Dilation, sizing up, and what dilating does to the trans girl brain

For those of you who don’t know what dilation is, here is an explanation.  Dilation is a process intended to keep the newly created vaginal canal open.  Just as when you get your ears pierced, you need to keep your earrings in, or the hole will close. So it is with a neo-vagina.

Dilation is something which is very necessary at the beginning, or you will lose depth (how far in something will go) and breadth…you can regain breadth (how thick a something you can take), but once you lose depth, the only way to get it back is new surgery, and sometimes that is very complicated, and never offers the same options you had first time around. Breadth is more nuanced. Being able to “take more” is a function in part of also preventing the formation of scare tissue, so the more you can dilate with larger sizes, early in the process, the easier it will be later when you want to put your new vagina to use.

You might think that no trans woman would go through this process of getting a sex change, and then not follow her doctor’s instructions, and end up losing her vaginal canal.  Yet, it happens, and surprisingly often.  There must be many reasons why, but the main one probably has to do with pain.  It hurts.

Oh, and it takes sooo much time. Some people start doing it 4xday…about an hour each time. You can see why they don’t want us to go back to work for three months after surgery. It would be bloody inconvenient disappearing that often through the day. And can you imagine walking out of the urinal (apart from how gross it would be) with a handful of dildos and lube? That’s basically what we are talking about here.

I count my blessings that I spent the last 18 months before surgery taking ballet.  I didn’t do it for this reason, but because I see ballet as core to my sense of self as a woman.  But the happy corollary is that I spent 18 months working my pelvic floor and learning to open my hips.  This proved to be a blessing in disguise, as I can just flop my legs open wide, almost enough to do a sideways split.  And so I was doing that to relax into dilation, and as a result split open some stitches.

My doctor’s response was priceless and deadpan, “maybe you could hold off on spreading your legs quite so much.”   Thank goodness the body healed itself and un-split my stitches.

Many women born with vaginal canals also dilate for various reasons, so this process is not unique to trans women.

My doctor gave me a set of them.  They are 9” long, slightly flared, gently curved at the tip, and made of hard plastic in different colours.  They have regularly spaced dots so I can monitor my progress.  As it happens, I’m a boss bitch.  Dilation has been “easy” for me. I have full depth. More than enough to take an above average cxxd. Not that I would want that, but I do want to play.

And while it is a pain to give up an hour or more three times a day when I have so few hours that I am awake, because recovering from this kind of surgery just makes me sleepy, as does any form of exertion…standing for more than 10 minutes, walking a few blocks…so my life does really revolve around dilation, eating, and napping.

One of my kids asked me how I can cope with so much time in bed, and was complaining because they were poorly for a few days and slept a lot, and I’m like, “are you serious?  I’m in bed now for a month and you are there chatting with your friends, playing video games and being served every meal in bed?”  The grass is always greener.

I took 100 days out of life to just focus on this change in my body.  I came to where I am on international women’s day (not by design; a happy accident).  I had my surgery on the first day of Spring.  I made a vulva on April Fool’s day out of clay, dried it, and then painted it black on the day of the eclipse.  Forty days in and I will paint it gold. 

I have an altar in my bedroom to the vulva, another to my ancestors, especially those women who have invited me into their names, for I have changed all of my name.  I have another altar to healing.

My surgeon made me sign an agreement that I would not work, not even one little bit (eg. not even Zoom calls) during my convalescence.  And as such, I am investing this time with as much spiritual energy, intent, and purpose as I possibly can.

I have been surrounded by love and am amazed at how people have been so supportive.  Some people who are so hard and who I would have never expected would show compersion or compassion for me, have softened, and I can see how that softening has been good for them.

This time is good for me as well as a gestation period.  What I face on the “other side” is challenging.  Life, work, life, work, my future.  Nothing is certain.  Having this time to heal and settle and to live without stress is essential.

How do I feel?  Like a gathering storm.  I have this lilac-coloured energy cloud that is swirling and growing around me.  I feel this as my power, and it grows by the day.  I close my eyes and feel my body suffuse with ecstasy as my soul takes up residence for the first time with relative ease.  I was worried that my spirit guide would leave me, would change.  It is so often the case that our spirit guides change over our lifetimes as we pass milestones.  But I am not like that.  I am loyal, and it takes a lot to shake that.

My spirit guide came to me when I called to him and I felt his presence not in my size, as I have always seen him, but in a size that showed him to be HUGE.  The Pegasus with a rider.  I could be with him, see all of him, but now again I can only see a little of him, for he too has grown.

Dilation is a meditative experience for me.  There isn’t much you can do other than lie back and focus on sliding this hard plastic object inside you.  There is ritual to it.  I put a bed protector down, a puppy pad.  I sit/lie on it.  I put on the same music, over and over.  I touch myself with gentle curiosity.  I look at my vulva in the mirror, get to know it. Take pictures for posterity and to mark my progress.  Then I lube the dilator, find the vagina, and guide it in.  I take my time getting it in, and it always hurts a little, but I have become better and better at just relaxing, opening up like a flower.

But my goodness ladies.  If I have to go to the bathroom even a little, or maybe I don’t even know sometimes, boy, dilation can bring on the need something fierce.  How do you cope with it when having sex?  I can’t imagine ever doing that without realling making sure I don’t need to go.

My doctor gave me four dilators of increasing girth.  I have started with the smallest, and now, have been given a year to “size up” all the way through them.  Her nurse who gave me “Vagina 101”, who showed me where everything was, and who has guided me through this process, told me to take my time, but to get started as soon as I felt ready.

But she said, “choose a day to start, but then do it.  Don’t just start a little and then say ‘it hurts’ and then skip a few, and try again.  No.  I want you to commit.  Do it as far as you can.” [I think she would make a great dominatrix. I hope I bump into her at a kinky party soon, I so want to kneel at her feet!]  I still have to start with the small one, get it all the way in, keep it in, to ensure I don’t lose depth, but then I size up by one, and once that is in, start the clock a second time.

The first one was small enough for me to not think of it as a cock.  But the next one up, the one I am using now, is hard to not think of that way.

The nurse said, “we’ve given you 4, but you can keep going, and you might want to at least get the next larger one.”  And I was thinking, ‘nah, I won’t want that.  After all, most strap ons are pretty small’.  But after dilating with this bigger one, and enjoying the slightly painful fullness it causes, I know that I am going to want to feel that more and more, and that I will really welcome a good seeing to when the time comes. I’m going to want that feeling of fullness.

And this is it.  I had to have a vagina not because I want to be with men.  I had to have a vagina because the vaginal canal represented vulnerability to me.  And how could I possibly relate to and understand what it means to be a woman on a physical level, unless I shared that? I mean not just vulnerability from physical violence, but also a sensitivity to the natural world, to having an operating system which is much more delicate and needs to be cared for and kept in balance. Women really are flowers.  But now, I am discovering something else.  I want to get fucked.  Good and hard.

I don’t want a man.  But I found myself thinking, maybe just once.  And I saw what he looked like.  A bronze adonis, as big or bigger than me, ripped, hairless, and so strong.  But the second time I thought about it, he was a black man, but otherwise, equally strong.  The next day I ordered the 5^th size, and look forward to getting there before my year is up…and also found myself looking at the catalog, and seeing just how fat these things get.

My own former bits were as wide as size 5, a bit more than…so I know that I am still within the range of normal.  But this simple act of dilating has forced me to think about things that I had never considered.  And what I do know, is that learning to open up like a flower offers a kind of beauty that is purely spiritual and metaphysical.

It isn’t the act of sticking something inside of me that makes the difference.  It is what has to happen in my mind and body to allow my muscles to relax, to allow me to open up.  And to what?  Not a man.  Not male energy.  No.  This act of opening up is a metaphor for what has to change in me to allow my own femininity to blossom and take shape.

The receptive qualities of the Divine Feminine are being shown to me through this act, several times a day, every day.  And it is a message I have waited a lifetime to hear…and it is affecting every aspect of my life, and my interactions with others.