoulders and arms is a Sisyphean task.

I was also afraid that he might want to beat me up.  I have to accept that this might come someday.  Just a few weeks ago a trans woman was badly beaten on the London Underground for being trans, and nobody also there came to her defence.  What do you expect when you have a Prime Minister who makes trans-exclusionary hate speech comments in the House of Commons during Parliamentary debates?  What should we expect when the Republican manifesto, I don’t think it is worthy of being called a platform, filled as it is with the “rich need to get richer and more powerful” nonsense as well as a litany of trans-erasure goals.

But I take this confusion, this not knowing, and I realise that I need women as my sisters.  I need them to teach me.  To teach me things that they grew up with.  To teach me lessons they learned early, and maybe the hard way.  And knowing this makes me humble towards women, deeply grateful, and it also feeds my submissive soul.  I find this situation a kind of “perfect storm” for my character, at once satisfying my deep and enduring wanderlust and explorer’s nature, but also slaking this thirst for submission to all things feminine.

One of the members of my transition posse is an SW.  She knows that I am a slave, that I am profoundly submissive, and that I have these feelings for her.  She is helping me to understand female sexual pleasure, how to touch, how to receive touch.  But I also learn so much from just watching her interact, move, be.  She also knows that I really mean it when a ‘good time’ for me is defined by her having a good time.  She seems to be really excited that I am developing as a bondage practitioner.  She has asked me to tie her up and to tease her.  In other words, she is a sub in her vanilla life, and a kinky one too, and because I am a slave, she is comfortable playing in this way with me.  I’ve been playing more and more with strangers now once or twice a week, on and off, for the past few months, tying them up.  I am finding comfort in it, but also loving the trust that comes with a woman surrendering to me.  I am honoured to be allowed to give the gift of sensual domination to a woman, who finds comfort with me, precisely because I am not a man, but have lived as one…that this trans woman provides a safe and reliable container.

I had previously described my perception of the female experience as if we took the keys of a piano, representing the male range of expression and perception, and added a few octaves above and below, high notes and low notes, with lot’s of intermediate notes between the keys which exist.  What I now realise is that this is still only 2D, and that the full female experience is 3D and beyond, that this souped keyboard extends in every direction.  If men are linear, women are spheres which expand and contract, in and out of multiple dimensions, at once visible and invisible.  I am reminded of how the moebius strip manages to have only one side in its 2-D existence…but imagine a sphere that was a moebius sphere, existing in 3-D, where the inside and the outside could be one.  In other words, female experience and perception is infinitely complex.  

You can understand how the reductive male experience is so suited to making rules and running the world the way it is designed today.  And that holds true regardless of how we got here.  But many women I know believe we are on the cusp of a new era.  I believe this.  We are entering an age of the Divine Feminine.  As a trans woman I feel it as fully and inevitably as the movement of a large clock.  But I think the growth in the numbers of truly submissive men and dominant women feel this too.  The natural order of things is changing.

Changing sex is a way for me to join the party even if the party is to last for thousands of years.  We can celebrate where men led us, but we can also see that the patriarchal model is no longer fit for purpose.  The world needs something different.  

It is way more than a feminine touch.  It is way more than equality of the sexes.  It is a re-ordering of the world and all socio-political structures, in line with a totally new relationship with each other and with our planet.  It is the only way we will survive as a species.  And I think we would like to do that, to do more than that, to thrive.

Join the revolution.  Celebrate diversity.  Support women first.  Recognise the divinity of the feminine.