I’m now the proud owner of a brand spanking new neovagina!
I arrived at the hospital this morning at 6 am and went in for my 4 hour surgery at 7:30. Took me a long time to fully wake up but all the nurses here are great and I haven’t been misgendered once.
The doctor sent me a photo of it right after surgery and it looked surprisingly good for fresh wounds. Of course now comes the swelling and healing part. I have packing inside, a catheter on my bladder, and a bolster literally sewn over my groin. I can’t feel much with all the drugs I’m on but the bolster is definitely annoying.
I just went for my first, very short, walk. I have to waddle in order to move and it’s very hard to get up. But the TV here has on demand movies and I’m in a corner room all by myself with a great view.
Visitors are only allowed for 1 hour so my wife/caregiver is back at our Airbnb. For now I’ll wait out the worst of the swelling with ice on my groin and movies while the wind whistles past my room and the fog rolls in.
After over a year of intentional planning, tomorrow is my gender confirmation surgery! I’m oddly calm today. Though that may change once I start my fun bowel prep diet this afternoon.
My partner pointed out last night that my face shape has changed a LOT in the last 6 months. It changed a bit right after hormones but I guess hitting the 2 year mark did something magical. I’m sure the weight I’ve been putting on helped round out the edges as well.
1 year ago Now
It’s really nice to look at photos and start to see more of my mom than my dad.
The closer I get to surgery, the more little things about my current parts annoy me. Like the way my balls stick to the side of my leg and how I have to aim to pee.
I seriously can’t wait to just sit to pee hands free. I don’t care that it will require maintenance like dilation and douching. I will gladly do that to have the parts I want.
After a 2 day drive down the coast, I’m now settled in my Airbnb and just finished my pre-op appointment.
My anxiety is mostly gone now that there are fewer things to go wrong and I couldn’t be more excited to finally be here! The doctor and all the staff at the clinic are wonderful and friendly. Though they did give me the predictable fatphobic lecture about my BMI being slightly over the “recommended weight.”
I have my COVID test tomorrow and then it’s smooth sailing until my bowel prep starts the night before surgery. Monday morning I’ll show up bright and early and go under for the 4-5 hour procedure.
We chose to drive down since airports felt too risky. The drive down the 101 coastal highway was beautiful but long. And we couldn’t stop much because everywhere we went there were hundreds of white tourists without masks.
I’m glad to see that the most Asian neighborhood we are staying in is much more compliant with mask laws. It makes me feel safer walking around though I suspect the tourist areas here are going to be bad too.
We’re trying to find things we can do while we’re here since everything is understandably closed. I guess we’ll go wander around some parks and eat lots of amazing takeout.
Thank you again to everyone who donated to make this happen! I’ve gotten some unexpectedly large gifts this week which make me feel so loved and supported.
As I’ve said before, it takes a village to make a vagina!
I’ve been off my estrogen pills for over a week now per doctors instructions for surgery. The hot flashes started a few days ago and yesterday they were happening almost all day. That coincided with a heat wave in Seattle and a lot of physical labor loading the car for the drive down which made for a very sweaty, unpleasant day.
Today I officially “come out” publicly as a writer. I am finally rebranding my blog to reflect what this is actually all about – Finding Haven.
My name is Haven.
That may seem like a simple statement but it took me a long time and a winding path to get there.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist cult and a community that had very rigid views of binary, pre-determined gender and sexuality. I didn’t know any out gay people growing up and I didn’t even hear the word Transgender until I was in college. When I first came to my Christian university, I was still very much a model of the rigid beliefs that had been hammered into me over time. I was very conservative and the first time the LGBTQ group on campus approached me with a petition, I balked at it and turned them away (politely).
Shockingly, it was my theology classes the next year that helped me change my views. I had a series of excellent teachers who slowly helped me break down and analyze my beliefs non-judgmentally and without a pre-determined outcome. They gave me the space to eventually realize that I wasn’t practicing something I believed but rather parroting what I had been taught. So I opened my mind a bit and started trying to figure out what I actually wanted to believe.
It was during that time that I first saw an event advertised on campus for a panel of pastors talking about homosexuality in the church. I decided to push my boundaries and attend, hiding in the back row of a large classroom. What I saw for the first time there was passionate Christians talking about how queerness and faith didn’t have to be opposed but rather could be accepted and loved. I was intrigued and decided to start paying more attention to the LGBTQ group on campus.
The next event I attended was a Transgender Panel. It was my first time even hearing of the word and it definitely pushed my comfort boundaries. But seeing out and proud trans people for the first time was eye opening. I came away from that event resolved to learn more about the LGBTQ community and become an “ally.”
I still didn’t realize that I was trans at that point because I thought that to do that you had to look a certain way, be very feminine (binary), and “pass” as a cisgender woman. I knew that I would never be able to pass so I continued to ignore my latent gender feelings.
The LGBTQ discussion group that I began attending was called SPU Haven.
Over the next couple years I became a loyal member and began calling myself a “gender non-conforming ally.” I eventually moved into leadership of the group and that’s when the shit hit the fan.
You see, homosexuality at our conservative university was considered to be in violation of the “Lifestyle Expectations Clause” that they made all incoming staff and students sign. What “homosexual behavior” actually meant, no one knew. But it did mean that our group found itself the center of controversy.
The university Administration decided at one point that we were pushing the boundaries too much and told us that they were disbanding the group. That we “no longer existed” and couldn’t meet on campus. Well of course being the baby activists we were, we kept meeting but this time in a open space instead of a reserved room. It harmed our ability to actually be a safe space but it got their attention.
Word of this ban eventually reached the local news sources, then other news sources across the country, and finally a group of alumni who organized a letter writing campaign. It was an intense 6 weeks where I found myself on the cover of the school newspaper every week. But eventually we scared the Administration enough that they privately apologized and gave us back our meeting space. A few years later, the group became an officially funded club.
My activism history was shaped by that experience of having to fight for my space. It took me a long time for my work to become truly intersectional, but that group planted a seed and was incredibly important to who I became.
So when I was looking at choosing a new name for myself to reflect my feminine and genderqueer reality, I chose Haven. It means sanctuary, safe space, and respite. Which is what I strive to continue becoming.
My long-awaited surgery is next Monday and I couldn’t be more excited! I’ve spent so much time and energy preparing and yet it still doesn’t feel real and probably won’t until my pre-op appointment.
I got a call from a San Francisco area code today and definitely freaked out when I saw the caller ID. I am so scared that something will happen, especially during a pandemic, to push it off. But luckily it was just the confirmation call for my appointment.
The car is all packed and tomorrow we leave bright and early to do a fun roadtrip down the 101 coastal highway with my spouse and her other partner who lives with us. He’s never been to the Redwoods so I’m excited for him to experience that for the first time.
I’ll keep posting here at on Twitter with updates about surgery.
Content Warning: I’m going to talk explicitly about sex in this post.
How did I know I needed surgery? It is a question I get a lot in different forms and it’s a good question, particularly for other trans people to ask each other.
My earliest inklings were from when I first learned what vulvas were. I was immensely curious as a child so I secretively turned to my local library and sex education websites to find out what women had that made them so amazing and supposedly so different. That’s when I found out the beauty that was the human vulva, vagina, and especially, the magical clitoris.
What was initially curiosity quickly turned into an obsession. And I doubt it was the same kind of obsession that my cisgender peers were starting to have as their libidos awakened. It crept into my psyche and my dreams. It wasn’t long before I was having both sleeping dreams and daydreams that involved strong, powerful women with both penises and vaginas. Because to me, the peak of human achievement would be having the best of both worlds. This was before I even knew that trans or intersex people existed.
It took me years of suppressed queerness before I finally admitted those dreams in group therapy as an early adult. And in the meantime I went through phases of hyper-masculinity as I tried to reconcile these desires to experience a vagina that kept pestering my brain. When I first had oral sex with a woman, the obsession only grew.
Eventually I finally got enough exposure to trans people that I realized I was one too. Not out of peer pressure like the media tries to paint it, but from seeing examples of people like me. I started out slowly and it took me awhile of my social transition before I decided to take any medical steps. You can see a lot of that progression if you read the early posts on my blog.
I had a lot of hesitation about starting estrogen because I was worried it would change how my already anxious/depressed brain worked. But once I started, I knew I could never go back. After the initial adjustment period, my brain had never felt more “right” and like I finally had the right operating system installed. But it did fundamentally change how I experienced sex.
I have always been hesitant and anxious about using my penis. But after starting hormones, there was some significant rewiring of my nervous system that took place and changed how I felt sensations. Suddenly an appendage that felt like a blunt tool now felt like a fine tip brush. It honestly felt like I imagine an inverted vagina would feel with a clitoris on the tip. My sensitivity increased immensely and I also lost all desire to use it for penetrative sex.
I had already started to think about surgery but my initial explorations had all been about whether or not it was possible to have a vagina and a penis simultaneously. I thought for sure that’s what I wanted because that’s what all my dreams still involved. I scoured the internet and couldn’t find anyone except naysayers who claimed it was anatomically impossible.
Finally, the first surgeons started to do what they called “penile preservation vaginoplasty” and my dreams were vindicated! Except ironically, by the time I discovered that, I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t what I wanted. I came to understand after almost 2 decades of dreaming that that form was more about what I was attracted to, not about what I wanted for myself.
Once I finally accepted that I wanted a vaginoplasty, the rest was just about getting through the medical gatekeeping. Last year when I went for my consult, I was sure that it was what I wanted. Now I am 120% sure and for months now I have been counting down the days (12) until I could finally achieve what I’ve secretly desired for so long.
I’ve been trying to decide for a couple years now if I am asexual or if I just have a low libido and as I think about life post surgery and all the sex I can have uninhibited, I think I finally have my answer. I just needed the right parts!
I’m in the home stretch now and I’ve started taking the pre-surgical meds. The Gabapentin is making my brain a bit hazy and I’m rather scatterbrained so hopefully this blog post makes sense. But in 6 days I pack up the car with my partner who will be my caregiver and her partner who lives with us and we drive down the coast to San Francisco.
I know that I’ve spent the last 4 years here writing mostly about my transition. And lately I’ve been very focused on surgery. But I want to take a moment here and remind you that being Trans is about so much more than Transition.
I started my social transition around the time I started this blog 4 years ago, but eventually that period of my life will end and my life will go on. Because ultimately this period is going to hopefully be a blip in the grand scheme of my life. And while I talk a lot about the challenges of transition and life as a trans person, I hope you’ve also taken away how rewarding my life is now that I am able to be my most authentic self.
My life is about so much more than transition and the world is filled with thousands of trans people living their lives, creating art, building relationships, and doing so many more amazing things than just transitioning.
The reason I share my (very privileged) story here is in the hope that by baring my soul and opening myself up to you readers, other trans people don’t have to do that education work. I live my life as an open book because that’s who I am. But for so many people, the stories I share are painful memories and open wounds.
So please, do not take away from my blog that it is ok to ask Trans people about their bodies, their journey, their medical details, and especially not “the surgery.” There are a million reasons why including that a LOT of trans people never want surgery. But the most important reason is simply that it’s none of your fucking business!
Our lives are not a performance for your benefit. Our stories are not open to your analysis unless we choose to make them open like I am here.
I write my story first and foremost for myself. Because I’ve found immense therapeutic benefit to writing out the burning thoughts in my head here. It really helps me crystallize what my brain is ruminating on and gives me an outlet for my emotions that benefits more people than just myself.
When I first came here, I honestly never thought that people would ready my work. I wrote this blog so that I, with my terrible memory shaped by trauma, could remember what I was thinking at each step along the way. And that’s still the primary reason I write. I never expected over 14,000 readers to visit my blog more than 27,000 times.
And while I’m very honored that you take the time to read my thoughts and sometimes rantings, I want to be very clear that this should not be your expectation of what being trans is like for everyone. Each person has a different path and honestly if there’s anything I could impress on you about the Trans Community it is that each of us is far more different than we are similar.
Finding Haven 