“It gave me a little more hope,” he told me later, “to keep going.” If he could just hang on, hang on, hang in there.
FAMOUS GAY MEN BIG DIG SERIES
And here they were, these trans and nonbinary people of many races and locations, coming together to try to hold one another’s questions and fears about which donor site on their body to use, and how the site had (or hadn’t) recovered, and how much sensation they had (“My whole dick feels like a giant clit!” one elated guy described his rare, very best-case outcome once to widened eyes all around), and what size testicle implants they got if they got testicles (which are optional) at all, and which surgeon they went to and when could you go back to work and who in the world took care of you, and did anybody else have this or that or a whole series of fistulas or strictures around their new urethral hookup that rerouted their pee and is also optional, and did anyone else just leave their urethra where it is? Once, a pre-op 52-year-old Black man who was struggling with money and his disability and insurance asked if having a penis was really going to make a difference, relieve any of this pain he was barely surviving, and I watched as the post-op group members calmly assured him that, yes, it would. So there I was then, finally, showing up to online specialized transmasculine support groups for people seeking or recovering from phallo, between hours spent hustling to call (six) surgeons’ offices about consults and my PCP’s office (19 times) for referrals and my insurance company (17 times - that I wrote down, anyway) for the necessary authorizations. Literally: The day I gave in and admitted that for me it was penis or death came after a last-ditch bout of denial in which I drove 1,400 miles in three days only to have to acknowledge, devastated, at my destination that I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I saw transmasculine support groups shut down and go silent more than once when someone brought up the procedure, and later, when I was that someone, I was twice invited to leave “with other people who might want to talk about that.” Whatever magical spectrum of unicorn gender expression was otherwise being embraced, it ended firmly before needing a socially, culturally, politically, historically, personally, emotionally, medically complicated dick.īut I did. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named after not getting one: Original Plumbing.
Most transmasculine people didn’t get one. “Well, I will love you no matter what, sweetie,” a cis female best friend of mine said when I told her I was transitioning, years before - “as long as you don’t get a dick.” One flatly demanded, “Don’t get a dick.” It was, another transmasculine person I used to know said, disgusting, insane to want and to have a surgeon make a sensate phallus out of your arm or leg or somewhere and Frankenstitch it to your body, to go so far out of your way to opt in to a tool, perhaps the tool, of so much suffering. Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to accept. I was so different from everybody else already. (If I even wanted that.) (And did I?) When I’d asked the surgeon how big my impending penis was going to be, he could only guess, pointing to the reusable water bottle in my hand, a metal cylinder nine inches in circumference: “Smaller than that.” I fixated instead on the information that a pert little average-flaccid package was not an option for me. So the news, 28 years later, that the agony was going to be over - abundantly over - was a bit much to take in. Growing up without one, I’d thought or maybe convinced myself that mine would grow in later - to the extent that when I see a woman in tight pants, I still often instinctively think, Where is her penis? - but my period at 12 aptly, agonizingly bled to death that increasingly implausible dream of reconciling with life, with God, that he wouldn’t make me like this and leave me like this forever.
Isn’t it good news that they can do it? - like: At all? And obviously, yes. In the car outside the doctor’s office afterward, I bent my torso in half and bawled, my face against the dashboard, my boyfriend petting my back to console me but confused. On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.