The profound impact that the arrival of my vagina is having on my brain

Once upon a time I was a boy.  I thought my thoughts and played with my friends.  At school, my friends were girls.  In organised playtime, after school play dates, they were invariably boys.  My mother often lamented that none of these boy “friends” ever seemed to stay friends for long.  But with rare exceptions, I never really liked boys, not even as friends.  That changed as I grew up, but in grade school I had one male friend who was close.  In high school, the same.  Coincidentally, they both had the same name.  Different people; same name.  What’s in a name?  I have often wondered how much the name we hold shapes who we are.  Both of these boys had a quiet strength.  Both didn’t talk much.  Both never showed off.  Both were stronger than me, even though I was quite strong.  But they never needed to show me.  They were both quiet, firm, and constant presences in my life.  The opposite of me.  I was flighty, flirty, and wild.  And I wanted my way.  Both of these boys shared another characteristic.  They were strong in their self-knowledge, and very often, at least with them, I didn’t get my way.  They were impervious to manipulation.  I admired them in part because they didn’t let me get my way.  

As I think back, they had boundaries even as children, and I responded to that well, just as I do now.  As I think about my present life, it is people who struggle with their own boundaries that I don’t do well with.  I know that I challenge people.  I probe for weakness.  I can’t help it.  I like strong people.  I know that I will eat weak people for lunch, especially if they become at all emotionally dependent on me.  It is like I am drawn to this.  I don’t do it anymore, but I did before.  

The woman I met on the dating app was just such a person.  In the end I told her over dinner one night, “the fear you had of me is categorically not the fear you should have of me.  But I am dangerous.  Emotionally dangerous.  You don’t want to open up to me.”  I couldn’t help it.  I needed to warn her off.  I don’t like people who are weak, at least to me.  Which is strange, because I am profoundly drawn to helping people in need, who are weak in that moment, and who need help.  I also love to help people, to care for people, to nurture, to feed.  But if I sense that this turns towards me, becomes a kind of unhealthy dependence, then I will push them away.

At school in those young years, I just played with girls.  Especially until academic seriousness kicked in, and somehow boys and girls got separated.  I was not conscious, at first, that we were different.  Yes, we were called boys and girls.  Until I was five, imagine that, I was not really aware of the anatomical differences between us.  Just that girls were so pretty to me.

In pre-school, I attended dressed in clothes that would be considered girls’ clothes.  I can’t remember how this was possible, and whether there was a fiction around my existence.  My birth name is not obviously male or female.  Roughly about the same time that I became aware of the physical differences between us, I began to realise that girls were different.  This made me sad, so sad.  I understood already then, that our differences were based on lived experience, on how we were treated, and how life took place, not on the biology of sex.

I was bitter when I was separated from girls or girl activities for whatever reason, as it was so important for me to minimize the separation, to not drift further apart.  To be excluded from girls and their activities hurt me because I also felt that it meant that I would become less and less like them, that authority figures or even group dynamics were inflicting life damage on me.  I also very quickly learned that I needed to keep my mouth shut about this.

I can’t deny that this fed a fundamental existential despair that grew throughout my life, and fed my gender dysphoria, may have been the core of it, and I wonder now if it isn’t entirely social.  In other words, if society was not so hell bent on putting girls and boys in separate boxes, would I have ever been like this?  Might it have been possible to get through life without this existential need to have a sex change overwhelming me and leading to the place I have arrived to now, with a neo-vagina and lots of bed rest to think on things?  I am 12 days post “Happy V-Day” as my surgeon sang out to me as she breezed through the curtain behind which I was being prepped for surgery.

As I grew up, it became clear that boys and girls had very different lived experiences.  Until puberty through the complication of sexual desire into the mix, I was able to still observe this first-hand through friendships.  Post puberty, when the wall of propriety, shame, intimacy, so many things intervened to keep us apart, it was the rare woman, mostly a girlfriend or an almost girlfriend, who gave me glimpses inside their experience.  The stories I remember most were ones of inappropriate male behaviour.

There are lot’s of them, and more and more, these have crept into the collective consciousness as women speak up about how awful boys were.  One of those girls was one of the ones who came forward during the tortured nomination process of a certain Supreme Court Judge.  How a sex abuser can be elected to the highest court is horrifying.  But I also think on a more profound level, that people don’t change from those behaviour patterns.  The sense of entitlement and abuse of power that must ride shotgun with a rapist have to be hardwired into their DNA.  Those stories made me hate being male, hate being seen as male, and determined to show women that I wasn’t like that.  And my time as being male, hearing enough locker room talk coming from even the “good ones” made me realise, that there are no good ones.  Male brain is lizard brain.  Collective male brain is worse.

Not all men.  The one man that a woman chooses, hopefully is not like that.  The natural contradiction that this line of thinking threads its way through is most eloquently described in the book I Hate Men, a delightful little read by Pauline Hermynge.  Most men don’t like hearing this.  Usually those are the ones to watch out for.  But the 25% of girls who are sexually assaulted by their 18^th birthdays (and 18% of boys) are predated upon by men.  And what kind of man would have so little decency?  What kind of man is so evil.

Of course, sexual assault is the extreme.  But casual sexism is the norm.  And it is the lived experience of all women, everywhere.  All.  Some laugh or shrug it off, some might deny its existence, but there is friction and headwinds that women face that men do not as they go through their daily lives.  That might be the pink tax (products for women are more expensive than those for me), it might be wage inequality (largely invisible), it might be attitudes about capability, casual comments.

I was aware of these things.  Doubly sensitive to them because I wanted to be on the side that faced them and was regarded at least as a potential source of this stuff insofar as I was perceived.  Women who dated me found that I was “different” and most of them also knew why, because I told them, and the ones who I was with were probably with me, because they needed that difference, and just as much, I needed a woman who needed that difference too.

I couldn’t be a typical man because I wasn’t one.  I didn’t think like one.  I couldn’t behave like one.  My wife knows that her attraction and eventual marriage to me was predicated upon this.  She was raped when she was 11 by a male babysitter at a summer resort that she was at with her family.  This man approached her mother offering to look after her children, and why her mother accepted, something you can’t imagine nowadays, but she did.  And once he got my wife alone, he assaulted her.  My wife was one of the rare few who testified in open court against her attacker.  Her mother was humiliated and blamed her for it.  That such an ordeal was placed on the shoulders of a young female rape victim is horrifying, but such were the times.  That her own mother couldn’t take responsibility for negligent parenting, and instead suggested it was her flirting with her attacker which brought it on, is unimaginably hard to understand.

I learned all of this after many years of marriage, just 18 months before my wife asked for divorce, on a lovely ski trip in the Alps.  As she told me the story I could only say, “I don’t understand how somebody could be so evil.”

“That’s why I married you,” she replied.

I thought back about how, when we made love, and she climaxed, that after she would sob, and somehow this made sense.  I was filled with a profound sense of pathos for her.  I was also deeply awed of her strength, and honoured that after all those years, she confided this in me.  To carry a silent burden like that within means to have also carried shame, and that makes it an even heavier load.

In a way, it makes sense that she needed someone like me to hold the “masculine” for her.  It is just sad that this meant that she needed me in that role for her to find her own femininity.  She has said to me that the hardest part of me coming out, what has devastated her, is that it has profoundly affected her sense of self, that it rocked her sense of femininity.

So, here we are, many paragraphs later, and I haven’t even begun to address the point of this post.  What a windbag!  Well, let’s just say that context is everything.

When I first began to have the sense of elation in myself that I would have the courage and wherewithal to not just come out, but to take these steps and to transition, and to change sex, the biggest prize for me was “lady brain”.  I wanted hormones to rewire my brain.

Of course, they have.  I wrote about how soon it happened that I could consciously tell the difference.  But I have also felt it again and again.  Have you ever felt that you knew something, and then a few months later, you felt that you knew it more, and that it was just richer?  Not that you didn’t know it before, but that it was like your vista expanded, a fog lifted.  That is what it has been like, where you can go days, weeks, months, with only gradual change, and then you wake up one day, and things feel as if they have taken a leap forward.

But this is my wiring we are talking about.  And yes, it is changing.  And yes, it is beautiful.

But the kind of “lady brain” that I have described in this post is one of lived experience.  And mine is clearly not that of a natal woman.  I don’t want to get into what it felt like to have my nose to the window looking in, but never able to hear what was going on, or the pain that caused, because that is something unique to dysphoria, making it a rare thing.  What is not rare is that there are natal men and women who are shaped by their respective experiences, and this makes us who we are perhaps as much or more than anything else.

I make light of how I am a baby in the sense of my girlhood, and how every woman is my older sister, but this is the essence of what I mean.  I have a lifetime of lived experiences to catch up on.  And I will never catch up.  Even now, my experiences will be different.  I will experience discrimination and disadvantage in different ways.  A potential male predator is as likely to beat me up as they are likely to want to sexually assault me.  In other words, the particular form of male entitlement that could real its ugly head in relation to me is more likely to result in serious physical harm or death as it is some kind of “sexual” encounter.  That is different.  It is mostly being an object of hate rather than one of desire.

But the feelings of vulnerability it sparks in me are not dissimilar.  And this vulnerability is part of why I couldn’t have imagined taking the steps I have taken recently.  I would not have been able to “complete” this first part of my journey as a woman without obtaining my own neo-vagina.  I know that my body will likely repulse and attract in equal measure.  I know already what I look like in a bikini.  I have a hot body.  And as it has changed shape into one that is more recognisably feminine, the dissonance created between my body and my height will stir feelings of rage in some men.  I stand out like a sore thumb.

Of course, I never want to be hurt.  And Lord above, I do not and will never dress for the male gaze, but I do love my body [now] and I want to exult in it.  I am acutely aware that a certain kind of man takes that as an excuse to make it his.  But I will take the risk as most women do, just finding safety in numbers, changes in behaviour, and vigilance, as my forms of protection.  But I have to learn this fast, having never been exposed to it growing up.  I don’t have the lifetime of incidents to work with, the lessons from sisters, girlfriends, parents to teach me.  My children are desperate for me to take martial arts.  Many trans friends, at least those in the US, carry guns, and urge me to do the same.  The trans community in general in the US has an attitude of being armed to the teeth as the cost of survival.  I can’t live that way.

I was able to think about these things before I had a vagina, because after all, the only person who knew I didn’t have a vagina when I was out and about was me, since I always tucked.  In fact, many women assumed I had had a sex change some time ago, including many I have been in close contact with, for example, the women I have tied up over the past months.  They quickly learned I was “packing” because I was happy to tell anyone who would listen of the imminence of my surgery date.

But no.  All this is noise.  The kind of changes I am referring to are the ones I feel taking place now.  The ones I feel as I dilate, which has become a form of thrice-daily one-hour meditation.  It is impossible to slide all 9” of a dilator inside you and lay there for the best part of 30 minutes or more in silent contemplation, and not feel how open you are.  My legs stretch so wide open I can practically lay completely fat on my belly with my legs splayed, a prelude to the splits.  It is having a profound effect on my mind.

Ditto the constant bleed, and how grounding in the body that feels.  I feel animal, and human, in ways that I never even considered before.

What does it to me?  Make me feel scared?  No.  Vulnerable?  Perhaps, but not consciously.  No, it is none of that.  It makes me feel more alive.  More in my body.  More present.  More here.  Here for me.  But also more here for those I meet, those I am with.

Is it empathy?  The Den Mother believes that my superpower is and has always been empathy.  She believes that my career success in the field of Mergers and Acquisitions was predicated on this, of operating in a male milieu with a woman’s skillset.  That I could read a room, understand the power dynamics, and work it so effectively because it was also combined with a lack of ego.  And that is true.  I never cared about getting the credit, I just cared about the getting the deal done.  And that’s why, any deal I touched ended up closing successfully unless the powers that be decided for some other reason to walk away.

It is a bit sad for me to think that I won’t be able to do that work anymore, because I enjoy it.  After all, we do typically love the things we are good at and become good at the things we love.  But I have already discovered that I face discrimination as a trans woman and know how much harder being out will make it to succeed in that world.  Is it that men are so afraid?  Yes.  It is.

Of what?  That a man might choose to throw his lot in with the women of the world, to become her?  It is perverse, but the headwinds that I face as a trans woman make me happier about this choice.  After all, being woman is not easy.  Being a trans woman is not easy.  The harder it is, the better it tastes.  And yes, I am prepared to fight for it every step of the way.  I have crossed the divide, and my neo-vagina (and HRT before it) was the burning of the bridges behind me.

Dilation, spread legs, time to think about it.  My journey into womanhood has accelerated.  Even without going outside I have learned more about what it means to me to be a woman all cooped up in bed.  To be fair, I have also been listening to a series of amazing women that I admire, love, and look up to, speaking about what it means to them to be a woman, and listening to them about what it is they think this woman needs to know.

I may have become the mother of my inner child, but every woman who smiles at me has become my mommy.  God bless all of you.