Hello, Jennifer. I have a question I'm a little embarassed to ask. First of all, I'm a biological male...I've always known that I was supposed to be a female, even before I heard of the term "transsexual". Probably even before I could walk. When I hit puberty, I discovered masturbation. And to this day, I find myself masturbating constantly! At least 3 or 4 times a day. Most of my fantasies involve being a woman. My problem is this...do other TS's masturbate? If I don't like my penis, then why do I need to stimulate it? I've heard of a recently discovered diagnosis of transsexualtiy that involves biological males being "sexually attracted" to being women...like its a fantasy only. But my desires to be female are not just sexual fantasies. They carry with me into social situations, my career, and my need to be maternal. I've also heard that hormone replacement therapy will kill a male sex drive (i hope) and end the confusion. But my problem lies with the masturbation itself. It causes me great guilt and confusion...since I prefer masturbating instead of actual intercourse with a woman. It makes me feel like some kind of beast.

I was that beast too. It was horrible.

All transsexuals masturbate, just as all human beings do, whether they lie about it or not. The reason is simple; it's biology. People pee, people make poo-poo, people flog the dolphin, beat the bishop, spank the monkey, whack the mole, tickle the boy in the boat, stuff the clam, pet the squirrel, buff the muff, choke the chicken, stretch the electric eel, Go Spelunking for Hidden Pleasure, visit mother thumb and her four daughters, participate in Onan's Olympics, practice the Lonely Art, slake the bacon, perform one-stick drum improvisation, Meet Miss Fist, bob, claw, Friggle and doodle-dash (all from the 1800's), jerk the juice and toss (1700's), bring up by hand and box the Jesuit (1600's), pump off, work off, and pump jelly (1500's). It is simply Nature, and is not the province of humans alone...all primates spank the monkey, and even dolphins tease the oyster. Constantly, just like primates.

Hormones are powerful stuff. They create drives not only primal, but desperately controlling. The influence of testosterone, which in both males and females is the hormone responsible for the sex drive (yes, females have testosterone too, produced by the adrenal glands over the kidneys), can be so intense that it can lead to dangerous behavior. Much violence is caused by frustrated sex drives, and many violent sex offenders (all of whom, throughout history, are male by the way...testosterone to excess) have begged to be castrated, because they felt themselves to be out of control, and had no wish to act as they did.

Our species, originally and still a brutal hunter-gatherer species prone to violence and rape, struggles with our basic biological drives. Nature does not care if we find them distasteful, Nature has no delicacy, no prudishness, no morals, no kindness. Nature mechanically functions to achieve survival, and our feelings do not enter into that one tiny bit.

We masturbate, as transsexuals, using even the very organs we loath, because we must. Because hormones drive us, and affect out behavior, because the pressure is too much, because the frustration overcomes our repugnance, because the Pavlovian reward of the pleasure and release has been evolved to induce repetition of the behavior Nature has decreed. So, like some experiment on rats, Nature punishes us with frustration and rewards us with pleasure, and the only curious element to all of this, is that we humans actually presume to imagine that we are somehow above such conditioning...that we are somehow not 'really' just hairless primate animals after all.

Sorry, friends, but our massive brains does not set us above the apes by much, and we are still animals after all. They choke the chicken several times a day, and so do we. Nature wants it, Nature demands it, Nature Will Not Be Denied.

That is why, in answer to your question, that you masturbate, even though you dislike it. I once rubbed myself raw...bleeding raw, driven by demonic hormones that ruled my life. It was awful, it was insulting to my identity, it made me feel lost and horrible, but I was a slave to hormonal mastery.

Then came transition, and with it, a severe reduction in testosterone. Now, post-surgically, my only testosterone comes from my adrenal glands, and -to be honest- I have very little sex drive anymore. I masturbate maybe six times a year. I am a bit of a disappointment to my spouses, who love me a lot, and want...more of me than they get. It's just that, well, after years of all that, I am a bit unhappy with sexuality overall. It was like a monster, and it scared me. It disturbed me, trapped as I was in the wrong body. I feel more comfortable being mostly asexual. It also is less messy and icky, too.

There is an illusion that Real Transsexuals are not supposed to be sexual. It is nonsense. Indeed, some would hold that the Real Transsexual is seperated from the transvestite purely by virtue of the idea that the Real Transsexual has no sexual connection to their gender dysphoria, and would never be caught in front of a mirror pawing themselves. This foolishness has led to such utterly insane contrivances as 'autogynophila', the contention that many transsexuals are simply hyper-super-transvestites (in effect) wearing female bodies as an ordinary tranvestite excites themselves by dressing up. This kind of ignorant and pernicious nonsense is what comes from ignoring the fact that hormones are real, and that people are people first and formost.

Real Transsexuals, once they hit puberty, can get just as excited as any growling, pinafore-clad transvestite, over their own image in the mirror, and still be Real Transsexuals. This is because nontranssexual women and men can just as easily get excited over themselves, or over their fantasies, and transsexuals are still just folks despite having a birth defect. The difference between the transvestite and the transsexual has nothing to do with sex at all. It has to do with gender, which is to say internal identity, a very different thing. But both may still, in puberty, slap the salmon while dressed up, or engaging in fantasy, simply because the hormones drive the animal that we are.

In the end, though, whilst the transvestite, clothed in mock femininity, kinkily continues to pummel the priest like a monkey on crack, the transsexual transforms into actuality the person that they truly are, solving a dilemma not of sex, but of identity. Then, when all is done, with a much lowered sex drive (in the case of the MTF, quite the reverse for the FTM!), the post-operative transsexual woman may yet occasionally be found, with a finger in her pie.

In short, don't fret it. It's normal, even if folks don't like to talk about it much. Things will get better, and that drive will reduce to something much more acceptable after transition.
 

I've been taking hormones, by my self, for about 4 months now. (I'm 20)  but have contacted the Gender Team here, and they know about it.  My therapist wasn't too bothered with it.  I was extremely happy with the changes that had occured so far,  and everything felt warm and pink. But since I got to have a gay friend, online, and started reading gay community pages, help pages, and such things, I've started to doubt, whether or not I should continue this. It has blown away my selfconfidence, just like someone slapped me in the face. It's so strange, because I scored 515 with your cogiati test, and I seem to perfectly fit the class 5 TS, I also showed a great deal of Gender Dysphoria in my early years. My main fear is that I'll feel guilty, 'artificial', especially after SRS. also the idea that I'll be with straight men, scares me. (I'm gay now). I don't know what they're about, and all of them might feel uneasy with the fact that I have been a guy, so therefore I might never be happy in relationships.

I'm also attracted to the 'down to earth' kind of feeling that these pages gave me, that there are so many people just like me out there(gays). I got the feeling that there's a place for me in that community, and that it's okay being gay. I'll simply be me, no strings attached. no skeletons in my closet. But if I would, stop the transformation, I'll lead a gay lifestyle, and probably only be active in the gay community since I can't pass for a straight guy.

The thing that scared me most was that it felt like a liberation, when I though about the fact that I might live as a gay guy for the rest of my life, because then I wouldn't have to deal with all these fears that I might have afterwards. (after transitioning), and be unhappy with myself for the rest of my life.(I do pass for a girl) Although I know that this path is right for me, because I'm not a guy at all. it's the fear that I'll never have a partner that will accept me a 100%, and the fear carrying a huge secret with me for the rest of my life, that my 'pureness' will be gone.  It's the same kind of liberation I felt when I started the process of changing sex.  But at the same time I'm very afraid that I'll loose my hair, that my hands might become bigger and boney, that my voice will drop further.

Here is the deal, simple and pure: the only...the ONLY...reason to go through transition is because you are unhappy with your body, and with the way you exist in the world, as a male, or as a female. That's IT. No other reason is valid...and the issue of your body is number one, even then.

There are no guarantees in the world. There is no guarantee you will ever find anyone being gay, straight, bi, trans, whatever. Everyone deals with this uncertainty. But if you do find someone who loves you, no matter what you are, they will -simply- love you. That is the point. Being 'pure' does not exist. All there is in this world is what works and what does not. Everything else is arbitrary.

The only thing that you need to decide is exactly who, and what you are, independent of the rest of the world. You need to know who and what you are inside. What community you belong to is not the issue. What you are considered to 'be' or 'not be' is not the issue. You already identify as Queer. Be you just Queer, or GenderQueer, you are still rare, still a 'freak' with regard to the majority of society, and outcast to most of the 'straight' world. Getting a change of sex will not save you from guilt or worry, or make you fit in anywhere you would not fit in being gay, or anything else Queer. If you are transitioning because of shame about being gay, you are doing it for the wrong reasons, and if you are NOT transitioning because you are fussing over what other people will think of you, because you think just being 'gay' is somehow nicer or easier, then you are also not acting correctly.

No matter what, you are different. Deal with it. Even if you passed so perfectly as a woman that even doctors would never suspect you, you will still know inside your own difference, and feel accordingly alienated. Guilt, shame, 'pureness' are all Other People's Problems. They are all indoctrinated crap you have been forcefed, and they are not useful.

What is useful is knowing who and what you are, what you really need to be happy, or at the very least to avoid misery, and then doing what YOU need, and to hell with opinion. You need to live your life for yourself.

And as for choosing to transition or not...you had better make sure you are doing it for the right reasons...because there is no reversing the process, once you have surgery. To put it bluntly, if you like your penis at all, you have no business having reassignment surgery. However, if you know that you should have a vagina, should be female, then that...and ONLY that...should motivate transition.

No person accepts ANY person 100%. Everyone in the world always has mixed and complex feeling about everything, and everyone. No person is ever any one 'pure' thing, not male, not female, not anything. Life is much richer and complicated than that.

The only sane thing for you to do, for any person to do, is to be yourself. Be who YOU are, not what you wish you were, not what seems cool, not what others want, not what seems to be more popular. Be you, your way, and make it work.

Anything else leads to eventual tragedy. Figure out what you actually need, and do it. Screw labels and definitions, communities and clubs, groups and societies, fussing over whether you should be 'gay' or 'trans' or whatever.

Just do and be, what you actually are inside. If you try to be anything you are not, you will end up empty.

Make your life, your own. Relationships and acceptance are not part of this. They come as they come...but I will tell you this: experience has taught me that when a person acts from their truest part, from their self, with a full heart, not trying to 'be' anything other than themselves, they almost always become attractive to people. If you seek any 'pureness'  in life, it can only come from this.

What could be more 'pure' than being your unaffected self?

Be you, your way.
 

Can a man stay male and have sex-change surgery?

Only if they are a Female-To-Male transsexual. Then, despite being born with a female body, the man inside that female body can have surgery and still stay a man, because the person inside never changes. The person inside is always what they are. Only the body can be changed.

Now I am not stupid, I think I know what you are really trying to ask, but the way you ask it shows ignorance and total contempt. You need to understand something very, very clearly.

Transsexuality is a congenital birth defect. Some people are born outwardly one sex, but their brains, the part that thinks, feels, and knows who they are, is the opposite sex. This mistake occurs before they are born.

As they grow up, they feel horrible, because their body is wrong. So if such a person goes through surgery, they are not changing in any way...only their body is being changed. The body is like a suit of clothing...and it is being retailored, remade. The person inside that body has never changed, and the brain is still what it was at birth.

That means that a Male-To-Female transsexual really, actually IS a woman, only she has a body that is deformed. When that is corrected, she is normal, or as normal as medicine can currently do.

No men change into women, and no women change into men. That is bullshit. There are men and women born with screwed up bodies, and they get them fixed. That is what transsexuality is all about. If you can grasp that, really understand that, you would never have asked the question you did, the way you did. It would make no sense at all.

Understand?
 
 

Hi. My boyfriend came to me yesterday and told me about his ftm surgery. He was really nervouse and scared the whole time he told me. He really didn't say much, but gave me some websites to look at and told me to take note of what theis is and get back to him. (he let town for a week) I have taken the time to go over a few websites, including yours. I know that i will still be with my boyfrined, i am not going to leave him because of this. I love him. But I would still like to have a better insight on this. here are my questions

1.) since he is ftm, was he actually born with the "womens equipment" and had
that until the surgery?

FTM transsexuals are the mirror image of MTF transsexuals, and vice versa. The same causes, the same basic problem.

A transsexual is a person who was born with a congenital birth defect. The brain has a sex just as does the body, and this sex is determined in the womb. In animals, including humans, birth defects happen, and one of these possible birth defects is to be born with an otherwise entirely normal body of one sex, and an otherwise entirely normal brain of the opposite sex. This is transsexuality.

So, yes, unless there were also some (very rare) genetic complications as well, your boyfriend suffered through having to cope with a fully female body in his youth....just as I suffered a male one in mine. That means that all his 'equipment', as you put it, his sexual organs, internal and external, were female. The brain however, was male, and to understand this, simply imagine any male you have ever known...father, brother, old boyfriend, whatever, suddenly stuck in a girls body. Imagine what that would be like for them. That is what it was like, more or less, for your FTM boyfriend. Pretty hideous.

2.) As a man is sexual activity performed properly?

That depends on the current state of surgery, and on just how much your boyfriend had done.

Even though the basic problem for the MTF and FTM transsexual is the same -wrong body- the path to correcting this problem is different. It is easy to encourage nature to grow immature organs...so it is easy to encourage nature to grow breasts on the MTF transsexual, because all bodies have breasts. In male bodies, the breasts are simply undeveloped.

However, all babies start out proto-female. Kind of 'almost female'. That is the stock human form. At some point the growing fetus  -if it is destined to become male- will start to alter. The proto ovaries drop down and become testes, the labia seal shut forming the scrotum, and the clitoris grows and seals around the urethra to form the penis. That makes a lot of skin to work with, for the MTF transsexual. It is more easily reversible, because there is a lot of skin, and because the stock human form is female.

Being male is a mutation, in effect. So the FTM transsexual, like your boyfriend, must endure a lot more. Of course breasts must be removed, as in any man with gynocomastia -enlarged breasts- but building a working penis is incredibly difficult. Surgery for the FTM transsexual is not quite as good as for the MTF transsexual, and it is very, very brutal. Sometimes many, many separate operations, over many years must be done. It is incredibly painful, expensive, and difficult.

Some FTM transsexual men simply forgo surgery altogether...it is just to horrible to face. I cannot blame them. It is. However, in the best circumstances, the FTM transsexual can function more or less normally, with regard to sex...however, they cannot impregnate anyone. Transsexuals cannot reproduce after surgery.
 
 
3.) My boyfriend has a scar across his chest. Is that scar from the surgery?

Yes. Some nontranssexual men will have that too, because of a condition I have mentioned...gynocomastia. Gynocomastia is caused by hormonal imbalances, and cause nontranssexual men to sometimes grow breasts. They have them removed, because it is very embarrassing -and reasonably disturbing- for a man to have breasts. FTM transsexuals have to deal with this too.

4.) He also says that he cannot have kids and is affraid i will leave him becasue of that. That i will never do. Is it really true. I mean, is he able to produce any sperm at all? Would i be able to be artificially inseminated by him? Or are there any other kind of medical way that i would be able to have his child?

Because your boyfriend's proto-ovaries, and later ovaries, never were altered in the womb to become testicles, the only solution is to have them removed. Since ovaries and testicles are where eggs and sperm come from, you boyfriend cannot produce sperm, ever. There is currently no way to take genetic material and create artificial sperm, though I do believe this will be possible within the next 25 years. This does not help your situation, of course.

One of the things all transsexuals feel bad about, to some degree, is that the ability to reproduce normally is not an option for them, that it has simply been taken away by their situation. Even if they never intend to have a child, the knowledge that a mistake of nature screwed them over can haunt them, and make them feel very bad sometimes. It can make them feel inadequate, or even feel like a freak. Of course, sterile nontranssexual people sometimes feel this too. It's human.

You cannot have his child, but there are other options. You could adopt, of course, or you could go to a sperm bank, or ask a friend to donate sperm. If you want a child, you can always have a child. There are a lot of ways for that...you just cannot make a baby with him specifically. Sorry.

5.) As an ftm, as the surgery is being performed are the male organs fake or are they real?

Yes, and no.
I am not being goofy here. It is one of those questions that is difficult to answer, and depend on what is important to you.

You see, all sex organs are what is called 'homologinous'. This means that they are all made of the same stuff, just shaped differently. As I have said, before birth, before a baby is fully formed, all humans are proto-female...a kind of state that is mostly female, but also kind of neuter. They have labia, they have proto-ovaries that sit up inside the body, and they look mostly female by far. Then, during development, the baby changes from this stock form into a full female...not much change....or into a boy...a little more change. To become a boy, the baby has the proto-ovaries drop down into a sack formed by the labia sealing together. This forms testicles in a scrotal sack. However, the testicles could just as easily have become ovaries...and the scrotum is just a pair of labia fused together to make a sack.

The material is the same. It is the same cells, the same stuff. Your clitoris is just a penis that never grew, or, just as true, a penis is a clitoris that grew way, way huge. It is the same thing, the same stuff.

When a transsexual has surgery, doctors basically rearrange the flesh. They work with what they have already there. So, when I started on hormones, I grew breasts just like any girl, because the hormones made them grow. In my surgery, the surgeon used my scrotal tissue and carved and sewed it back into labia again.

FTM surgery is like that. The labia is sewed together to make a scrotum, like should have happened in the womb, but did not. The breasts, which have grown too big, are removed, so they are not a problem anymore.

So, what is real? What is fake? The skin is the same stuff, and in males and females, it is just differently arranged. Sometimes some stuff cannot be made, and some stuff has to be thrown away, because our technology is still not a great as our dreams. It's not perfect, but it is the best we can currently do.

I look at it this way.... imagine if a person was in a war, and had their genitals and legs, and chest skin blown off, up, and all over the place, yet they survived. What are they now? They have no physical sex, and it would be hard to tell whether they had been male, or they had been female wouldn't it? You would have to wait until they woke up, and ask them.

That is the point...the body is a carriage. We ride in it, but the person inside is the owner, the driver, the point of even having the carriage at all. Only the brain is ever 'really' male or female, because that is where sexual identity exists. The body could be anything, but it is the person inside the body that knows what they are. The body is just so much meat.

So, it depends on what you think is the important bit. If you think the meat is important, and the person in the meat is not, then the answer is that your boyfriend, and I, are somewhat, but not entirely (because the skin is the same, remember!) "fake".

On the other hand, if you think that the person inside the meat is the point of it all, then we transsexuals are as real as you are.

That is why I said 'yes, and no' back there. Some people do think that the meat is everything, and that people do not matter.
I am not one of them. I think people are the important part.

You will have to ask yourself what you think is important, and answer the question of 'real' or 'fake' based on that.

In any event, the meat that makes up your boyfriend's brain is actually, really "male", if that matters. You cannot see that meat, but it is in there, and it is "real".