Talkin' About My Crotch
Jan. 20th, 2012 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timI have an announcement to make that some people may consider TMI and which may be NSFW if text can be NS F your W. In 3 1/2 weeks, I'm having genital reconstructive surgery. I'm a person who doesn't mind sharing details about my body that many would consider rather personal. The concept of TMI has never rang very true for me (in general, I want to know everything about everybody, and it's hard to imagine being squicked by somebody else knowing something about me). However, I also believe in consent, and part of that means not foisting details about my sexuality on anybody before they have the chance to opt out. So if you are someone who plays a role in my life such that knowing very intimate details about me would make you uncomfortable -- or if you just don't care what's going on in and around my crotch -- here's your chance to opt out. Don't follow the link.
Specifically, I'm having metoidioplasty (abbreviated "meta" since whoa that's a lot of letters) and scrotoplasty, with Dr. Toby Meltzer in Scottsdale, Arizona. To understand how meta works, it's useful to know that what are often called "male" and "female" genitals are actually much more similar than most people think they are. (Go ahead, read that post, it's really good.) So, even though I was assigned female at birth, I have a phallus, and so does almost everyone else who was assigned female at birth -- it's just smaller than the phalluses of most people who were assigned male at birth, and is held to my body by a ligament that prevents it from protruding outward the way the androtypical model does. Also, in case you're not aware, introducing exogeneous testosterone into a body that hasn't been producing it causes your phallus to grow -- pretty dramatically. (I've been taking testosterone for 4 1/2 years now.) Some guys say "about the size of my thumb" but either they're exaggerating or they have larger thumbs than mine. So anyway, meta is a procedure that involves cutting that ligament so that the phallus can stand out, allowing the owner (or other people, you know, hopefully) to handle it in a way more akin to the way in which one handles an androtypical penis. In addition, the surgeon will use various bits and pieces of extra tissue that's currently hanging around that area to lend more girth to my penis, because as you know if you've seen "Happiness", it's all about girth.
The scrotoplasty, which is a separate procedure, involves constructing a scrotum (as you'd guess) from what's currently my labia majora. This is also a pretty natural thing to do, since in fetuses, it's the same anatomical structure that develops into either a scrotum in androtypical fetuses or a set of labia in gynotypical fetuses. Currently there's no way to implant functioning testicles in a guy who was born without them, so instead I'll get saline expanders at first, and in a second procedure in a couple of months, silicone testicular implants. (Yes, like Neuticles, but you're not allowed to say that.) In the meantime, I'll have to inject saline solution into my scrotum every week, which sounds a bit scary but then, I never thought I'd be able to handle injections of any kind and now I inject myself with testosterone every week. It sounds like the expansion process is, um, interesting; the surgeon's instructions include some comment like "you may have to modify your clothing style." Because I'll be walking around with a nutsack the size of a volleyball, I guess? It's all part of the journey. Finally, I'll be getting a mons resection, which basically involves tightening everything up so that my penis can be moved up front and center rather than hanging down from where it's currently positioned.
Some guys get a procedure called urethral lengthening (UL) which relocates the end of the urethra to the tip of your penis. This generally means you can pee standing up easily, without using a stand-to-pee device, after surgery, though not always. I'm not getting UL right now since it's the source of most complications resulting from meta. I've read about what some guys end up having to go through with strictures or fissures, and for me being able to stand to pee more easily, while nice, isn't worth that. I can always get it done later if I choose to. The other reason I'm not getting UL is that with most surgeons (including the surgeon I'm going to), getting UL requires a vaginectomy. I'm pretty deeply ambivalent about having a bonus hole; there are things I like about it and things I don't. For now, I'm too ambivalent to give it up. So, after surgery, I'll have both a penis and a vagina, which is pretty fucking badass. I'm not sure what having a vagina with no labia will be like, but I know it'll be good to not have labia preventing access to the good stuff. My penis won't be very big, but it will be within the range, size-wise, of what's possible for male-assigned-at-birth people. It'll be obvious from looking at me naked that I'm someone who has a penis and scrotum, and not someone who has a vulva. (This is important mostly for me, in the mirror.) I knew for sure I wanted to have meta when I looked at this link (NSFW images), of a guy who had surgery with Meltzer as well. Meltzer has done a ton of these surgeries and I trust him when he says that meta without UL has very few potential complications. He was the only surgeon I considered -- of the others in North America who would do the same procedure, many of them would have turned me away because I'm too fat, and I didn't feel up for leaving the US for surgery right now (oddly enough if you don't know the backstory, one of the best surgeons for all-things-trans-guy is in Serbia).
I'm hoping that surgery will lower my high (probably higher than I'm often aware of) level of background anxiety (the theory is that when your brain is screaming at you every minute "wtf am I doing with this vulva, I'm a dude" it all starts to sound like white noise pretty quickly, but loud white noise) as well as enabling me to do the kinds of sexual things I'd like to do. I probably won't be able to penetrate anyone's ass or vagina with my penis, but I'll be able to get blowjobs in a way that's not fundamentally different from how any other guy who has a cock gets blowjobs, and jerking off will feel like jerking off. Beyond the particular in-bedroom details, I feel like more broadly, I don't approach people for sex or dating as much as I would if I had the kind of body I need to have. My subconscious looks ahead, imagines a scenario where disappointing or frustrating sex happens (for me, because I still don't have a penis at the end of it, no matter how attracted I am to the person), and says "no thanks". I've been in gay male cruising spaces a few times, and even had the nerve to remove my clothes, but in the end I always felt like my body was saying something that wasn't accurate about me, and that hooking up with anyone would involve so much explanatory labor to compensate for that that in the end, it wouldn't be worth it. It's a lot easier to have someone look at your crotch and be able to guess accurately at what you're interested in doing than to spend half an hour explaining it. I have a hard time articulating this even though it makes perfect sense inside my head, but basically, my brain is wired to need to have a penis and there's just no way around it. I've tried using a strap-on to fuck a partner (with more than one different partner) and I was super-conscious of having a strap-on on, and it basically had the opposite effect it's supposed to, of making me more aware of the way my body isn't where my brain needs it to be. For me, I think I just really need to have a phallus that's part of my body and wired into my nervous system. I'm aware of how ridiculous it is for me to type these words when we all take it for granted that this is true for every cis man. But for some reason, when you're a trans man, you have to say that explicitly because otherwise most people seem to just assume that you don't need a dick.
The other main type of genital reconstructive surgery that trans guys get is phalloplasty. Phalloplasty involves taking a flap of skin from elsewhere on the body (forearm, hip, or abdomen, usually) and constructing a tube that has the same dimensions as an average penis owned by a guy with a cissexual body. Actually, it sounds like a fair number of guys end up with above-average-sized results (but I would reckon that most of them would be happy to be average!) The technology doesn't exist yet to construct an adult-sized penis that can get erect spontaneously, so usually, guys who get phallo get a pump-like device put in that allows them to get an erection by squeezing a bulb or pressing a button. In contrast, guys who get a meta get spontaneous erections, since the underlying tissue already had the ability to get spontaneously erect (fun fax: clitorises get erect, too!) Generally, phalloplasty constructs the new phallus around the old one, so that the small phallus gets buried inside the larger one and gets stimulated indirectly when someone squeezes the penis. There are only a few surgeons who do microsurgery (possibly only one) so that the larger phallus has erotic sensation all the way down to the tip. Those were all reasons for me not to get phallo, as well as the higher cost and the fact that because I form hypertrophic scars, I'd probably end up with a very bad scar resembling a large burn scar on the part of my body that the skin graft was taken from (if that was the forearm, it would be hard to explain to people). However, it's possible to get a phallo on top of a meta, so there's always room for me to change my mind in the future, especially if the technology improves. I should point out that lots of guys get phallo and are happy with the results, and there's no need for me or anyone else to tell them they shouldn't be satisfied with their bodies. It's just not for me right now.
Unfortunately, I happen to live in a country where health care isn't considered a universal human right, and where it's standard for insurance companies to deny coverage for procedures that only trans people have even though these procedures are medically necessary for trans people (if an organization as conservative as the American Medical Association has admitted it, which it has, it's probably true). Due to some peculiarities of my job, I don't even have any health insurance coverage through my employer, and I only have a minimal individual plan for catastrophes. So I'm stuck paying $25,000 out of pocket. For me, the only way to finance surgery anytime soon was to go into debt; of the costs I've had to pay so far, I paid the majority from CareCredit (a medical loan service) and the rest from a credit card. It's definitely less than ideal to take on that much debt, but I didn't see other options. I could wait until I saved up the money, but that would mean waiting several years and honestly, I'm not sure I can make it that far. I figure it's better to take on the debt now in exchange for having an extra couple years of my life that are happier and more productive than they'd be otherwise. I also consider myself extremely lucky for having access to credit and for having the educational privilege to work in a field where I can fairly easily get a high-salary job that will allow me to pay back large amounts of debt in less than 90 years.
Oh, and I probably won't be able to ride my bike for a while, so that blows.
Anyway. There's a lot of politics and drama among trans men about genital reconstruction surgery, which is part of why I wanted to write this post. Everybody is different, but for me it comes down to: I'm a guy, I was born with a body that can't do what, being a guy, I want to do; I'm fixing it, as best as I know how. Nobody would criticize a cis guy who lost his penis in an accident -- or even at birth from a circumcision mishap -- or due to cancer and wanted to have it reconstructed. And yet, people both inside and outside ostensibly trans-friendly circles have opinions on what I want to do with my body that aren't positive. There are radical trans folks who say I'd be happy if I only understood that I don't need a penis to be a man, and there are conservative cis folks who say I'm mutilating a healthy part of my body. They all sound pretty similar in my ears. The bottom line is that no one else's ideology is going to change my neurology. In one sense I wish that it could, so I could avoid having surgery and spending a lot of money; in one sense I don't, since if I changed my brain, I wouldn't be me anymore. Anyway, I'm just not cool with double standards in which a cis person gets framed as having the right to have surgery to return their body to the state it's "supposed" to be in -- whatever that means -- but where a trans person gets framed as doing something all whimsical and weird by bringing their body close to the image of it that's hard-wired into their brain.
I thought long and hard about writing this post, which really amounted to thinking about whether to talk in public at all about having genital surgery. I didn't feel like I could just mention it was happening -- except maybe very cryptically, and that's not usually my style -- without giving a lot of detail and a lot of explanation, given all the misconceptions and ignorance around the subject. When I had top surgery, I could basically allude to it, maybe even make a joke about being glad to have that off my chest, and that was it; the concept was pretty understandable, as were my reasons for wanting to do it. But now, I've had to think about all the social stigma around talking about one's genitals or one's sexuality in general, as well as the countervailing belief that trans people deserve no privacy about their bodies and cis people are entitled to ask us entitled questions all the time and everywhere. In the end, I say to the first one: fuck all of that, a lot. Keeping us silent about bodies and sexuality doesn't serve my interests or the interests of anyone I care about. Shame, guilt and embarrassment literally kill people, and I'm in a privileged position such that I can afford to hit back at those forces with little cost to me. I'm not going to apologize for having a body, having a sexuality, or for not feeling like the way cisnormativity tells me I'm supposed to. As for the second, I can only add a disclaimer that just because I'm discussing my embodiment very candidly here constitutes neither permission for you (the reader) to interrogate any trans person you meet about similar matters, nor irrevocable permission for anyone to ask me anything about those things ever.
In exchange for reading this far, you now get to ask whatever questions you want to. Of course, I still get to not answer if I don't want to, and delete comments if anyone decides to be a shithead. Asking general questions whose answers can be googled for makes kittens cry, by the way. If you want to know something about my experience or opinions, that's fair game, as long as you can be respectful about it. Also, in before "that takes balls!"
ps -- I sometimes forget that some things are not as obvious to the rest of the world as they have become to me. I use the term "genital reconstructive surgery" because it's descriptive. The more common terms "sex reassignment surgery" or, worse, "sex change" are misleading, because the surgery I'm having isn't to change my sex or to make me into a man. I've always been male, I just have some anatomical features that are atypical (though not rare) for men to have. Transphobic fundamentalists (both of the right-wing religious kind and the second-wave feminist kind) like to say that "nobody changes sex", and they're right, but not in the way they think they're right. There are all kinds of unfortunate things out there in the mass media, like the bit in the movie "Transamerica" where Bree says that after "the surgery", she'll be a woman, that some people have come to believe it. But terms like "sex reassignment surgery" reflect an ideology that I don't share and that runs counter to my interest, so I try not to use those terms, though sometimes, as when talking to health insurance company people on the phone, it's an unfortunate necessity.
Specifically, I'm having metoidioplasty (abbreviated "meta" since whoa that's a lot of letters) and scrotoplasty, with Dr. Toby Meltzer in Scottsdale, Arizona. To understand how meta works, it's useful to know that what are often called "male" and "female" genitals are actually much more similar than most people think they are. (Go ahead, read that post, it's really good.) So, even though I was assigned female at birth, I have a phallus, and so does almost everyone else who was assigned female at birth -- it's just smaller than the phalluses of most people who were assigned male at birth, and is held to my body by a ligament that prevents it from protruding outward the way the androtypical model does. Also, in case you're not aware, introducing exogeneous testosterone into a body that hasn't been producing it causes your phallus to grow -- pretty dramatically. (I've been taking testosterone for 4 1/2 years now.) Some guys say "about the size of my thumb" but either they're exaggerating or they have larger thumbs than mine. So anyway, meta is a procedure that involves cutting that ligament so that the phallus can stand out, allowing the owner (or other people, you know, hopefully) to handle it in a way more akin to the way in which one handles an androtypical penis. In addition, the surgeon will use various bits and pieces of extra tissue that's currently hanging around that area to lend more girth to my penis, because as you know if you've seen "Happiness", it's all about girth.
The scrotoplasty, which is a separate procedure, involves constructing a scrotum (as you'd guess) from what's currently my labia majora. This is also a pretty natural thing to do, since in fetuses, it's the same anatomical structure that develops into either a scrotum in androtypical fetuses or a set of labia in gynotypical fetuses. Currently there's no way to implant functioning testicles in a guy who was born without them, so instead I'll get saline expanders at first, and in a second procedure in a couple of months, silicone testicular implants. (Yes, like Neuticles, but you're not allowed to say that.) In the meantime, I'll have to inject saline solution into my scrotum every week, which sounds a bit scary but then, I never thought I'd be able to handle injections of any kind and now I inject myself with testosterone every week. It sounds like the expansion process is, um, interesting; the surgeon's instructions include some comment like "you may have to modify your clothing style." Because I'll be walking around with a nutsack the size of a volleyball, I guess? It's all part of the journey. Finally, I'll be getting a mons resection, which basically involves tightening everything up so that my penis can be moved up front and center rather than hanging down from where it's currently positioned.
Some guys get a procedure called urethral lengthening (UL) which relocates the end of the urethra to the tip of your penis. This generally means you can pee standing up easily, without using a stand-to-pee device, after surgery, though not always. I'm not getting UL right now since it's the source of most complications resulting from meta. I've read about what some guys end up having to go through with strictures or fissures, and for me being able to stand to pee more easily, while nice, isn't worth that. I can always get it done later if I choose to. The other reason I'm not getting UL is that with most surgeons (including the surgeon I'm going to), getting UL requires a vaginectomy. I'm pretty deeply ambivalent about having a bonus hole; there are things I like about it and things I don't. For now, I'm too ambivalent to give it up. So, after surgery, I'll have both a penis and a vagina, which is pretty fucking badass. I'm not sure what having a vagina with no labia will be like, but I know it'll be good to not have labia preventing access to the good stuff. My penis won't be very big, but it will be within the range, size-wise, of what's possible for male-assigned-at-birth people. It'll be obvious from looking at me naked that I'm someone who has a penis and scrotum, and not someone who has a vulva. (This is important mostly for me, in the mirror.) I knew for sure I wanted to have meta when I looked at this link (NSFW images), of a guy who had surgery with Meltzer as well. Meltzer has done a ton of these surgeries and I trust him when he says that meta without UL has very few potential complications. He was the only surgeon I considered -- of the others in North America who would do the same procedure, many of them would have turned me away because I'm too fat, and I didn't feel up for leaving the US for surgery right now (oddly enough if you don't know the backstory, one of the best surgeons for all-things-trans-guy is in Serbia).
I'm hoping that surgery will lower my high (probably higher than I'm often aware of) level of background anxiety (the theory is that when your brain is screaming at you every minute "wtf am I doing with this vulva, I'm a dude" it all starts to sound like white noise pretty quickly, but loud white noise) as well as enabling me to do the kinds of sexual things I'd like to do. I probably won't be able to penetrate anyone's ass or vagina with my penis, but I'll be able to get blowjobs in a way that's not fundamentally different from how any other guy who has a cock gets blowjobs, and jerking off will feel like jerking off. Beyond the particular in-bedroom details, I feel like more broadly, I don't approach people for sex or dating as much as I would if I had the kind of body I need to have. My subconscious looks ahead, imagines a scenario where disappointing or frustrating sex happens (for me, because I still don't have a penis at the end of it, no matter how attracted I am to the person), and says "no thanks". I've been in gay male cruising spaces a few times, and even had the nerve to remove my clothes, but in the end I always felt like my body was saying something that wasn't accurate about me, and that hooking up with anyone would involve so much explanatory labor to compensate for that that in the end, it wouldn't be worth it. It's a lot easier to have someone look at your crotch and be able to guess accurately at what you're interested in doing than to spend half an hour explaining it. I have a hard time articulating this even though it makes perfect sense inside my head, but basically, my brain is wired to need to have a penis and there's just no way around it. I've tried using a strap-on to fuck a partner (with more than one different partner) and I was super-conscious of having a strap-on on, and it basically had the opposite effect it's supposed to, of making me more aware of the way my body isn't where my brain needs it to be. For me, I think I just really need to have a phallus that's part of my body and wired into my nervous system. I'm aware of how ridiculous it is for me to type these words when we all take it for granted that this is true for every cis man. But for some reason, when you're a trans man, you have to say that explicitly because otherwise most people seem to just assume that you don't need a dick.
The other main type of genital reconstructive surgery that trans guys get is phalloplasty. Phalloplasty involves taking a flap of skin from elsewhere on the body (forearm, hip, or abdomen, usually) and constructing a tube that has the same dimensions as an average penis owned by a guy with a cissexual body. Actually, it sounds like a fair number of guys end up with above-average-sized results (but I would reckon that most of them would be happy to be average!) The technology doesn't exist yet to construct an adult-sized penis that can get erect spontaneously, so usually, guys who get phallo get a pump-like device put in that allows them to get an erection by squeezing a bulb or pressing a button. In contrast, guys who get a meta get spontaneous erections, since the underlying tissue already had the ability to get spontaneously erect (fun fax: clitorises get erect, too!) Generally, phalloplasty constructs the new phallus around the old one, so that the small phallus gets buried inside the larger one and gets stimulated indirectly when someone squeezes the penis. There are only a few surgeons who do microsurgery (possibly only one) so that the larger phallus has erotic sensation all the way down to the tip. Those were all reasons for me not to get phallo, as well as the higher cost and the fact that because I form hypertrophic scars, I'd probably end up with a very bad scar resembling a large burn scar on the part of my body that the skin graft was taken from (if that was the forearm, it would be hard to explain to people). However, it's possible to get a phallo on top of a meta, so there's always room for me to change my mind in the future, especially if the technology improves. I should point out that lots of guys get phallo and are happy with the results, and there's no need for me or anyone else to tell them they shouldn't be satisfied with their bodies. It's just not for me right now.
Unfortunately, I happen to live in a country where health care isn't considered a universal human right, and where it's standard for insurance companies to deny coverage for procedures that only trans people have even though these procedures are medically necessary for trans people (if an organization as conservative as the American Medical Association has admitted it, which it has, it's probably true). Due to some peculiarities of my job, I don't even have any health insurance coverage through my employer, and I only have a minimal individual plan for catastrophes. So I'm stuck paying $25,000 out of pocket. For me, the only way to finance surgery anytime soon was to go into debt; of the costs I've had to pay so far, I paid the majority from CareCredit (a medical loan service) and the rest from a credit card. It's definitely less than ideal to take on that much debt, but I didn't see other options. I could wait until I saved up the money, but that would mean waiting several years and honestly, I'm not sure I can make it that far. I figure it's better to take on the debt now in exchange for having an extra couple years of my life that are happier and more productive than they'd be otherwise. I also consider myself extremely lucky for having access to credit and for having the educational privilege to work in a field where I can fairly easily get a high-salary job that will allow me to pay back large amounts of debt in less than 90 years.
Oh, and I probably won't be able to ride my bike for a while, so that blows.
Anyway. There's a lot of politics and drama among trans men about genital reconstruction surgery, which is part of why I wanted to write this post. Everybody is different, but for me it comes down to: I'm a guy, I was born with a body that can't do what, being a guy, I want to do; I'm fixing it, as best as I know how. Nobody would criticize a cis guy who lost his penis in an accident -- or even at birth from a circumcision mishap -- or due to cancer and wanted to have it reconstructed. And yet, people both inside and outside ostensibly trans-friendly circles have opinions on what I want to do with my body that aren't positive. There are radical trans folks who say I'd be happy if I only understood that I don't need a penis to be a man, and there are conservative cis folks who say I'm mutilating a healthy part of my body. They all sound pretty similar in my ears. The bottom line is that no one else's ideology is going to change my neurology. In one sense I wish that it could, so I could avoid having surgery and spending a lot of money; in one sense I don't, since if I changed my brain, I wouldn't be me anymore. Anyway, I'm just not cool with double standards in which a cis person gets framed as having the right to have surgery to return their body to the state it's "supposed" to be in -- whatever that means -- but where a trans person gets framed as doing something all whimsical and weird by bringing their body close to the image of it that's hard-wired into their brain.
I thought long and hard about writing this post, which really amounted to thinking about whether to talk in public at all about having genital surgery. I didn't feel like I could just mention it was happening -- except maybe very cryptically, and that's not usually my style -- without giving a lot of detail and a lot of explanation, given all the misconceptions and ignorance around the subject. When I had top surgery, I could basically allude to it, maybe even make a joke about being glad to have that off my chest, and that was it; the concept was pretty understandable, as were my reasons for wanting to do it. But now, I've had to think about all the social stigma around talking about one's genitals or one's sexuality in general, as well as the countervailing belief that trans people deserve no privacy about their bodies and cis people are entitled to ask us entitled questions all the time and everywhere. In the end, I say to the first one: fuck all of that, a lot. Keeping us silent about bodies and sexuality doesn't serve my interests or the interests of anyone I care about. Shame, guilt and embarrassment literally kill people, and I'm in a privileged position such that I can afford to hit back at those forces with little cost to me. I'm not going to apologize for having a body, having a sexuality, or for not feeling like the way cisnormativity tells me I'm supposed to. As for the second, I can only add a disclaimer that just because I'm discussing my embodiment very candidly here constitutes neither permission for you (the reader) to interrogate any trans person you meet about similar matters, nor irrevocable permission for anyone to ask me anything about those things ever.
In exchange for reading this far, you now get to ask whatever questions you want to. Of course, I still get to not answer if I don't want to, and delete comments if anyone decides to be a shithead. Asking general questions whose answers can be googled for makes kittens cry, by the way. If you want to know something about my experience or opinions, that's fair game, as long as you can be respectful about it. Also, in before "that takes balls!"
ps -- I sometimes forget that some things are not as obvious to the rest of the world as they have become to me. I use the term "genital reconstructive surgery" because it's descriptive. The more common terms "sex reassignment surgery" or, worse, "sex change" are misleading, because the surgery I'm having isn't to change my sex or to make me into a man. I've always been male, I just have some anatomical features that are atypical (though not rare) for men to have. Transphobic fundamentalists (both of the right-wing religious kind and the second-wave feminist kind) like to say that "nobody changes sex", and they're right, but not in the way they think they're right. There are all kinds of unfortunate things out there in the mass media, like the bit in the movie "Transamerica" where Bree says that after "the surgery", she'll be a woman, that some people have come to believe it. But terms like "sex reassignment surgery" reflect an ideology that I don't share and that runs counter to my interest, so I try not to use those terms, though sometimes, as when talking to health insurance company people on the phone, it's an unfortunate necessity.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 02:28 pm (UTC)I'm a guy, I was born with a body that can't do what, being a guy, I want to do; I'm fixing it, as best as I know how. Nobody would criticize a cis guy who lost his penis in an accident -- or even at birth from a circumcision mishap -- or due to cancer and wanted to have it reconstructed. And yet, people both inside and outside ostensibly trans-friendly circles have opinions on what I want to do with my body that aren't positive. There are radical trans folks who say I'd be happy if I only understood that I don't need a penis to be a man, and there are conservative cis folks who say I'm mutilating a healthy part of my body. They all sound pretty similar in my ears.
I'm happy for the trans folks who don't feel a need to reconstruct their bodies, but I do (not that I can afford surgery now or maybe ever, but if I could, I would absolutely go for it). And the implication from some "ostensibly trans-friendly circles" that this means I'm ideologically inferior is really not a helpful thing. So it is helpful, anazingly helpful, to read another trans man, with feelings about his body similar to my own about mine, openly talking about it.
Best of luck with your surgery, and I hope your recovery is fast and trouble-free.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 03:06 pm (UTC)I hope your surgery goes well. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 04:14 pm (UTC)Can I send a link to my partner? He may be able to use this with the folks in the mens group - people have a LOT of questions and it is hard to find a good explanation in non-medicalese.
Off topic, but fistulas SUCK. Big time.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:29 am (UTC)I don't know who first used the phrase "reconstructive surgery" in this context, but I definitely like it better than the alternatives (the only problem is I don't want to abbreviate it as 'GRS' because that's confusable with "gender reassignment surgery", a term I hate).
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 04:31 pm (UTC)And it's downright disgusting how some people don't recognise your right to seek out this treatment that you need.
Good luck, I hope it all works as desired.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 05:44 pm (UTC)"The bottom line is that no one else's ideology is going to change my neurology." <= YES.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 06:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 07:49 pm (UTC)I don't know that I have specific questions but it's very possible that I might want to ask some in the future; this might be something I want to do someday? Maybe? Surgery is really intimidating for me and I haven't quite gotten to the point where I feel ready to tackle another one. But I would be very interested to hear about how surgery and the healing process go, if you want to share later on. And if I ever start considering it more seriously I may want to talk to you about your experiences if that's ok.
I'm really intrigued by the fact that you're going to do saline scrotal injections! I have been aware of saline inflation for several years now but didn't know that it was a part of preparing for scrotal implants. Huh.
I've tried using a strap-on to fuck a partner .... and I was super-conscious of having a strap-on on, and it basically had the opposite effect it's supposed to, of making me more aware of the way my body isn't where my brain needs it to be.
I'm not sure that I've quite given up on using strap-ons altogether, because my experience has been limited and I want to try it a few more times, but that's kind of what it feels like to me - I'm just more aware of what's *not* there, especially since there's no sensation during what my brain says should be a really intense experience. It's very jarring.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:39 am (UTC)Heh, yeah, I didn't actually know that saline inflation was a thing until about a year ago when I saw a notice about a workshop on it at the FTM group in San Francisco. As far as I can tell, saline injecting in preparation for having implants put in will be different in that I'll have expanders in my scrotum that will... contain the fluid, I guess? I'm not exactly sure of the logistics. As with most things, there are probably a million videos on YouTube were I just to look.
Edit: and I forgot to say (because I didn't even notice it the first time), fantastic icon :-D
And yeah, I haven't given up on strap-ons either -- I expect I'll want to try again even post-meta, since I don't expect to be able to penetrate anyone with my own junk -- but somehow the dysphoria combined with self-consciousness about the straps not being quite tight enough and not having much control of the cock and created some sort of synergy of bad feelings. One thing that *isn't* dysphoria-inducing (for me) is pumping -- I was skeptical, but it actually works, at least in the short-term. I'm not sure if I've gotten any long-term gains from it, but I also haven't been doing it all that regularly. I'm looking forward to pumping post-meta, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-20 11:56 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you can remedy this uncomfortable and difficult situation.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:41 am (UTC)I hope it'll actually be a remedy! I had to realize that "better" was preferable to not doing anything because I couldn't have "perfect", in order to decide to have surgery. It's been a growth experience and all that. Heh heh heh.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 12:31 am (UTC)Thanks for this post. Thought provoking and informative, without making me any more anxious about my own body! which is nice. :-)
There is definitely a difference between you (or anyone else) understanding that a person doesn't need a penis in order to be a man and the expectation that therefore you, personally, don't need a penis in order to feel whole on your body or even just wanting a penis. The radical fundamentalism that says that maleness is not dependent on the phalluses and therefore no one should have or want genital reconstructive surgery makes my teeth itch,
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:43 am (UTC)Anyway, thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 01:59 am (UTC)The term "type reconstruction" has bothered me because it's "reconstructing" something inherent in the expression—something that should be inherent in the expression.
"the expression
"it's you"
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 02:14 am (UTC)♥
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-22 12:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 02:10 am (UTC)If I could easily have both a penis and a vagina, I'd be so all over that. BAD. ASS. I mean, I understand the ambivalence, but, hey, might as well like it while you've got it.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:45 am (UTC)"Stand up for your rights, boys, but sit down to piss."
Date: 2012-01-23 09:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-21 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 07:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-23 10:02 pm (UTC)Medical science is so cool... Shame it has to be so painful (literally and fiscally) when it's being perpetrated on oneself. May it be worth it for you and more.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 08:06 am (UTC)IMO, there would be much better surgical options by now if cis dudes weren't in charge of the medical establishment and didn't feel threatened by the idea that if just anyone could go get a perfectly satisfactory penis, not everyone would choose to.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-31 04:51 am (UTC)I admire your bravery, I'm really excited for you, and I hope everything goes well! Also, you should go on a really long bike ride right beforehand, while you can.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-31 06:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-10 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-10 01:50 am (UTC)Funny story: My upbringing was at least progressive enough that I learned the basic penis-goes-in-vagina-to-make-a-baby facts at a very young age, but that education didn't include the existence of the clitoris (or any other part of a gynotypical set of genitals other than Teh Hole), so when I noticed (in retrospect, strangely late) that I had one, I thought that it meant maybe I was actually a boy. And it turned out I was, that just wasn't why :-) I wish it was more routine to teach people about this stuff.
Sadly, I don't think the bike ride is going to happen as it turned out my headset was literally cracked in two (which explained why it was coming loose every few days) and thus my bike is currently in the repair shop. I guess that'll be all the more time for me to work up anticipation for my return to the saddle ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-01 11:38 am (UTC)I hope the surgery and recovery goes well!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-01 10:05 pm (UTC)$9,987 for the meta itself, with IV sedation
$6,530 for the scrotoplasty
$2,084 for the mons resection
$624 for 1 night in the hospital
total for stage 1: $18,225
Stage 2, which happens in a couple month, is putting in the permanent implants, so that's whatever $25000 - $18225 is. I have seen people saying that Meltzer is one of the more expensive surgeons for meta, but for me I don't want to economize, plus like I said, a lot of the less expensive surgeons are not an option for me because they consider me too fat to deserve proper medical care.
My impression is that going to Serbia is cheaper (and the team there is one of the best in the world), even when you include travel costs, but I didn't want to deal with that.
Your profile says you're an undergrad -- if you're thinking about grad school, consider a school that has trans-inclusive insurance for students. There are getting to be more and more of them.
And thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-02 04:55 am (UTC)D=
Yeah I actually looked into my student health care cover, if I'm with them for more than a year they will pay for theater fees and hospital stay and that will save me about 2,500. Not sure if that covers transgender related surgeries though, I'll have to ask.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-02 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-02 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-12 01:27 am (UTC)hey
Date: 2012-04-27 02:11 am (UTC)I was wondering well, how do you start the process? Do I try and find a psychologist? Do I talk to a doctor? As a 26 year old, I'm ready to start transitioning but I just dont know what my first steps are, especially to start with testosterone.
I hope you're healing well, and I hope you don't mind the stupid questions. Thank you.
Re: hey
Date: 2012-05-06 12:40 am (UTC)I don't know where you live, but the best first step is probably to try to find an informed-consent clinic or a doctor who prescribes EEI (exogeneous endocrine intervention, though probably saying "testosterone" is most likely to be understood). You may want to get therapy as well (especially if you've experienced trauma or depression over and beyond the usual expected amount from being trans), but if you choose to do that, you can do it in tandem with pursuing medical intervention. If you can, find someone who doesn't agree with the WPATH standards of care, as they are limiting and deprive us of agency. Where I live, Lyon-Martin Clinic is an example of an informed consent clinic. There is a fairly long list of other such clinics and doctors at http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/jjezi/informed_consent_registry_show_your_playing_hand/ -- but, if you don't live near any of them, you can always just find a doctor you trust and show them a copy of _Medical Health and Maintenance for Transgender Men_, available for free online.
"Informed consent", by the way, basically just means that the doctor (or nurse practitioner in some cases) explains the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy to you, and you sign a statement saying you understand those risks. There's no "real-life test" or other gatekeeping; no one tries to assess you to see if you're trans enough, people trust that you know that for yourself.
If you decide to get top surgery and/or genital reconstruction surgery later on, you may need letters from a therapist and/or psychiatrist for those, unfortunately, but it should generally be possible to be prescribed testosterone without those letters (however, your mileage may vary depending on income, insurance coverage or lack thereof, and -- unfortunately -- your race and disability or lack thereof). Also, some people opt to have surgery before starting testosterone. It's not what I did, but everyone is different and there's no one right way.
There are a couple useful groups on Yahoo!, though like any group online there are plenty of misogynist and otherwise oppressive things that get said:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FTMEarlyTransitioning/
and from there you can probably find links to other groups. There's also http://ftm.livejournal.com/ (I don't know if there's anything that's been formed on DW, and I haven't read the LJ community in a long time) and obviously stuff on reddit, but it sounds like you know about that.
If you want to email me (my email address is in my userinfo) I might be able to suggest more specific stuff about finding informed-consent people in your area, but you can probably also chase links from the reddit post that I linked to above.
Good luck... and sorry for taking so long to reply.