Musings from my convalescence: can a transsexual woman get “blue balls”?

Trigger Warning: there is some discussion of vaginal bleeding and faecal incontinence, so be warned.

I’ve been getting blue balls of late, a first.  The irony of this is not lost on me, a post-op transsexual.  Only in my case, the cause is the looming risk of constipation. But “blue balls” is a deep fake anyway. Right?

One nasty side effect of the narcotics I am taking for pain is that they constipate you.  I can’t stand taking medication to counteract medication, but I don’t want to pop my stitches by straining, so I drink a daily cup of this unctuous stuff Miralax, drink an herbal tea called smooth move which helps things along, and in a pinch take Colace as chewable gummies.  That last one is the killer, with magnesium citrate as it makes the water in your body flood into your intestines, so is very dehydrating, meaning you have to drink that much more to catch back up again.  I know this is too much information, but I am reading a book that is confessions of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to women, including awful things they’ve done.  It was a gift of one of my iconic women, the Den Mother.  It is cringe in a laugh-out-loud kind of way.  

Anyway, my story is that I didn’t make it to the bathroom on time the night before surgery and at midnight made a big mess.  Thankfully I threw my pyjamas into the laundry and had them out and drying on the rack by 1:00 am.  I was feeling better by then, anyway.  Laundry rack?  You can take the Italian out of Italy, but you can’t take the Italian out of her.  I hate driers, they ruin clothes.  Sadly, so do sisters.

As for the poop incident, my surgeon would have been proud.  “I’m sorry to say this, but as your doctor, I want you to have faecal incontinence.  That’s a good thing from a surgical perspective.  No straining.  I will give you medications to bring that about.  So don’t think about going for walks.  You might find that wearing diapers is the best thing as pads and underwear won’t be enough.”  She was right and wrong…I haven’t “lost my shit” post-op, but boy, the night before was ugly. And as kinky as that conversation might have been, in these circumstances, there is no kink pleasure anywhere to be found.

As a tall girl I am very sensitive to the care needs of my cotton clothes (all clothes for that matter).  I’ve been doing my own laundry since I first became a ballerina giraffe, when I was about 12 or 13, and not having my stuff shrink was critical to not looking ridiculous.  After all, I was growing so fast that clothes were already on a super short lifecycle, I didn’t want to get into a situation where they were already unwearable after the first wash.  As I look back at childhood photos of me, what you see is a child in clothes that were painfully too small.  Kinda cute, now that I am a girl and dress that way on purpose.  “Oh Daddy, my skirt is so short, don’t you think?”

My sister very helpfully washed my clothes.  And as a mother who probably does way too much laundry, just throws it all together.  Thankfully I didn’t have much to wash, as what she did wash went from white to grey and from my size to someone else’s, and so it shall be.  I politely declined her offer the next time around, “you know, I really like doing it myself, and I brought so many clothes with me, I need to get them all dirty, and anyway, putting things away, its best if I do it, as that way I can find things again, but thank you.  You’re so sweet.”

She called me the other day and for the first time in our respective lives she said, “hang on, I have to pee,” and took the phone with her to the bathroom.  You see, I do have a sister now.  I like it much better this way.

I came off of Oxy yesterday.  The Den Mother began with a disciplined approach.  She hid it from me.  All my other meds are arranged on the kitchen counter in neat rows by the hour in which I am to take them.  We have a little baggy system where they all go into baggies with notes written on them about what I am getting and when I am to take it…this is so I need to be wakened at medicine time and can just fit them in to the closest slot around my frequent naps.  I feel like a wolf and am napping all the time.  And they are often short, 15 minutes, but I still feel as if I have slept for hours.

I liked being on Oxy.  The Den Mother who knows me better than my not-soon-enough-to-be-my-ex-wife (I need to find a new name for her, tragic figure that she is, one that is not denigrating, but encapsulates her energy) hid the Oxy from all of us.  It is a dangerous substance.  Part of why I love her is that she made me beg each time.  It was mild begging, not cruel, but she wanted to know my pain levels just as they did in the hospital.  But even still, we managed to get me onto a dose level 1/3^rd of what I was permitted by the time the Den Mother went home.  My sister picked up the baton and continued to tighten the screws in a loving fashion.  

My current caregiver is not of the same tough love school, so I have had to pick up the baton, and have gone cold turkey.  But our dynamic is different.  She is a love interest.  And this affects everything about our interaction.  I love holding a woman, and she is someone who loves to be held, to be cuddled, to feel touch.  But everything is reversed right now, as she cares for me.  She reads to me from a book that resonates with me and makes me angry, because it describes 1950’s American casual sexism, institutional sexism, and the challenges of being a woman in a society that doesn’t even begin to consider women’s rights.  It is a novel called Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.  I shall review it at the end.  Combined with the book I am reading to myself right now, Lady Secrets: Real, Raw and Ridiculous Confessions of Womanhood, which is a hoot, and When Women Lead by Julia Boorstin, a book which documents the institutional sexism presence in the Venture Capital industry, a world I know all too well and have experienced my own discrimination in.  I have lost two jobs because of being trans, so when I read the stats, I just get mad.  I’m not sure if I should be reading or having such things read to me right now, which is why Lady Secrets is such a necessary antidote as it gives voice to a rebellion against all of the resistance women face in life…but my friend talked me off the ledge of depressive thinking in relation to these books so that I could just lie there and focus on her soft voice.

She reads to me a few times a day.  I love it.  I am curled up and getting to just look at her, and feel her voice resonate through her body and into the bed, can hold my stuffed animals and be tucked under the fluffy duvet and be utterly submissive and enthralled.

I am bleeding more than before.  Not a lot, but enough to be noticeable.  I have never had “an accident” in a pad failure and seem to be navigating that well.  I can’t tell you how life affirming and joy-making it is to look down as I pull up my panties and see how my shape has changed down there.  I can’t even begin.  If there was one thing that I wanted more than anything since I was little, it was a vulva.  And I can tell even now, before the healing, that I am going to have a beautiful vulva that looks as if I was born that way.  My trips to the London Vagina Museum have shown me 10,000 vulvas in all their diverse glory, and mine will fit right in.

It is vulvic pleasure.  And you know what?  There is something so profoundly innocent about the gentle curve of the body as it disappears between my legs that fills me with boundless joy.  It also makes me want to be naughty.

In addition to my blue-balls sensation, a cultural nonsense designed by the male to elicit pity from the female, I have another perverse outcome.  At the moment, the only style of panties I am wearing are boy shorts.  Go figure.  But boy shorts are the only style that doesn’t have seams where I have seams and need to heal.  So boy shorts it is.

My wife used to give me boy shorts for birthday and Christmas, her way of saying, “I’ll support you this far.”  They were ugly.  I never wore them.  But somehow I kept them, and here they are, and I am bleeding in them and throwing them away.  There is justice in that.

Every time I go to the bathroom I have to change my pad, as there is blood.  I am curious ladies, as there is something else.  I am pleased to say that I smell fresh.  I am douching once a day with dilute hydrogen peroxide and just smell sort of like clean seawater.  I get this smell every time I have my nose in the general direction of my quim.  

I have to be super sensitive to this as trans gals are super prone to yeast infections early in their female lives, as the vaginal microbiome has yet to formulate defenses—its population of bacteria not yet grown.  It hadn’t occurred to me that this was important or even existed.  We call the gut microbiome the second brain.  Does this make my vaginal microbiome a third brain?  Why not, and what kind of thoughts would it have or influence?

What else?  The pH of a trans girl’s vagina is not as acidic as that of a natal women; at least not at first, but it takes many years for this to change.  Both of these factors mean I face an increased risk of yeast infections so need to do healthy douching on the regular.  This is not necessarily good for natal women but is absolutely essential for trans women.

I don’t really know so well how other vaginas smell, or taste for that matter, but have had the pleasure of meeting a few in my life, and finding that the longer you were down there, the better they tasted.  None of them ever smelt “bad” to me, or off.  But being hyper-sensitive to smell, a good thing in the world of cooking, I am to keep track of what my lady place smells like so that I can take preventive action should it ever be necessary.  

Dilating consumes much of my day.  The rest is sleeping and eating.  Or washing my dilators.  Or replenishing the 24/7 ice packs that I have to wear on my vulva, perineum and mons.  If I get too cold down there, that also creates a sensation of “blue balls”.

Dilating does something else.  If there is any poop in me at all, dilating makes me want to go to the bathroom something fierce.  Ladies, is that right?  Does penetrative sex make you want to poop ever?  Admittedly, I am eating a diet which is so fibre rich and my body is in such a strange place in terms of its hunger for nutrients that the passage through me is at pace, but still.  I can’t dilate and not need to go to the bathroom after.  I try to go beforehand, but I am not to strain at all, so there might still be some in there, but boy, it sure wants to come out when I am done.

Right now, my doctor has me dilating to preserve depth, which is the easiest thing to lose.  So, I am mercifully on the thinnest one.  It slides in relatively easily, and most of the time, it is fairly easy to get it all the way in.  I am blessed in my depth and can take a full 9”.  Not that I ever will.  Though one of my girlfriends suggest I try it at least once.  That’ll be an interesting nut to crack.

Next week, I will have to begin sizing up: same length, but gradually thicker.  Ouch.

Ahh the joys.