I should sleep because tomorrow means travel, needing to be focused, and moreover I must accomplish important work during the way. But I am unable to – even taking an anxiolytic before sleep, I woke and cannot find the peace to sleep more. I must ride it the best I can, like Inanna passing into the Underworld. Putting down what I feel in text at least will help some.
The experience of being a sexual creature in this body is becoming harder and harder to endure. I can’t ignore it fully. Core, I suppose, is that it seems for a variety of reasons that being myself at this time in this body means it is near-impossible for me to receive bodily manifestations of love and lust. This stems from several reasons.
Weight I will only mention in passing. I am still hovering on the upper edge of the normal spectrum of BMI, and while that now means some curves, I still remember lovers telling me their honest feeling that my weight made it less interesting to touch me, that a desire to be with someone more like themselves remained in the background. And of course I cannot hold this against anyone; if we cannot be honest then what does anything matter? I for my part am trying to let myself care about whether my lovers actually attract me, which I have not always, so I should encourage the same in them. There is also that so long as my belly look like this, protruding far beyond my breasts, I feel always a little like a pudgy man more than a woman. I never knew what having a conventionally fit or attractive body was like, and I feel bitter about it. I deserve to know that feeling. So weight loss, at almost any cost, must be one of my priorities, and I can take some solace within the loneliness of the body that I would have to go through that process anyway before I have a body which I can expect many people to want to touch except out of pity. Very well, this is useful.
More importantly, and requiring more effort and attention, are my disgusting genitals. I did have that one single occasions where someone, for whatever reason, licked me, taking care to warm me up, mask my shape, applying pressure where my opening would have been, and who then brought me over; dealt with my fluids so the dysphoria spike did not come, and I could just sink into a relaxation I had not felt in years. I had not thought I could experience this pre-op at all, really, and it brought me hope that perhaps I can. But I am not very interested in this person on almost any level – socially, mentally, physically otherwise, and I should not play with their emotions, and they are not near me.
Perhaps I must accept that as the exception confirming the rule, because nothing like it happened before for many years, nor since. With partners by and large the respective dynamics of each relationship does not have the other having any real drive to touch or please me; each I am sure feels some misplaced guilt or sadness over it but the fact remains, each feels a desire primarily for what I can induce in them, and surely also out of the love I know to be real a wish for me to be happy, but the realities of how complicated I am leaves that wish no space to be expressed within anything resembling spontaneity. I love them each regardless and cherish what we have.
I recall that girl who sought me out to have me top her, met me once and then broke that off based on how my trans-based body uncertainty was a turn-off; I never mentioned it but she said she sensed it. Surely in some sense this shines through to all I am with. My loathing and bitterness over my body spreads like inky taint through empathy and kills feelings of lust towards me. I suppose unempathic individuals might be exceptions, but the reality is, I want only sex and nearness which is fully empathethic, where there truly is love, not with some mechanical stranger. And I know this to be a very tall order.
That girl was cis; I realize increasingly that I cannot relax fully unclothed with any cis person. With cis women I see our anatomies differ and I am in the darkness. With cis men I see them be similar and the same happen. And perhaps with trans people, I trigger their dysphoria by them sensing mine? Post-op girls, for that matter, I also feel tense around – some part of me is so much in awe and envy; I feel their perspective overshadows mine, it is a fearful respect and it makes me almost unable to make moves on them. It’s much like cis girl envy but in its own way more powerful. I deeply hope this will not happen to me in turn when I am post-op, that pre-op trans girls will feel too scared to lick or finger or fuck me. But I push that fear far far away.
Still my body does crave release as all bodies do. Touching myself is not an option, the feeling of loneliness and additionally dysphoria from stimulating myself such as I am becomes too much. I cannot even bring myself to do this to prevent atrophy even if it will help for surgery. I long for somehow someone stimulating me so that I do not have to be the one doing it, as an act of love or devotion or even out of attraction, a wish to make my mind experience another state. There are ways, but all the easiest ones are ones that treat my genitals as though they were male, and then I cannot relax; I have tried this now with two trans girls and it reminds me too much of how my genitals naively are paced. Getting ordinary “blow jobs” and liking them is something men do, my mind tells me in that moment. Though I would never see another girl so.
What remains is essentially just frottage or toys, and partners who are fundamentally passive feel no real drive to use those on me, their interests drift elsewhere, away from my trying to manage freaking out over being reminded of my shape. It simply doesn’t seem like it will happen with anyone, and I don’t have the energy left to try to go out and search for someone with whom it might. I’ve searched for so long for so many things and it never works. Meaningful things don’t happen when you seek to make them happen, within this sphere, they only happen when you do not expect them to.
So barring exceptional cases of people acting unexpectedly, and where still other mismatches remain an issue (as in, looking up casual lovers is no real option since I will just feel lonely in their company since there will be neither connection nor attraction), it seems genital release is basically off the table for me. There remains being pushed far enough from other kinds of stimulation – my nipples are sensitive to pleasure and even more to pain, and pain at least gets me out of my head. To experience pain with someone, I need much less of complex trust and safety and all these other things. It is more realistic to hope for, and I must take renewed steps to ensure I experience it. I need it. I need my body bruised and sore and aching so I can finally relax at least in some way, at least for some little while. This I should try to make happen, though of course it too is complex and not just something I can expect will come to me, or that I can expect to be able to make happen.
Most importantly, I bitterly and urgently and desperately need SRS now. I know it is no magic bullet. It might just take climaxing off the table permanently by loss of nerves, and I can’t expect more people will want to have sex with me post-op than pre-op. But at least I would be able to be open to receive, to ask for, to be naked with in more ways. I would not have to train each new person on what they can and cannot do, would not have to reinterpret and remap all sensations, would actually be able to be naked and just see what happens. Stimulation, while probably less straightforward, would be easier to ask for or move to receive. I need it already. Every day of waiting is a day in a body where asking to be touched is like asking someone to take out the stinking garbage bag – maybe they will, when it is their turn, but their heart will never be in it. Nor mine.
What is now in the way? I do want to apply for insurance coverage. I cannot myself, my psychologist must do it for me. She is in no hurry, no effort between our monthly sessions. She is happy to drag this out, what does she care? That can just keep on and I have no way to push her, no way to force her, because this is still gatekeeping, still something she must sign off on out of paid kindness. Perhaps something will happen next time. But perhaps it will not even work, and the insurer demand the present therapy continue for another year before they consider it. And while the time spent waiting takes place, I still have no date for my surgery, I cannot have one assigned until insurers sign off. So the long waiting list grows longer every day.
I am not sure I can take another year of this. Right now I feel I cannot. I feel like self-harm and crying and darkness. So my only fallback is to schedule it privately. I feel like an idiot for even considering – it costs 28K in total, which I don’t have yet. If I only wait a few years more insurance will cover, perhaps if I am lucky even a few months more. But right now I don’t feel like I have a year, I don’t feel like I can endure this that long.
So what can I do? I have savings of 20K. I can get the Suporn deposit of ca 3K back, and must. I will have to pay 8-10K in home renovation costs this year. Given yearly bonuses, if I save 1K per month, which is my realistic maximum, then I would have 20K free for surgery by end of the year, and another 8K by next August. The first operation is 19K, the second 9K. It would almost work, at least for a date next year, as it is six months between surgeries anyway. But that leaves me entirely without margins or safeties, if there are any unexpected costs or emergencies, or anything ends up more expensive, this plan breaks and I would have to cancel the date.
Perhaps I have to accept that endurance. And accept I must now save as much as I can, and look for the possibility even of loans. And accept I will burn all my savings and backups and margins on this. Because I feel I can’t go on like this much longer. I will do what I must.
lost in transition 
Many resonances. (also hi after a long silence on my part.)
It undoubtedly is easier within a committed relationship. My partner-until-recently was a huge help in helping me begin to locate a tolerable pleasure. Being bisexual and AFAB nonbinary, they were familiar with genital dysphoria, interested in my body before and after surgery, and engaged with exploring possibilities for stimulation that worked around the frustrating configuration of our respective bodies.
The experience you describe with a partner who was able to treat your body as it demands echoes a small number of experiences my ex and I had. It was truly remarkable to discover that my body was capable of experiencing stimulation as though it has already changed, and the orgasms it produced were bursting clouds and rainbows emerging in unfamiliar sunlight. I was delighted on those occasions to be able to feel that this was intuitive for my partner, because not only did they do the work effectively…I felt them treating me as a woman, full-stop, and the relief of it generated a volume of response that I’m sure both impressed and annoyed my poor neighbor.
Incidentally, my studies in treating them as though their anatomy was different were quite successful as well. We could both feel the difference between when I was treating them as a masc-leaning partner with a vagina versus a man with a penis shaped differently than most. This works in both directions, and when it does it doesn’t feel like a lie. It feels honest, exciting, and intimate.
Now that they’re gone, I doubt I’ll find another partner with whom I can attempt those things, but I pine for it. I know it’s possible, and I feel no interest whatsoever in other forms of contact.
To my dissatisfaction, they began to focus more on a form of sex that looked exactly like “straight” missionary sex, with the exception that both of us were profoundly engaged in a sort of mental and emotional body-transfer that put us in control of the other person’s genitals. I’d always kind of done that with my partners in the past, and it had made me an extremely competent and attentive lover with a string of satisfied partners, but I’d never experienced *someone else doing it to me at the same time*. While eventually it began provoking the same suffocating fears of not being able to perform that had stopped me years ago from desiring penetrative sex, it was nonetheless another substantial demonstration of the deep plasticity of the experience.
On my own I’ve been working (with varying degrees of success and satisfaction) on generating similar feelings however I can. Penetration-as-presently-possible is very infrequently an aid, but as with you it’s not something that interests me. It’s a frequently stressful and disappointing exploration, but I’ve been able to find moments of successful transformation that continue to reassure me that this is possible.
The difficulty of the work seems to come from:
– the need to balance physical looseness throughout my body, which is very new and still experimental in me;
– focus on sensations that have an entirely different character than the ones I’m familiar with from my old life, which is like preparing a salad when a microwavable snack is within reach;
– pioneering of physical techniques that require deliberate abstraction from my body combined with careful attention to responses I’m not sure I know how to conjure;
– deliberate ignorance of my blatantly masculine features and repetition of careful scripts that will reassure me that my unsatisfactory parts are in fact like the parts I so dearly long for;
– and a sort of near-meditative mental stillness in which I can feel out fantasies that will coordinate with all of this well enough to draw arousal toward me without bringing its companion dysphoric-and-otherwise stresses.
In short, I can see why many women don’t bother to masturbate. It’s maddening. And I long for a world where it’s easier to find partners who will understand the nervous joy available in discovering the strange, shifting rules of a transfeminine body.
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