In October 2016, Emily Kaufman, then a 20-year-old junior at the University of Michigan, told her story of trying to join a sorority as an out trans woman to Cosmopolitan.com. Emily never got a bid to a Michigan sorority — but the same month her story was published, she accomplished another one of her life goals: to undergo gender confirmation surgery.



A little over a year later, Emily, now a 22-year-old senior at Michigan and a board member at Point of Pride, a non-profit that supports the trans community, is sharing her experience of what it was really like to undergo gender confirmation surgery. “I know a lot of girls who are curious about what it's like to go through it, because they want to and haven't yet,” Emily said. “There's so many concerns, and there's also a lot of misconceptions. I want people to know the truth.” Here is her story.

I wanted a vagina even before I came out as trans and started transitioning in 2015. I remember thinking, "Maybe I could be a guy with a vagina.” I thought about it every day for three years. I dreamed about it. I used to, about once a week, break down and cry in my room over not having a vagina. It wanted to feel like I was in my own body and not inhabiting someone else's body. I didn’t want to be renting my body — I wanted to be a homeowner. When I realized I was trans, my dreams about having a vagina made sense in a whole new way. I needed the surgery to feel like myself.

Having gender confirmation, or “bottom” surgery, as it’s often called in the trans community, was really important in my transition. But for other people, it's not. Some people don't want to go through the grueling process of it. Some trans people might not have any surgeries, ever. Some people like their penis — you do you, girl. I want people to know is that it's normal to want a vagina and to get one, but there’s also a problematic stereotype that trans women aren’t “real” women until we have surgery, and we are. I’ve always been a real woman.

In late 2015, when I was 19, I found a surgeon in Montreal, Canada, through the trans grapevine. He’s one of the most well-known surgeons for gender confirmation surgery. After researching U.S. surgeons, I came to the difficult realization that the surgery would cost $22,000, minimum, here. My surgery in Canada — including the hospital stay — was $15,000. It wasn’t covered by insurance at all. It’s such a specialized surgery, and it’s covered by certain insurances but not others.

My family's pretty well-off, so they loaned me some of the money, and I worked in the campus dining hall and saved. I'm lucky because so many people can't afford it, and also because I had my parents’ support. My mom came with me to Montreal, and her support was crucial. Other people don't have parental support, which can make it a lot harder.

When I was doing my research, I realized that the irony is that the media and cisgender people are obsessed with the surgery, but no one actually knows anything about it, including a lot of transgender people. You really can't get much information unless you talk to someone that's had the surgery, and I only had a couple friends who'd had it before me. There’s no education. I tried doing research and it's really difficult to find.

Emily Kaufman

For example, I had a lot of trouble finding pictures of post-surgery vaginas — they’re not really put out there because they can be considered sexual pictures. I only think I saw, maybe, one picture, so I didn't really know what I was going to get. Some people are able to talk to their surgeons about what they want — mostly how big or small your labia are — but I did not. I was just so grateful to get the surgery, I didn’t even think to ask, honestly. The only place that I ever consistently saw a trans girl’s vagina was in porn. And the ones I saw in porn were … pretty bad. They sometimes looked plastic. Mine doesn't.

People also think that, after surgery, trans woman have this robo-pussy — that it's just a hole, and you don't have any feeling. But my vagina looks very much like a cisgender girl’s vagina and I orgasm so hard, it’s amazing. Some of my friends didn't believe me that I get wet; I get soaked when I come. It comes down to the quality of the surgeon: 15 years ago, yeah, women who got the surgery might have had dry vaginas. Not anymore.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what the surgery really entails, too. Some people think it's chopping your dick off and that's it. What they actually do is make an incision around the tip [of the penis], take out the erectile tissue and then, basically, flip it inside out, and then the head [of the penis] becomes the clit. (You often need to get electrolysis in that area, because the way the surgery is done, with the inverting of the penis, you could have hair inside your vagina, and that would be kind of a problem. My surgeon got rid of all of the hair during the surgery, which is one of the main reasons I decided to go to him). The testicles create testosterone, so when you have bottom surgery, you get rid of your testicles and you don’t have to take testosterone-blockers anymore. So, after my surgery, there’s one less pill I have to take. That’s the quick version, but it's all the same material, just repositioned.

Before my surgery in October 2016, I didn't let myself get freaked out. I was just focusing on the positive. I was taking the rest of the semester off from school to recover, and I was excited. But the day before, my mom and I were in Montreal, and I felt so ill that I didn’t leave the house. I had suppressed my emotions and my nervousness and it just exploded. In terms of prep, you have to stop hormones three weeks before surgery (to minimize the risk of blood clots), so my facial hair started coming back a little bit and that kind of sucked.

The day of the surgery I had butterflies. I looked at my penis for the last time, and I knew it was soon to be just a horrible memory. After the nurses wheeled me into the operating room, I knew my life would be drastically different upon awakening.

When I woke up after surgery, I wasn't in that much pain. But then, after an hour or two, my anesthesia wore off and it was the most unbelievable, excruciating pain of my life. I’d give it an 11 out of 10. It was like someone took a sledgehammer and shoved it between my legs. It’s like you’re having sex with a knife. It was horrible. There was this stent in me, almost like a giant dildo thing, to keep [my vagina] open for three or four days.

I was bedridden as fuck the first day. The second day, I wobbled around the hospital for about 10 minutes total. I was in so much pain, I thought I was literally going to die. I had to go into a zone and just try to forget about it. I didn’t have a morphine drip, and the pain meds they gave me sucked. I could only take them every four hours, so I asked my mom to hold my hand because that's the only thing that helped.

After the first two days, it was uncomfortable, but it got better. As soon as they took the gauze off, maybe a week later, I saw my vagina for the first time and it was like a war zone. It was so swollen and bleeding, it looked like someone just stuck something inside you and mushed it around. But as the days went by and they took all the padding out, it was pretty cool to see. It was really real — after all the time, and money, and tears, and everything.

There were three other girls who all got surgery on the same day as me — one in her 30s, one in her 40s, and one in her 50s. We all bonded after surgery, and after two days, we all moved to the recovery house down the street from the hospital. We were all there for each other. It would be like, “I’m so excited to get the stitches out today!” or, “You had your first bath, how was that?” They gave us those blow-up donut things to sit on, but they didn’t help, so we would all stand up and eat French pastries together. And they said that if you didn’t pee enough on the sixth day, you wouldn’t be able to get your catheter taken out, so my roommate and I were just guzzling water and competing for who could pee the most. That was comic relief for us.

They took the stitches and the stent out and then you have to start dilating — sticking these hard, plastic dildo-type things in your vagina — because you don't want it to close up and you don't want it to lose depth. There are three dilators: a small blue one, a medium green one, and then the big orange one. We — the other girls and I — called the big one Thor. To be honest, I'm never going to see a dick as big as Thor. It’s not happening! You start out with the two small ones, lube it up and stick it in. There are five little white dots on the dilator, and you have to try to make it so that you can get the fifth dot in. You want to have as much depth as possible.

I had a breakdown on day four post-surgery. I didn't know you had to dilate so many times a day, so that really sucked the life out of the next month. How was I going to get through the school year having to dilate? I remember crying and being really upset. I normally feel older because of everything I've had to go through, but it was one of the first times in a long time that I felt like I was 20 and the other girls were mentoring me. Because they were older, and their pain either was not initially as bad as mine or they were better at dealing with it than me, they helped talk me through it.

The first couple of months were still really hard. I resented my vagina a little bit. I was so stiff and sore. I had to dilate four times a day, 30 minutes each, two hours apart, so I didn't leave the house most days. I felt trapped, and it was terrible. I didn't get to see my friends. But I did go to Washington, D.C., for the Women’s March, because Donald Trump was elected president two weeks after my surgery. It felt like a doomsday situation. I was trying to see the best of it, but I was thinking about my rights as a trans woman under the Trump administration, and the fact that they might go backwards. I need protection under the law from discrimination, and I felt like his election was a green light for bigots. I thought, “It's very likely that I will go to a store during this presidency, and that someone will say, ‘We don't serve your kind here.’”

Emily with Laverne Cox. Emily Kaufman

After the first month, when the pain started going away, and I was down to dilating three times a day, I started to love my vagina. I nicknamed it Lil’ Ems; it just sort of happened. I was like, “Lil' Ems and me are gonna be friends forever.” In some ways, my vagina was like a baby, because the first month when you're a parent you're like, “Oh my God, go to sleep, you're up all hours of the night.” Then, after a few months, you don't have to do as much stuff, and the baby starts getting cuter — I didn’t have to dilate as much and my vagina started getting cuter. She started looking like a vagina instead of a little mess of skin.

I freaked out for a long time about my vagina not being normal, but I think it's just something all women go through, like, "Oh no, my labia are too small.” I was concerned about my vaginal health for a long time post-surgery, too. I remember one of the therapists who wrote me a letter of recommendation told me a story of this woman who got her vagina something like 25 years ago, and it had this smell that she didn't think anything of, and then she lost her vagina. She had to have it removed. So that really worried me.

I have kind of chilled out at this point and don’t worry about my vagina constantly. Now, almost a year and a half later, my vagina looks like every other person's vagina, but with two faint scars on either side where the incisions were that are still healing. You can't really tell it’s any different from a cisgender person’s vagina. When I don't shave, you couldn't tell at all. I've shown a few of my trans girlfriends, and a few of my cis girlfriends, either pictures or in person, for science, and they've all been pretty shook.

Having the surgery has given me confidence. I always had anxiety that people could see my bulge. I'd be scared to wear bathing suits. It’s just really nice to be comfortable in my body now. I wear leggings all the time.

And I feel safer. Now, I have the same problems that cis girls have, like, "Oh my gosh, I've got to shave more" — not, "Is someone going to tell I'm trans and then literally murder me?” My friend got punched in the face once on a date after a guy found out she was trans. There's so much violence against trans women and I didn't want to be another statistic.

I don't identify myself as trans on my dating app profiles because it just brings out the creeps, or turns a lot of people away, and I would like people to see me as the woman I am. Before my surgery, I did say I was trans in my profiles, because it was a safety thing — I didn’t want anyone to be surprised and turn violent — but then I’d be fetishized a lot. In a lot of ways, it starts with trans porn, which is very objectifying and misogynistic. It's not, like, “sexy trans girls stripping.” It’s more like, “she-male tranny slut gets anal fucked.” [Ed. note: “she-male” and “tranny” are both offensive terms not accepted by the trans community.] Some guy messaged me on Tumblr recently and asked to see my dick. I was like, "Oh well, I don't have one." I mean, it's been a journey.

I will tell people if I were to start dating them, but I feel like announcing it upfront gives people preconceived notions that, once they'd met me, would go away. I wouldn't let the first date, or interaction, pass without telling them I’m trans, because it's an important part of my identity. I do feel, in a lot of ways, that the surgery did complete my transition, but I'm still trans. That's not gonna change because I got surgery. Not acknowledging that would erase my whole experience.

Benji Bear/SHEI Magazine

Sexually, I started to feel something in my vagina about a week after surgery, but I wasn’t able to masturbate until a few months afterward, because it was so sore and still healing. For the first five or so times, it hurt, but touching myself felt super normal. I even tried to finger myself before I had surgery, because I just really felt a connection with having a vagina. I would sort of push my dick in a little bit. And there's this thing where you can finger a trans girl in the socket where the testicles descended, called muffing. I tried it once and it was weird, but some girls like it.

What happens for trans women, when you're on estrogen for long enough, is that your orgasms start feeling different even before surgery. The difference is that when you have a penis and you're full of testosterone, it's a very quick, concentrated sort of situation — five seconds max, after the ejaculate comes out, you're done. But now, and even after being on hormones for a while, it would be 10 seconds. Female hormones increased the orgasm time and it started being more full-body. After the surgery, l think I've had at least one multigasm — like 30 seconds.

I recently had sex for the first time with my vagina. I’d been pretty cautious about sex, generally. I almost had sex with a few guys I’ve met at the club, but then they turned out to be creeps and I decided not to. Especially after going through the surgery, I didn't want to mess up anything. He didn't need to be, like, Prince Charming, but I wanted it to be someone I could trust in a safe environment, and it was. I was emotionally ready and it was something I wanted.

I think it was pretty similar to what other women experience their first time, based on what I’ve picked up over the years. It hurt and felt good, and it took a while to get it in all the way. There were times where I was close, but I didn’t orgasm, because he didn’t know vaginas very well, which most men don’t. I think it takes time to create that comfort. I will say that sex is a more fun way of dilating, and I’m happy that it’s been done, because it had been hanging over me for so long. The pressure’s off. I know that it can work.

I am so fortunate and so privileged to be able to have my vagina, and to have that comfort in my body. One of my close friends doesn't make enough to afford the surgery. She’s going to be saving up for years. I remember how much pain it was for me to live with a penis every day. For me, it was only three years or so that I really was in anguish, wanting and waiting for the surgery. For some people, it's 30 years. It's very depressing. That’s why I’m working with young trans women through the non-profit I’m on the board of, Point of Pride, trying to help and support young trans women and men. We give grants toward electrolysis treatments and other services people need in transitioning.

Girls will message me and very cautiously ask, “Can we talk about the surgery... if it's okay?" I say, “Of course,” because I want them to be educated about it. Until fairly recently, it was super taboo even within the trans community to talk about it. I think a lot of trans people are so aggravated giving the 101 class to cis people, that they don't want to get into the advanced class with trans girls. So many famous trans women don't talk about it, because they say it's private. But what about all the trans girls that want the surgery? Who are they looking up to? There's no one. The only super-prominent trans woman that I've ever heard talk about getting surgery was Janet Mock. It means a lot to me. Her first book really helped me get through.

I've been very open about my whole journey, my whole transition. I’ve posted about it on Facebook the entire time, and so it was just a natural thing for me to share I was getting surgery. I hope that by sharing my story that I can help in some small way to normalize trans people and the process of transitioning. But just because I'm open with my story doesn't mean every trans person is. Most trans people are really tired of being asked questions about their bodies, and actually, no one likes being asked about their genitals. Let's talk about other topics.

My recovery is going well. I still have to dilate about once a week. But I feel whole, and while I have issues with my body like most women — sometimes I wish my waist were skinnier or my hips were wider — they're nowhere near as bad as they used to be. It's just a whole new world, to quote Aladdin. My vagina is my favorite part of my body.

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