Schrödinger's Pussy
(Disclosure: This blog post deals at length with topics related to variously gendered genitalia, including my own, and frequently uses scientific and crude slang terms to refer to them, as stylistically necessary. It is very much a sprawling rough draft that quite nakedly addresses a lot of potentially incendiary and problematic thoughts and feelings. I can assume it is decidedly NSFW and has content warnings of graphic descriptions of surgeries, frank, body-positive discussions of sex and sexuality, as well as transphobia and misogyny both external and internalized. I hope you’ll read it all anyway.)
“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
- Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” (1935)
So a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source walk into a bar…well actually, they’re sealed inside of a box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, the flask shatters and the cat dies. But as long as the box stays sealed, we don’t know if the cat is still alive or now dead. On a quantum level, the cat is both alive and dead, only understood as one or the other if someone opens the box. “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!” (Brad Pitt, Se7en [1995]), indeed.
Many of us have likely heard of “Schrödinger’s Cat,” though far fewer of us likely came across the thought experiment during our research into quantum mechanics. Schrödinger’s Cat has become the stuff of pop science, referenced in science fiction or, worst case scenario, turned into punchlines on The Big Bang Theory. Often these references represent misreadings of what Schrödinger actually meant to illustrate with his “ridiculous case” of the cat; but the misreadings coalesce into a popular understanding of its own, with its own nuance and thematic resonance that has something more compelling to say to more of us than quantum mechanics would. So, my reading here is likely a misreading too, but I’ll go ahead and open the sealed box, let curiosity kill the cat, and lean in. After all, I don’t study quantum mechanics.
But speaking of misreadings, I’m not even going to talk about Schrödinger’s cat. I want to talk about Schrödinger’s Pussy.
About the similar indeterminacy of my transfeminine identity (I won’t try too much to speak for transmasculine and nonbinary folks, though I could guess at some overlap). The “quantum superposition” of being–neither?–one or the other, or as many people may see it, one then the other. Continually situated as stuck between, never arriving at “having transitioned,” but rather always in the middle of “transitioning.” Always transgressing. Always only trans. And what that type of tension comes to mean for me beyond just “what’s in whose pants.”
Nevertheless, you get my pun, so I’m starting below the belt here, quite literally at crotch level. Trans people nigh on everywhere are conceived of primarily by their genitals and the questions others have about them. Conceived of and arguably reduced to. But after years of well-meaning and trans-allied messaging that has instructed people to not ask other people about their genitals, we are also reduced to indeterminacy. This indeterminacy is often uniquely trans, not something cisgender people (those who still identify with their assigned sex at birth) have to experience. And while I’m not saying, “actually you should ask other people about their genitals,” I am saying that we don’t really have to ask cis people in the first place. As a result, “don’t ask other people about their genitals” is really instructing us to not ask trans people about their genitals. This tension between cisgender people’s voyeuristic curiosity and polite avoidance of trans anatomy as a topic generates a state of what I’ll call genitaltity.
So let’s explore my thought experiment on the concept of genitality, fleshed out by Schrödinger’s Pussy. If someone is a cisgender man, I can safely assume he has a penis. A cisgender woman, a vagina. These are of course generalities about genitalities; we still have to cultivate some awareness of and respect for rare exceptions and have a sense of tact about the whole subject. When I was still perceived as a man pre-transition, people assumed “penis.” If someone sees me in public now and perceives me as a woman, then they assume “vagina.” If I tell someone, without qualifiers, “I am a woman,” they assume vagina. But if I say trans woman, the safe assumptions about who’s supposed to have what genitals are immediately destabilized. (This scenario notwithstanding the possibility of being “clocked,” or found out, as trans.) In fact, whether I have had “THE Surgery”™ or not, the new assumption resets to penis. And yet this assumption is plagued with doubts, second guessed by questions wondering if indeed I have had “THE Surgery.”™ As a result, I have neither and I have both. Now I could of course tell people what I have–one, not the other. But pussy and cat aside, I have unleashed the radioactive source, shattered the flask, and poisoned the vibe. Social etiquette based on anatomical “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is now dead. I have reminded people that, God forbid, I have genitals. Perhaps even the genitalia they don’t expect, or maybe worse, the one they do? My admission may satisfy the invasively curious, but it scandalizes the average person who does their best to never acknowledge what trans people like me are “packing” or unpacking. Quantum superposition is atomically bombed out by my transgressive imposition.
So while I don’t want to be regarded as a sideshow curiosity, a walking genital marker behind a censored blur, I admit that I strangely prefer the honesty and curiosity to the nicety. Because if anything, I wish on some level I could innocuously refer to what’s between my legs without it becoming a thing the way cis people get to all the time. They say “don’t ask other people about their genitals” while gesturing to their own semi-regularly. I can cite plenty of examples, either and both penis and vagina. If you disagree with or don’t identify with my evidence here, just know that these are all things I’ve personally experienced on one side of the perceived gender binary, then the other. Like the blind prophet of Greek mythology Tiresias, I have “been both” and bear a particular witness of the world that not many else can claim to. A clairvoyance of gender. So to anyone who has an ear, let them hear me out.
Cis men adjust themselves constantly. They infer or outright state how painful it is to be “kicked in the balls.” They similarly discuss the usage of athletic cups. Half the humor on Jackass wouldn’t work without those idiots (I say with love) wearing cups and facing, or I guess crotching, off against golf balls, softballs, bowling balls, paint balls–name a ball, it has been launched at their balls. They get boners, they mock boners, make up slang about boners, and otherwise live their lives led by their boners. (On the one hand, I kid, and yet on the other, I thought I was a cis man myself long enough to know…) They can pee standing up and joke about writing their name in the snow. I can go on and on.
Cis women are generally more discreet than men, but aren’t Barbie doll smooth in the ways they take up space either. They discuss their periods, getting cramps, spotting and flow, which menstrual products they buy, etc. Those who become mothers recount stories of their time in labor and everything after physically. And women don’t have to be mothers to talk about pregnancy. Or for that matter, “cameltoe,” experiences of getting waxed full of anatomical allusions, getting turned on or wet, etc., etc. Cis women don’t worry about having boners and, despite what Freud said when he was high on enough cocaine to kill a horse, they definitely don’t have “penis envy.” (Again, from a post-transition perspective this time, I kid and yet I’m gaining enough experience as a woman now to know…) I’m aware that different levels of societal sexism and purity culture can affect how publicly certain cis women want to discuss these things, but they nonetheless can and do without much existential upset over properly assumptive genitality.
In regard to all of the above, I do not begrudge cis men or women the privilege to suggest the facts of their genitalia. I also understand and sympathize with the ways in which each gender still feels unable to discuss certain things comfortably, like penis size or having larger labia among other topics. These are things they should feel free to address without all our weird sexual hangups about what’s normal or ideal or not allowed or whatever. If they want to. At least they get the cisnormative pass to do so.
I do want now to engender consideration of the ways in which I can’t mention mine even implicitly without social faux pas. Admittedly I’m working off “anecdata” here, but I still maintain that my experiences are illustrative of a larger trend. For example, once my social media algorithms began to figure out I am a woman after transitioning, they began pushing Thinx period panties at me every opportunity they could, across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. One morning at church before service began, I told some other ladies about this funny little development, pointing out specifically how ironic it was because I don’t need them. I don’t bear the internal organs to menstruate, no matter how much I wish I did (I know, it must sound wild to want to have a period). I joked, “Close, but not quite, social media” and “well, their algorithmic heart was in the right place,” etc. And it wasn’t like *record scratch* awkward, but some got it and politely laughed more than others. It didn’t quite land, and I definitely felt the vibe shift, because I reminded them I have genitalia that doesn’t match up with “what women are supposed to have.” Similarly, I have made brief references to tucking to cis women that they respond to with anything from well-meaning hesitation to outright awkwardness. About the same goes for my comments wishing I could wear really tight and/or yoga pants, thongs, women’s fitness apparel, etc. (this is not to say I can’t, and I know trans women with more “fuck it” attitudes willing to, but my fear of obvious “bulge” and bottom dysphoria prevent me from risking it). I’ve fielded questions from cis men about how, like logistically, my wife and I have sex, but also been received with chilly discomfort and strained smiles when I dare to allude to aspects of our sex life. And so on and so forth and so it goes for my audacity to acknowledge my own genitality. On the other side of the great wide gender divide, I can imagine trans men experience similar awkwardness when they bring up their periods, or don’t exhibit penile anxiety about being kicked in the balls they don’t have, or mention their chest binders, or grieve their breast size, or any other number of gender nonconforming experiences they could address much to polite cisgender chagrin. Then there’s nonbinary people in between confounding everyone by choosing neither but still being categorized against their will by assigned sex at birth, as if the real truth is in the genitalia. Woman, man, or none, we’re all already what we’re not supposed to be by cisnormative standards, so of course we’re not supposed to talk about it either.
So once again, I am reduced to not only my genitality but furthermore a practiced ignorance of the fact. It seems to be up to me to preserve this indeterminacy for cis comfort. It’s the androgynous elephant in the room (the room is my pants). Neither penis nor vagina and simultaneously both until I dare “open the box” on Schrödinger’s Pussy.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not demanding that everyone have to hear about my genitals whenever I want. Especially at this point in my transition and current relationship to my body, it’s not like I even want to talk about it that much–excepting this lengthy blog post, of course. But my point up to now is that “don’t ask (trans) people about their genitals” has adversely engineered “trans people shouldn’t talk about their genitals.” Penalizing any kind of curiosity actually reinforces yet another double standard about how cis people and trans people get to take up space in vastly different ways with starkly differing levels of privilege. And believe me, I hear myself, it must sound absurd to bemoan the privilege to talk about my genitals. But it’s not about me demanding rights or complaining about cisgender privilege or enforcing some new set of strict standards for anatomical conversations. I promise I’m not doing that, or at least not intending to. All I’m attempting here is to make visible how I as a trans woman experience society according to rules I didn’t ask to follow and which I’m supposedly not allowed to break. I am ironically marginalized by the very measure meant to protect me. Sure, don’t ask me about my genitals if you don’t want to, but don’t be scandalized either when I want to obliquely refer to my anatomy in the same ways that cis men and women get to all the time, without acknowledging the privilege of this unquestioned norm.
So here’s your chance to revise your reaction: I want to talk about my genitals now. Don’t be scandalized. It’s not like you have to see them up close. Schrödinger's Pussy remains boxed away.
I’ve been pondering at length this concept of mine in Schrödinger's Pussy, ahead of the most important “one or the other” event of my life thus far: my upcoming gender confirmation surgery tomorrow. Or sexual reassignment surgery, or genital reconstructive surgery, or put simply and vaguely, bottom surgery, among other ways to refer to it. Not so vaguely, I am getting a penectomy, orchiectomy, penile inversion vaginoplasty, urethroplasty, and clitoroplasty, assisted by a skin graft and adjacent tissue transfer from my lower abdomen. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is: the surgery will take about six hours, I’ll stay in the hospital for six days, and then I can expect about a six week recovery. (Six weeks is the standard canned guess, but it’s an incredibly optimistic and conservative one.) It will actually be my very first surgery, not counting wisdom teeth removal, and the most viscerally invasive one of my life. It may be very painful to recover from. The aftercare is somewhat complicated and will have to be kept up with for the rest of my life. My surgery still won’t satisfy skeptics and transphobes who will think of my new vagina as “not real” at best and “genital mutilation” or “a Frankenstein vagina” at worst. (This rhetoric of course completely ignores the fact that they perform vaginoplasties on cis women as well when they need them after vaginal injury from childbirth, pelvic floor diseases, or vaginal cancer requiring previous removal of the vagina, called vaginectomy.) Knowing all of these things, I still know I want to go through with it. I think a lot about all of these medical, anatomical, cultural, social, and interpersonal observations and opinions about what a surgically engineered vagina is like and what that means. And I still know I’m beyond thrilled to be getting my own.
In “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” Andrea Long Chu–a writer and trans woman like me, except like way more famous–controversially likens her vagina to a “wound…requir[ing] regular, painful attention to maintain.” Chu is not necessarily wrong on a strictly anatomical plane. Just as a new piercing site must be continually stretched by its jewelry for the first few months or else close back up, a vagina constructed by method of penile inversion requires regular dilation. Dilation in this sense refers to inserting a medical grade dildo into the newly formed vaginal canal to help it maintain its opening and shape, otherwise it will close back up through a condition called vaginismus (something cis women also experience actually). Trans women are expected to dilate every day for about forty-five minutes at first, then three times a week, then ultimately once a week for the rest of their lives. And like Chu says, it can be painful. But, to be abundantly clear, she is also wrong: it won’t always be. Chu’s focus on the pain–if not outright misery by her estimation–of transition colors her entire perception of its various intricacies in grimly black and white tones. I won’t speak for every “post-op” (meaning they’ve had gender confirmation surgery) trans woman and the painful exceptions that may pop up, but if dilation were forever painful, then the very function of constructing a vaginal canal would be self-defeating. They are designed with penetration in mind. And other trans women friends of mine report that after some recovery time, dilation can easily become masturbation. So characterizing a neovagina as some sort of perpetually painful wound keeps unwarranted attention on the supposed unnaturalness of it, as if it is foreign and fake and harmful. And that feels downright irresponsible when bad actors look for any crumb of “evidence” to further curtail access to trans-affirming care. Chu muses that, “people transition because they think it will make them feel better. The thing is, this is wrong,” as if that won’t add to the argument that trans people are mentally ill and assisting their transition will only make them worse. The thing is, she is wrong. On this point. I still admire Chu’s insight and don’t begrudge her the role of public trans academic provocateur. Plus, I don’t think an exercise in trans women “eating one’s own” does much good. So I won't continue to pick her words apart, not when (arguably even more famous, or at least to me) fellow trans woman writer Kai Cheng Thom wrote such an insightful riposte to Chu already in “The Pain–and Joy–of Transition.” Because transitioning isn’t easy, and can in fact be painful, but it’s also one of the most beautiful reclamations of joy there may be. I want to anticipate my surgery with this joy in mind.
Nonetheless, I will dwell upon Chu’s “wound” for one more point. I think a lot about the long line of comedians and their ignorant fans who think of surgically transitioning only as “chopping your dick off.” Dave Chappelle proudly leads that parade these days in Netflix specials ranging from Deep in the Heart of Texas, The Age of Spin, and Equanimity & The Bird Revelation to Sticks & Stones and The Closer. In his own words, “Them n****s cut they dicks off…Never seen somebody just throw their dick away. Don’t need it.” More of his “jokes” have included referring to trans women as “transgenders” (it’s an adjective, not a noun) and worse, “m[e[n with a beard and big D-cup titties,” saying “yuck” at Caitlyn Jenner’s “man-pussy,” claiming “the only reason all of us are talking about transgenders is because white men [sic] want to do it,” and even proudly declaring himself a TERF (“Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist”). He and other comedians who idolize him then hide behind self-serious claims about how “comedians hold up a mirror to society” and “they make fun of everyone equally” that then devolve into complaints about how “comedians can’t make a joke anymore.” Chappelle even pulled the “my best friend is trans” defense, using trans woman Daphne Dorman as a shield because he claims she liked his jokes–before she took her own life. Through and through, these not-so-secretly craven tactics only serve to uphold the belief that comedians should be immune to criticism and then be able to leverage their hurt feelings about “cancel culture” against attempts to hold them accountable anyway. It’s certain that these kinds of jokes about trans-affirming surgeries (and those feel like the nice ones compared to some of Chappelle’s other takes) are deeply offensive and unquestionably transphobic. But on this topic, I’m actually not here to “cancel” the comedians who repeat the same “chopping your dick off” joke.I just want to tell them it’s grossly incorrect and worst of all, not funny. If I may make a joke of my own about the neovaginal “wound,” I’d say, oh it’s actually way worse than just chopping your dick off. You actually slice it as well as the scrotum in half and sort of flip them outside-in to form the labia majora and minora, then you bore a hole between the rectum and urethra to form the vaginal canal and then line it with penile skin to make sure it’s capable of erogenous sensation. If that sounds gross to you, then I guarantee that’s your unacknowledged prejudice, because actually, all surgeries are super gross! But where gross sounds way too negative, let’s reorient toward some positive shock and awe. It’s honestly pretty hardcore. To quote the most unlikely of sources, “that’s brutal” (Nathan Explosion, Metalocalypse [2006 - 2013]). But out of something so “brutal” comes something so beautiful. Way more than just a wound. And to go through with the procedure arguably takes more “balls” (that the surgeons will then remove) than any of these comedians punching down will ever have. I am in fact a badass. I think of this too with joy. So I’ll let Thom have the last word on transition actually being “frequently [full of] joy, fulfillment, and relief.” She sums up, “While Chu is right that transition can be painful and at times disappointing for some trans people, there are good outcomes in transition. Many of us are living them.”
I would absolutely concur with Thom that I am living out a good outcome in my transition up to this point. I will however still own up to the fact that, for me, it’s a good full of bad and ugly sometimes. Neither the bad nor the ugly will ever outweigh the good, but transitioning so far has been plagued by overlapping and contradicting feelings that I have to regularly counsel myself through (with the help of an incredible therapist counseling me too). Even after my bottom surgery, I will have a sort of Schrödinger's Pussy. Out past just the neither and both of penis and/or vagina, it comes to represent for me the similar indeterminacies that complicate how I feel about my identity as a woman in a world where I know full well many still see me as a (mentally unwell) man. A woman who will very soon have the vagina she’s always wanted, but not without some work.
For as long as readers can continue to hear about (my) genitalia, I do want to investigate the tension between anatomies that I currently lean over the precipice of. There are feelings between the two I wrestle with before my surgery, about right genitalia, “real” genitalia, and realities I know and cannot feel yet. As I contemplate having my own vagina after three decades of dealing with a penis, I know I’m beyond tired of this version of myself but unable to existentially wrap my head around the body I will soon have. I literally cannot feel what it will be like because they will be the feelings that a different version of myself with different anatomy will feel. But I will try here to think through what I cannot yet feel, starting with everything I’m overthinking about having a (neo)vagina.
I’ve already mentioned how beyond excited I am to have a vagina of my own in a matter of days, but with this sea change comes a flood of complicated feelings I’m wading against too. Being brutally (internally transphobically?) forthcoming here: I do have a hard time thinking of my imminent vagina as a “real” one sometimes. As I’ve name-dropped here and there so far, they call it a “neovagina,” which just means “new” one, but does at the same time feel othering to me in a way that doesn’t sit well. In the crude words of a stranger on Reddit who DM’ed me with innocently invasive questions about vaginoplasty, my vagina will in the most crass sense be “100% recycled dick.” Which feels technically correct but also really transphobic? He was trying at least, I say here with a sympathetic facepalm.
(Important sidebar I can’t ignore here: I sincerely don’t mind these kinds of inquiries, because cis people are often so uneducated on intricacies of the trans bodily experience, so who better to help them learn than a trans person like me who won’t “bite their head off” for their curiosity? Dismissals to “do your own research” don’t work when so much harmful misinformation about transgender people and the care we need is one Google search away.)
My neovagina will be the result of surgical innovation rather than the original design of “The Great Physician,” as my mom sometimes likes to refer to God in her healing prayers. It will have less nerve endings where they really count, a general lack of natural lubrication (though many trans women dispute this claim in their personal experiences), at least as compared to anatomically original ones, and as I mentioned will require regular maintenance to maintain. Neovaginas often have higher placement of the clitoris, less clitoral hood, and shallower labia minora as well, at least without further cosmetically corrective surgeries. It will be more medical marvel with the best approximations it can manage than “normal” embodied feature. I struggle with feelings of anatomical inferiority about what transphobic critics have termed the “designer vagina” I will soon have. And yet, I can also acknowledge a lot of these feelings, while rooted in technical surface-reading truths, are bullshit. Who cares about normal or natural? There are so many “unnatural” medical interventions that we don’t needlessly politicize. Upper lips corrected to remove cleft palates are still “real” lips. Heads treated for craniosynotosis are still “real” heads.” Deviated septums repaired through septoplasty are still “real” septums. Even nonsurgical measures such as corrective lenses yield “real” vision and hearing aids help those hard of hearing “really” hear to some degree. Brains aided by medications for depression, anxiety, ADHD and more still have “real” thoughts and feelings. And though yes I can physically survive with a penis, my bottom surgery will greatly improve my quality of life psychologically by correcting my current bodily incongruence. Besides, as for my vagina, just like the popular adage goes for aforementioned meds, “If you don’t have your own, then store-bought is fine.” So differentiating between “fake” vaginas like mine and lips and septums treated by other types of reconstructive surgeries is just legsplitting based in bigotry hidden behind “real” concerns. And of course let’s not even give time or consideration to red herring arguments about mentally unwell strawmen who require amputations for limbs they feel like they don’t need (a popular and preposterous favorite hypothetical that transphobes love to cite).
Because neovaginas still “really” work. They are capable of some natural lubrication, especially if you get yours through newer, currently less widely available methods such as peritoneal pull-through. They experience erogenous sensation, are capable of physical pleasure via clitoral stimulation and/or penetration, and their inner walls contract in the same ways that pre-installed ones do upon orgasm. No, they can’t process or release menstrual blood or cervical fluid, but that’s a “gotcha” argument based on comparing vaginal apples to uterine, ovarian, cervical, etc. oranges. Not to mention, the projected deficit of lubrication experienced in neovaginas achieved through penile inversion isn’t that different from the vaginal dryness and need for lube exhibited in their proto-anatomical counterparts. Plus, given the myriad of ways all vaginas look different from one another, as illustrated by Jamie McCartney’s famous art installation “The Great Wall of Vulva,” (formerly “…of Vagina”) neovaginas will generally look about the same as vaginas, if they are the work of accomplished and renowned surgeons. (I won’t speak here to the rare botched jobs some have been cursed with, especially not when in general bottom surgery has a 99% satisfaction rating, much to transphobic chagrin about “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and transition regret.) Trans women who don’t disclose their identities to sexual partners have reported that theirs largely didn’t even notice the difference, and informed sexual partners have similarly reported that they feel “about the same” most of the time. So rather than despair over my differences from the ideal female body I’ll never have, I want to take joy in the body I will have and its similarities to the organ I desire for myself. It will surely and soundly beat having a penis.
It may go without saying then, but you should know I can’t help saying hardly anything: I am so tired of my penis. You know this far in here that I won’t shy away from the uncomfortable and contradictory truths when I say this. Sure, it has had a perk or two, or should I say peak. Despite my desire for internal reproductive organs capable of menstruation, I will admit how nice it is to not have to suffer through the physical pains of having a period. (Believe it or not, I will attest to still having my “time of the month” because HRT definitely gives me the emotional and somatic and even gastrointestinal turmoils of a period, I just don’t leak or bleed.) And yes, achieving orgasm with a penis is far easier by considerations purely based in engineering and design mechanics regarding the “ol’ up-down-in-out,” etc. Nonetheless, oh my God, my kingdom for a cunt, ya know? Oh to be free from the baggage (sack-age?) of having a cock. (Forgive the profanity, but anything for alliteration.)
First off, I know that anxieties about penis size are as vastly over-fixated upon as they are fueled by pornography and sexual folklore more based in bodyshaming than they will own up to. And there are reliable consolation phrases about how “it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean,” which are bolstered by real experiences not grotesquely glamorized in porn by real people, about preferring more average sizes and experiencing pain and discomfort with far larger ones—shoutout to actually real subreddit r/bigdickproblems! But these logical rebuttals don’t work well on cis men (like me, back when I thought I was one) culturally trained to constantly worry if they’re big enough or not. Back again here to bodyshaming, this anxiety is unfortunately exacerbated by jokes as well as not-funny prejudices from men and women alike who don’t realize how awful they’re actually being, much like when people have discriminatorily binding cutoff requirements on weight or height. Men with penises constantly ask their partners if theirs is an adequate size, but the answer they actually want is “yes, it’s big.” I have, no joke, received unsolicited DMs from men on Reddit asking me to “rate their cocks” (hard no, pun intended). Unlike women, whom I have had candid conversations with about size and aesthetics of their breasts and even vaginas (I mean, it’s not like a common occurrence, calm down), most men treat penis size like The Great Unspoken. Outside of jokes at each other’s expense, they’re all Ken dolls to each other. Because what if they turn out to have the smallest one among their friends? (I know there are likely healthier exceptions to this trope among more enlightened men, but they aren’t the norm by far.) Now I have definitely freed myself from the fear by and large of “measuring up,” but that kind of constant insecurity can leave unexpected harm behind. I don’t intend here to whine that “men have it harder” (God, the puns make themselves) than women and I acknowledge the kinds of bodily insecurity that they suffer through as well: feeling small-chested, feeling too “amply blessed,” criticized for wanting breast augmentations and/or reductions, having larger labia with more “curtains,” choosing to maintain or remove pubic hair, etc., etc. The scrutiny upon them is significantly more pointed and more punishing in many ways–and yet, none of these traits or worries about them are cast as integral to the success or failure of the sexual experience like men’s penis size is.
Rounding back to my “elephant in the room…[of] my pants” joke from earlier, I’ll preempt the next inquiry head-on: while trans women’s penis size is similarly plagued by the same kind of “size queen” rhetoric, it is far less anxiously harped upon, because the fact that a trans woman may have a penis at all is the main thrust of the fetish for “chasers” who want them for “the best of both worlds.” (Also that wasn’t some clever humble brag; there’s nothing elephantine about my own, and that’s fine.) I and other trans women experience the occasional pleading from these fetishizers to “not get rid of it” because “you’re perfect the way you are,” which has far more to do with their “kink” than my bodily congruence. But my autonomy regarding my anatomy is my own and I am definitely moving forward with the surgery.
Another reason for how antsy I feel to get it done is the fact that nearly everything about penises is so not subtle. People with vaginas get to experience sexual arousal like their own little secret, but not those of us (currently) with penises. This arousal announces itself in an erection that protrudes outward and demands to be seen and known, unless well-hidden with some pains. And erections are made ready for their debut by the most innocuous of stimuli too, leading to all kinds of awkward situations where their longsufferers have to conceal at all costs or awkwardly scramble to explain, “sorry, it just happens sometimes!” This is hardly exclusive to trans women of course, as cis men fret the same kinds of frets about erections’ lack of social awareness. You can feel this anxiety in Michael Cera’s line-reading in Superbad (2007) saying “I mean, just imagine if girls weren't weirded out by our boners and just like, wanted to see them. I mean, that's the world I one day want to live in.” For me, it’s a world I never should have had to wish for; this world as I currently embody it is already one I didn’t opt into under these conditions. So while cis men share the embarrassment about ill-timed boners, they have less in common with me fearing the societal upheaval mine would cause.
Not to mention, though of course I will, their eventual exit is preceded by an orgasm of the most ostentatious manner that leaves viscous evidence behind inconsiderate of its context; it’s literally called “ejaculation,” which means, outside its medical reference, something exclaimed quickly and suddenly. Yes, vaginas can dampen and soak things too but don’t always have to, while a penis seems designed to make messes. Where a vagina confides its pleasure, a penis calls it out for all to hear. And I’m tired of being so “loud.” Plus, incredibly done with the discomfiting space it takes up.
When not erect, the penis and proximal anatomy nevertheless still (trans wo)“manspread” in crowded ways I have come to hate on a deeply embodied level. To those who cross their legs one thigh over the other as opposed to the one-foot-over-other-thigh method that creates a sort of delta of space between: try to feel this out with me. Before you cross one thigh over the other, place a hacky sack right in between, fixed within the intimate space where inner-thigh meets groin. It’s a little more difficult now, a bit more awkward, right? (If you come at me with “that’s easy, what’s the big deal,” replace with bigger and bigger beanbags until it begins to feel uncomfortable, or just shut up and take my experience seriously.) I have a variety of difficult and awkward feelings about how to place my legs comfortably in the most ladylike ways while still making just as comfortable room for my inconvenient anatomy. In similar clothed complications, I have to “tuck” my penis between my legs and out of sight so as not to create the appearance of a bulge in jeans or dresses—and dress slacks and shorts seem to be lost causes for now. It can be uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing, and sometimes feels like it has social and actual life-or-death stakes (do you know how many trans women are murdered in this country every year and how many states still have “trans panic” defenses in their law books?). The most undetectable, “unclockable” tuck jobs often require different kinds of gaff tape (make sure you shave and never use duct tape!) to keep things securely and literally stuck in place that can be potentially painful to remove. Plus, think about how much more complicated trips to the bathroom then become. I don’t use these methods. But in general, it’s not always healthy to tuck without damaging the anatomy; in fact my surgeons advised against doing it too stringent or often. It’s especially not a good idea to workout while tucked (though I know some trans women still do), and bad in the long term to stay tucked for overly-extended periods of time. For me this means I can’t go to a gym, or wear certain outfits, or make quick trips outside to take out the trash or accept food from DoorDash delivery drivers, etc. in my pajamas. “Not unless,” as John Mulaney quips, “everyone gets really cool about a lot of stuff really quickly” (The Comeback Kid [2015]). And you know we can’t expect cisnormative society to be up to that. So I hide and I fret and I wish my body weren’t shaped like this and I eagerly await its reblossoming as a beautiful butterfly ready to spread its labial wings.
Let me double down on clarifying here that I speak only for my bodily experience. Maybe some of what I say here will resonate with other trans women, or maybe even cis people will recognize similar thoughts and feelings. I fully recognize it may mystify or even offend non-binary people who have no use for these concerns about such categories. And it could register as the complete opposite for trans men just as dysphorically exhausted of their bodies as I am mine. They may likely kill for the anatomy and experiences I never wanted, but hey: same, and trade ya! There are cis men who are fine with having a penis and all that “cums” with it, and there are some who take great pride in it, some too much. Cis women I am friends with have told me they think vaginas are actually gross (which admittedly somewhat hurts my gender-sensitive feelings); but I mean, technically if you think about any body part and its functions, it’s all gross. Bodies are gross. And weird. And beautiful. And awesome. And transformational.
For my part, having a body assigned and perceived as male that I have taken into my own hands, so to speak, and transformed into the female one that matches my gender identity has demonstrated to me the absolutely adaptive artistry of our bodies. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1939 essay “On Fairy-Stories” he calls humans “sub-creators” as descended from a Creator God. In his own words—as sub-creators, “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” Now for his part, Tolkien is talking about artists, specifically fantasy writers, who make the world of Faerie with language in a lesser version of the way that God spoke our very world into being. But I’ll play with his words here and subcreate a reading of my own. Trans people and the medical interventions that help them along subcreate a new reality of embodied gender qua sex out of the raw material of the Created. Given the amount of stories ranging across literature to popular entertainment to erotica that imagine “genderbent” scenarios where characters transform into the complete natal versions of the opposite sex, trans people provide the textual evidence that fantasy can become reality. It may not be the Created one that we truly desire sometimes in which we’re reborn as our cis counterparts, but it’s a subcreated one that shows how we join in the act of creation with God in our own “derivative” way. In the spirit of appreciating what I have rather than envying what I cannot, I’m trying to revel in the beauty of this artistry that I live out through embodied praxis. After all, to quote Tolkien one more time, “The Recovered Thing is not quite the same as the Thing-never-lost. It is often more precious.”
But trying isn’t always succeeding, and the bodily tension of gendered in-betweenness does get to me through feelings beyond just the genital. And I want to nakedly confront all the good and bad and ugly I confessed to earlier. Amidst the Schrödingerian neither-and-both, my transition has been one full of anxiety and self-doubt about whether or not I actually am a woman or not. Acknowledging my repressed feelings of gender dysphoria took me such a long time that by the time I finally felt brave enough to do something about it, I immediately felt like I was making the wrong choice. But every time I thought about it, it felt wrong by other people’s standards but completely right by my own. All the same, when I began to fully understand my feelings as being a transgender woman, a large part of me felt like I was playacting. Especially after I came out to my wife, I began to think, you can still take it back, it’s not too late yet. It was as if my own mind was telling my mind to “say psych right now.” This much farther into my transition, I am fully confident in my identity as a woman and wonder how I managed to maintain the facade, even to myself, that I was a cisgender man for so long. But the amount of people, ranging from “gender-critical” women–otherwise known as TERFs–to conservative pundits of many different stripes across science and religion, that are fully confident in how deluded I am does get to me sometimes. Put simply: what if they’re right? What if the science really is “clear?” When you layer on the religious trauma I am still unlearning, I then panic about the eternal implications of my decision to finally come out and transition–even though, as a Christian, I stopped believing in hell several years ago. What if my belief is mistaken–that the Bible’s clobber passages were actually right on target, that hell is very real, and I’m headed “straight” there? So the woman I know I am still wonders if she’s still a man after all. I listen to that panic a lot less these days, but I can’t claim it’s fully gone.
Especially when there’s the outer social context to my internal struggle. I regularly experience a number of small invalidations of my gender across different aspects of my lived experience. It turns out there are many tortuous ways in which I can be made to feel, or let others make me feel, like the forever-between entity I mentioned early on here. Not man enough and too much of a woman. Not woman enough and still too much of a man. There are microaggressions that upset my “neither/both” indeterminacy for me and/or invalidate my witness on certain aspects of the neither or the both. It’s hard to describe the double-bind of feeling like some of your old college friends still treat you like the same “guy” you used to be while at the same time demonstrating a newfound disregard for your input and company that makes you realize, oh now they see me as a woman…in a bad way. Or the uncomfortable experience of having women in different wardrobe change scenarios hesitate to change in front of you as well as when you change in front of them. When a dear friend of yours who is otherwise incredibly supportive says to your wife, “well, us biological women…” and another tells you “well, you’re kind of like a lesbian* with an asterisk because lesbians like vagina and you don’t have one yet.” When one of your oldest male friends rebuts your observation about the slur “tranny” with, “yeah, but no one really says that word anymore” as if you wouldn’t know. When certain women that my wife and I are mutual friends with want to have a girls’ hangout with her and don’t consider including me. This is not an exhaustive list of experiences. These and more have functioned as bumps along the road to transition.
I also regularly deal with frictional feelings of existential gratitude, grief, and guilt about my very identity as a transgender woman. I know many trans women who are unashamedly glad not only that they are women, but they are trans women. It’s the transness in and of itself that they celebrate. And likewise I know trans women who have no plans to ever get bottom surgery, and take great pride in their penises and lack of bottom dysphoria. There are even trans women with no interest in even starting HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). But I also know plenty of trans women like me, with more complicated sensibilities about our identity. I want to state upfront here that there is really no wrong way to transition or to be trans. I don’t want to be yet another kind of gatekeeper of legitimate transness when there’s enough of those outside the transgender community. But I still confess to feeling like I’m the one doing it wrong.
Because here’s the thing: I honestly just wish I had been born a cisgender woman to begin with. Being a trans woman is my favorite way to live this life I’ve been given, but it arguably feels like seeing through a glass darkly at the AFAB (assigned female at birth) experiences I genuinely wished I could have had. I wish I had an anatomically pre-installed vagina. And a uterus, and ovaries. Like I said earlier, I honestly wish I could menstruate. Because that would potentially mean I could experience what it’s like to be pregnant. I wish I could know what it’s like to have a clitoris with supposedly double the nerve endings a penis has. While I will get to have some of these experiences through my new post-op anatomy, I still struggle with the harrumphing feelings of “but it’s not the same.” Beyond just the bodily, I wish I could have been spared of three decades of feeling like a defective man looking in longingly from the outside of a female experience I never thought I’d get to live for myself. And while I understand here that I’m leaning on gender norms that toxic masculinity too violently reinforces, I wish too that the gender I was conscripted into hadn’t come with so many conditions that felt like punishments to me. I’m sure you can guess at the list: sports, tools, cars, underdone emotions, all the stereotypes that aren’t necessarily true, but also not not true. But even detoxing from masculinity and telling myself it was good I lived out my gender non-conventionally didn’t make me feel more at home in this body I never wanted. I still felt left with a giant gender-shaped hole whose void I stared into that began to stare back into me, à la Nietzsche.
But already here I’m demonstrating one way in which these feelings of transgender longing for cisgender living can be inherently problematic. For starters, referring to my body as the one “I never wanted” flies too close to the rhetoric of trans people being “trapped in the wrong body.” The argument goes that this rhetoric of entrapment still privileges cisnormative bodies as the ideal, that trans people are only the way they are because they have the “wrong” body. Pushback against it from trans activists and scholars instead advocates for valuation of the non-normative bodies trans people already have. They say different versions of the facts that, we can demonstrate the radical mutability and plasticity of the body through medical interventions, as well as advance a more transformative embodied rhetoric through the moves we make within social and cultural transition to take up space in different, less gender-constructed ways. And to all of these claims, I say, beautiful, and yes, and I do my best to feel proud to be not only a woman and not just a lesbian, but a transgender lesbian woman. But, as admittedly problematic as the confession may be, my pride still experiences pangs of jealousy for a cisgender life I never led. So in those times where I find it hard to be grateful for the life I’ve begun forging and much easier to grieve for a life I missed out on, I try to remind myself what is actually great about being trans, here and now in this life.
I find that gratitude for this life and its tension with grief for another helps most of all when I mourn the cis girlhood I never got to experience. Because then I get to tell myself, thank God I didn’t have to live through that…and not because of PMS or periods, stupid boys and awkward adolescent phases full of casual sexism, or even any internalized sexism on my own part. Remember, I wanted to be the woman I am now, and I’d have taken the bad with the good. And yet, as an unrealized transgender girl growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian home in North Georgia during the 1990s and 2000s in America, I was ironically lucky to be “safely” hidden inside a male-perceived body.
For starters, I know that I was somewhat grand–mothered? into my lesbian identity by being a “straight” “male” for so long, but compulsory heterosexuality bites back both ways. (Though, getting very confessional here, I did experiment with a couple of other boys throughout middle and high school, and determined through those experiences as well as many other nonsexual, that cisgender men just don’t “do it” for me.) But as odd it as it may sound, I felt “gay” for them and tried liking “other” boys because that somehow felt like what I was supposed to do–and yet that mistaken prompt was directly contradicted by the social script telling me I could only like girls. So think about how confusing that felt to me, if you will: I felt (secretly?) gay but was told that was straight, and wondered if I should be straight, but knew I couldn’t because that would be gay. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t undergoing existential crises with every crush I ever had because of this pretzeled logic problem about what my orientation was supposed to be. I was repressing the hell out of these feelings, but it plagued me like an inexplicable pain you couldn’t figure out and knew you should go to the doctor to get it checked out, but never did. Nonetheless, I got the somewhat better end of this deal: girls. I dated semi-regularly, had sexual experiences way too young, and followed my little emo heart wherever it took me. Not saying I was any kind of Casanova, just a kid gaining typical life experiences, much to the chagrin of my parents who never knew what to do with me. I wasn’t supposed to date until I was 16, but had my first “girlfriend” at age 9, my first date age 12, and unbeknownst to them, first sexual experience with another girl–though I didn’t see it that way at the time–when I was only 14 (first one with a boy already by 11). On the flipside of the cis girl life I never had, I would have been conscripted into compulsory heterosexuality in the other direction toward the boys I grew up going to school and church and college with. Now I’m biased of course in the most sapphic of ways, but I knew these boys, I was friends with a lot of them because I was considered one of them, and God forbid having to ever date one of them. Though I certainly bear my own weird scars from my perplexing sexuality and repressed gender identity, I know it’s fair to say that I dodged a bit of a bullet by not dating boys and/or men. In this case I know particularly well, because I was trained to be one of them: we were kind of idiots. I cringe at the life my former self led. And I sympathize for any girl who had to date me back then as well as any other woman who can’t help but be attracted to men (truly the most compelling argument for “born this way” rhetoric).
But more gravely, I recognize the standards I was held to as a young “man” growing up in fundamentalist evangelical Christian purity culture were vastly different than the ones heaped atop the shoulders of young women. Or worse yet, fastened around their nethers like chastity belts. For me, those observations started at home. My sister’s clothing choices were under pretty regular scrutiny in comparison to mine, especially as far as cleavage was concerned. My mom was quite judgmental of any girl I brought home with more difficulty covering up in that area solely because they were more ample than my sister was. The messaging she received about dating, kissing, and “running any more bases” was more heavy-handed than mine. As the cisgender daughter of our mother, she was given practical advice about the female embodied experience that I know wasn’t nearly conscious enough in keeping up with the practices of other girls her age. When they talked about that kind of thing at all (not like my dad was some kind of open book either though). It sounds harsh I know, but I am glad I did not have to grow up as my mother’s daughter, but rather came late to the title instead. Beyond the home and into the church culture we were raised within, the issues and practices only worsened. At church on Sundays, youth group on Wednesdays, and church camps and youth conferences over the summer, much of the same messaging was repeatedly drilled into young minds, with very different damaging marks left behind from one gender to another. Growing up under the veil of purity culture was hard enough for boys, but far worse for girls by far. Each of us were held to the same ethic of total abstinence until (heterosexual) marriage, with scare tactics of how devastating premarital sex is hinged upon paradise-level promises of how great marital sex would be if we wait until “I do.” But purity culture bears its own sort of Christian Bizarro version of the secular double standard that “men can be players, but women can only be sluts” branded in scarlet. Boys are reared to become men led by their insatiable sexual drives who therefore expect regular assistance from their “helpmeet” in the marriage bed. Girls, however, are brought up to be regularly brought low through a variety of rhetorical abuses. They are considered devoid of sexual desire, ignorant to carnal topics of any kind, meant to bat away the advances of boys who apparently can’t help themselves. That is, until they get married, at which point, these women are expected to be pastors' wives in the streets and porn stars in the sheets. The shame of deviating away from any step on this divine path is often harsh and humiliating in ways that boys and/or men never have to experience. There are analogies likening their genitalia to crushed flowers with damaged petals after even one foray into fornication (shoutout to Jane the Virgin [2014 - 2019]’s abuela!), warning them that sex is like giving a piece of yourself away and bearing the piece your partner leaves with you forever, and casting them as Jezebels instead of Proverbs 31 women for making the wrong choice. As patently absurd as it sounds, I swear I heard a sermon by a prominent youth pastor at a church camp I served at one summer as a counselor with the worst scriptural exegesis anyone has likely ever heard. He talked about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, with particular emphasis on the rare “fact” that the donkey Jesus rode upon had never been saddled before. And from there, he basically told the teenage campers that they didn’t want to be the kind of donkey who’s been ridden before. That’s right, he got from Day One of Jesus’ Passion Week preceding crucifixion to condemning premarital passions of any kind with a donkey metaphor. Except of course, in this illustration, the teenage girls are made to feel like the donkeys while the boys still get to consider themselves their riders. Imagine the shame a sermon this dangerously wrongheaded may have instilled in a teenage girl hearing it who had already their first sexual experience before attending church camp. Imagine, beyond this camp and out into the church culture writ large, how any woman with a higher sex drive must feel within a social setting that teaches her not to have any sexual desire and shames her when she does, in fact making her feel more “manly” for it in some sort of strange purity-culture-gender-dysphoric switcheroo. Imagine having to be the Hester Prynne of your evangelical bubble while the boys you grow up around get to hide behind your scarlet letter like Dimmesdale (only without any of the tortured introspection, public confession, and dramatic death scenes). If you are in fact not at all religious or just unfamiliar with the weird little corner of American Christianity that is evangelicalism, you may still recognize many of these maneuvers from the larger patriarchal playbook outside of and encompassing this church culture. Which is of course exactly the point. Purity culture can make it worse, but this rhetoric is just as pervasive under different names outside of it. Boys grow up into men within a church culture that works toward coddling and protecting and even lionizing them, while treating its girls and women like collateral who should know better for the both of them. These adult male boys likely couldn’t handle growing up as girls in the church culture they created for them.
I know that, even for my own more gender-complex part, that I was lucky to be spared this specific trauma. Though now I feel its absence in the ways I relate to my increasingly feminized body. I carry myself with less anxiety and reservation about my body and more comfort with its sexual capacity than even my poor wife does, bearing scars I did not have to while in my own kind of hiding. It feels a bit uncomfortable to recognize this kind of mournful gladness in myself, but I still think it important to highlight as part of my relationship to womanhood and the ways I am able to appreciate its joys without having to bear its developmental traumas that no one else should have had to either. Because when we consider womanhood only in terms of its pains and struggles, it comes across as a myopically miserable way of conceiving gender. Gender-critical women do so by essentializing womanhood as only what one must endure. They insist on definitions of womanhood steeped in menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, as well as buffeted by their unique experiences of sexism. As a result, given my lack of uterus and thirty year deficit of presenting female, I am made up as a “man in a dress” playing with makeup while making “natal girls” unsafe. But womanhood is about so much more than period cramps and heavy flow, or childbirth and length of time in labor, or even sexism in all its forms. Womanhood is more than just a perpetually aggrieved version of feminism. If we think of what it means to be a woman in this way, we actually trivialize what womanhand means, as well as what being a man must be like to a dangerously cartoonish level. This kind of feminism is wielded like a weapon by TERFs who treat all trans women like villainous men only looking to rape and pillage women’s spaces. Not to mention the fact that we want to turn black into white, up into down, and completely descend all scientific consensus into complete insanity.
(Believe me, I understand the notion that if you think about the things I’m saying here at their most basic and superficial levels, it may very well sound mad to you; but nothing in life is ever basic or superficial for very long, every “rule” has countless exceptions, and we often find that the observed life tends toward chaos more than order. There are cis women who can’t conceive, can’t menstruate, some not even born with uteruses, some born with XY chromosomes while some cis men are born with XX chromosomes—and this doesn’t even begin to touch upon the other complicated side of this too-unacknowledged territory, being the fact that intersex people exist too. In other words, the Bible nor the science nor much of anything else is as “clear” as TERFs and transphobic fundamentalists want them to be.)
In response, there is an encouragingly positive turn in feminist thought toward how bad patriarchy is for everyone, including men. In turn, that means feminism is meant to be for everyone. It should liberate women from the oppressive limitations of a society built with them held in place as second sex citizens as well as deliver men from the expectations of a toxic masculinity that conscripts them into only one version of manhood that harms more than helps them. Overlapping this umbrella of consideration is the fact that trans women can still experience damaging shades of sexism even while still presenting male. I’m not referring to “reverse sexism” or men’s rights, etc. but rather the ways in which those not out yet can still be cognizant of and suffer from sexist behavior in ways material and/or internally gender dysphoric. The ways in which trans girls align more with feminine traits while perceived as boys barred from exhibiting such supposedly gender nonconforming behavior can lead to microaggressions and outright bullying that will scar them psychologically for years to come. Now in more direct and explicit ways these days, I fully recognize that since transitioning and coming out publicly I have been made the target of sexist behavior I only heard about and never experienced for myself before. And yes that does indeed affect my positionality in relation to sexist marginalization, “now” my own too. But it’s not like I was unaware of these issues before I came out, and can attest to experiencing more indirect versions of some of them while still repressed and closeted. It’s for these reasons that I, and many other trans women, bristle at the (well-intentioned) quip “Welcome to Womanhood” from cis women when I report my own experiences with them now. I know it’s not a malicious statement, but it’s very (unintentionally?) condescending and ends up feeding into the belief that “I was a man but now I’m a woman,” as opposed to taking seriously the fact that trans women are women and always have been even if not always perceived that way. It comes across as “allowing” me to be a woman…after an appropriate period of hazing I should have to go through to earn my spot. But womanhood is a lot more nuanced and nebulous than a sorority. And even if I “was” a man, I can attest to being really bad at it, like being picked last for a sport I didn’t even want to play. Now I promise that I appreciate the welcome on some level, but I would much rather the recognition that I’m finally a visible part of the gendered “club.” I’ll take “I’m glad you’re here and we’re for you when it sucks” over “yeah well now you know what’s it like.” I’m glad I’m here too, even while grappling with all the complicated and contradictory feelings of grief and gratitude and grievance and something greater. No matter what kind of woman I am, with whatever modifier that people put way more thought into than most trans people even do, it beats pretending to be the man I never was.
Across every word of this piece and each wonder and worry they encapsulate, I want it understood that I still choose to lean into the weird tension of transness. I love my life now more than ever, despite the fact that it definitely isn’t easier than before. I know the world will choose to see me in all manner of ways I have no control over, but I know who I am and that’s enough to keep transitioning onward. The concept of Schrödinger's Pussy I have drawn out here may offer a sketch of how cisnormative society misunderstands the trans experience by forcing it into preconceived molds, but what’s in my pants doesn’t fully illustrate the complete experience of being me. Like in Good Will Hunting (1997), when Will’s therapist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) says to him, “you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart.” The abstract art of my genitality and the mystery that surrounds it is one such painting, and cis people see it, they create it themselves, and they presume. But my “fucking” life (you can intend the pun if you want) is not for them to rip apart, especially given the ways they reduce me to shreds of threads they want hidden away among more normative materials. I get to carve out my own makerspace, and my next installation I’m working on in there is going to shock them all. I call it “Trans People Deserve to Own Their Experiences Without Cis Discomfort.” Given the recent push for STEAM (A for “Art”) over just STEM, I’ll muddy my metaphors here and lean back upon my titular concept here: Schrödinger's Pussy is only a thought experiment, much like the actual Erwin Schrödinger's cat was. It’s as simple as The Matrix (1999) is complex: “There is no [cat.]” My neither and my both are my business, yes, but I have a right to refer to it without fomenting diplomatic ruin. Trans people have real bodies, and real bodies have genitalia. Today I have a penis. Tomorrow it will be a vagina. Open the box, release the poison, kill the cat. Show your pussy (I’m speaking figuratively, you prudes). Embrace the good, be honest about the bad and ugly, and live the life you have instead of the one you never will–even if that means upsetting the people who politely wish you dead. I’m preaching to myself here, but maybe someone else needs the sermon. Despite curiosity and nicety and indeterminacy and genitality, it’s not Schrödinger's Pussy: it’s mine. And I’m going to love being the trans woman I am even more with it.
Jacques Derrida famously suggests in Specters of Marx (1993) that “A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts.” He means that scholars generally don’t speak in terms of subjective belief, faith, superstition, etc., nor do they leave phenomena up to forces they do not understand; they are rational, they are researchers, they believe the answer can be found, and their answer will be grounded in reality, not “spectrality.” There are subjects to be avoided–there are “sharp distinctions” (Derrida). I’ll take the titillating risk and suggest too that “A traditional scholar does not acknowledge their genitalia.” By “traditional scholar” I don’t really mean contemporary academics, especially given work done in humanistic fields such as human sexuality, porn studies, etc., as well as sciences directly involving the body. I’m talking here about the collective belief in a professional, public-facing persona that keeps on task and topic with polite points about polite ideas in the streets, and saves the rest for the sheets, so to speak. In conversation with friends, at home with your partner, on an alt account where you can let loose, and so on. To acknowledge the “other stuff,” especially that stuff (i.e., the majority of this blog), is to seem at best unprofessional and at worst perverse. “Why are you talking about this stuff?” they bemoan when someone crosses the conversational line (the one right below the belt) in public contexts. But “this stuff” is important to acknowledge, especially where it intersects trans “stuff.” In Derrida’s exordium to the book, he says he wants to lean into the spectrality and cross (in)corporeal lines traditional scholars wouldn’t–“to learn to live with ghosts” (Specters of Marx). In turn I exhort us “to learn to live with genitalia.” Don’t be scared of them; it’s not like they’re ghosts or something. We can talk about “this stuff.”
As for my “stuff,” I’ve learned throughout my transition thus far that cis people don’t know very much about trans people’s bodies. Due to part unawareness, part lack of education, and most insidious part a practiced ignorance of the subject. They’re mostly okay with trans people, just not when trans people start getting really trans around them. But if I don’t have power and liberty to talk about this stuff and open the box on Schrödinger's Pussy, then they’ll stay content to leave me trapped in the between of neither and both, gendered only at a quantum level and left for dead/alive as a castrated question mark and the answer key purposefully misplaced. We need to talk about this stuff, about trans stuff, about the stuff of genitality, about, I don’t know, all of the stuff! Crucially if we’re going to work toward a better culture that’s better aware of trans people as fully embodied individuals with a right to take up messy, bodily space. To misquote the Killers, I’m coming out of my box and I’ll be doing just fine (“Mr. Brightside,” kinda). So we need to learn to live with trans people having genitalia. With me having a pussy, an actual, real one that I love for its transness as much as its femininity, one I am “allowed” to talk about. With me misusing Schrödinger’s cat to talk about pussy galore (it’s a bond joke and a Bond joke!).
I’m done with neither and both,either/or, and definitely quantum mechanics. “What’s past is prologue” (William Shakespeare, The Tempest [1611]), so enough scientific thought experiments. I’m boxing up Schrödinger, working toward being more alive than ever and leaving behind what’s radioactive, poisoned, or dead. Screw genitality, and ask me, “What’s New, Pussycat?” (Tom Jones): I’m getting a vagina! And it’s okay and good to talk about, to write an entire blog post about it, and to hope you’ve read this far enough into it. “Ridiculous case” closed.
