Welcome!

Inspired by fantastic resources such as Hung Jury: Testimonials of Genital Surgery by Transsexual Men (ed. Trystan Cotten), the blogs My Trans FTM Lower Surgery and My Phalloplasty, and the many Facebook and Yahoo surgery groups in existence, I decided to take my experiences public (well, blog public).

I hope that this blog provides a mix of:
1) Logistics - information including costs and insurance coverage, the surgical procedure, recovery timelines, and revision decisions.
2) My story - the thoughts and feelings associated with decision-making and responding to surgical outcomes.
3) Context - the systems, patterns, and norms that inform and shape my identity experience and, likely, the experiences of other trans men.

I believe the visibility of trans male bottom surgery stories has a profound effect on the lives of trans men and the decisions we make about our bodies. By sharing our experiences, we disrupt the incessant stream of myths and misinformation in our community and help each other to make informed decisions (that may or may not align with the preferences of our surgeons). Most significantly for me, these electronic and print resources have created an avenue in which to process an experience that can be very isolating. The percentage of trans men who brave bottom surgeries remains small, whether a result of personal reasons or lack of access to resources. Consequently, we are rarely in close physical proximity to one another unless we live in a densely populated area. Even so, many of us hide in plain sight leaving the world of the web as a primary source of information and dialogue.

Currently, I live in a rural-ish region of New England which, paradoxically, has a Transgender Clinic at the local Hospital and a biweekly transgender support group, but no LGBT Community Center. I am the first trans man under the care of the physicians at the Transgender Clinic to undergo any type of genital surgery (well, that they know of). While I have been fortunate to meet a handful of other trans men in the area of varying ages and races, none of them expressed an interest in genital surgery when I was exploring my options for metoidioplasty 3 years ago. What this all adds up to is that I haven't had the option of sitting down in-person with another trans guy to process this life-changing decision. I know I am not alone, but I do feel isolated.

Aside from the fact that I'm not swimming in a sea of bottom-surgery-pursuing-trans-men, I have found that the seemingly simple task of talking to friends, colleagues, family, and others about this is much more challenging than I imagined. I've been on testosterone for almost a decade now and have looked unequivocally male for 9+ of those years. This means that the majority of the people in my life have always known and seen me as male. So, when I've approached the topic of bottom surgery with a few of them, the response of, "but you're already male" was (and still is) deflating.

What does it mean to be "already male"? I fully believe in the diversity of choices that trans people make about their bodies and that we should respect and affirm people for how they identify irrespective of how that does/n't align with cis-defined notions of male and female bodies. For many years I understood my experience as both "I identify as a man with the body I have" and, simultaneously, "I identify as a man, despite the body I have." I felt pride many days, confused others, and at a certain point after my hysterectomy I started to feel a strong pull towards wanting a phallus (therapists would say I was seeking gender-concordance). I never expected that I would feel that way, nor do I believe or perpetuate the myth that all trans men will or should end up wanting a surgically constructed phallus. The bottom line is, everyone saw me as male in my day-to-day life, but at some point, I recognized that I didn't feel that way - in my skin, under my clothes, and in my romantic relationship. Was I "already male"? Yes. Was that still not enough? Absolutely.

This realization, which began around the beginning of 2012, set off a chain of events that would drastically define the next several years of my life. The details of this are what I hope to document here, some in retrospect and some as they unfold in real-time.

Welcome and thank you for visiting.