How Does it Feel to Wake up after "Sex Reassignment"
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Recently i wrote the following letter to friends, to mark two weeks of thinking and introspection over my „sex reassignment operation“. I far prefer the German term „Geschlechtsangleichende Operation“, for reasons which i talk about as part of my thoughts ….
Dearest Friends
It is now day 13 after my „sex reassignment operation“, so I wanted to say to you all: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kind emails, PMs and messages. I wanted to put down a few words about how I am, and how this huge change is unfolding within me.
Each big step of transition is bringing me peace. And i just have a really happy, hopeful background feeling from this Op. There’s such a complex braid of feelings, but a summary would be a profound sense of relief at what feels like a true “homecoming”. Ever since i began seriously thinking about this gigantic step, the word “homecoming” has been with me. We all begin in early gestation in female form. In a male child, the rudimentary sheath folds outwards: the image i give my children is of a dishwashing glove with one of the fingers pushed inwards, “inside out” from how one would normally wear it to wash the dishes. This is the form we all begin with; later, in a male child, it folds outwards (ready to wash the dishes!) and anti-Müllerian hormone tells the womb not to grow. All foetuses, every single one of us, are programmed to grow a womb, unless told otherwise by this latter hormonal signal a couple of months into gestation. This only partially worked with me, thus i have vestigial uterine tissue in my tummy. As i have explained to my children, this operation is simply like pushing the finger of the glove back in again. A darling friend in Melbourne gave me the image that, until I have my op, i should think of myself as a “herniated woman”, just waiting for treatment for a prolapse that should never have happenned! How i find dearest Tara’s utterly unique mix of humor and deep wish to comfort so nurturing! And so, right from when i first began thinking about all this, i saw a deep symbolic and poetic beauty in the idea — my true homecoming.
Just after my Op, the weather in München was gorgeous and, when they wheeled me into my room facing the afternoon Sun and bathed in the most glorious light, i said to myself that “this is a new dawn”. As I heal more and the pain and exhaustion become less, I glimpse more of the emotional landscape that will underly my future, and it is like walking into a beautiful green dale with a golden morning sun and the restful sound of a stream running alongside the path i tread.
Transition is like that: it’s first and foremost about sincerity, about taking away the hinderings and blocks to sincerity and honesty. And in so doing, one slowly soothes and quiets the jarring sense of incongruence that gnaws endlessly at one’s being. And once one takes away hindrance and stilled the chaos that prevails as a result of that everpresent gnawing feeling, one clears away the rubble, at last leaving a solid foundation that one can build one’s true self upon. Intimacy flows readily when one interacts with the outsie world as one’s self, instead of through an interface that one feels is needed to conform with society’s demands. There’s more thought space, more feeling space, so much more of me to devote to the people and things that i really care about. Indeed, transition leaves caverns of room, so that stresses and problems that were really big and left one barely enough room to breathe become little packages, barely noticeable in the corner of the new, free space left in one’s emotional life.
As i lie here, resting, recovering, contemplating my future, two examples keep coming to mind to illustrate that relentlessly gnawing, jarring incongruence in my former life.
I did something curious before my op that i both find a little disturbing, and which i am also glad i did. Unsurprisingly, the night before my op, i had to shave my genitals completely. For some reason, i felt the need to take a few photos with my phone of their state before the op, the last time in my life when they would have a form that i loathed so much. This is the one and only “dick pic” I ever took, and i assure you i shall be the only person who will ever see it. To look at that photo two days later, after my operation was done, was surreal and immensely powerful. Firstly, i can honestly say that this was the first time in my life since i was about 5 years old, when i first realized that i had a huge problem with what i saw, that i actually looked at my former genitals and truly took in their form. When one is trans and has body parts that feel deeply wrong, dissociation becomes automatic. Whenever my gaze had had to be directed to that area, for practical purposes like cleaning and hygiene, my mind would simply switch off, and I have literally no memory aside from my photo for how i looked down there. I had a kinetic map in my mind of the ridges and dales my fingers would need to follow with soap as i cleaned myself in the shower, but no visual memory at all. In the same way, i have a picture of my face as a child before puberty in my mind, and i also have an image of how i look since transition: hormone therapy has been kind to me and facial surgery 18 months ago restored the curves of my eyes and jaw that i had before puberty inexorably scarred me, making my face ever more alien to me as i glanced anguished in the mirror perhaps a hundred times a day. I have no memory of my face between puberty and transition, and the only reason that i know the person in the thousands of photos i have of my partner and our children is that i took those photos.
And when i looked at my former genitals, i was shocked. They were sooooooo little. Little of course in the physical sense: i was never hugely endowed to begin with, and hormone therapy heavily shrinks that part of you, mainly through heavy atrophy of the corpus cavernosum (the erectile sponges within the penis and the clitoris). But they also seemed little in a much deeper sense. Now that the tissue had been reworked and the genitals in the photo were no longer mine, now that there was this new distance between me and them, i felt an overwhelming sense of, “wow, was that what all the fuss was about?”. Already it seems hard to believe. “They have lost their power to hurt me”, i think, before sadly realizing that it was never their intention to cause me so much pain. My Mother Nature, the Goddess i see as comprising the sum total of the beauty of the Universe as a whole — She did not mean to hurt me. Indeed, at the prompting of a counsellor, i once wrote a letter to my five year old self, imagining what i would say to that darling little frightened child with no-one to listen to her. I besought her not to dwell on injustice, but rather:
“You feel that the creator, whoever they may be, has given you the wrong body. How right you are in that thought. But the creator has not done this deliberately or maliciously. Sometimes the dazzlingly beautiful diversity of life that She creates bears random little quirks. She’s not perfect, our creator, but She is perfect simply by not being perfect. She’s a real Goddess, not a phantasy one, so She cannot be all powerful and thus really does accidentally occasionally make people who have the wrong bodies for their minds. Without random little quirks, there can be no dazzling beauty of manifoldness of life in our World, which I know brings you such joy and always will. I know how sad that sometimes makes you, that you are one of those random quirks, and I know of the tears you cry when no-one is around. I know how frightened you are to tell anyone the reason for your tears.”
Without those random little quirks, woven into the tapestry of life itself by the mind of Nature Herself, none of us, NONE of us would be here to behold the beauty of four thousand million years of Her work. And i have indeed always rejoiced in the beauty of our World, and have always felt loved by that Goddess, even in my darkest hours. What further evidence of their being loved by Her does anyone need, other than the fact that we have all been granted the sublime wonder of self-aware conscious existence, the power to grasp beauty and feel joy?
My former genitals in the photo now looked so harmless, even with a kind of quaint beauty if i imagined them as a new lifeform, perhaps a mushroom, that one encounters for the first time in the wilds. Jonathan Miller in 1978 made a wonderful TV series called, “The Body in Question”: it was a medical science documentary with a difference, in that it explored our bodies through the attitudes and feelings we have towards them. The final episode dealt with our mortality, and began with Miller at sea in a little boat, which happens to be a metaphor I have always had for my own person and my own life, and he held up a laundry sized bucket full of salt water, asserting it was roughly the volume of tears a person cries in their lifetime before pouring it gently into the ocean — returning the symbolic life lived to the amniotic liquors of our beautiful planet that gave birth ultimately to us all. It was a powerfully beautiful and poignant symbol, and i keep thinking of it now, asking myself what fraction of that bucket would contain all the tears that i had cried over the wrong genitals, the wrong body, particularly in childhood and puberty before learnt helplessness had snuffed and stamped out the energy to rail against an inevitability that I felt was deeply wrong. I rather think it would be at least a third to a half of all the tears i have cried up till now. Soooo little. Is this TRULY what all the fuss was about, Selena? I smile to myelf, so, so happy to be where i am, and glad to part with my former body on good terms. My before-transtion self was not a bad person, they were the best me i coud be, given the interface, the armor I had to encase myself with to remain acceptable to the word around me. Although i believe the after transition Selena sees the World very differently, the basic values I strove for like kindness and courage have not changed.
A second example of that everpresent, gnawing sense of incongruence in a trans person is related to the assertion that i have already made that i prefer the German term “Geschlechtsangleichende Operation” to the English “Sex Reassignment Surgery”. Nothing is reassigned — those words simply do not fit my experience at all. The word “anzugleichen”, to align, describes perfectly what i have just gone through — the treatment aims to bring my body into congruence with what I feel is intrinsically me. Again, the word feels so right because it is about soothing, removing this terrible everpresent jarring incongruity that gnawed endlessly at me. It’s about the coming of consonance, the stilling of dissonance. A great deal of my treatment has been done in Germany, and i have come to love the German language around transgender medicine because it uses metaphors and kenning very much in keeping with my thoughts, my own personal struggle and my history. One speaks a great deal of the Übereinstimmung — congruence — that these treatments aim to afford the patient, for example. But look carefully at that word, and at the gorgeous kenning that lies at its heart — Stimme, stimmen. Although everyday German speakers, native or foreign, probably take no more heed of the kenning than speakers of my own beautiful mother tongue take of the rich array of kenning that lies at the root of many of my own native words, words like übereinstimmen, zustimmen and so forth are all grounded on a kenning wherein a person’s voice stands representative of their thoughts, their feelings, their opinions, even their whole being. Such a powerfully important idea for our times, when so many groups and minorities seem marginalized and not listened to, when our society is overshadowed by so much foreboding of real potential peril At one point, one of the surgeons in my team used the expression something like, “um die patientin zu stimmen, wie ein schönes Klavier”- literally, to tune the patient as if she were a piano. I’m of course here speaking about transitioning to female treatments here, as in my case, specifically. When i heard this phrase, i was overcome by a crashing wave of relief and feeling of recognition of my own emotional state by another, and big, hot tears spilt instantly down my cheeks, for i have ALWAYS thought of my anguished feelings around gender in terms of a dissonance metaphor, and i even wished as a tweeny child explicitly that i could be tuned like a piano into the true me. One Saturday afternoon when i was 13 years old, we had our piano tuned and i watched the piano tuner work his way meticulously hither and tither along the strings, with the sound of the instrument becoming ever fuller, brighter and more beautiful, each string becoming more perfectly a part of the chords he used to bring other strings into consonance as a whole, as he wrought his careful craft. I sat there, soaking up the sublime sounds and imagine myself being tuned; it was such a lovely and soothing image to hold in one’s head for a troubled child.
I am sooooo overjoyed with the results of the operation. The team in München have created the most beautiful shape for me, and transplanted plenty of tissue for the inner labia that’s looking healthy in readiness for the cosmetic “Korrektur” in 6 months time. And when i look at what’s been done, it’s looking less and less like she’s been run over by a truck and more part of me, so healing is definitely well underway. The doctors so far have been impressed with the speed of my healing, but, for me, i’ve never asked my body to heal sooo much tissue at once, so it’s been hard up to now to feel that i am healing when i look at her. That’s notwithstanding my being laid up for days and weeks at a time with heavy injuries several times as a teenager after nasty falls from bikes and especially horses on the farm where i grew up. We were pretty feral where I grew up.
I can already see emotional recovery is going to be easy in this case, in contrast with my last major op. I had facial surgery eighteen months ago, which restored the curves of my eyes and jaw that i had before puberty. They too did such lovely work: their method was to begin with a photo of me at 11 years old and age it in software as though i would have had a full female puberty as the bone shape to work to. Emotional recovery from this operation was really, really tough, and i am still partly dealing with the grief it let slip. When i saw the restored shape of my eyes, which was exactly as i recalled as a little child, it brought back intense memories of going through puberty, helpless, watching my face become alien to me. It was also a time of repeated sexual abuse at the hands of my gender policing peers at the expensive all-boys school I was sent to. I grew small, feminine breasts and these were the subject of endless physical attention, some of it extremely violent. I had no one I could turn to, so those years evoked by my facial surgery, as well as by the breast tenderness that HRT begets, were a horrible time for me. The twelve months after my facial surgery were filled with panic attacks, and, on one occasion, a terrifying psychosis, the most terrifying experience i have ever had, when the anxiolytic medication i had been prescribed went terribly wrong. But the spontaneous, heartfelt kindness of people around me who helped me that day on Bahnhof Adlershof is something i shall never forget and shall certainly write about another time.
This time around, my Op takes me back to the period of my life, between about 5 and 9 years old, when i most ardently wished my genitals were different before the horrors of unwanted secondary sex characteristics overtook me in puberty and crushed all hope. At that age, the capacity for phantasy is very powerful, so, although there was sadness, there was a very alive phantasy wherein i believed that everything would somehow sort itself out and that somehow one day i would wake up a girl. I joyously gave myself the girl name “Moon” sometime around the age of four, which is why my legal name is that of the Greek Moon Goddess, and indeed my legal spelling is the Greek “Selene”. In English i’ve always wanted it pronounced like Selena Gomez rather than Celine Dion, so i spell it with an “a” at the end in English — it’s otherwise an uphill battle telling people to remember! In German i introduce myself as “Zelina” and tell people to use standard German phonetics on the Greek spelling of the word. Somehow to a 4 to 5 year old, our beautiful Moon was the most female thing i could think of. Those years of kindergarten and early primary school were actually pretty happy for me in many ways, because i would organize my friends into make believe games, with me always as “Moon”. “She was only pretend” i would tell my friends, but of course there was a great deal more to it than that: up till about 9 i felt safe amongst my friends in behaviors that i would NEVER have revealed to my family. I think i was safe because my friends seemed to enjoy the stories i created. Moon was often a spacefarer, we journeyed to the galactic center, to a fictional black hole in “Sector Cygnus Five” (spookily six years later astronomers discovered the X-ray source in Cygnus X that was later declared to be the first confirmed black hole that humanity has observed), the rings of Saturn and the great Red Spot of Jupiter. Yes, i am well aware that there is no surface to stand on and that we’d never have survived Jupiter’s radiation. I was six years old, OK? Before i go on, i have to get it off my chest that a pet bugbear of mine is people who obsessively look for ‘faults” in sci fi movies, presumably to look clever, particularly if the primary story is about the characters and how they deal with the human condition. Cinema is a heavily constrained and limited medium, and liberties are always needed for fullness of expression. I could have screamed when a friend recently insisted on repeatedly pointing these faults out in the film Gravity, as we watched this movie together, when, for me, this beautiful story was primarily about the grief for the senseless loss of her four year old child that the character Dr. Ryan Stone (played sublimely by Sandra Bullock) carried into space and how her terrifying ordeal brought her to a place of greater hope. I’ll have such people know that began my career as an academic theoretical physicist and I can spot these so called “faults” better than just about anyone, but mostly for me they do not detract from the stories in the least because the characters, not the science, are the main point for me. (Many people do not know that the famousest astronaut of all, Neil Armstrong, carried very alike, real-life crushing grief that he never seemed to come to terms with for his own daughter Karen). Above all, DON’T tell me, as so, so many have, about “faults” in “Interstellar” — i assure you, you will not be telling me anything — I simply don’t care a whit, don’t give the nether end of a rat, and it’s absolutely still hands down one of my fave sci-fi movies of all time. Maybe instead look at what they got right, for the images of Gargantua, the black hole, and the visual distortions it works on views of the Universe around it were produced by actual, magnificent, numerical simulations of the underlying relativistic field equations by some of the most advanced simulation techniques in that field at the time, overseen by the magnificent teacher Professor Kip Thorne, whose thoughts gave me so much delight as i explored the world of geometry and relativity so long ago. We believe that a real black hole up close would look very like what you saw in that movie. I greatly admire Kip Thorne and was delighted by his contribution to the plot, for it is a subtle but clear signalling that Thorne subscribes, like me, to the philosophy of Aeternalism.
I think my “Moon” character in these games was a mixture of the female characters i would dream of being. One of the main longterm ones was Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, one of L. Frank Baum’s finest, most complex and beautiful characters, beginning in the Oz backstories as an arrogant young woman full of hubris and growing with age into a most wonderful figure of strength and kindness. I so wanted a Glinda doll that i saw in the merch at a stage performance of “The Wizard of Oz” but i would NEVER have dared ask for one. Her costume in this production was so beautiful i nearly cried looking at pictures of her in the performance programme. Then there was the adorable Sapphire, the Princess Knight,, perhaps the wondeful Osamu Tezuka’s famousest manga character aside from Astroboy. One must also mention various female characters like Marla and Slim from Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol; Marla and Slim were both from Venus and Marla particularly captured my imagination when she replied to someone’s surprise at her astounding capacity for memory with, “A Venutian has the facility never to forget”. I don’t recall her most famous retort to a slight on her intelligence, which apparently was, “There are no dumb blondes on Venus!”- the humor and gender politics of that one were waaaay above my head at that age. I read Slim as female, and i was a little mortified to find out at eight years old that my heroine was indeed male — many of the characters were highly androgenous and gender bending, and my mistake bears witness to their effectiveness. I had moved on to other stories and characters by then, so my schock was short lived and bearable. Roberta Leigh made a sly humorous reference to her Jewish Russian origins by giving all the extraterrestrial characters strong Slavic accents, particularly in the case of the Martians. Interestingly, there were no female Martians talked about in this story, and they, especially the major character Husky, had an impossibly insatiable appetite for sausages. I recall falling off my chair backwards one evening at the dinner table in fits of laughter when my four year old sister stuffed at least five sausages (they were little ones) into her mouth, trying to make a Russian accent declaring that she was Husky!
Sapphire, the Princess Knight, Osama Tezuka’s gorgeous main character from the anime “Ribon no Kishi”, that i would watch every day at 10am when channel 7 did “Binges” of it every day during school holidays.
And then of course there was a SUPER COOL British sci fi UFO where a group of women under the control of Commander Gay Ellis (played by the gorgeous Gabrielle Drake) staffed the control and command operations in the Earth’s early warning system against UFO invasion on a Moon base. I flitted between a phantasy that i was Commander Ellis on one hand and the lovely idea of her being a protective older sister or aunt on the other. This show was a savior to me for several years as it let me indulge my dream of being part of a group of women like that in a sci fi that had a heavy following of all genders, so my obsession with it didn’t stand out. None of my friends realized the true reason why i always wanted to be the commander if our story took place on a moonbase! Of course, i got endless Christmas and Birthday gifts of Matchbox replicas of the Moon Interceptors and other mechanical creatures from the show. That partly annoyed me, but i was actually interested in technology and design in general even though my first love has always been the natural world, and, moreover, it also kept me involved with “camouflage” play that kept my inner thoughts under the radar — no one seemed ever to suspect my true reasons for my obsessions with the show, even though i think i talked about the Moon women waaay to much. The grownups around me were pretty clueless, in hindsight The men on the Moon base flew the combat interceptors, and the women got to do all the interesting stuff like trajectory calculations and the Moon walks needed for inspection and maintenance, and, although the thought of being in any military organization has horrified me since early childhood, i thought being in that group of women would have been pretty cool, especially when you got to wear a uniform complete with a purple wig!
War was very real in Australia in those years — Australia, actually even in 2021 a highly authoritarian culture, conscripted its young men to fight in Vietnam and a couple of events like the attack on Phan Thi Kim Phuc when i was 8 (she was only a year older than i) and the sinking of the Frank E Evans destroyer when i was 5 were utterly traumatizing to me as a child and they still make me shudder. So not only were the women on the moon base in charge and did all the interesting brainwork, the men had to go out and risk being shot at. Smart! There was only one thing i feared more in those days than growing up male and that was to be sent into war as a soldier. Not only because i feared death, which i did, but knowing that soldiers did the evil that i found so utterly horrifying by Phan Thi Kim Phuc and the Frank E Evans.
Anyhow, i have been having a HUGE time watching these old comforts from that era: Youtube has SO MANY WHOLE episodes of all of them. It’s so funny to watch UFO now, it seems to naf, the music and the emphasis on the far-in-the future date of 1980!!!! (the series was made in 1969). Interestingly, the backstory about the aliens and their motivation is really clever, something i never realized as a child. But, being a TV series, you have to watch hours and hours of this stuff to get the whole picture! Hey, they would be wonderful outfits to wear to a kink party or Kinkatastisch!!!
I’ve had a great deal of pain, exhaustion and anxiety in the last few days from a bladder infection. But it’s day 13 and i at last think the worst of it is behind me. I know i can pee naturally again now, so this has laid to rest one of my biggest fears. Most of the pain comes not from the op itself, but little things that add up, like “nappy rash” under the bandages and muscular pain from lack of movement. The doctors identified the bacteria causing the cystitis and already i feel heaps better after four doses of the IV antibiotic.
I shall be back amongst you before too long. Hopefully we can still meet under 2G conditions, and i always test myself before meeting friends. For the first time i am reticent and halting in being social, because, despite being vaccinated four times (two AZs in Australia and two Biontechs here — it’s a long story of bureaucratic difficulties), even a mild COVID infection could wreak havoc with my healing, so i shall wait until the wounds have fully healed before venturing out. It’s going to be a little lonely, but i shall have the strength of thinking the thoughts that i have written about here and about my future. I am finally looking forward to being reunited with my darling family in the New Year — our daughter is enrolled in a fulltime German course and will join me at the end of January.
I miss you all and love you so much
xxx Selena 💜🌺🌻🦕🦖🌺💜
