Entering Anthesis

It’s been over two months since my sex-reassignment surgery; much of the pain and swelling has subsided, external sutures are closed up, and all post-surgical secretions have stopped. She looks almost too “perfect” — symmetrical, youthful, minora tucked and enfolded between the majora.

My neo-clitoris is also ripening. When lightly touching it, it is still very sensitive and tender but not painful anymore. In fact, there’s a relatively dim but very present warm glow that seems to prefigure the erotic jouissance that is yet to come upon completed healing. It feels so categorically different from penile sensation — not a kind of sensation I am used to — yet somehow I feel more at home with this new sensation than with the old one. And when I look at myself in the mirror, what I see reflected back actually looks and feels more “natural” to me than what I was born with, in spite of my vulva being a surgical reconstruction.

How funny it is to me when people critical of transgender surgeries refer to sex reassignment as a form of “genital mutilation” that “irrevocably destroys” otherwise “healthy organs” and produces “permanent infertility.” Only the last of those is technically true.

How can I go through such a beautiful, life-affirming process of embodied transformation and consider it to be a form of “mutilation,” almost akin to something like FGM? How are my genitals “destroyed” when they not only look like a perfectly sculpted form but, above all, are actually able to produce pleasure without pain — a form of pleasure which, to me, is superior to the one I had before? And sure, my genitals were technically “healthy organs,” but what good is that if their presence and their use only ever brought me shame, anxiety, and constant dissatisfaction? And why should my fertility matter, as if being fertile in and of itself is some kind of inherent good or even socially necessary value? I may not be able to provide seed for children of my “own,” but I still have the opportunity to provide a home and a family to a child who doesn’t have one. Beyond that, there is value in my being this way beyond my capacity to produce offspring; by being more at home in my body, this body can be a vehicle for so much more. I can give “birth” to more than just a child, like every other woman can.

With this new body, I can do so much more than I could before. You might not actually see that my private parts have changed, but there’s a radiance that exudes from me because of that change, and I hold myself in a way that is undeniable to people when they meet me. I am no longer self-conscious about this part of my body, no longer feel like an “imposter” like I used to, no longer so catatonic when relating to others — because I have a new vitality from being at home in myself in a way that I never have been before.

People use such horrible language to describe the type of transformation I’m going through, out of their own fear and abject horror at the thought of genital reconstruction, and they try to induce a similar fear and horror in others in order to prevent people like me from getting this kind of care. They also often couch their propaganda in terms of “protecting minors,” but at least as far as male-to-female sex reassignment surgery goes, it’s not even practical or wise to operate on minors — because SRS done well actually presupposes well-developed, mature male genitals, since this allows for the most material to be repurposed. Providing male-assigned-at-birth trans feminine minors with SRS is simply counterintuitive, and this is one of many reasons why sex change operations on minors are very, very uncommon, if they even happen at all.

Some people try to characterize MTF SRS (male-to-female sex reassignment surgery) as part of a “transhumanist” plot to make nature and the feminine irrelevant — so that men can recreate women through frankensteined-men in their own narcissistic image of desire (itself a parody of giving birth), thereby fully integrating the flesh-disdaining misogyny of patriarchy with its implicit homoerotic recognition of men as the only real subjects, in one movement. This is quite a provocative image — equal parts cyberpunk science fiction and gothic horror.

But the only people who truly believe that are not the ones undergoing such procedures, or truly listening to those who undergo such procedures. My neo-vulva does not make me feel like I’ve transcended the human condition — it actually makes me feel more human. My neo-vulva is still natural because I am experiencing for myself, in real time, how what we tend to think of as a static, pre-programmed “natural state” is actually a radically open/empty process that is always adapting to changing conditions. My neo-vulva is not just a formally reconstructed mash of skin and flesh — it is a fully functioning organ which might not be able to give birth (why limit the value of the vulva to its role in reproduction?) but can give birth to pleasure.

I also opted for, out of circumstance and after a lot of reflection, zero-depth vulvaplasty — meaning that I have an external vulva but no vaginal canal. I had decided that all the risks and tribulations of a neo-vaginal canal were not worth it for me, especially considering that most people get a canal to be able to have penetrative sex, typically with a cis man. How could my choice to be zero-depth ever be a choice that coincides with the desire of men? Even if I did get a fully-depth neo-vaginal canal like most trans women undergoing SRS, how could anybody make such a personal decision — to go through such a radical, and at times stressful and painful, experience — just for other people? Having gone through this process, it makes no sense to me that someone could ever do this for anyone but themselves and their own happiness — one which doesn’t necessarily neglect the happiness of others, but often enfolds the happiness of others into oneself. (Other people deserve a happier me — because when I am happier with myself and love myself, I am better poised to make others happy by acting on my love for them.)

People also often make it seem like sex reassignment — or just gender-affirming care in general — is somehow either a severe transgression against the inherent “sacredness” of a body supposedly designed in one moment before birth by some transcendent deity, or a pitiful attempt at trying to rewrite something that is genetically “hard-coded” into the body by evolution. But my experience is that this body is more open/empty to alternative trajectories of development than most people realize or are willing to accept, and that this body and I include-and-transcend each other in an open-ended process of co-creation. My body is not passive, inert matter — it actively and intelligently responds to my choices, as much as my choices are constrained by what my body can afford to do for me.

My lived experience as a transsexual woman undergoing sex reassignment surgery is empty-and-luminous process-relational ontology in the flesh — a living refutation of the ideological notion that our bodies are ultimately fixed at birth by intelligent design or natural selection. My transition is a concrescence at once so utterly profane and so utterly sacred. I get to experience, with my own body, the creatively advancing, dynamically unfolding nature of the entire cosmic process: all things, including myself, are always open/empty (pregnant with possibility) and ceaselessly inclusively-transcending (delivering something new with the help of others).

I am not an objectified, Frankensteinian construct of phallocracy; I am the radiant subject of my own becoming — in alignment with and attuned to the gyn/ecological feminine matrix of life that makes my own life possible and to which I will return when I die, having lived as a loud and proud transsexual woman. That my own life was lived in the pursuit of freedom is nothing but a reflection of how freedom is woven into the fabric of reality itself. The blossoming of my zero-depth neo-vagina is also a blossoming of the universe itself — and the intensities my neo-clit can evoke are at the apex of this development, an apex which does not finally stand alone with teleological finality like the summit of a mountain, but is an ever-differentiating relationship with the rest of my cosmic body, like the meristem of plants — affording me possibilities for experience that have been hitherto thought impossible.

Great Mother Open/Emptiness makes all things possible, and I am forever, immeasurably grateful that she provided me the space to have this little dreamy life of mine. And I am equally so grateful to Great Father Inclusive-Transcendence for persuading me, with love, to become more than myself through community with others. I am because I am-not; this is not just my neo-vulva, my neo-clit… this is our neo-vulva, our neo-clit, and we did this together, as one great cosmic family in communion.