Part One of this writing exercise is here.

No fair! My feet didn't come with a flower!

Below the waist. My feet, like my hands, are slightly bigger than I’d like, hairier than I’d like, but I can’t really complain. They’re not huge, it’s occasionally obnoxious to find shoes in my size but never impossible, and hair removal has thinned much of the worst growth. I still have some patches around my ankles that I need to shave when I shave my legs, but no body is perfect. My legs rival my chest and face for the most dramatic success of hair removal. I shave my legs, much more in warm months, but don’t grow the same thick brambly forest that I used to. As of today, I haven’t shaved my legs in at least a month, and while they’re hairy compared to my shaved-this-morning face, they’re night and day compared to when I was in high school, pre hormones and hair removal. My legs are, like my arms, places of strength. I don’t run – it hurts my knees – but I bike and walk and swim and climb ropes and trees and lovers. I’ve been working on strengthening my hips, something a physical therapist said would help my knees, but don’t have much to complain about.

At the same time, my legs and arms have shrunk the most over the course of my transition. I joke that, since going on hormones, I’ve gone up two cup sizes without gaining any weight. All that mass, my previously mentioned boobs, had to come from somewhere – lots of it came from now-departed muscle mass in my arms and legs. I’m still stronger than lots of my girl friends, who knows whether as a result of testosterone or simply genetics, but decidedly less strong than I was before hormones. I’m not complaining, however, other than the occasional struggle at circus or the gym. But no pain, no gain. Or something.

Stretch marks line my thighs where they connect to my hips. I remember in middle school, shortly after the onset of puberty, asking my mom what these strange lines on my thighs were. She laughed and explained how growth impacts the body and the skin. My calves have the occasional scar or mark: Where I backed into a hot camp stove on a family camping trip, the spot on my knee I hit over and over and over the summer I was learning to ride my bike, marks of time and of growth and of pain. (I forgot, in Part One of this map, that my left hand (with the broken fingers) has a small companion scar on my shoulder where I hit the ground when flipped off my bike.)

My hips and my butt have grown over the course of my transition, shifting and changing like so many parts of my body. But, again, like so many parts of my body, not in exactly the way I’d want. But, again, no body is perfect. I’d love for my hips to be a little wider, my butt a little more rounded, my boobs a bit bigger. But I love the curves of my hips and my butt that are there. The way the right dress or tights or shorts hugs my body on the way down. The exact way the suits and pants and clothing I used to wear before transitioning didn’t.

This is exactly what I was hoping to find when I searched for 'cartoon cock.'

Curving around to the front of my body brings me to a part of my anatomy that has absorbed a lot of my mental energy lately. My dick. My cock. My penis. Whatever you want to call it. (Or, if you prefer (as one partner did), whatever you want to call her.) Searching this blog for penis brings up lots of posts. (I want to make a joke about “raising the issue” but can’t figure it out. Someone make an innuendo in the comments.)

Unlike some trans women, I’ve never felt like my penis was a totally foreign part of my anatomy. (Yet another parenthetical: I don’t think that makes me a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ trans woman. There is no hierarchy of transness! This is an observation I’m making about my experience, not a judgement about myself or anyone else.) I never felt like I wanted the dangly bits between my legs, but – starting around the end of middle school – I was able to identify that doing certain things felt good. Occasionally, it felt great. I, like many teens, became a regular and proficient masturbator.

I wasn’t always sure how to fit that within my burgeoning trans identity, though. Lots of the stuff I read online talked about people wanting to “cut off” their penis. I hid it between my legs sometimes, enjoyed the smooth and tucked look much more than the bulge, but not to the point of seriously contemplating taking a scissors down there for a trim.

But my penis and I didn’t have a great relationship. I remember the first time I masturbated, stopping at one point and thinking “OK, I’ll try this again tomorrow.” Then reaching down and finding all this stickiness - I’d cum without realizing it – and thinking, “That’s what all the fuss is about? That was fun, but not great…” Over time I learned how to elicit better sensations, and I certainly enjoyed masturbating and such, but I feel like going on hormones really opened my eyes to my body. (That’s a shitty metaphor, but you know what I mean.)

My first (and really only) girlfriend in high school and I fooled around a lot. There was a lot of dry humping, under-the-shirt play, general teenage fumbling around. We even attempted ‘real’ sex once, although I don’t think either of us particularly enjoyed it. I know I didn’t get a ton out of it, and I’m pretty confident she didn’t either. (And I just broke all social conventions and sent her a Facebook message asking her about it, so maybe I’ll be able to know for sure! Craziness of the Internet!) She was the only person I was really sexual with until my college girlfriend, the one who continued to date me through much of my transition.

And I’ve never really enjoyed being the penetrator in penetrative sex. I’ll do it if a partner wants to, but am not really equipped – physically or emotionally – to do it particularly well. I think doing it with a strap-on might be more fun, but haven’t had the opportunity to try.

But sex of most any kind, during high school and college, seemed unfathomably confusing. I’m sure that’s true for most (all?) people, but I have a suspicion it’s doubly true for trans and queer folks. I didn’t like my body, didn’t want it, and yet it was still able to provide such please. I’d feel some guilt after masturbating, as it if was encouraging this body I didn’t want, this interaction with myself I would never have selected.

Going on hormons hasn’t changed the physicality of my cock – I can still get hard, for example – but it’s sure as hell changed how it works. I’ve discussed this before, so I don’t know that I need to totally delve into it. But my penis is so much more sensitive now. Stroking must be done with some amount of lubricant, or it’s unpleasant. Vibrators, previously uninteresting, have become a regular and important part of my sex life. And orgasms are much longer, more sustained, more difficult to obtain but so much more delicious when they’re achieved.

The way I think about my body has also changed the way I think about other people’s bodies. I’ve had sex with other trans women and interacted with their cocks (read: sucked and been fucked by) in ways I would never have imagined as a ‘lil baby teen. One of the things I’ve been realizing (and discussed in this post about online dating) isn’t that bodies are unimportant - I’m not ready to renounce my lesbian identity – but that they’re less important than I previously thought.

It’s interesting how quickly thinking about my penis turns to thinking about sex and sexuality. Not shocking, but interesting.  Because, to shift topics slightly, that’s not the only reason I’m considering surgery. It’s about body integrity, a sense of self and personal authenticity, feeling comfortable, all the bullshit cliches I’ve talked about before. But yeah, it’s also about sex.

I remember fantasizing that pure and unsullied desire could transform my penis into a vagina. That tucking it between my legs and wanting it enough would create the change. This was also about the time when I started reading trans fiction (something I haven’t posted about in a while…don’t worry, it’s on my to-do list) which meant I was exposed to tons of stories about magical transformations, medical and scientific transformations, totally and completely unexplained transformations. But, reading these stories, one thing was clear: the universe was full of genders transforming.

Ta da!

I didn’t honestly believe any of this was happening, mind you. I wasn’t really expecting to wake up one day with a vagina. To have my parents say “Whoops, there’s been a mixup. This is yours,” and hand me a box with a cunt. But I hoped like help. I even prayed, although I’m not totally sure to whom: Gods and goddesses and life-forces and universal energies and anyone who I thought might be listening and sympathetic.

This drifted away from a body map quite a few paragraphs ago. Maybe that’s OK. My psychic energy seems to be swirling around my crotch these days anyway. My continual (and occasionally successful) attempts to find dates or get laid. My constant ogling of the women around me. For example, the women coming in and out of this coffee shop as I type this. Women walking down the street. Especially women at the gym. I’m not at the point where I was a few months ago, when I thought (correctly, as it turned out) that my hormones were out of whack. But I’m a sexual person. More broadly, I’m a physical person. I like hugging and cuddling and touching, even if it’s non-sexual and simply sharing energy between friends. So yeah, a lot of my mental energy goes into thinking about sex, sexuality, body issues, gender issues, all that jazz.

Right now, my penis and I have an uneasy truce. We like each other, well enough. Being sexual is lots of fun, and I’m still (12 or 15 years later) masturbating regularly, even if the way I do it has changed a bit. But as I research surgeons and go on consults, it becomes more and more clear that our days are numbered. The relationship may not be drawing to a close – all the flesh and blood supplies and nerves will be reused in constructing a vagina, not simply tossed out with the trash – but we’re preparing for the biggest shift since I went on hormones, and probably the biggest change we’ll ever have.

I wonder how my penis feels about all of this. Is it exhausting, this exploration and discovery and potential (lets be honest: probable) surgery? Or is it exhilarating? Maybe I’m thinking about this whole thing the wrong way.

Maybe my cock is just as read to be a cunt as I am ready to have one.