Finding the Divine Feminine within

I found a new therapist, a sex witch

It appears to be human nature to seek to define ourselves.  Part of that is a voyage of discovery: “ahh, here are my peeps.”  Another part is groping in the dark, trying to find ourselves, either seeking some familiar sensation or feeling, or hoping to see in the dark, and then latching onto whatever feels similar enough, as this is the only way to turn on the lights.  And then the precarious one, the dangerous social one, the one where the world defines you, and then you let that become your cage, “here sweetie, just go in here, you’ll see, life is so much better this way.”

But as a free, liberated woman, none of these “choices” are real.  They are all the siren call of Scylla and Charybdis, seeking to lure us onto the rocks of our own destruction.  Soothing surrender.  No, for the woman who wishes to own her self, to be the mistress of her own agency, something deeper is required.

There are no roadmaps.  There is no certain terrain.  Indeed, there is almost nothing that can help you find your way to the sanctuary within.  I am not writing today just about women (I cooked dinner for a group of women yesterday, not one of whom would call themselves a woman, every one of whom was on testosterone, every one of whom had had a mastectomy—all but one, the divine they who had invited me).  I learned more about what it means to be a woman listening to them than just about any group of people I had ever spoken to before.  And they spoke, we spoke, about the physical seat of female power, vulva, clitoris, vagina, cervix, tubes, ovaries, about the types of sex change operations in either direction.  Accidental education surely helps us find the way.

Another way that helps is to find mentors.  Many people who have achieved “enlightenment”, or are on the path ahead of you, simply don’t wish to speak.  Their gifts are hard won.  Who are you little baby, to ask.  We are all governed by self-interest.  Even altruism has self-motive, the desire to feel useful, worthy, or to feel the warm kisses of praise.  Thankfully, there are some, however, who have reached a point in life, in their careers, that they have decided to foster community around them.  Reaching out to such people and hearing them out will give you some of the tools that you will need on your way.

What does it mean to be a woman for this woman?

My birth certificate says I am woman.  So, before law, I am female.  So, too, all my other legal documents.  The vestiges of my legal male self are left only with my healthcare providers, who have an ability to care “right” to know that I was born as something different, for the absence of certain structures inside my body, will help them to diagnose and treat.  A legal woman.

The female body has some peculiar features to it, things that I learn every day.  For one, oestrogen-fed skin tans more easily, and also retains a tan for longer.  I have not figured that out, but have noticed this.  To me this is a joyful benefit, as I am a sun worshiper.  I know that it is stupid to be like this, not least because the sun’s damage to the skin is real, making it crepey, leaving brown spots…all things which happen more easily to the thinner, more delicate skin of a woman.

When you take my blood, you will find nothing to distinguish my blood from that of a healthy teenaged girl.  My hormone regimen is intended to induce “second puberty” by putting me on doses that are well above the maintenance range for a woman born with functioning ovaries.  The intent is feminisation.  It is working.  Working in ways that reveal themselves every day.  I am hormonally female.

While taking female sex hormones for a long enough period will render a natal male permanently sterile, stopping taking them will mean that sooner or later your testes will “recover” and begin producing testosterone again.  There is scant research on this topic as few trans women detransition if they can help it (just 1%), but it appears that oestrogen does begin to alter the physiology of the male reproductive system (shrinkage is the main difference—small balls, small penis, but this is also mirrored inside, with all the internal structures, tubing, etc also shrinking—almost as if oestrogen was turning back the clock).  I have had an orchiectomy as part of a full-on sex change operation, and that means that I will have to take oestrogen for the rest of my life or suffer the consequences of severe menopause.  Yes, menopause.  A female affliction.

But hormones are powerful beyond belief.  They are a control mechanism for every cell in the human body, every cellular process.  I have to come to understand that “feeling it in my bones” is different now than it was in a male body.  And while you may look at me and see the vestiges of the man I once was, there is little left of the feeling of what it was to be a man, and I don’t mean rationally, I mean at the level of skin and bones.  I have forgotten what it feels like to be a man.  What it feels like.  Not emotionally, but actually in my skin.

If I try, I can conjure memories of what my man brain would have felt like, or remember what certain things felt like in my body, but this is different.  Every cell, whether wired to our brains for sensation, has feeling.  This communication network has changed.  I am living in my skin in a different way.  What I want, what feels good, what my body aches for, needs, is different than it used to be in such a profound way that I can’t even conceive of what it felt like.

If you took some random Joe off the street and put them through what I put myself through, I am sure that the outcome would have been different.  How do I know that?  How do I feel?  I feel ‘right’.  Really ‘right’.  Comfortable in my skin.  This is a new feeling for me.  Something which I never had access to before.  We can talk all we want about gender dysphoria, this body level feeling that something isn’t right, technically, that there is incongruence between biological sex and lived sense of gender…thankfully this doesn’t happen to too many people, because it hurts like hell.  Like wearing a psychic hair shirt.  There is no possible comfort position, and everything looks and feels awful.  

Gender dysphoria came and went with its intensity, but it was never not there.  I never knew what it would feel to be okay in my own skin.  To be happy to contemplate my own naked body.  To revel in touching it, touching myself.  Of just being me as a human in my own skin.

I have my last in-person gynaecological visit with my surgeon next week.  I am expecting her to give me the “all-clear” to go out into the world.  I am going to cry my eyes out.  I know it.  Every time I think about it, I start crying.  I am so in love with her.  Apart from just having this monster crush on a gorgeous woman, I have deep reverence for professional competence.  This is what is triggered when I encounter a really powerfully embodied dominatrix, only this is another order of magnitude—20 years of study and residency to qualify to do your first operation…that’s a kind of expertise and dedication that is sexy beyond belief.

But what this surgeon has done for me, is to save my life.  I wouldn’t have made it to today without knowing since I was a little boy that I could grow up and be a woman, that I could change sex.  And yes, a part of me wishes that I had changed sex as a child, or better still, just been born a girl, but the pain that has gotten me here has given me so much.  My surgeon has also given birth to me, and the metaphorical parallels between what is going on with my body and what happens to a woman’s body through the birth-giving process, is so bizarrely symmetrical, it is no longer a metaphor.

I hardly ever leave home without a breast-feeding pillow, a donut to sit.  Advertising to any woman who has given birth that my vulva really hurts.  A very sweet woman came up to me at a dance class the other day and said, “I really love your breast-feeding pillow.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Did you have pelvic surgery?” she asked.

“I had a baby,” I said.

“Aww,” she cooed, “how old is the baby?”

“I don’t know yet; I’m still figuring that out.”

“I’m a baby too,” she said, getting it.  “And so’s my friend,” she said putting her arm around the woman who was holding her on her lap.

“Yeah, I’m a baby too,” said the other woman.

I still buy products in the maternity section of Target, post-partum relief of various kinds.  These are all reminders that I belong to a different tribe now.

I am no longer a ‘they’.  I am only ‘she’, and I say it out loud, and proud, in every room when I introduce myself.  My voice still says otherwise, but little by little it is changing.  Weekly vocal therapy is the only way to break the patterns of the male voice…and I hope to get far enough so as to not need surgery, as it is a risky procedure with uncertain outcomes, and ones which are only worth it if the voice has already been changed in affect.

I don’t care if I look to someone as what a woman looks like to them.  There is no man-feeling in this body.  There is only my physical reality as a woman with a vulva and a clitoris, breasts, achingly smooth skin and increasingly lithe limbs.  The man left the building and left me behind.

I stood in lingerie the other day in a room full of people—another story sure to emerge—and the eyes on me went two places, to my chest and between my legs.  I love my breasts, and they are bag and steadily and happily filling out.  But even more importantly, there is no longer any bulge between my legs.  Even the swelling has come down so much that all I have now are slightly plump labia, but you can’t really tell when I have panties on, or that they are any different than any other woman’s.  I can’t tell you how joyful that feels.

I was ready to suffer any amount for that feeling.  To be able to lie in a bikini, to wear sexy underwear, oh gosh, it is what I always wanted.  And yes, my vulva is beautiful to me.  My doctor has given birth to me, a fully grown woman.  But my reality is that I am still a baby.  My therapist sees me as an adolescent girl, asking all the questions about her body and the place of her body in society just as a teen girl does.  She is more right than I am, only this feeling that every adult woman is my big sister, has something to teach me about being a woman, makes them special to me.

Post-op womanhood v. pre-op

I was living out for roughly two years before surgery.  My new birth certificate was issued before my sex change as I had already undergone “permanent changes” to my sex as defined by the legal system, and by the medical community.  Politicians are still behind the curve on this.  Trans women are women.  How far do we have to go to make this commonly understood and accepted?  It is just a matter of time before uterine transplants are real, before a trans woman can get pregnant and give birth, surely a matter of time, before we can be completely rewired.  What then?

I know that many trans women choose a different path than mine.  I also understand that society has different feelings about trans women who retain male genitalia and those who do not.  The term “transsexual”, widely discredited for its earlier links with mental illness, is now being reclaimed by trans women who have had sex change surgery to distinguish between themselves and trans women who have not.

I knew what felt right for me.  I wasn’t willing to call myself a woman, and to drop ‘they’ as a pronoun until my legal documentation was in place, and I was post-op.  That was for me.  Others may feel differently.  Self-identification should be sufficient.  And yes, there will be toxic assholes, most likely real men who abuse this to have access to women’s spaces.  But this isn’t trans women doing this, it is sick men who will do whatever it takes to hurt women, no matter what, no matter how.  

Trans women are almost universally victims.  We chose it.  In part, though to call being trans a choice is a bit of a stretch.  I embrace the positioning, for I was willing to pay the price, and being a woman has a cost to it that being a man simply does not.  I know some women will say that they don’t suffer from sexism, chauvinism, and maybe they are the lucky few.  As a trans woman I get all of it, plus some choice morsels reserved for people like me.

As I stood on a busy city street corner in this highly enlightened city the other day, a car of young men drifted by at just the right speed for question and reply, “are you a man or a woman?” one shouted, and then satisfied he could answer his own question, added “you faggot.”

“I’m a dyke,” I shouted back.  I was just flattered that he wasn’t sure what I was when he first saw me.

Before surgery, I went to a lesbian meet and greet cocktail party.  It was very different for me than going to a mixed male-female party.  For one, every one there was Sapphic.  But it was also an awakening for me.  Not one woman hit on me all evening.  Not one looked at me with the little sparkle in her eye that is a prelude to flirting.  Not one.  It was very upsetting.  When I go to a party with straight women, this happens a lot, they flirt with me, and they become disappointed that I am not a man in touch with his feminine side, being playful, but instead, I am a woman.

Just a few months later, I went to another one of these events, only this time it was different.  I had beautiful and engaging and flirtatious conversation all night long.  Conclusion?  The act of the sex change has changed me in the eye of the beholder.  And this without even saying anything about it.  And it wasn’t that I needed the external validation to tell me that something was different, it was instead a confirmation that something which emanated from me was picking up and attracting different signals.

In other words, lesbians were looking at me as one of them, without consciously knowing that I no longer possessed male bits.  And that tells me that something more subtle is at work.  Is it what I smell like?  Possibly.  Is it my energy?  Also possible.

I think, however, that it is just that something has clicked inside of me that says ‘woman’…comfort in my skin, a changing of my voice, my smell, my affect, my energy, all of it.  But it needed the change in me to go from physically male to physically female.  I went on a date with a trans woman the other day who has many years of transition ahead of me.  She has also had lots of work done, and her face is female, her bosom was ample, she fit a female figure more obviously than I, but she was never going to have the op, and while we didn’t get into it, I could get out of my head that she was carrying a big fat cock in her skirt.  It’s horrible of me to think this way, but I decided I didn’t want to hang out with her anymore, in part because I have no interest in being romantic with someone who has those bits.  None at all.

And yes, society has to work this out…what do we do with people that are ambiguous, in a literal sense.  I am ambiguous too, also literally, but more figuratively, and I can’t help but wanting to dress in ways that signal that I have formally and physically changed sides—so am prone to wear clothes which show that I am not tucking any more as there is nothing to tuck, but also clothes that show that I don’t just have breasts, but real breasts.

Society and men think that this signalling of mine is for the male gaze.  That is a symptom of the malaise.  I do it for me.  I do it to signal to women also that I am of the tribe, not an interloper.  I know that some women deny us, and that is coming from a place of their own wounds.  [As an aside, my endocrinologist reclassed me as intersex as a political statement, as they are doing with all of their trans patients, for intersex are not being denied access to hormones in one of the 24 states that have now restricted access in the US for hormones—yes, you read that, in a country ostensibly lead by a party which supports trans rights, the minority party is making it very hard for my brothers and sisters to freely enjoy life as free citizens].  But what of intersex women?  Women with both characteristics?  It was no falsehood that I was/am now intersex.  Two years of hormones and a sex change have guaranteed it.

What is this post really about?

Female power is more sexual than male power.  Female power comes from sex appeal and the ability to attract.  It is being magnetic.  It is more powerful than male energy.  It is being sexy, and hot, and desirable.  It is also temporal, but a woman who finds this energy, harnesses it, and uses it, carries a gift that will live on in her confidence for life.  

This is exactly why the patriarchal system relies on putting women down, body shaming, of stealing her agency, of threatening her ownership of her own body by allowing a debate on reproductive rights.  A woman who knows and wields her sexual power is dangerous to men.  She makes them lose their minds.

And what I have realised in myself, first learned as I went out one evening with a dominatrix friend of mine, who soon had a queue of men who wanted to kiss her feet or lie underneath them, is that I don’t have that power yet.  Or at least, I haven’t figured out how to cultivate it and wield it.  And while I don’t want men, I do want men to desire me.  I also want women to desire me.  Even more.  But the point is, in either case, this is the answer.

To be a woman I must find my own sexual power.  I must step into female sexual energy.  This is why my new therapist is a sex witch.  This is why I have a dawning realisation that my own future and present happiness is directly correlated to being a sex witch myself.  Nothing matters more.