This article was originally published on The Queerness, a critical collective giving a platform for queer voices.

I want to talk about vaginas, specifically trans vaginas. My vagina, which I received sometime in my late forties. I want to talk about the way it looks, the way it feels, actually feels, there between my legs and the way it exists as a place of pleasure.

Often it is the first thing people ask me about if they find out I’m trans.

“Have you got one?” they say.

“Does it work?” they say.

“Do you have sex?” they say.

I never answer their questions unless we are of course in bed getting intimate. That’s rarely the case so the conversations never happen or never happen with intimacy.

I think it’s a crying shame that I don’t get to talk about my vagina and that other trans women don’t get to talk about theirs. We should have post surgery vagina circles and pre-vaginal classes.

Our vaginas are different, unexplored, created, surgical, magical, mysterious and too often untouched by outsiders. I spent many years dreaming about mine, imagining how it would feel to reach down and discover an opening, to feel right. I had sexual dreams about having a vagina from my teenage years onward.

I dreamed that a hand would slide into my knickers and find a moist slit. That a finger would push in and then a phallus – plastic or real, would push in slowly and deeply and make me gasp.

I carried on dreaming that dream until the night before surgery. The same faintly naive dreams that my vagina would work like any natal female's.

My surgeon told me he would make me look realistic, with a vaginal opening, a sensate clitoris and lips; inner and outer. I was told I couldn’t have sex for at least three months.

For four days after surgery I didn’t have sex dreams as I fell in and out of morphine-consciousness. I only wondered what my vagina would look like once the packing and bandages had come off. People post photographs but they tend to be the ‘butterfly’ ones.

“Look at me they” they say “I’m a beautiful pussy fuck me.”

On the fifth day the packing came out and a nurse, a specialised nurse, gave me a small hand mirror to inspect their specialist work.

“Pleased?” She asked.

“It looks like an angry monkey’s arse” I wept.

“The swelling will go down,” she replied.

The swelling did go down but I had months of problems; tightness, dilation, scar tissue, erectile tissue, peeing, infection. The list goes on. But it’s not the full picture because I love my vagina. I mean I really love my vagina. Which is lucky because it’s one of one.

But I’ve never felt confident enough with it to have sex. It’s still, a few years on, quite painful to dilate, it’s got much tighter and the depth has been lost. It still bleeds occasionally and I’ve stopped having my dreams about simple uncomplicated sex.

I masturbate sometimes and it feels wet, but wet from where? And why did nobody tell me about the wet? What is the substance? And why does it go hard in the very centre of my vagina, hard enough that it feels impenetrable ?

I went to see my surgeon and they are going to stretch me open and have a look. I feel like an old cow, I mean bovine, being checked for calf.

I don’t have my sex dreams anymore about my beautiful puffy vagina, swelling around a finger or a phallus.

I spend too much money on handbags now, a substitute I think, and a temporary measure.

But I’d rather talk about us, about our vaginas, our sex lives and really talk with authenticity, not in a way that aims to mimic or settles for greyness but talk in a way that leads to us understanding our bodies, our surgeries, our desire and our options and limitations in regards to sex. I think we at this point have a duty to open up the discussion for younger trans femmes looking up and rushing towards the ever growing waiting lists without fully appreciating what it may mean to not orgasm. What it means to dilate as an ongoing weekly ritual and what it means to have so many people, medical people, tell you that they don’t know about your vagina. It seems odd but there doesn’t seem to be a map of our sex- lands, no shared knowledge that can answer simple questions.

Like what happens if someone pushes hard inside, will it tear? Can it tear? If I stop dilating will it close up? And where is the lubrication coming from?

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