Changing the Frame
As I’ve approached and have since passed my one-year anniversary of HRT, I’ve found an increasing ambiguity to my attitude toward my genitals. What makes this strange to talk about, beyond the topic itself not being one I love to discuss, is that I don’t actually have a problem here.
I have zero dysphoria in regard to my genitals. None. I am way more concerned about, oh, the shape of my hips and butt. I don’t really gender genitals, right? Anyone can have whatever; who cares. It’s their own business. But I am partial toward a penis, and mine is very pretty. I don’t think about my genitals, hardly at all ever—it’s not very interesting to me—but in the event that I do, I am fond of what I have. It’s kind of an ideal situation, really: I got all the parts I want off the à la carte menu—and all the best models at that.
Really, I’m just starting to like my body a lot. Which is so novel to me. And such a frickin’ relief.
With that established, a lot has happened over the last year. my body has changed so much, both in appearance and function. My relationship toward and concept of myself have transformed entirely. I am not the same person I was last spring, at all; that person’s time is well over. All of this has thrown what seemed like a fairly straightforward and boring relationship—this girl and her dick—into this great fog of uncertainty, and I’m not really sure where this is leading, if anywhere in particular. Ergo, I guess, finding words to think it through here.
Even that description, it indicates a thing that I guess I’ll get to in a minute, but first I feel like I need to set up the more practical elements.
Again, I really don’t… care, much, about this, beyond thinking that dicks are neat and liking mine in particular. I don’t and won’t have sex. Ever, under any circumstances. I barely ever masturbate anymore, which also comes to me as a tremendous relief! (Because, ew, fluids (except… not so much anymore).)
Which is to say, I sure do have full-on girldick going on at this point. In form and behavior, there’s been a big feminine shift. It feels different, responds differently; big change in character all around. All of which for me is somewhere between a shrug and a thumbs-up, right. It’s not doing those annoying things that I always wished it wouldn’t. It’s very polite. Still as pretty as ever. More so, even: better texture; no longer have to worry about semen—which I very do not miss! But again, I’m not really using it for anything, so ih, Whatever? Sure.
As incidental as this is to my life, it is emblematic of the way my body and mind are finally on the same page these days, agreeing on principle and acting more or less as one unit. There’s no longer this detached robot effect thing happening. What I am and who I am are intertwined. So on the one hand my genitals aren’t what they used to be; on the other, again neither am I. Beyond that hard existential hand-off that happened last August or so, there’s the much more current understanding that I am in fact a girl—a non-binary girl, yes, but there is no doubt.
Which is to say, I always have been of course. A girl, I mean. I just took a very long time to get to a place where I could wrap my head around the idea. Even after recognizing I was clearly not cisgender, I didn’t dare make this leap, as much as I wanted it to be true. It felt… preumptuous? Well, that’s my own neurosis. Point being, the psychodynamics here are very different from what they used to be—and what this thread is, is me trying to chip away at what the hell they may be angling toward.
In the past I’d sort of… not fully understood, even as I sympathized with, trans women who adopted other, often gendered, terminology toward their genitals. Again, lacking that dysphoria and actively liking the parts I had kinda made it not… land, for me personally. But there’s been this shift recently, and I feel like I recognize the pattern from my earlier slide into acknowledging my actual full-on gender.
For months before it clicked that I am and always have been a girl, I kept applying the term playfully, descriptively—in half-jest. Here it’s harder to grasp what i’m doing or why, But I have realized I’ve begun to feminize my anatomical terms. It’s one of those things where until I heard myself begin to verbalize them I didn’t notice that I had been using them internally. I’m searching back, and I don’t even know when it began.
It’s not consistent, either, as even this thread will show—and indeed will my reticence to actually write the things I’ve been thinking and saying to myself, without knowing quite why or how I got here. (Because… well. that’s my own business. And it’s confusing, and doesn’t matter in substance.)
Dancing around that little point, where we are is that I’m still in a situation where I am actively very fond of the genitals I have, right, to the extent that I care at all, but everything about the situation from the tangible to the emotional has become increasingly feminized.
So what’s going on here? Am I just being cute, the way I thought I was being cute in calling myself a girl—until I realized, oh wait, there’s a reason I keep asserting that, huh? The parts I’m referring to are very different from how they used to be, as is my working relationship with them. But, I don’t want anything different from them; that much is 100% definite. If anything, I only like them more than I did before. We’re certainly on better, uh, social terms, as these things go. They’re gorgeous; they’re a part of me. There’s no desire for an intervention whatsoever.
I guess what’s happening is I’m reinterpreting their meaning and purpose as I reinterpret my own. I think this may be related to the reclaiming—or I guess i should say claiming—of my body as my own; as an inextricable element of what it experientially is and means to be me. It feels arbitrary and peculiar to me that I would just start to think and use these terms in relation to myself. It’s unclear to me how or why i made this leap. It’s like… seriously, where did I pick that up, and why is my mind wanting to assert it? It feels a bit silly to me. But I think it’s to do with this ever-gathering holism to my relationship to myself. I guess now that it’s begun to click for me that I’m a girl, my perspective to a whole lot of things is just realigning, subconsciously—maybe experimentally, before I get to be aware of it. My subconscious presents me these experiments it’s been running, to test its ideas against the reality I’m living, and is like, okay, so what do we think about this, then? Does this make sense? And I’m all, huh?? Why are you handing me this? And my subconscious shrugs, and melts back into the shadows with a chuckle.
So I guess that may be what’s happening. I think I’m probably just quietly realigning a whole mess of things without actively trying to here, with the new information about who and what I always have been—and there are some… artifacts as a result, which will pop up. Every day I’m crunching through decades of misalignment, incorrect framing, misapprehension, that I’m whizzing through an effort to rebuild with the knowledge that I now have—with the understanding that I have always been a girl—which carries all of these major implications.
Alongside that, every day I’m growing closer to myself, more wholly integrated as a real person who actually exists in the world—so I guess subconsciously, there are some implications to my understanding of and relationship to some practical aspects of myself. Which doesn’t mean I’d materially want them to be any different—which I very much don’t. Especially now, after all these upgrades. It just means, I guess… I’m settling into myself? Starting to resolve my history and reality? Solving mysteries, rewriting history?
So. Okay. I’m not sure that this is the last word, but I think I’m a little clearer on what the hell my head is doing now.
And there’s your daily dose of awkward content. Enjoy.