Transgender Life

My post-op self: happy, healthy and smiling

Sex-change and happiness

It feels like something of a taboo for a trans woman to talk about her surgery. But recently, I've seen a lot of negative stories on Twitter about transgender surgeries, with at least one detransitioner campaigning to ban trans people from having surgery, saying it's life-ruining. I'd like to provide a different narrative - my own, personal narrative - about the surgery I had last February, just over four months ago, and which is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

For the benefit of those who may not know what surgery I'm talking about, I'm referring to 'vaginoplasty' (reconstructing my genitalia as a vulva, including a vagina). It's described variously as gender reassignment or gender confirmation or bottom surgery, but for the purposes of this blog I'll use the term that's meant to be pejorative: sex change. Partly this is in tribute to our wonderful media and their framing of the surgery as 'sex-change op' - ever the populist, I will replicate the language here, in a kind of ironic tribute. Also, ‘sex-change’ is quite a dramatically retro term, like ‘transsexual,’ or 'BMX bikes,' they're terms I grew up with in the 1980s and 90s, from the non-halcyon era of Rupert Murdoch and the tabloidization of the British media in which the British public discourse coarsened (though we did have good bikes). Also, I know gender-critical feminism doesn’t believe a person can change sex, so I think it’s a fun term to use on this count too, a political one that’s provocative.

On the subject of my experience of 'changing sex,' I want to elaborate here that as someone who went on female hormones in 2016, then came off them from the end of 2019 (on medical advice), before going back on them at the end of 2020, I’ve experienced the real-world impact of a mode of female puberty, that led to a degree of menopause followed by a second male-puberty, then a second degree of female puberty again as I finally returned to oestrogen. Through biological changes, I’ve experienced the real-world impact of what it is to pass and not pass, to attract male threats or avoid them, I've felt the menopausal hot flushes and the raging of testosterone. These are significant biological changes with huge social and psychological implications – life and death implications, employment and unemployement implications, violent/non-violent implications. Do I think it’s possible to change sex? Not in an absolute way, but partially, yes, and if I was once male-bodied, I’m now trans-female bodied. From the impact of different hormones on my psychology and body, to the social impact on your appearance, the difference is life-changing.

I digress. Last week a detransitioner called Ritchie Herron went public in the British press about his regret having the ‘sex-change op’ and has suggested the whole procedure be reviewed. I want to say immediately that if Herron is a victim of a bad surgery - he complains in the interview with the Daily Mail that it takes him ten painful minutes when urinating - then he has my sympathy. However, Herron’s claims of being fast-tracked by the medical authorities appear less convincing: it seems the process took him approx. 6 years (2012-2018, according to the story), from talking to doctors in his mid-20s to having the surgery at 31 years of age. In some ways the length of time mirrors my journey (and probably most people's journey), which also took several years from first appointment to the surgery. It is a long period of time, with lots of ups and downs, many periods for reflection, and plenty of opportunities to get off the ride if you so wish. In 2020 and for a period of months, also like Herron though for my own complex reasons, I considered detransitioning. But to then make the leap and actively campaign against trans rights and trans people's access to healthcare is not inevitable, and this is where my sympathy for Herron absolutely ends.

Call for Papers: Workshop for Early Career Researchers
At the digital margins? Researching and communicating
marginalisation in online political engagement

Monday 21st March - Tuesday 22nd March 2022

University of Birmingham

We invite proposals from postgraduate students and early career researchers working on critical, feminist or queer approaches to social media to a two-day workshop. The workshop will involve research presentations (Day 1) and skills sessions on publishing and public engagement (Day 2).

Social media is often considered by political scientists as a digital public sphere, offering new spaces for democratic engagement and collective will-formation. In European and international politics, it is understood to play a key role in facilitating participation in transnational democracy. Despite increasing public attention to online abuse, however, the experiences of traditionally marginalised groups have been insufficiently explored. Women and people of other marginalised genders often receive misogynistic, highly sexualised and often racialised messages when engaging in democratic debate. Such forms of gendered and racialised online violence can be considered a form of ‘participatory inequality’. Social media nevertheless offers opportunities for resistance through what Nancy Fraser terms subaltern counter-publics, in which minoritized people can seek support and mobilise. Yet, such online spaces are not automatically safe for everyone: Trans women and gender non-conforming people face particular risks in spaces dominated by cis people. Likewise, women and gender non-conforming people of colour experience racism in spaces dominated by white people. Despite this, there has
been little intersectional research to date about the extent, nature, and implications of such patterns of exclusion for democratic participation.

Today I went for a walk while altering my route, to avoid a man whose attentions have become a little too close for comfort.

I've been vaguely aware of him for a year or more, as he watches the world go by outside his apartment window. There was only ever a face in the gloom of his apartment. Then last week a man stopped me alongside a canal to give me some kind of compliment, and I realized it was him. He told me he'd fallen in love with me from afar, from his window.

He seemed under the influence of alcohol. I smiled politely at his words, and kept walking in the opposite direction. I felt sorry for him for being drunk in the early afternoon.

I told my flatmates. They described it as harassment and asked me if I was okay. I shrugged. Was it harassment? Wasn't it just some drunk guy trying to be nice? And again, I felt sorry for him. He might be an alcoholic, an illness that turns people into something terrible, not least for themselves. Who was the real victim here?

But then the other day, I was returning from my graduation ceremony in a black dress, black tights and boots, a little more eye-liner and mascara than usual. I entered a particular street and recognized the mix of 1980s and 1990s music booming from a certain window. I looked up, inadvertently, and there he was, staring at me. Eye contact made. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Keep walking Gina, like it never happened. Keep walking, like you're not aware his eyes are lasered in on your back and every step you take as you walking down the street away from him. But the flurry of thoughts came anyway: what if he thinks the outfit and extra niceness is for him? What if he takes this as flirting, as a signal?