It’s like having a leather wrist band on at all times. It doesn’t hurt in the least, but you’re aware it’s there. You can feel when things press against it but it’s a dulled tactile sensation, there’s something in the way. What’s left of the past. There’s just a little too much between the world and that part of you.

It earns you stares from strangers who see it. There you are, in swim trunks at a summer music festival by a glorious shoreline and someone asks what happened. She can’t know the full answer is asking about your genitals. The problem isn’t delivering a crafted answer with conviction. Her attention will move on, but yours is another story.

It earns you expressions of empathy for assumed pain by those who think they know about lower surgeries. But if I could feel said hypothetical pain, I would be feeling more than I can. You can read on some of them how their assumptions of what it must have taken to make such a decision, to conclude that this is a better way of living than otherwise. They don’t understand, no matter how many research papers they’ve read, stories they’ve heard and however much of yours they may have witnessed.

By far and away, awareness of skin grafts and scar tissue is far better than the overwhelming chaos of dysphoria. But the focus in information gathering forums are on the reconstruction, and at best on the motor functionality of the donor site, perhaps even its visibility. No one discusses its loss in tactile sensation.

Sometimes though, you want to take that wrist band off. But this isn’t fashion as symbol or signal worn with pride. It’s what’s become of that body part; it’s there for life. It doesn’t convey a practice done to heal and/or play, it’s a reminder of the shitty reality you survived, and the “choice” you made to address it.



[Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash. Description: a book on a stand against an orange background. The cover reads “What I Didn’t Post on Instagram: A Collection of Essays on Real Lives And What We Filter Out.”]

As always, my experience is my own; your mileage may vary. I had a full thickness graft to cover my donor site, it may be quite different for someone who had a split graft used.