Help, I can’t find the clitoris!  And she’s mine.

The smell of my vagina and how strange it is to know that what I am smelling is me

Trigger warning: there are some very frank discussions of the vagina, fluids, blood, smells, and the messiness of vulvular life.

Separately, I almost always post chronologically. This post was written roughly 6 weeks ago, but I somehow missed it in the publishing queue.

Many of us have been fortunate enough in life to come into contact with a vagina that belongs to someone we love.  Some of us are even more fortunate to have gotten to “know” many such mystical, spiritual things belonging to more than one woman.  And of course a great many women, though sadly not all, have gotten to know and love their own kitties.

I don’t mean to boast, and it was thanks to a small number of really body-aware women who taught me how to find the clitoris and how to please them, but I did know where it was and how to find it.  The delicious and hilarious irony now is that I can’t find my own!  Okay, it hurts a bit down there to go probing around, and the swelling is still affecting things, but it is faintly absurd and most definitely humiliating to ask the doctor to show me.  

She’s there, I can feel her…do you know how when a baby is born the father has a chemical reaction that makes him “know” that the child is his?  Well, this is what it felt like.  A few hours after surgery I had some confirmatory good feelings from down there and I knew exactly where they came from and what was up.  My doctor will tell me to be patient, and that I am not to play with it anyway…for at least 6 months.  And because obedience is my kink…

I suspect that all trans women spend an inordinate amount of time getting to know their own neo-vaginas.  And despite what one friend said to me after telling me, “don’t do it.  It won’t even be real,” I have concluded (I already had, and anyway, I wasn’t asking) that it is very real.  Very.  There is no doubt that within a few more months, it will be indistinguishable from a natal vagina.  Even a gynaecologist will struggle to tell the difference until she finds I have no cervix.

Oh, and my husky voice.

I do have a question about peeing.  I will also ask my doctor, but ladies, is this the way it works?  It is a bit like a car wash down there.  My pee just seems to “wash” my inner labia.  It doesn’t shoot straight out.  I am thinking this is in part the result of swelling, which has begun to subside, but everything is still swollen down there.  I mean, pee is sterile, and I can certainly recall the burning taste of pee on my lips and tongue as I went down on various partners over the years.  A taste which goes away quite quickly after you’ve been at it for a while.

Everything is still a bit hazy for me mentally right now, so I can’t remember whether I described what I smelled like after my bandages came off.  Do you know if you have a really beautiful piece of filet mignon.  Fresh, perfect.  Then you cut through it, a nice perfect cut, and give the meat a smell.  Immediately post op that is what I smelled like down there, like fresh cut meat.

But I am not bleeding anymore.  I can’t put the exact day to when I stopped, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether the bleed was from inside of me or was superficial and coming from places where there were stitches.  But broadly speaking, all signs of blood disappeared at the 4 weeks post-op mark.  That’s “normal”, perhaps on the fast side.  The fastest I have heard is 3 weeks, but some of my sister’s bleed for six months or longer.

I also had very little flow.  I will say that it was like a light period flow, never quite soaking through a pad.  And boy, is there a difference in quality between pads.  And I guess many women readers will know that it was only in 2016 that the makers of menstrual products began testing pads with menstrual blood instead of liquids like water…but even today, this practice is far from universal.  So, if you have a pad where the blood seems to show signs of just having flowed across the pad and not been quickly absorbed, then you can have a pretty good idea of what’s going on there.  Just one more example of something designed by men for women with no regard to functionality or need.

My doctor told me that my healing was fantastic, one of the best she had seen [and then I promptly went out and popped a stitch!  Which, thankfully, has now healed back closed thanks to the miracle of the body].  And here I am thinking that what I miss most, what I need and what most, is what I cannot have right now.  To be a fitness bunny again.  I miss exercise sooooo much.  My hunger to exercise has transformed into a kind of knowing of my future which includes a deep comfort in the body I will have, want to have, and the work it will take to have it.

From fresh meat to?  This is the question.  One of the ways that I have become much more body conscious is what I smell like.  When I go to the bathroom, it is not just bathroom smells I smell, but also me.  This gaping cavity that has been opened up in my body, this direct opening to my secret, this biblical birthing passage, my canal, is a scent dispenser of me.  My neo vagina allows my essence to be present, and the smell of me, of my body, is in the room.

I think of a famous incident at the New Yorker of sexual harassment where the then editor, who was later exposed for his vile statements, would say to women that he could smell them…and would make rude comments about what he smelled.  Some people refer to being able to smell their sex.  Something about going from male to female has shown me my animal self.  This part of me was harder to access as a male-bodied individual.

I was once asked by an enlightened woman what it was that I most wanted to experience when having sex.  What did I love most about sex.  And I answered that I loved most to feel ‘animal’.  There is a presence in the body that comes with that, when the mind has left the stage, and our feelings take over.

This smell is symbolic of that.  Smelling me is symbolic of that.  Scent is the most primordial of all senses.  There is no more powerful way to connect to our limbic brain, the animal brain, our instinctual selves.  Scent is also the most powerful mnemonic for memories.  My Queen uses sound to condition my response to her touch and her domination.  When I enter “her space” and I am to submit, there is music playing which is always the same, and immediately reminds me of who I am in relation to her, and it is not a mental process, but one that my body just owns.  My body takes over, and I don’t need to think about anything.  I don’t need to think about submitting, and I don’t need to understand even a little bit.

Sound is powerful, and it is wonderful tool for conditioning.  And as I develop my practice as a dominatrix, I will most definitely use this as a tool.  But I will also use scent.  For scent is the most powerful of all.  What is the limbic brain?  It is our lizard brain.  Our deepest, most instinctual, animalistic brain.  It tells us more about feeling, action, response, than any other sense.

And this too is a form of conditioning.  When I dilate, when I pee, when I sense that I need to change my pad, I am confronted with what I smell like.  And I confess that I hold the pad to my nose and smell it to get to know my scent.  There is also a valid health reason for doing this.  Our scent is an indicator of health.  Particularly for women.  The health of the vaginal microbiome is directly reflected in what it smells like.  The natal female vagina has a slightly acidic pH, and this acidity helps protect it.  The neo-vagina does not have this natural acidity, and not enough research has been done to determine what happens over time.  But the immediate issue is that because my neo-vagina doesn’t have the same acidity, I have to make it more acidic to keep it healthy.

So, I douche.  And I douche with an acidic douche.  I use a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide, which is particularly appropriate for a post-surgical neo vagina.  Over time, I will switch over to a more organic douche, one that is based on a solution of vinegar water.  And I come from a culture of bidets and have a bidet in every bathroom of my home. The bidet, for those who don’t use them, is for washing the genitals.  Men use them too, but really, they are for women.  And they are beautiful.

My needs as a neo-vagina owner are different than those of a woman who has a natal vagina.  There are times when a natal vagina should be douched, mainly when there has been a urinary tract infection.  But generally, a natal woman should not douche as this can interfere with her bodies natural defences.  An entire industry has been built around fostering women’s insecurity about what they smell like: scented douches, feminine deodorant spray, pads that have a “fresh scent”…and yet, the irony in all these products is that they harm you.  First, there is the harm that is telling us that we don’t smell good, that our scent should be hidden, or covered up.  But second, these products really can harm you, particularly douching with anything other than a dilute, unscented solution of vinegar or hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂).  But a natal woman shouldn’t even need this unless something has gone off.

There is a valid health reason for me to take a good sniff of what is happening down there, to smell the blood, to smell the secretions.  Because an off smell is one of the first indicators that something has infected me down there.  Trans women are more susceptible to urinary tract infections, particularly early on in the life of a neo-vagina, and so douching is actually really important for us.  And that is because our bodies don’t have the vaginal microbiome yet that a natal woman has (a girl is born with a healthy vaginal microbiome that she gains from her mother in the womb and during the birthing process)…and what is wild is that women who live together end up developing the same microbiome, even if they eat a different diet.  Is that not wild?  The microbiome lives in symbiosis with what we eat, and our bacteria adapt to our diet, but also talk to us about what they want to eat.

When you have gas, this is your gut microbiome telling you that it is unhappy about something.  In my body this is a sign that I have eaten something that makes my microbiome stressed.  The first is over-eating.  I may not have the same sense of fullness at times, but if I have eaten too much, I am reminded by having gas.  When I eat cheese, which my body struggles with no matter how much I love it, I get gas.  When I first switched over to a diet which was more consciously vegan/vegetarian, I got gas.  When I started eating much more fibre, I got gas…but now this is a happy place for my gut.

The other day, one of my magnificent children cooked spring lamb for our Easter meal.  It was divine.  But boy was my gut unhappy.  It was the first piece of red meat I had eaten for roughly six months.  And it took me two or three days for my gut to settle down afterwards.  And I also smelled different during this period.

I do eat a lot of spices, for instance in my magical morning “coffee”.  This has a profound effect on what I smell like.  I also feel so energized and good from drinking it.  It is filled with anti-inflammatory spices, the full raft of omega 3-6-9 oils, anti-oxidants and adaptogens.  I know it is good for me because of how I feel after.  I love coffee, but in preparing my body for surgery I stopped drinking it.  This was tough.  I drink a litre of it a day, usually before 7 am.  Coffee is also really good for athletes.  Caffeine helps muscle recovery before and after strenuous workouts, particularly ones that lead to lactic acid build-up or muscle-growing micro-tearing in muscle fibres.  But lying in bed 24/7 is not the right physical state for this.

Coffee, not caffeine, is also bad as a drink for someone recovering from surgery for another reason.  Acidity.  The acidity in coffee, whether decaf or regular, interferes with the body’s ability to heal itself.  No coffee, therefore, until I heal. Thankfully there is my new mushroom “coffee” which is really chocolate to the rescue.

But here is the point.  What I smell like, what we all smell like, is driven mainly by what we consume.  We talk most about garlic and onions and things that make us smell bad.  Bad breath.  I love garlic, and in insane quantities, but I don’t smell like garlic like some people in my life who have a different diet and eat much less garlic, but when they do, egads, leave the room.  And I think that this is the result of eating a predominantly plant-based diet.

I eat a ton of fruit, especially pineapple, which I eat dried or as the backbone of shakes.  Shakes are something which one of my children has brought into my life, along with a nutritionist, as they are fabulous delivery mechanisms for the nutrients the body needs after surgery.  I will write one day about how to prepare the body for surgery and how to use diet to recover faster.  But I need to finish my living experiment of this process first.

My diet, however, is most definitely showing up in what I smell like down there.  I can pick up the scent of pineapple and of some of the spice I consume.  Cinnamon or cassia bark is present.  Fenugreek is present.  Both of those come through the body and leave a beautiful and subtle fragrance.

If you are a man who wants your cum to taste good to her, for your balls to smell good to her (when they are clean), all you need is to eat fruit, lot’s of fruit.  Bananas and pineapple are the most scent-giving, flavour affecting foods.  Give your body at least 24 hours to flush itself of toxins and other things.  No junk food, no processed food, only goodness and lot’s of fruit.

I lay with a most gorgeous woman over the last weekend before surgery.  We explored each other’s bodies in the dreamy light of one of the inner bedrooms of this apartment.  It is a womb-like space, this whole apartment is a cocoon, a healing place, a dreamscape.  And we came together and gently explored and touched in a sensual embrace.  I think of the smoke from the incense stick and how it softly rises and gently folds around itself.  We were two incense sticks whose smoke mingled.

Before seeing her, I changed my diet.  I ate things for two days, and only those things, that I knew would make me smell good.  It mattered to me to be with her with intention.  There are some people who we come to as we come to goddesses.  That we enter the temple when we are in their presence.  Yes, it is a form of respect for her.  But it is founded in respect for the self.  When we respect ourselves and our bodies so much that we wish to present them at their best to a love partner, then this effort becomes manifest.

And yes, she could smell the difference.  She smelled me, all of me, sniffing me incessantly.  ‘Oh, you smell good’, she said.  So did she.  She wore a natural perfume, and she sprayed my pillow with it, so I would have her with me after she was gone.

What do you call it when it is the last time you will ever have sex?  In this case, she was my last sex before surgery, my last sex as a man.  With a tantric love, kundalini practitioner, I could “get it up”.  In this case, there was no hint of that, and yet, our time together was one of the most divine, sensual, sexual experiences of my life.  We both knew what it meant.  And the dreamy sense of play that was an extended exploration of one another’s bodies was made all the more delicious for its fleeting, diaphanous pleasure.  Up in smoke.

We talk about losing our virginity.  Why is it a loss?  Why is it something to say goodbye to?  A loss of innocence?  I carried my innocence with me even after I had lost it over a lifetime, and still managed to preserve it.  Still managed to find wonder in the exploration of a partner’s body.  To find that play was still possible with familiarity, perhaps even more so.  To learn about what someone likes, to learn about how they wish to be touched, is a beautiful process…but to know is even more so, when you can tend to her needs, and play with her without words.

I prepared my body to be with the person who was going to push the boat out, the canoe which carried my male self, and let it lose itself in the stream.  She has been born now, and he is gone, floating forever down the river, in the canoe of my dream self, the one I floated into this life in, the one that I gave birth to myself on an Ayahuasca journey just two short years ago.

I lost my girlginity before I had a vulva.  I say this because the woman I was with was my first genuine lesbian partner.  There was something way more affirming to me about sleeping with a lesbian than there has ever been about sleeping with a straight woman.  And I do marvel at the change in my relations with straight women, and how many come onto me compared to what it was like when I presented male.  One of my best man-friends said to me, “you’re the ideal man now.  You’re a woman, so you don’t threaten women; you listen; you are emotionally available; and you still have enough of a man in you to give a woman a sense of your power.”  He told me this as we sat and sipped a delicious red wine.

But I have not found that lesbian women are attracted to me.  I felt this at the one evening I went to which was a lesbian social evening.  I know that there is a “trans women are women” movement.  And politically, I am absolutely in alignment with that.  I will admit to some cognitive dissonance in the idea that our genitals can be disconnected from what our sex is.  I was not willing to call myself a woman when I still had male bits.  That also extended to using the women’s bathroom, or accessing female spaces, to change, to do anything.  This is different now.  But it came with a legal sex change and a surgical sex change.  I am a definitely a woman now and assert my she/her pronouns every time someone gets them wrong.  Every time.  

Before, I was accepting of all pronouns, but gave they/them when asked.  I am still patient, and not really crestfallen when someone misgenders me, but I suspect will change over time.  I begin to think that it isn’t so hard to gender someone correctly.  A little effort at first, particularly for people who have known you for a while, but then it should settle.  And with strangers, give me a break.  For someone who presents in this way, you either give them she/they or you ask.

The bathroom is a private space.  Having a beautiful bathroom, spacious, clean, well lit.  This is something very important to many women.  This one too.  In the houses I have designed, the bathrooms are always one of the most important features.  Big.

But there is something else going on, something which I understand now because of my new relationship with my body.  The bathroom is a sacred, private space.  I like the toilet to be in another room.  What we do in the bathroom are forms of cleanliness rituals.  Bathing, anointing.  But also being in the self.  Being in the naked body.  Taking the naked body through the ritual of cleanliness and into the clothed body.  The mask we wear, the protection we put on, but also the projection of ourselves, our desires, our sex, our ability to attract or repel…all these things are born from the rituals we perform in the bathroom, in the boudoir.  Our makeup, our perfume, how we wish to feel on the day, how we already feel.

And when I go to the bathroom now, I can smell me.  I can really smell me.  I smell my sex.  And it is a delightful smell.  The vagina is sometimes described as fishy.  That is a sign of a UTI in real terms, but it is also something which I think men say when they are not being respectful.  A healthy vagina smells fresh.  Oceanic, perhaps, but always fresh.  And I think that every woman knows what she smells like.  

I have always had a strong sense of smell.  Very.  It is one of the pleasures of life, but also what helps me to cook well.  To taste well, to eat well.  But my sense of smell on oestrogen has increased dramatically.  This is a biological evolutionary necessity for the female of the species.  And this change has been pronounced in me.  We lose our ability to smell as we age, and part of this is about evolution and self-protection.  When we are young, learning to distinguish what is safe to eat and what is not, we are much more sensitive to smells and tastes.  This keeps us from dying.

But once we have learned these things, it is safe for the brain to let go of these perceptive talents and to use the brain energy on things which are more suited to where the needs are at that time in our development.  This is why kids stop hating beets, or spinach, or mushrooms.  The adult palate is less sensitive, and things come into balance.  But also, our sense of smell is less acute.  Whatever age-related changes in my ability to sense smell might have arisen, they have been more than reversed on oestrogen.

I’m a sommelier by passion.  Certified.  I took the training when I was younger because I loved wine.  For work reasons I stopped before the final training, what is known in the trade as “degree” level, and the last rung on the land before becoming a Master of Wine.  I do not have a goal to be a Master, but I think it would be a good time to go back and finish that step.  I can smell better than ever.

It is strange but smelling me in such a visceral and animal way, is making me feel more a woman than anything else, than any item of clothing, of any affirmative comments, of a happy glance in the mirror.  Knowing that I smell good, knowing that I smell me, the insides of me, is giving me a calm certainty that my femininity, my woman-ness, who I really am in this flesh and blood, is a woman who smells like pineapple in the morning.

One bizarre and final twist. One of the side effects of switching over to an oestrogen-dominant body has been that my sense of smell has sharpened. This can be a bad thing when you hang out with someone who has bad breath, but has done wonders for my cooking. And that, my friends is hard to imagine–that I don’t even need to have cooked these past months and my cooking just moved ahead to a whole new level. Is this just one more area that women are going to slay?