The Complete Vagina Diaries

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I have edited and compiled here the main entries from the public diaries I kept following my vaginoplasty surgery on December 4th, 2025. The first entry comes on Christmas day, some weeks after the surgery; the final entry, in May 22nd, 2026, comes just before the revision surgery I had on 30 May, 2026. Some of you may have encountered some of this writing before. It is long, so you may want to bookmark so you can take your time.

I’m lying here in an apartment in Bangkok wearing an avocado-print t-shirt, one bolster beneath my knees, another propping my upper body at a forty-five-degree angle. I wear a little white belt to which I can attach pads, when I dilate, to hold in a hard, acrylic dilator. I don’t otherwise wear underwear unless friends visit. I ask them to bring protein shakes, cereal bars, and coconut water, along with whatever mail is piling up at reception. People keep bringing me strawberry Pocky. I love having guests, but they sometimes make me feel like an animal in a zoo: something to marvel at. The worst visitors tire me out, because, even in this state, they seem to want to unpack all their shit with them. The best tire me out because they make space for me to vent. Sometimes I have visitors I don’t know too well, people who just want to help; with some people, it is only in times of crisis and need that you discover how cool they are.

I have a little table besides me with a metal kidney bowl, a rubber bulb, saline irrigate, iodine, betadine, KY jelly, condoms, kitchen paper, baby wipes, cotton swabs, latex gloves (two sizes too small), sterile gauze, two soft rubber dilators, and one 6.5 inch (S) acrylic dilator. Twice a day, I take out a small, LED-lit mirror, and I lay everything out in the order in which I will use them. On my bed I keep a pair of pajama bottoms for wrapping ice packs and a 1.5-liter bottle of water, along with extra kitchen paper. On the floor beside my bed is a trash bag full mostly of medical waste and cereal bar wrappers. Beside the trash bag is a little bag full of medication, including leftover tramadol and lorazepam, which I hope to never touch again, along with a bunch of anti-nausea and stomach-pain medications. All that remains of the anti-inflammatory and various antibiotics now are empty packages, except for Torcozia, of which about one-week’s supply remains. On my bedside table, I have an eye mask; Loop Dream earplugs; baby wipes; Wellbutrin; melatonin; injectable estradiol valerate; Nothing CMF earbuds; moisturizer; sports tape, which I’ll never have to use again; some progesterone; both Paracetamol and its generic; acetaminophen; Androcur, which I’ll never have to take again; an empty pack of peach-flavored Mentos mints; a nail clipper; two Tangle Tweezer brushes (one with a handle, one without); ear wax remover; and a lamp.

Between my legs, above an incontinence pad, Little Monster seethes, clit like a lychee, labia minora like two Frankenstein frankfurter fangs with their bellies split open, bleeding, the structure’s lower half missing, likely due to necrosis, so that it suspends itself above a vaginal opening that, along with the separated wounds either side of it, coalesces into a foaming jaw. Little Monster, I tell myself, is the chrysalis between Big Dick and Little Angel. I tell myself she knows what she’s doing. At night, she inflates her frankfurter fangs into bat wings and scours the streets of Bangkok for small mammals, returning to bury herself in my pubic mound so my body can digest them, spitting out the sinews and bones, waking me up when it’s time for her to demand her douche and dilation. I tell myself she came from a galaxy far away—maybe she rode into our solar system on 3I/ATLAS—and took my body as her host, her ecosystem, here to give her protein and nutrients and clean and dilate her for three-to-five hours a day.

Little Monster has ruled my life for the past three weeks. I feel grateful that I can tell myself I have forgotten the worst moments, even if in truth I am just doing my best not to recall them. I feel grateful that the worst is behind me, even if I know I can’t guarantee this. This is how my life might look for the next three to six months: bed full of cushions, table of medical supplies, drugs on the floor, and Little Monster sitting unpretty between my legs. She’s lately began to hiss when I pee. Hopefully I’ll gain a little more energy as the weeks go by. Maybe, in a few weeks, I’ll be able to pick up my own mail. I go to the bathroom like clockwork every two hours in the night. I haven’t done a solid shit since the surgery. Sometimes, my intestines have me screaming out in pain, hoping no one will be walking past my apartment door to hear it. My pee rides along and up my thigh. I get nauseous every time I walk to the kitchen. I think I would despair if I hadn’t chosen this. As much as I’d like to return to my pre-surgery routines, it all seems somehow preferable to the situation I had before, in which that large, unwanted organ, loaded with all sorts of social baggage, dangled where Little Monster now is, always threatening to come loose and form a dangerous bulge whenever I was in public, having the audacity to grow whenever I got aroused, killing said arousal, forcing me to build into my masochistic erotic world ways to contain its presence. Little Monster is hideous, and her future is uncertain, but she’s mine, and we have an understanding.

I know that if I had the discipline to keep my eyes shut for more than ten minutes, I would realize how tired I am, might not be able to bring myself out of it. Once that happens, I’ll wonder how it took me so long to get myself resting. I know I need to rest, but it’s not so simple. I need to keep myself together. I have what I can only call a strategic breakdown once a week. On my worst day, I experienced diarrhea tears: that’s the only way I can describe it. All of my senses are turned up to eleven. I’ve not lived a minute without a relentless inner dialogue streaming through, sometimes multiple at once in a fugue. If it’s a gift, it’s one I pay for in irritation. I need to do something with words, to take them in and push them out of me. To digest what I read the way Little Monster eats small mammals and coughs up the sinews and bones in prose. I’ve seen the sun twice in the last three weeks, and words, anecdotes, rants, little narratives, my habit of anthropomorphizing everything in sight, silliness, these are what allow me to give the monotony some shape.

But I have, by now, written enough to exhaust myself. I feel a little dizzy. It’s Christmas day. Just another day. I’m worn out. I feel isolated. But I feel I have so much more fortune to be grateful for than misery to moan about, not least the bolster between my legs, my table of medical supplies, the fact the stains on my bedsheets are from betadine rather than blood, the occasional visits, the friends who text me to ask how I’m doing, my air-conditioning unit (which was broken the day I returned from the hospital), my more painless days, my little shelf of art from friends and strangers alike, my three beloved plushies (Strawbs, Neé Cuggles, and Kirby) who are always having a party (and waited with me in the hospital throughout my stay), a little army of plastic Kirbies who guard a now-defunct key Oz’ tattoo studio in DTLA, which keeps me connected to my forever-but-maybe-never-again home Los Angeles, my hi-fi system, Geese, Oklou, Nala Sinephro, Mukimukimanmansu, hemlocke spring, Alabastair DePlume, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Tenniscoats, a chance, after so many years, to get curious about music again, to trawl the lists on RateYourMusic, itself a reminder of what the internet once was. There was always a limit to the sincerity of my gratitude when I lived with the other organ. Things with Little Monster are different.

It’s Christmas day for me in Bangkok, but not yet for most the people I know. I am alone. I’m writing about my immediate surroundings because anything else would tire me out too much. I wanted to take a stab at feeling like a person. I don’t want to try and do anything too smart. I don’t have much to share right now, but I can at least can share a slice of myself. I rarely wear make-up. Watching make-up tutorials is too much work for me. Almost no one sees my genitals ever. I don’t care for cosmetics enough to suffer this much. I want everyone who needs this surgery to have access to it, whenever they need, without having, as I did, to tell the doctor how much they played with dolls as a little girl and dreamed of being a housewife, without having to draw a man and a woman before getting told off and told to redraw them, to give flesh to the arms, legs, and fingers and put a floral pattern on the woman’s dress.

On the other side of my bed is my MacBook Air. My MacBook Air, in public, is how the world can know I’m a lesbian. But the world already knows. Everybody can tell I’m a lesbian. I don’t know why or how. I can’t normally watch a movie more than twenty minutes at a time. I watched Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind, the 1940s Disney Pinocchio (so dark), half of del Toro’s Pinocchio, half of the 1975 Toei animation of The Little Mermaid, half of Galaxy Railroad 999. I watched an hour-long YouTube video of someone who had never played Dark Souls playing Dark Souls for the first time and falling in love with it. I watched a video by a YouTuber called geopold about the Hong Kong fires. I learned that bamboo is grass, not wood. I watched a flamingo mating dance. I sent it to Quyen, who calls me the flaminga, reflecting the fact, she says, that everyone treats me like an exotic bird. I have a bunch of people and some group chats I text in LA, Providence, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Delhi, Lagos, Valencia, Tokyo, Singapore, and elsewhere. Maybe, one day in the distant future, we can all have a party somewhere. I have a dream of visiting Sichuan someday, because I love the food and the spices, and I hear Chengdu is super gay. Quyen sends me pictures of noun, her cat. I’d love to play a video game, but I don’t have the energy. I want to watch more movies, but I don’t know what I have the energy to watch.

I write this sometime after midnight, mid dilation. Whenever I finally fall asleep, I will start waking up again at one- or two-hour intervals, and I feel each time as though I’ll need to keep sleeping forever. This means I don’t do my morning dilation until afternoon, and my evening dilation ends up happening at midnight. My daytime runs from my first dilation, maybe around 1pm, until the midnight dilation from which I am now writing, but I’ll usually intermittently nap between 4 - 8pm. This means I’m usually only awake for around 8 hours a day, even if it feels like so much longer. Each time I fall asleep, I go into a heavy zone between thought and sleep that, although never lasting more than a few hours, gives me the same feeling, upon waking, as having slept for a whole night.

Today, every time I fell asleep, I dreamt about Venezuela. That’s as much I can say. These dreams had no substantive content, but they were still about Venezuela. It is like I was thinking about Venezuela as I fell asleep and my dreams crushed the thoughts into a murky abstract texture that, while almost completely lacking in content, still bore the mark of its original material. I happened to be awake and on YouTube at the time of the press conference earlier today following the Maduro kidnapping. Trump looked like he wanted to go to bed even more than I did. Even as he read from a sheet, he still kept trying to adlib, reiterating several times that the US will be running things. He didn’t sound like someone talking about something that was all that much his own. Rubio and Hegseth stood behind him, also looking like they’d rather be sleeping, along with someone I soon discovered to be John ‘Raizin’ Cane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a venture capitalist, who seemed a little perkier than the rest.

I don’t have much to say about these events. There are, of course, many ways in which it is nothing new. I expect people will suffer. US tax-payers are going to fund it, and the gains will be spread among a small set of powerful people who will use them to secure more power and initiate more horror. Have we entered an era where the US is going to go around kidnapping foreign presidents willy nilly? Maybe. When scrupulous people learn they can get away with something, they usually see if they can keep doing it. It seems at once clear what these people are after, while it at the same time carries an air of chaos, like the perpetrators are sometimes in the shadows even with their own strategy, just taking chances and seeing how far they can push things.

But I don’t always have the best grasp of politics or geopolitical issues, so I’ll save the commentary for more incisive minds, to Venezuelans and people who have a deep understanding of the machinations of US imperialism. I’ll leave it at saying that today, for me, was, like for so many people, a day of taking in news that will surely change the course of history while also carrying on in relative isolation with the smallness of my personal life, moving through unchanged immediate surroundings: in my case this apartment that I leave only once a week for surgical follow-up appointments. I read things. I share things. I try to process things, whatever that means. I remain unsure as to how this news might bring about any actual change in my behavior. I am confident of my ignorance in how some things will play out, but I have some ideas, at least, about the range of possibilities, some of which exist at such large scales as to be barely conceivable. I’m glad always to be reading and learning, to encounter writing that pushes me a little away from habits I might otherwise cling to, while also remembering that however well I recalibrate my models of all the possible futures ahead or adapt myself to change them and that I still need to dilate or clean my wounds or have something to eat or—this one especially, since I often forget until late afternoon—take my morning medication.

I am here right now, just as I am every day, twice a day, lying beside my betadine and lube and sterile gauze and sterile swabs and baby wipes and latex gloves, all laid out on some kitchen paper on my bed, with my acrylic dilator fastened with the maternity pad to sit 6.5 inches deep into my new vagina. My legs dangle over my bolster. I am listening to various experimental South Korean indie musicians: as I write, it’s the album achimnol by khc. On the other side of me sits Volume I of the complete manga edition of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which I can read for about twenty minutes before it tires me out. I have Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffala, too: I can usually manage about three poems. Earlier I played the remaster of Final Fantasy VI; its remade orchestral soundtrack is a little overpowered against the game’s pixel art. I have never played it before. I spent too much of 2025 in some kind of survival mode to read too much poetry or manga or play video games or make playlists. My 2015 MacBook Air is still on—I was earlier watching a video on YouTube about Luigi Mangione—even if I have no more plans to use it tonight: the screen saver is on, and I believe the screen saver is broken, showing floating squares of different colors that I assume are supposed to contain images. I’m taking advantage of this recovery period to give myself a miniature experience of childhood amid all the roughness of the past year, which year I don’t think I will be able to process, whatever that means, until I am able to look back from it, from a different self and a different world, many years from now.

It is still hard to see how Lady Monster, my new vagina, might ever look like a vagina. One side of the labia minora is still the size of a tangerine. The other side seems to have mostly fallen off, with blue stitches dangling where it used to be. The clit still hides. A small tear has appeared along a fold of the labia majora, so I am daily spinning a swab to ease crusted blood off it. I use the same spinning technique to tug at the various other forms of goop that this creature coughs up. As gross as they are, both activities can be kind of satisfying on those rare occasions when I get a good chunk. The opening of the vagina is still cavernous, full of stalagmites and stalactites made of flesh and a white goop that the nurse told me was peritoneum skin. In any case, it’s not my job to figure out how to recraft Lady Monster’s appearance. My job is to keep her healthy by dilating and cleaning her, to feed myself protein and nutrients that she can feast on in turn, to use as little energy as I can, and to sleep. Likely, she will need another operation before she can be her true self.

Despite being uncomfortable, physically worn down, mentally depleted, and often in pain, I have found something luxurious in the latest phase of this recovery. I am a graduate student, the new semester is yet to begin, and since it is the semester of my qualifying exams, I plan to cram everything in at the last minute, anyway. This means that, for now, the only thing I need to do is tend to my body best I can and keep myself at least mentally occupied enough that I don’t fall into spirals of anxiety or depression. Sometimes I still get visitors, which always gives me a burst of energy. I feel calmer around people now that I have this vagina. Having to accept people’s help is also allowing me to see some beautiful sides to some people (and more difficult sides of others). I have been making playlists for friends. I still, thanks to now having a vagina, feel more at peace—despite everything that is making me miserable—than perhaps I ever have. When I struggle, I remind myself just how much worse things were only a week before and how much worse they were, in turn, two weeks and three weeks before that.

Today I am one month out of surgery. Maybe soon I will try to walk to a nearby corner store, but I don’t want to push myself. I expect it might be another two months before the swelling will have gone down enough for me to sit without the donut pillow and at least another two months before I am going out to meet friends and such. In any case, at the time of writing it is 1:46am: I have to take the dilator out and will spend around twenty minutes on wound care. My next surgical follow up is tomorrow. I have to be up at 8:30am.

I’m writing now to see if I can write anything at all. The last few days have tested me. I developed an infection on one of my drain sites, which has since spread to the area where they had to resew the wound. I kind of marvel at how relatively chill I was about this resewing at the time: I had open wounds several inches either side of the mouth, like a shadowy Joker grin; I had some stringy white goop dangling out of me; I got mild food poisoning; and I can’t begin to describe how abject the experience was of being prepared, in this state, for the operating room, how much effort it took even to fling some slippers off my feet. I remember texting a group WhatsApp the night before, desperate to talk to someone. Coco called, and I hyperventilated and cried for at least an hour, but I hardly seemed to realize how justified this was. I kept saying how weak I felt. Coco kept telling me that, given that this was the first time I’d fallen part in the two weeks since surgery, I was surely a badass. And now the wounds are separating again. I’m taking new antibiotics. The swelling has hardly gone down in the past few weeks. I had some days recently where I could read a bit and play video games, but in these past few days I have reverted back to the full-body exhaustion that was all I knew a week ago. I write this while I dilate, which requires that I literally gaze at my navel.

Yesterday I walked to a local doctor’s appointment. My street doesn’t have any sidewalks, so the walk required me to dodge a lot of traffic. The air quality is awful in Bangkok at the moment, and even if it was maybe only a 30-to-40 minute round trip, I woke this morning with my body in a mild state of crisis, glowing with aches from head to toe. Everything hurt. I could hardly move. The world was crashing down on me. The apartment is getting dirty, a faint medical smell lingers for which I can’t identify a single source, social media is my respite annoying but social media is a headfuck, the world is moving so fast, and I keep dropping things then struggling to pick them up. If I drop two things in a row it makes me want to burst out crying, which impulse gets cut off by my dropping or knocking over some third thing. Some demons have been haunting me—my fight with Cissy last year, in particular, which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write about. I’m not sure, today, how I am going to get food for dinner: the idea of going all the way down to my building’s reception seems impossible and, given the infection, not entirely safe.

It is also still too hard for me, with so little experience on surgical matters, to imagine how some of the issues with the operation site could be resolved. It continues to be a miserable mess and unlike anything else I have seen (and I have, by now, seen a lot). The surgeon and his team insist it’s just a little bit swollen, nothing out of the ordinary. I’m not a medical professional, but I have eyes, and while I know bodies can do miraculous things, there are limits. One half of the labia minora sits like a testicle above the vaginal entrance, with the other poking out the side. The entrance itself is an inch wide, and for reasons I can’t muster he used some of my perineum to make the opening, meaning I have both a little ridge in it and hair is growing, despite his promise of a hairless technique. I have witnessed more negative change than positive in the past week. I worry that this cycle of wound separations will never end, and while I also know that thinking too much about it would be a wasted effort, I still find myself thinking too much. How can I avoid it altogether, when twice a day I have to douche and clean and dilate and then paint every last crevice of it with betadine, staring at it in the mirror all the while?

Yesterday was the first time I had left the apartment independently in over a month. I have a handful of visitors each week, but I spend most of my time on my own, and I spend much of my time in bed, and I spend much of my time in bed hoping to find ways to keep my mind occupied despite how little energy I have to do anything. Sometimes I still make playlists. Sometimes I text friends. Sometimes I can read a few pages of a book. A few days ago, I played Final Fantasy VI for a full hour. Despite how low my energy is, it is nice (and I am little impressed) that I am still able to pump out full sentences and present some front of coherence here.

As usual, I write this while I dilate. If I wasn’t writing, if I had just shut my eyes, I would probably be drooling in a murky slumber by now. I need and ought to be resting, but I also know how much the accumulation of all these little anxieties gets in the way of quality rest, so I hope that this writing will be a worthwhile investment in the end. Perhaps I’ve written some things I will feel differently about when I’m in a less foul and fragile mood. But it will be interesting to have these little dispatches to look back on. I hope people get something from them, however small. I hope I will be glad to be able to look back on them some way down the line.

In two days, it will be three months. I had my three-month follow up today. Things are healing OK. One side of the labia minora is still the size of a ping pong ball, but the tissue is healthy. The wound at the mouth is hypertrophic and still hurts; Dr. W injected it with steroids again and will do so again in a month. Hypergranulation had appeared behind the labia minora, which he covered with silver nitrate. Originally, we were talking about doing a revision in June, but I think that’s too early. The more it heals, the safer the revision will be. I want to do as much electrolysis as I can on the part of the perineum that is in the entrance before he tries to reattach the labia minora. As well as stretching the labia minora and making it mor symmetrical, he will narrow the entrance and flatten the perineum ridge at the mouth. It all still looks so crazy, right now.

I don’t think the revision will be a huge procedure, but knowing how I tend to respond to surgery, I’ll probably be out for a month. For now, I am still swollen and can’t sit upright without my donut pillow. My energy levels fluctuate. Today I did facial electrolysis: I’m trying to do as much as I can while my insurance still covers it. Numbing injections make my face swell, so I asked for a cream: the nurses were concerned. They said, I don’t think you understand how much this will hurt. I told them I’d done a lot of electrolysis before and hoped it would be similar. Well, in Thailand they use different technology, which hurts more, and they go at maybe three times the speed, and I had two people going on me at once. I had tears rolling down the sides of my face and was sometimes kicking the air, contorting my whole body. Tattoos have nothing on this. Sometimes the nurses would ask if it hurt. I would laugh like a maniac, and they would laugh, too. Jep nitnoy, I said, which means ‘it hurts a little,’ and one of the nurses replied: I think from how you are reacting that jep mak mak. We all laughed. They asked halfway if I wanted to switch to the numbing injections, and I said no, and I think they thought I was slightly crazy. Their laughter wasn’t mean or sadistic: I put them in a position where, to do their job, they needed to make me suffer. I think we were all trying to cope.

Three months is a significant milestone. My energy is coming back, and this seems to be the most essential ingredient to combatting depression. I know from past experience that an electrolysis session can leave me in a torrid state for at least a few days, but that doesn’t mean it will throw me back where I was a month ago. The overall arc is heading towards energy and more agency, towards being able to get around and sit down and gather myself to do real work. I will have to live with the strange mess of what my underwear currently conceals for some time to come: hot women are asking to tie me and shoot content with me, and the tease of it all is killing me.

As my energy returns, I will have to start once again making more decisions about how to live my life. The greatest blessing of this recovery, for which I have, effectively, paid time off, is the privilege of having no responsibilities other than taking care of my physical body. How I sometimes yearn for a leader. How I sometimes yearn for someone who could help me understand the world and my place in it beyond any reasonable doubt. How I sometimes yearn for someone to tell me what to do, to free me from endlessly deciding, who can bring me into a community that allows me to participate in collective action and purpose. These yearnings have always simmered but have become so much stronger since I left the US and came to live as a guest in a country for few reasons other than that it seemed the safest option, now a 14-hour time difference from the community I’d built, giving me an almost unlimited freedom to consider what, of the Western world, I am to care about and act upon and why. What kind of life might I live, and in service to what or whom? How reluctant I am to accept that the only place such a leader can truly reside, anyway, is in my own heart, so long as it remains as open as it is determined. I sometimes stop listening to my heart, but it never stops beating.

I write this while I dilate. Now, more than three months out of surgery, I only need to douche with the saline admixture once per day. This makes my morning routine simple: I put on a glove; I put some lidocaine jelly at the opening of the vagina, where the wound keeps getting hypertrophic; I don’t bother with a condom: I just spray the dilator with alcohol and wipe it down with a baby wipe; then I lube it up and fasten it in. I don’t even need to create a pillow fort. If I want to get an earlier start to the day, I can get up earlier and do this while lying down, resting my eyes while the dilator works its magic.

I avoid looking too much at the thing or thinking about how much hard work might still be ahead; it’s still hard to imagine a decent result, but I just have to accept where it’s at: such acceptance is a matter of stamina, but with my energy returning, I can go longer between breakdowns. Given how awful things were in my early weeks, I’m quite impressed that I wasn’t falling apart even more. I can become more of a baby about the smaller issues in life. Give me a common cold, and I’ll narrate it like the apocalypse has arrived.

I am able to masturbate now, and my vagina most certainly can self-lubricate on arousal. I get wet. I squirt. The surgeon said this was impossible, and some people online tried to claim that it must just be urine. The refusal of doctors to believe trans women’s repeated testimonies on this outside of a clear understanding of how it works is unsurprising but still boggles my mind. I imagine urine is a part of it, but I’ll just say I’ve eaten enough pussy and smelled enough urine to confirm that there is no easily identifiable difference between how I get wet and how someone with a natal vagina can.

The orgasm feels good: it is euphoric where before it would thrust me into an instant dysphoric depression. I probably hit it a bit too hard in the early days when I had nothing else to do. I felt almost completely lost in a fantasy world. I half-forgot that I lived in Thailand and was constantly dreaming about moving to other places, Ho Chi Minh City or Chengdu, in particular.

The biggest change in the last week has been to my energy levels. With complications, excess swelling, wound separation, two follow-up surgeries, and two infections, my first three months were challenging, and before the three-month mark, getting out of the apartment to walk for thirty minutes felt like a big achievement and would sometimes leave me completely worn out. But last week, my energy levels shot up overnight. I’ve met friends for lunches. I went apartment hunting in 100-degree heat and found a place. A few days ago, I went to a cafe and did some admin (I have to go back, because I left my donut pillow there). My dad was in Thailand last week, and I saw him for the first time in person in at least a few years. Yesterday, I had a full day with a friend, another pro-Domme who was visiting from Tokyo. We spent half the day lying in her Airbnb, watching a Thai girls’ love show, and the other half eating.

I am going for lunch tomorrow with a friend visiting from Hanoi. On Friday, some friends want to take me to a lesbian bar. On Saturday, we have a sapphic rope jam; I may let my friend do an arm bind on me, but mostly I can just relax and use it as a chance to see people again. Two people are going who recently asked me on dates, but they are both 24. In this past year, I have been asked out on dates exclusively by women under 25. I don’t know if this is because gen Z queer women are bolder or into older women or more comfortable with trans women (they were all cis) or what, but I can’t say it bothers me.

I also do feel something shifting after my surgery. It was interesting to remove ‘trans’ from my IG bio and see how much warmer other queer women became in my DMs, but—even online—I do maybe think that being free from the discomfort of my genitalia, the feeling like I have something that I want to hide and would need to disclose, put a forcefield around me, such that I wouldn’t be able to register if someone was interested in me. Something about my new configuration, mangled as it may still currently feel, allows me to feel within myself in a way that allows me to conceive of other people finding me attractive, also.

I had times during my recovery where I wouldn’t speak to anyone for a week or two, and I’d be surprised by the sound of my own voice when I finally said something aloud. I had a time early on, before the infections, where I had energy enough to play Final Fantasy VI, read the Nausicaä manga, and compile playlists, before my energy dropped again so that other than maybe 30 - 60 minutes of Thai videos and a 20-minute walk, all I could do was lie in bed. I enjoyed reading Nausicaä and playing Final Fantasy, but these are things I struggle to see myself coming back to now I can get out and about. Spending so much time by myself, I forget myself: I have a hard time imagining or believing my pre-op life, of orienting myself towards what is important and real.

I still grapple with questions of pass-ability. In daily life in Thailand, everyone just treats me as a cis woman, and it takes a weight off, makes life so much easier. But when I walk down one of these areas full of tourists, all these middle-aged white men give me an evil eye, and I can’t tell whether they’re checking me out or clocking me and expressing disdain. This experience makes me glad to be in Thailand, where things are for the most part simpler for me as a trans person, and even when people do clock me, it doesn’t affect how they treat me as much as it would in the US. A lot of my friends here are Thai, and it’s not like they don’t respect the unique challenges trans women face, but as far as how they treat me as a woman, most of them couldn’t give fewer fucks about the fact I am trans.

Anyway, dilation time is almost up. This is probably the last surgery-update essay I’ll do for a while, because meaningful changes will be further apart. Unless or until I have a revision, now all I have to do is heal.

When a friend tells me she is depressed and doesn’t understand why, or she’s depressed even though things seem to be going so well, or she’s depressed when she ought to be grateful, or she’s depressed and feels pathetic for being unable escape it, I’ll sometimes do an inventory with her of all that she’s been up against.

By lately, she might think of the last few days or weeks, and I’ll think of at least the last year. Maybe it’s only been a year since she had a major breakup with someone with whom she had expected to spend her life. From her perspective, the fact this happened a whole year ago may be all the more reason to be past it. But as her friend, I can see how this breakup still reverberates through her present struggles: I remember how she was seeing life before it happened; I saw how much it shook everything she believed about how life is meant to be.

Maybe she faced an even greater loss even further back. Perhaps she lost her father four years ago. Four years, to many people today, can almost seem too great an expanse to hold any serious causal chain. Bad things happen. We feel feelings. We process the events. We move on. This process mirrors how many follow the news cycle: a dramatic turn takes on more significance than the long-term processes in context of which the turn was less a turn than a foreseeable culmination.

Maybe, even at the time, when her father died, she felt nothing. She was glad he was gone. What else was there to feel? But sometimes, the answer to a question like this can take years to appear, because maybe what disturbs her still goes way back before her death.

And then there is her position in the world: the way various intersections of oppression slice through her, not manifest just in the arrangement of her present circumstances but in all the baggage she carries and all the constraints and potential risks she faces, invisible to almost everyone who doesn’t wear the same shoes. There is the isolation she feels when facing, again and again, how poor most are at listening, however desperate they all are to be heard in the same way themselves.

I write all of this as an exercise of sorts, because it would surely make sense for me to look at my own recent period of depression in the same light. Do I need the grace or compassion of another, or can I validate my own realities? Can I make an inventory without feeling like I am indulging in self-pity or rehashing the same old shit? Perhaps this period of depression arose not despite the material comforts that I have recently gained—energy to go out again, an affordable apartment in a quiet neighborhood, and a degree of safety and economic ease that would have been inconceivable to me only a few years ago—but because these comforts finally give me enough space to feel everything else.

And maybe because I spend so much time alone.

After all, my surgery was only four months ago. I had serious complications. A broad spread of my groin region ripped open. I had an infection and two follow-up procedures. I was in bed for almost three months. I am still in a state of mutilation, and my next surgery is only a few months away.

After all, only nine months before the surgery, I gave up a life I’d taken years to build after coming to believe that my position in the US put me at serious risk, and I bore that loss while most people around me denied the risk, rendering my decision as something like a form of lunacy, lost contact with me, or asked me about my ‘adventure in paradise.’

After all, to afford to move to Thailand, I began working at a BDSM dungeon, accumulating hard cash and trauma in equal weight. I crossed a threshold. And not long after I arrived in Bangkok, I did some sex work in Pattaya that fucked with my head, thinking I would at least get paid. I have become accustomed enough to certain forms of trauma that I can barely, at this point, single them out.

After all, a week ago I started doing sex work again. Only this time, I didn’t need to; it just fell into my lap. And I still can’t get my head around the way returning to it fucked me up.

After all, the surgery was my fourth major surgery in two years.

And the second to have major complications.

After all, I only began my transition three years before the surgery and, owing to my skills as a writer, found, within only a year of getting started, people looking to me for guidance before I had time to start figuring things out for myself.

After all, before transition I was in a serious car accident, had a serious concussion, and developed severe gastritis that became my entire life for the six months that followed.

After all, before that, covid hit us all, and just before covid, in 2020, I watched my mother neck some fatal poison for an assisted suicide in Switzerland.

And all of this happened in the period where I could finally say, after moving to California, that my life had taken a turn for the better, because much of what came before all of the above was of far more harrowing stock.

And this period included Earth-shattering breakups and staggering rearrangements of the global order. I lived in four different countries. I lost more than half my friends to transition, such that I now have hardly any contact with anyone I’d known before the age of 33. Many of my close friends could easily, after reading this, tell me of some other thing I forgot to mention. The world kept changing, but not in the way some people like to say, as in simply getting worse and worse. Rather, the waters of catastrophe lapped ever further up the shores of the island of which I had been lucky enough to think a sanctuary. Sometimes, when people say the world has gotten so much worse, they may be saying something true, but what they are also describing is a loss of privilege: they have less shelter, now, from the catastrophe that had been unfolding all along, in the grip of which so many millions are born.

It was in 2019 that I made my first serious attempt to transition.

I am 38.

And here I am, grateful as fuck for how blessed is my current lot but being hard on myself for not being even more so. I am depressed, and I also fucking can’t with just how much I love my life. I hear others tell me how they’re jealous of this or that thing that I have and, having not always had many of these things myself, I understand full well their jealousy. Days I feel like one of the luckiest people who ever lived. Days I feel I can hardly go on. Sometimes the same day.

If I can be this depressed, I must be safe. I call it my luxurious depression.

I cannot speak about many things. Some things I am too ashamed to share. Others I can’t find a way to express or can’t imagine that others will understand. The greatest blessing in my life is what I get to witness. I am intimate with worlds that some might hardly believe exist.

We may not always understand the things that others carry, but we can know that others carry burdens of equal or greater weight. It’s a cosmic horror I take a perverse comfort in, to wish no one had to go through any of this, but to know at least I’m not alone.

And my mantra, when I’m depressed: It’s the size of the mountain, not my skills as a climber.

And the silver-lining of hard times: the worse it gets, the lower the threshold for better becomes.

This will be the last entry of my post-op diary. In one week, almost six months out from my initial sexual reassignment surgery, I will get a revision surgery with a different surgeon. My original surgeon has been coy about what complications had occurred, claiming, at times, that there was just a bit of excess swelling and wound separation. This is not so: The urethra is on the side. The opening is around 3cm wide. The ridge that goes between the anus and vagina is inside the vagina and still has some hair. One side of the inner labia is almost the size of a golf ball. The inner labia hangs above the mouth. A lot of erectile tissue remains above the hood, meaning that my vagina currently gives a significantly bigger bulge than a tuck. Because my original surgeon tells me that this is just a bit of excess selling and wound separation, I cannot trust him to fix it.

The surgeon I am seeing next week has a stellar reputation. He sees my vagina as an especially challenging case. He thinks that, if the surgery goes well, he will be able to get it 80% towards his ideal, so I have a cap on my expectations even in the best-case scenario. The erectile tissue is hard to remove, because critical nerves swarm the area, and it would be easy to permanently kill sensation; I think he will er on the side of leaving it still a little large rather than risk damaging the nerves. To fix the opening, he will bring the inner labia a little lower than is usual. He’ll smooth out the ridge at the entrance and hide the hairy area behind the inner labia. He’ll also make the inner labia more symmetrical and move the urethra to the center. He had some other complaint about the way my original surgeon did the urethra, something to do with leaving too much of my original shaft behind it, but I wasn’t clear on whether he can or will fix it. I’ll ask him in my pre-op on the 25^th.

After the surgery, I will wear a catheter for five days. I will stay at least one night in hospital. The initial swelling will mean I won’t be able to tell for a while how successful the surgery has been. Wound separation may occur again—this is, in part, because I have asked him to connect the inner labia at the bottom—although it is not likely to be as severe as last time. A new scar will run from the mouth of the vagina down one side of my thigh. The so-called ‘scarless technique’ that my previous surgeon boasted of means I have a strange scar lines going through the inner labia—which the new surgeon will open to get access to the erectile tissue—but I don’t have the usual scars that go either side of the thigh. I imagine dilation in the early weeks of recovery will be challenging, and I will have to take care not to rip any of the new parts.

The surgery was going to be on 14 June, but the surgeon couldn’t book his usual operating room on that day. I learned only a few days ago that this new date, just a week away, was now my only option if I want to get the surgery in time for my insurance to cover it. I had been planning to do more work on my manuscript, and since getting the news on the surgery date, my mind has halted all work on that, since it is not something that I can rush. Instead, I’m trying to get it in a readable-enough form that I can look at what needs removing and what will need filling in; I want to test whether these diary-like dispatches have a place within it. I can get impatient and anxious when I know people are reading my longer-form work, so the fact I will be recovering from surgery will be a good distraction.

I anticipate the surgery with a mix of dread and excitement. Dread, for obvious reasons. I’ve been mostly repressing how intense some of the last recovery was. I will again be under general anesthetic for a long time. I know how badly my body reacts to it. The day and night after a major surgery is always a nightmare of nausea. Wearing the catheter will be unpleasant. All sorts of unexpected issues will arise, especially given that my body is prone to unusual scarring and wound separation. I am prone to post-op depression, largely, I think due to the anesthesia. Psychologically, surgery is always liable to take me to strange places. I do not know how good the results can be, and I cannot even be sure that this will be the final surgery.

The excitement is in the hope that it will be the final surgery and the results will be good enough that I can feel a little more comfortable in my body. It is my fifth major surgery in two and a half years. I also moved country in that time. I’m tired. I have been living these past three years always with a limited horizon, knowing that whatever I do, a major surgery will soon enough interrupt it and keep me in bed for one or more months. The third surgery was also a revision surgery, and the surgeon assured me that I wouldn’t be out of action for more than three weeks. My new surgeon has said the same for next week’s surgery. Alas, the last surgery knocked me back for almost two months, so I will prepare for the worst and hope for the best with this one.

Knowing this might be the final major transition surgery—having electrolysis as the only remaining disruptive medical-transition activity—I feel like a door is opening a crack, like maybe I can take up a new hobby, put more effort into developing friendships, try and date in earnest, and go to town on the book. Maybe I can start acting a little more in the world, rather than just writing in the day and hiding in my apartment every evening doing little. I know better than to assume everything will go perfectly. At the same time, when the surgery date came forward, I noticed the depression I have been living with in recent months start to soften. I haven’t had energy to do anything, because I haven’t had the motivation to do anything, and I remain hopeful that, with this surgery behind me, I will find more motivation and energy to start building a life, as cynical and exhausted as living in this world as a trans woman and a lesbian sometimes makes me, as difficult as I find it to find spaces, even in a relatively welcoming Thailand, in which I can feel safe.

On Sunday, I am doing a shibari shoot in an onsen-style bath. I like the photographer and the rigger (I have a mini crush, to be honest), and I think the results will help remind me, when I am stuck in bed, of the fun to be had ahead. It will be nice to push my body one last time before the hiatus. I heard a rumor that the local lesbian bar now has a pool table, so perhaps I will start playing pool and keep playing until my future wife turns up to challenge me (I’m not good at pool). I have told some friends that I’m getting the surgery, so I will hopefully have enough visits to get me through.

My building charges double the government rate for electricity, meaning that the cost of air conditioning is extortionate. I try to use a fan as much as possible, but for this month, I’m just going to have to bite the bullet. Thailand is hot. Usually, I don’t mind it; I spent my early childhood in a similar climate, in Singapore. Living here, I think about those days more than usual, and I wonder sometimes if those formative experiences built in me a greater tolerance for this climate, because I don’t seem to complain about the weather as much as I most, and I usually take any opportunity to complain. The woman who asked if her pee tasted of coconut asked if I wanted to go to the beach with her. I said it will have to wait until I’ve recovered from the surgery. I’ve been here for more than a year, and I still haven’t been to the beach. It almost feels like I’m avoiding something.

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