Some of the situations that you describe should make the whole hospital feel shame!

I left the hospital feeling like they were trying to kill me, tbh - not intentionally, but just structurally my well-being was threatened by being in the hospital. I had a lot of thoughts about the hospital when I left, and I feel like the experience really intensified a kind of “individualist” psychology of not trusting institutions and so on (whether that’s reasonable or not, my psychology was changed by the experience - it may even be a bit of PTSD).

Not being able to sit upright safely sounds like the first thing that would come into someone’s mind when asked about restrictions after that surgery. “Juking” your blood pressure so that the nurses would leave you alone?! Aren’t they supposed to have the slightest idea of how this is all supposed to go down?

The nurses knew nothing about specific details as far as I could tell. Probably half of the nurses were floaters on loan from other floors with no familiarity with the kinds of surgeries people are recovering from on the urology floor I was on. The hospital also recently changed their policy so that nurses went from managing 4 patients to 6 patients. Lots of nurses who had worked at this hospital for the past 20+ years recently left over increasingly bad working conditions. There is a shortage of labor, lots of turnover, and general chaos and failure of the institution to continue providing the same quality of care they were known for before.

Besides all of that, congratulations on your operation!

Thanks! 😊

Did you choose your own surgeon?

Yes.

If you did, how hard was it to find and choose them?

Where I live there aren’t a lot of options, and this surgeon is the dead obvious option for the entire region - it was an easy choice considering the intersection of 1. the lack of alternatives and 2. the amazing results of this surgeon.

Did you have trouble affording the entire procedure?

The whole cost was $135,000 (based on memory), and insurance covered all but around $1,400 of it. Unless insurance decides to go back on this later, it was relatively affordable for me (obviously still extremely expensive - this doesn’t mention the thousands of dollars spent on a hotel for my partner to stay nearby and for me to later stay near the hospital the second week after I was discharged from the hospital).

Did you manage to get paid time off from your work?

Yes, I’m on short-term disability leave, which I believe is FML protected.

How are your new organs faring?

The outer sutures are healing great - no granulation or wound separation AFAIK, but I am having real trouble from wound separation at the base of my vagina, the skin graft is sloughing off around the “frenulum”. The skin seems to be continuing to slough off deeper in towards the canal. It is creating asymmetry and there is the potential for the integrity of the canal to be compromised. This is a very precarious moment for me, but the probabilities are in favor of things working out OK as long as I avoid further trauma and the situation doesn’t worsen. Luckily my dilation seems to not be causing any pain or blood, so that is a good sign.

Did you ever feel any regret for choosing this?

I fully expected regret, the psychologists I spoke with told me it’s very common to feel regret. I had lots of fears right before the surgery, and had to just take the leap of faith.

When I woke up and was finally moved to a private room, the first time I actually got to look at the results, I expected to feel panic or fear or regret - but instead I felt what I would describe as an overwhelming avalanche of relief. I started sobbing from happiness and relief, it was completely unexpected, I wouldn’t have said my bottom dysphoria was particularly bad - but it was clearly worse than I expected.

There have been a few other moments where I realized how much better I feel, like when my genitals are exposed to nurses or medical workers, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling the same shame about my body as before. I always felt so guilty when medical workers were exposed to my body before - maybe it’s dysphoria, maybe it’s transphobia - either way, I felt monstrous and embarrassed about what I am and the way workers were unfairly exposed to my body. Now it feels like my body is finally how it should be in that social situation, I don’t have to feel like I’m exposing someone or being “wrong”.

It’s also been a relief when using a public restroom, I didn’t realize how much tension and fear I was holding before about being “caught”, I had all this irrational fear that the lock of the door wouldn’t work and a woman would walk in and see me - I always tried to strategically drape my clothes to hide my genitals in case that happened … and now I feel like things are just “right” and I won’t be in danger - I feel less vigilant, more safe, and like I actually belong.

So, no - I haven’t felt anything like regret yet. The closest so far has just been wondering about my sexual function, I have a lot of sensation in my clit but I can’t explore anything yet because it’s still healing. So I think there is a question about sexual function I would like some reassurance about - but I know the situation before the surgery was not working well for me, so it’s just a possibility right now that the new situation will be better.

I can say that when I see my body in the mirror it looks so “right” to me, I don’t know why or how that works, but the genitals before looked wrong on me and now it just seems natural, like how I “should” have looked all along. It’s sorta hard to describe, but yeah - I love the way it looks so far (I didn’t expect that tbh).

hardly surprising, but still 🤢

EDIT: seems like the site is pretty dead, looks like 4 years ago a bunch of people moved there, but more recently I don’t see much activity (probably for the best, considering the content seems to be pretty far-right).

seems like a right-wing echo chamber, similar to Voat.

Möth craves your lööps

for real, I see a woman in every photo, what a dream 😊

amazing, but this feels like one of those “woman to woman” transitions XD

How do you feel over time, and any advice or words of wisdom to share wth baby trans girls?

amazing 😍 and these are not all that common, right?

I’m much newer to this, I socially transitioned around 2 years ago and medically transitioned around one and a half years ago.

It’s OK to refer to stereotypes, I tend to think it helps us communicate even if there can be a social injustice that comes from generalizing.

I also feel like I would just want to be a cis woman and so 100% female sounds very good to me, but my sense is also that I’m definitely not a guy. I certainly learned to live as one, and identify as one even, but I always felt a bit out of place as a man. When I was in middle school for example, I would have low grades in gym class because I refused to change in the boy’s locker room. When I would go swimming I often would wear a t-shirt because it just felt wrong. I didn’t like sports or athletic activities, and while some stereotypical boy interests and activities overlapped with mine, I found myself forming a strong preference for female friends by the time I was in the 5th grade (around 10 years old), and that became quite an extreme preference for me.

Nonetheless, I can feel some affinity with men - ironically, my dysphoria made me fit a certain kind of stoic male stereotype well. I think Imogen Binnie captures this well in Nevada - the sort of crust punk stoic who doesn’t take good care of themselves and so on. Outside of the trans context, I identified with the ascetic life of the Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in The Passenger, rotting away sleeping in a hay bed in an exposed windmill or roughing out a winter in an unheated house in Idaho … I tend to think now that this was more about my own depression, dissociation, and general mental issues than about my gender - but I certainly identified with a certain subgenre of masculinity that emphasizes the virtue of suffering and not feeling anything.

I think for me what helped me realize I wasn’t non-binary or bigender was by interacting with other non-binary and bigender people - I met someone online who felt like their beard was a part of who they were, they loved their beard and shaving it was a huge mistake for them, but they were transfem and medically transitioning - so they a gender expression that includes breasts and jewelry but also a beard, and that feels natural and good for them. I find it hard to relate to that, my beard was good in many ways - it was nice to feel the air around me blowing (it was like an extra sense of sorts), and it covered my face and made me feel less social anxiety that way. It was also a perfect mask, it allowed me to finally fit in as a man after so many years of being perceived as too feminine and gay, or even just younger than I was. It gave me social acceptance of sorts.

But the beard was also sickening, even when I was pretransition and unaware I saw a picture of myself with a beard and I felt truly nauseated - it’s like seeing myself did psychic damage or something, I didn’t just hate myself it was disturbing to me that I could look that way. I just didn’t realize it was a gender issue - and since I’ve transitioned, what I see in the mirror feels better, and I feel more comfortable taking photos of myself than ever (I basically never took photos of myself and was upset if anyone else tried to - now I take photos of myself all the time and even feel good about some of them, something that had never once happened before).

My partner is someone who identifies as bigender, and for them they feel a great deal of openness and acceptance of gender traits, they say they would be happy in a male body as well as a female body, and they wear both male and female clothes. They have a particular gender expression that is both femme and butch that is hard to describe accurately - muscled and strong, but with long feminine hair and so on. The muscles on my body make me feel nauseous, I hate my calves for how developed they are, and I can’t relate to their preferences.

Now, those are just two ways of being non-binary / bigender, and it seems like everyone can be pretty different, which is why I like talking about it and learning, because I have so much to learn from people’s self concepts and the way they think about and use their labels.

I tend to think there is probably some super complex biology that makes me inherently a mix of gendered traits both biologically and otherwise, so it wouldn’t be surprising to me if I were technically non-binary, but I am not sure I really fit that label well and I don’t use it. What seems true is that I should have been born a cis woman, and I’m now doing what I can to compensate for the male body I have so I can integrate and live socially as a woman and feel more comfortable in my own skin. So far everything feminizing has felt great, and I haven’t had much trouble giving up being a man - there is nothing I miss or felt attached to that was difficult to lose. Being a man was essentially all bad, and being a woman seems all good for me.

Anyway - I would love to hear more of your experiences, or if you have any advice in all your years of experience, it would really be helpful 😅

interesting! I do think some people might view themselves as “non-binary” while feeling both male and female - it’s maybe just a different way to conceptualize it (because being both might be thought of as not just one or the other, hence the “third gender” or alternatively just the falling out of the binary / one or the other kind of thinking when being both).

Either way, thanks for the response - I always like to learn how people think about their gender, it’s interesting to me as I struggle to think about my own gender 😅

If you’re willing, I wonder what the “feeling male” is like for you.

For example, I don’t consider myself bigender or non-binary (maybe I actually am in some technical sense, so I’m open-minded and willing to acknowledge my self-knowledge is limited and subject to revision), but I definitely have what I would characterize as habituated ways of thinking of myself as male, and as I transition and increasingly occupy a female body and social role, I have that kind of “both” experience.

I just tend to not enjoy the "both"ness I feel, I did have a notion even when I was pretty young that I should have been born a girl, and being born a boy was some kind of unfortunate accident 😅 So I tend to think that doesn’t fit a non-binary experience - but since I’ve lived a whole life as a male, it’s hard not to have habituated some attachments or ways of thinking of the self as male, and that can then give me feelings that might fit with being non-binary, though I tend to think it’s habituation for me rather than non-binary-ness, it’s just hard to tell the difference sometimes.

is the distinction between what you’re feeling and non-binary that “non-binary” is like some “third” gender, while what you’re feeling is the two genders at once (not something else, but both)?

I don’t know anything about this, but you seem very aware of what your needs are, and so it’s more a question about the specific facility and their policies - it sounds like you need a facility that would be able to accommodate your needs, and you would want to talk all this through with someone from the facility to ensure your needs can be accommodated reasonably, and then to have contingency plans if things don’t go as promised.

I wish you the best of luck, I hope you are able to share your experiences to help others here - thank you for reaching out, I think this is really important to talk through.

The scrotum and phallus skin is removed and used as a skin graft and it becomes the lining of the neovagina. You don’t want hair in your neovagina. Besides the obvious discomfort with that, there have been cases where hair in the neovagina leads to infections.

Usually surgeons now will cauterize the follicles they find on the skin graft, but that only addresses the hairs growing in that cycle - you need to have removed the hairs over many cycles so new ones don’t come in after the surgery. That’s why it’s best to have cleared all the hair with electrolysis across several cycles - ideally over an entire year (even longer than that would be better because the following year you can kill any that were missed the first year).

I went through all of this too, and transition is weird in that it simultaneously decreased and increased my dysphoria.

When I first transitioned I wasn’t bothered by my deadname at all, but after a few months it really started to bother me and I even started to feel weird that I had ever been called that. It’s like the way I thought about the name had been rationalized and seen as “genderless” and just “me”, and only once I started going by a different chosen name did I have the space to see my deadname more objectively - the way it is gendered and used in a gendered way, and how poorly that fit “me”.

Also, yeah, I paid little attention to my voice before I transitioned and once I transitioned and started paying attention to my voice for practical reasons like wanting to pass for safety, I suddenly realized how horrible my voice sounds and how it isn’t “my” voice, etc.

On the other hand, there were also lots of moments of gender euphoria happening - dressing the way I’ve always wanted in public, and integrating as a woman socially was like a dream come true, a dream I had buried and suffocated and tried to kill but which somehow miraculously came to life anyway.

From what I’ve read these are common experiences - I know it seems weird for dysphoria to suddenly appear, but I think as coping strategies like denial and repression melt away, there is some instability as you pay more attention to your body and details that before you successfully ignored.

This is a challenging part of transitioning, but all I can say is that repression really is worse than transitioning and that it does (slowly) get easier. Also, the mental health improvements and joy that come from transitioning are a lot more than I ever could have expected.

thank you

this is so upsetting

thanks!! I’ll just be excited to be able to walk around again, being on strict bed rest is a lot more difficult than I expected, lol.

thanks 😊

yes, wait times can be very long and this is a surgery that requires a lot of planning. 6 months isn’t even enough time to get your hair removal finished, generally I see recommendations to have 1 whole year of electrolysis and at least 3 full cycles of hair clearance. That alone is a huge amount of work and time - I had 1 hour electrolysis appointments once a week. When you add in the typical insurance requirements to have been on hormones under the supervision of a doctor for a year and the requirement to get two independent letters from psychologists, you are looking at a lot of appointments with endocrinologists, psychologists, and eventually with the surgery team. It’s a lot - so start now if you think you might even possibly want it.

When I socially transitioned I practically promised myself I wouldn’t get a vaginoplasty, I only wanted an orchi … and that position was fully reversed after 6 months of estrogen. I wish I had taken the possibility of a vaginoplasty more seriously, and that I had started hair removal for that much earlier.

I DM’d you some details. My recommendation is to start electrolysis yesterday, lol - hair removal takes a very long time and it’s best if you can get at least a year of electrolysis so catch all the hair cycles.

thank you!! ❤️