Anti Federalist
Member
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2007
- Messages
- 117,564
My Penis, Myself - I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.
Merry Christmas [MENTION=6186]Danke[/MENTION]
So taxpaying citizens, who contract a case of the Chinese bioweapon released on the world, funded partly by our government, will get denied treatment if found to be out of compliance, because we don't have hospital space, because you fired thousands of people for refusing to take an unsafe and ineffective series of jabs supposedly to protect them from the CCP19 weapon and they are out of compliance, but lunatics like this can get a whole operating floor to engage in their insanity, at taxpayer and insurance premium payer expense.
Mother fucking Clown World on steroids.
My Penis, Myself - I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1
On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.
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. Isn’t it good news that they can do it? — like: At all? And obviously, yes. It was. 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. So the news, 28 years later, that the agony was going to be over — abundantly over — was a bit much to take in.
I fixated instead on the information that a pert little average-flaccid package was not an option for me. (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 was so different from everybody else already.
I was already always so different.
Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to accept. “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. Most transmasculine people didn’t get one. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named after not getting one: Original Plumbing. 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.
But I did. And I couldn’t outrun it any longer. 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.
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. 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. If he could just hang on, hang on, hang in there.
“It gave me a little more hope,” he told me later, “to keep going.”
“I would rather have died on the table than not had the surgery,” one Korean American guy with great sweaters responded (and, like everybody here, gave me permission to repeat), to a chorus of nodding Zoom heads.
It has happened at least once that someone did die. I was fully ready to, by which I mean I’d just spent nearly the last of my savings, which I’d burned navigating the emotional-mental-social-medical-legal-extreme-marginalization mindfuck shitshow of transitioning, on a burial plot just in case. One of the nodding heads in the group belonged to a nonbinary white person who was still horizontal in recovery from having had, a week prior, the worst happen, which was that after their procedure, in which all the fat and skin had been stripped from their left forearm from wrist to nearly elbow, along with major nerves, an artery, and veins, and then shaped into a tube and connected, in careful layers, to skin and blood vessels and nerves in their pelvis, their new penis had failed.
It died. On them.
But here they were, already getting ready for their surgeons to harvest a whole other part of their body within the month with zero hesitation. Because those three days they’d had their penis, they said, before being rushed into an eight-hour surgery that couldn’t save it — the feeling of it, even just for one moment, even still bloody and painful and packed with stitches: worth it. And I understood that immediately when, after a yearlong surgery waiting list and a deep quarantine and an anguished prerequisite COVID test I would either pass or lose my date over, I woke up last December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a 40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I’d been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was.
Merry Christmas [MENTION=6186]Danke[/MENTION]
So taxpaying citizens, who contract a case of the Chinese bioweapon released on the world, funded partly by our government, will get denied treatment if found to be out of compliance, because we don't have hospital space, because you fired thousands of people for refusing to take an unsafe and ineffective series of jabs supposedly to protect them from the CCP19 weapon and they are out of compliance, but lunatics like this can get a whole operating floor to engage in their insanity, at taxpayer and insurance premium payer expense.
Mother fucking Clown World on steroids.
My Penis, Myself - I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1
On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.
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. Isn’t it good news that they can do it? — like: At all? And obviously, yes. It was. 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. So the news, 28 years later, that the agony was going to be over — abundantly over — was a bit much to take in.
I fixated instead on the information that a pert little average-flaccid package was not an option for me. (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 was so different from everybody else already.
I was already always so different.
Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to accept. “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. Most transmasculine people didn’t get one. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named after not getting one: Original Plumbing. 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.
But I did. And I couldn’t outrun it any longer. 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.
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. 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. If he could just hang on, hang on, hang in there.
“It gave me a little more hope,” he told me later, “to keep going.”
“I would rather have died on the table than not had the surgery,” one Korean American guy with great sweaters responded (and, like everybody here, gave me permission to repeat), to a chorus of nodding Zoom heads.
It has happened at least once that someone did die. I was fully ready to, by which I mean I’d just spent nearly the last of my savings, which I’d burned navigating the emotional-mental-social-medical-legal-extreme-marginalization mindfuck shitshow of transitioning, on a burial plot just in case. One of the nodding heads in the group belonged to a nonbinary white person who was still horizontal in recovery from having had, a week prior, the worst happen, which was that after their procedure, in which all the fat and skin had been stripped from their left forearm from wrist to nearly elbow, along with major nerves, an artery, and veins, and then shaped into a tube and connected, in careful layers, to skin and blood vessels and nerves in their pelvis, their new penis had failed.
It died. On them.
But here they were, already getting ready for their surgeons to harvest a whole other part of their body within the month with zero hesitation. Because those three days they’d had their penis, they said, before being rushed into an eight-hour surgery that couldn’t save it — the feeling of it, even just for one moment, even still bloody and painful and packed with stitches: worth it. And I understood that immediately when, after a yearlong surgery waiting list and a deep quarantine and an anguished prerequisite COVID test I would either pass or lose my date over, I woke up last December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a 40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I’d been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was.
