What they took from us

My thanks to TulipR for giving me permission to repost his Twitter thread, which can be found here.

I want to tell everyone what they took from us, what irreversible really means, and what that reality looks like for us. No one told me any of what I’m going to tell you now.

I have no sensation in my crotch region at all. You could stab me with a knife and I wouldn't know. The entire area is numb, like it's shell shocked and unable to comprehend what happened, even 4 years on.

No one told me that the base area of your penis is left, it can't be removed - meaning you're left with a literal stump inside that twitches. When you take Testosterone and your libido returns, you wake up with morning wood, without the tree. I wish this was a joke.

And that’s something that will never come back and one of the reason why i got surgery. My sex drive died about 6 months on HRT and at the time I was glad to be rid of it, but now 10 years later, I’m realising what I’m missing out on and what I won't get back.

Because even if I had a sex drive, my neo vagina is so narrow and small, I wouldn't even be able to have sex if I wanted too. And when I do use a small dilator, I have random pockets of sensation that only seem to pick up pain, rather than pleasure.

Any pleasure I do get comes from the Prostate that was moved forward and wrapped in glands from the penis, meaning anal sex isn’t possible and can risk further damage.

Then there’s the dreams. I dream often, that I have both sets of genitals, in the dream I'm distressed I have both, why both I think? I tell myself to wake up because I know its just a dream. And I awaken into a living nightmare.

In those moments of amnesia as I would wake, I would reach down to my crotch area expecting something that was there for 3 decades, and it's not. My heart skips a beat, every single damn time.

Then there’s the act of going to the toilet. It takes me about 10 minutes to empty my bladder, it's extremely slow, painful and because it dribbles no matter how much i relax, it will then just go all over that entire area, leaving me soaken.

So after cleaning myself up, I will find moments later that my underwear is wet - no matter how much I wiped, it slowly drips out for the best part of an hour. I never knew at 35 I ran the risk like smelling like piss everywhere I went.

Now i get to the point where I’m detransitioned and the realisation that this is permanent is catching up with me. During transition, I was obsessive and deeply unwell, I cannot believe they were allowed to do this to me, even after all the red flags.

I wasn't even asked if I wanted to freeze sperm or want kids. In my obsessive, deeply unwell state they just nodded along and didn’t tell me the realities, what life would be like.

And finally, there’s dilation, which is like some sort of demonic ceremony where you impale yourself for 20 agonising minutes to remind you of your own stupidity.

This isn't even the half of it. And this isn't regretted either, this is grief and anger. Fuck everyone who let this happen.

When I lost 1600ml blood during surgery, it took days to get a blood transfusion. The surgery lasted 3 hours longer. They joked about the blood loss too.