What a sex change feels like and what that has to do with Christmas…

For those who celebrate Christmas, do you remember what it felt like to be a small child and to wake up on Christmas day?  Thinking you would never fall asleep the night before and then going out like a light?  Waking up painfully early with excitement that had continued to build through dreams and over the night?  Lying in bed with anticipation, waiting until it was safe to go and wake up the parents—just about the only reason that might be okay.  Creeping down the stairs, waiting until you were allowed, and then going into the living room, where the tree stood, so big, stuffed underneath with newly arrived presents, and already blazing with lights at 7:00 am?  And then finding this mysterious joy in the magic of it all, a whole-body sensation, flushing with excitement?  “Who?  Me?” it seemed to feel, feeding this snowballing sense of excitement.  A present from Santa.

It was a pretty amazing feeling; one I would wish to keep.  When my children were young, I used to read them the Polar Express.  It is a pretty simple story, but the message of the book always proved too complex for the audiences being read to [and to many of the adults brought to read this]…it is hard to tell a child about the loss of innocence, which is the deep message in that book…but the gentle way in which it explores the magic of faith, in this case, faith in Santa, is powerful and beautiful.  As an adult, reading that book to my children, I did not read it quite so literally.  An allegory of sorts, in reverse, a tale about believing in magic.

I always cry when I read that book.  And even though my children are grown, I still get through those final pages without getting choked up.  They always asked why I was crying, and I have never told them.  Hanging onto magic is one of the hardest things to do in the world we live in.  So much of life is one rude awakening after the next.  Even the meanest person who has children seems to be able to hang on for at least a little while to helping protect their own child’s innocence.  Often lost as an abusive parent, or just a mean, kind of kick-the-dog parent, just can’t help themselves and start taking the lid off, robbing the child of this sense of magical wonder.

I fought back hard as a child when people tried to take my magic from me.  When I sat on a park bench next to two older kids who talked to each other and said that Santa didn’t exist, I just got up and left.  I was sad that someone would say something like that, because I could only see that as a way of taking away magic.  But I also understood Santa to embody magic, even if it came manifest through my parents, or others.  The magic was the spirit of giving, of play, of imbuing this mystical event with care for others, with thoughtfulness, with a kind of generosity that hurt to give, and was a joy to see received.

There’s a lot of emotion in there.  The parallel to the title of the post is just how complex and wonderful the differences are between having the bits I use to have, and my lady bits now.  I’m not talking about my beautiful little boobs which seem to elicit a mix of envy and kinky, sexy, bad girl behaviour from whoever I happen to be fooling around with at the time.  I am talking about my vulva.  And boy, my Dr. is going to be rolling her eyes at how hard I am finding it to not get aroused.

What’s happening in my body?  Down there?  Well, two things.  First is that I am being weaned off of pain medication…the only heavy duty one left is for nerve pain, which is half of the pain or more of down there.  The second is that all of those nerve endings are waking up.  It can take a year or even longer for them to wake up completely, but for some people, it can happen sooner.  I felt my clitoris within an hour of coming out of surgery.  The labia on the left side of my vulva are completely awake.  The ones on the right side are catching up.

What I don’t recall is ever feeling anything like the feelings coming from down there when I used to have a penis and balls.  It sounds cliché, but clearly whatever I had before was meant to become labia.  And my goodness, it feels really good to touch them lovingly, tenderly.

The Christmas feeling I am talking about is here.  My vulva is this gorgeous gift.  It is a forever gift, one that reveals itself to me in its beauty and mystery and incredible ability to give pleasure to me.  I can’t stop playing with it, looking at it in the mirror, teasing it, poking a finger inside, looking around.  In a somewhat hilarious and totally embarrassing moment, I had to ask the nurse who was doing my third gynaecological exam in as many weeks where the clitoris was.  She chuckled.  She had just repeated the lesson on how to wipe my ass, so this was really in the category of the basics—things that boys never learned.  Indeed, the nurse recounted the day in her school where the boys were sent off to learn “who knows what,” and the girls learned how to wipe themselves hygienically, about pregnancy, periods, and so on.  You can guess which session had more content.  

I would say that I was able to play with and please a vulva and its owner because I was taught by someone who dared to expect to be pleased.  For my own, I was afraid of poking around down there while it was still a bit beaten up, and while there are still stitches and you know.  I didn’t want to hurt myself.  She went right in while I held the mirror and she showed me, and by gosh, there it was.  And it looked just like a natal one.

The awakening of nerves process is painful.  It is not gentle.  I would say it is a bit like having an isolated lightning bolt or like having a nerve fibre feel like it is a tube having something too large shoved down it.  It is a shooting pain that makes you hit the roof or even cry out, but thankfully it goes away in seconds.  Leaving instead a dull dread that it might happen again.  Or that another is coming, as they seem to come in clusters.  The good news about these pains is that they are signs of life, and every one of those means the awakening is happening.

It turns out that I got my “hernia” from overzealous use of my new Hitachi magic wand, a confession too embarrassing to admit to even my doctor.  I told the nurse instead.  We had a giggle.  And then she told me to swear off the toys until at least 6 months had passed.

And boy that is tough.  I get horny from the slightest thing.  Right now it is just going into a meditative state, being present in my body.  It seems that soul me only wants to be present in one place, and that is in my vulva.  And the kind of arousal I feel is very different than what I felt as a male.  It is diffuse but also more intense at the same time.  I understood the words of the surgeon who told me that when things are rearranged my sense of pleasure will increase because my brain (because of the hormones that are governing it) will find everything as it should be.  But I can’t stay horny because as soon as I am aroused blood starts rushing to those lady bits, and that hurts, so I have to ice myself immediately to try and cool it down.

The human body is a miracle.  And that a man and woman can be so different but also so similar at the same time…the rest is this towering edifice of lived experience.

And for that, you really just have to throw yourself into the deep end.  

I now understand that really beautiful lingerie is like wrapping paper.  And every day I get to unwrap the most precious gift of all.  And I have to say that being with a woman feels so much better to me than it did before.  My truth is that in order to be able to love a woman fully, which requires giving and receiving, I needed to be a woman.  I couldn’t do it so easily before, it just felt hard to me, because I wasn’t comfortable in myself, in how I might be perceived.

My fantasy life is also going haywire…all of a sudden these new vistas are opening up before me of Sapphic pleasure.  I can hear the whispers in my ears, feel the warm breath and murmuring indulgences as if I am in this vast corridor of spirits, all female.  I love it here.

Three times a day I look at my vulva in the mirror, touch my labia, caress them, feel the sensations, have a peak inside, and then relax, a deep relaxation which sometimes sees me fall asleep as I slide a hard plastic dildo inside of me—we used to call it “lying back and thinking of the Queen.”