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Transgender

A Trans Dude Explains What Finally Having his Own Dick Feels Like

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Trans journalist Gabriel Mac describes achieving his life long dream of attaining a penis via phalloplasty and how it finally led him to closure with his dream of attaining manhood.

He wrote of his initial experience in GQ magazine in 2019 saying: “I’d bolted upright in the middle of the night, having seen myself, again, as male, and started panicking (Not this again). But instead of pushing it away, again, I didn’t, and then managed, after another brutal month of making peace with my own inside war, to say to myself in a burst of light and relief: I’m trans.”

“The solutions are imperfect,” a gender therapist, who is also trans, said to me about medically transitioning after I’d already decided that I would do it, had to do it. And though I understood what he meant, lying in bed later with the sun coming through the blinds and my body full of bright shimmer, I’d thought: Not for me. For me, they are perfect.

By the time I got to karaoke, I recognized that femaleness was slowly killing me—sometimes not so slowly; I’d spent the several hours before walking out the door curled in a sobbing ball, breathing myself through the pain by clutching the little vial of hormones I’d start shooting soon, soon.

For decades, I could not begin to consider that I was trans, because I didn’t want to die. (Under his weight, all those times, I’d internally begged: Please don’t kill me.) At the same time, the pain of being closeted and trans absolutely made me want to die. (Under his weight, I’d also internally begged: Just kill me.) My dysphoria had been leaking out for years, quite unsubtly for the past 10. I’d stuffed it in the containers holding the rest of my suppressions: so much sexual torture. The older, fatter man with the dog whom the figure took me to (the figure, for the record again, says none of this ever happened), who was really nice to his dog but insulted me while he forced his erection into my mouth. A dad at a sleepover who sensed compromised prey and carried me into an empty room, telling me he loved me afterward. When I started really remembering, in my 30s, what I forced myself to forget, it was quite unwelcome. Nobody sold the story that I was fine—perfectly fine—harder than I did.

Above: Mac in 2019

When I saw hints of my history, I shut them down, until exactly one—the precise shape of the sleepover-dad’s dick—got through in an ayahuasca ceremony, commencing years of sober, if initially confusing, recall I’d desperately avoided. But I had to remember before I could face it.

And also this: the gut-churning homophobic terror (well, and hate-crime terror) that rape had made me a faggot. I’d identified as bisexual since I was 12, but even my supposedly female partners had been practically—or actually—boys. The night I woke up in a panic over being male but didn’t ferociously fight it was made possible by 18 wrenching months (well, and a lifetime) of accepting that I might be gay; that night, I was finally able to tell myself that being a survivor was in fact a fine reason to be trans, too, if that turned out to be my reason.

Now Mac writes in Vulture: “Growing up without one [a penis], 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.

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.

Read the full story here.

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