Quote from: suzifrommd on July 14, 2013, 07:43:22 PM
I've begun thinking seriously about whether SRS is for me. I know I WANT it, but I'm not sure if that's a good enough reason. What motivated you to go ahead with your surgery?
I never believed that I would ever be accepted by anyone as female, instead I believed that the only chance I had in this life was to be accepted as a trans woman. I also believed that neo vaginae were a lot different from what I considered at the time to be "real" vaginae. I fell in love with a pre op woman when I was still closeted and trans phobic. I didn't believe I was female, I believed I was someone who had been denied the opportunity of being female all my life and I was right. It wasn't that I was afraid of trans women, I was afraid to transition and I was afraid of being female. I believed that trans women had to limit themselves to being trans in order to be "safe", "sensible" and "sane".
My girlfriend of the time broke up on me. I really loved her and I loved doing things for her. She was the first person I had ever fallen in love with. I remember how too early in the relationship she told me she loved me when her actions told me the exact opposite. To her "love" was a sensation she felt and that was the extent of it for her. For me I also felt love for her but the love I felt for her caused me to want to care for her, be there for her, do things for her, spend my hard earned money that I could have been using to transition on her. All she cared about was herself and her transition. I caught her cheating on me, I asked her if we had a monogamous relationship and she said that yes of course we did and that we had talked about it before. We had never discussed it previously though but she assured me we did. The thing was I knew she was cheating on me and it wasn't just that she was cheating on me she would cheat on me with anyone who would look twice at her.
Anyway... I wasn't exactly a Spring Chicken at the time but I had fallen in love for the first time in my life but really she had fooled me and what I was really in love with was the idea of being in love because as my therapist at the time assured me, my supposed girlfriend and I didn't even have a "relationship". Another aspect of our "relationship" was that I believed that the only chance I ever had to transition would be if I sold my house and moved in with my "girlfriend" and started over. I lived in a small city that was very conservative and ran my own business, self employed. I believed if I transitioned where I was that I would experience terrible prejudice and loose my ability to support myself.
My girlfriend and I broke up. She kept cheating on me and kept allowing me to catch her. Really it was so cruel that it seemed like it had to be intentional but she was so selfish that she would tell me she needed these experiences to feel good about herself. One day she just stopped answering the phone, stopped seeing me, except to allow me to help her move to a new apartment. I was no longer able to spend weekends with her as a female and I was stuck in my home town living as a male. It felt like a hole had been torn out of the center of me. It was very real like I had lost my legs in an accident or something of that nature. The loss I felt was profound and lasted for many years while I struggled against my fears to transition.
Eventually my bank decided to give me an increase on my home equity line of credit which was all I needed in order to have SRS surgery. At the time I knew I would never go full-time but I thought that at least I could have a vagina and that would be something. In a state of calm depression I went and had SRS and recovered from it but I found that it was much more difficult to continue to play a man now that I had a vagina and my vagina was awful. It was hideous and asymmetrical. There was so much scarring and loose skin on the outside that the skin hung off me in large tags or flaps and literally looked like a turkey neck but the joke was I also had Zero inner labia and Zero clitoral hooding.
Also Marci Bowers removed so much skin at the entrance to my vagina that it will always gape open and no surgery can replace what she took off me. My clitoris was off to one side and so positioned so low that it connected to my urethra. But the thing was my vagina allowed me to begin to have some experiences. At the time in order to change paperwork one had to have the surgery so I was able to change all of my documents. Also I had that experience of having sex with a guy who thought I had been born female which I wrote about previously, an experienced that allowed me to begin to believe in myself as a woman.
Remember how I talked about how to my girlfriend being in love was only a sensation she felt that never translated to how she treated me? She was perfectly content to betray me and to cheat on me. Well I have found that believing in one's self as female can be kind of like that, at least it was like that for me. I would have been the first person in the world to assure you that I was female but before SRS, before having experiences that allowed me to begin to change on the inside, I would have been the first person to deny myself the very experiences that allowed me that change. I would have made the choice to limit myself to being trans. I would have been the person telling everyone that they absolutely had to "confess" to any sexual partner immediately. But I was trans phobic. I was afraid of allowing women who transitioned to be female. I felt like to do so at the time would be to deceive people.
A long time ago I was taught in a bible study that the old Anglo Saxon word 'belief' was composed of two words, by lief or by life, by living. Belief wasn't intended to be a "feeling" but rather how an individual acted in respect to ideas. Now days we just assume that belief = ideas whereas in early Christian Society it meant a code of conduct. My girlfriend believed that love = a sensation one felt. I believed that belief = an idea. We were both wrong. Believing in yourself as a woman or as a man isn't an idea, it is how you treat yourself, it is the freedom that you allow yourself or regarding lack of belief it is the limitations you put upon yourself. And the thing is you don't have to be able to pass as female to begin to believe in yourself. All you really have to do is stop acting in accordance with the idea that you aren't a real woman assuming your core idea is that you are a woman or a female.
So to make a long story short I had SRS because I believed my life was over and I didn't know what else to do with myself but the experience allowed me to begin to find some true happiness, it created a platform where I was able to begin to experience myself as a woman and experience was the only thing that ever allowed me to be able to begin to believe in myself as female. I feel that we tend to be a product of our experiences or that our experiences co create our consciousness. But I also believe that many people allow fears to interfere with or to completely prevent that process. SRS taught me that being a man or a woman isn't an idea, it's an experience and the funny part is when I tell people I transitioned I tend to prevent myself from having that experience though before I began to have the experience of being female I assumed that the experience of being a trans woman was the same. Looking back that was my the Lady Doth Protest too Much factor though. That was back when I wasn't having the experience of being female and instead I was using ideas and words to fill in the vacuum, the gap, the emptiness. Back when I constantly had to explain to people I was female because it wasn't happening in real life and at that time words and ideas were the only way to convince myself that it was happening. But it wasn't. Before SRS, even during the best of times I felt like a female impersonator. I never would have used those words to describe the experience I was having though because I was too busy trying to convince myself I was female.
SRS was for me a way to stop telling myself I was female because it is easier to listen to my body and my experiences than it was for me to do the daily affirmations thing in contradiction to my body and my experiences.
HOWEVER... It wasn't SRS that allowed me to begin 'Believing' or by-living in myself. SRS only created a platform for the experience of being female. It was the experiences I began to allow myself after transition that changed how I believed or by-living-ed in myself and just as love can also incorporate a sensation, believing in myself allowed me to experience new ideas about myself. New ideas about what is possible for someone who transitions. New ideas like, "Women who transition can just be women." If you allow yourself to have that experience you will begin to have that experience. If I had read this post before I had SRS it probably wouldn't have meant anything to me. It wasn't until I began having experiences after SRS that I began to understand this but I would like to imagine that most people are smarter and better at grasping the concept than I was.
