by Holly Lorka
While I appreciate the gesture, Gillette, I can’t claim that as my entire truth. Here’s the thing: while I’m not exactly a female, I’m not exactly a male either. I’m more of a hybrid, I guess. Now that I’ve had time to live in this body, I don’t feel like it’s so black and white, and I’m not as mad about it as I was when I was young. I’ve somehow figured out how to celebrate both sides. Except I never celebrate my period, because that’s just dumb and I’m still kind of pissy at God about it. I wear men’s jeans because they fit better; I wear women’s sports bras because they fit better. Sometimes I wear my big black penis in bed; sometimes I leave it under the bed and take it like a girl. And I still, constantly, have hot dreams about blow jobs.
I hate having to check the gender box on forms. First, why is gender so important? And second, why can’t they have more than two boxes? Like ones that say Other, or Undecided, or That’s a long story, or What does it matter, or None of your business, asshole, or maybe Seahorse? (Look up the sex lives of seahorses. That shit is interesting.) The thing is, I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m amazing.
A friend told me a story. She said that when her aunt died, her family gathered around her and told her to go to heaven to get her crown. As she was dying, she started patting her head and smiling. I hope when I’m about to die, my family gathers around me and tells me to go to heaven to get my penis. I’ll pat my crotch and smile, knowing that God will have one for me, and it’ll be big and black, because maybe he doesn’t hate me after all.
the man, the myth, the legend
I went to nursing school on a whim. I never once in my life thought I wanted to be a nurse, but I had a freak-out moment in college where I needed to make a decision and the nursing building was pretty close to the lot where my parking permit was valid. I told myself when I graduated that I’d give myself five years before doing something else. I’ve since learned that no other job comes with four days off a week and the ability to wear pajamas to work. As a result, I’ve stayed in it for twenty-plus years.
If you read these stories in order, you know that I also moved to Texas on a whim. I found my way to a job at a very small hospital because my staffing company said they needed help one Sunday and I wasn’t doing anything else. When I pulled into the parking lot, a deer galloped across the cobblestones in front of me. When I got out of my car, I heard dance music lilting out of speakers hung in the beautiful oak trees on the campus. What the fuck kind of hospital was this, with its wildlife and good taste in music? It turns out it’s a cool-as-shit one full of beautiful weirdos. That’s right, I fit right in. So I stayed.
This hospital is full of patients, sure. But it’s also full of fun and dancing. We keep one of those counter bells by the charge nurse, and if you make a particularly sick burn, you get to slap the bell and then someone down the hall will yell, “Order up!” There is constant giggling, especially on Fridays when we hold afternoon dance parties in the social work office and get down to Justin Timberlake or Prince. We would all be fired immediately in a normal hospital, but here we are celebrated, especially if one of us trips while holding a tray of food or walks in on someone who forgot to lock the bathroom door. That’s a pretty big celebration.
We also do a great job of taking care of patients, probably because we’re all so damned happy most of the time. My specialty was recovering people in the ICU after open-heart surgery. My favorite part about it was that most people did well. They came in, had their surgery, ate pain pills and green Jell-O, got out of bed, walked, laughed at my stupid jokes or when they heard someone yell, “Order up!” and went home with a pillow shaped like a heart. I made my patients all come back on their one-year anniversaries to show me their scars and update me on how they were. My favorite thing to say was, “I almost didn’t recognize you with pants on.” Clearly, I had found my niche.
After I worked there for five years, the hospital had to eliminate the heart program because it was too small and they couldn’t afford to keep it going any longer. I had to decide between going to work for another hospital and staying where I was and never recovering heart patients again. I certainly wasn’t going to abandon my counter bell and my Friday Prince dance parties; I love to dance and my jokes need to come out. I decided to stay and figured I could try to find other ways to be happy there, even while just changing knee dressings or walking grandmas with pneumonia to the bathroom twenty-seven times a day, reminding them each time not to grab me with used Kleenex in their hands. Grandmas really like their Kleenex.
Then, something spectacular happened. My boss called me into her office and told me that we were getting a new service line in the coming year that I would probably be excited about. That service line was phalloplasties, which, if you google like I had to, is creating a phallus from a flap of skin taken from another part of the body. Or, if you need it in my type of English, it’s the bottom part of female-to-male surgery where they build a dick that has feeling where there previously was no dick. So, basically, what I’d wanted for myself for my entire life. Right there in my tiny weirdo hospital in Texas. Where I had no business being. A world-renowned gender reassignment surgeon from San Francisco was putting a team together to operate in Austin, and right in my lap is where they somehow ended up. Like all the whims had planned this the entire time.
I had to google it because I am the worst wannabe-man on the planet and had no idea this was even possible. I’d talked to some of my friends who also wanted dicks about what our options were, and we all thought our only choice would be to take hormones and get what we already had to grow into something that looked more like a thumb than a dick and try to be happy with that. But none of us wanted another thumb. We wanted something that looked real and worked, or else forget it. We were proud girl/boys, all of us, and we didn’t want our dicks to be tiny. We had no idea that this whole other thing was happening.
I went home the night I found out, sat on my porch, and told my girlfriend about what was coming. I was stunned and still in disbelief while the birds chirped on like it was just another day in the middle of Texas. My girlfriend looked at me and said, “I can’t believe how lucky you are. Everything just works out for you.” She obviously hasn’t read any of my stories, but I understood what she meant. The serendipity was just a little overwhelming.
The next months flew by in a flurry of Google searches, blog views, and in-service trainings about female-to-male transitions and hormones and using proper pronouns and what it would look like and feel like and how it would feel that way. It wasn’t just me doing all of this searching; it was lots of folks at the hospital who probably hadn’t even thought much about this stuff before. Now we were all looking at dick pics on a daily basis. The search histories of our work computers must have been a nightmare for the IT and HR departments. I had never been more proud of us.
The day the surgeon flew in to give us his official presentation on what he planned to do, I sat in the audience with my mouth open, mind blown. Here is an explanation of the procedure:
The team takes a flap of tissue from one’s nondominant forearm and removes it most of the way. It has blood vessels and some very sensitive forearm nerves in it.
While it is still attached on one end, they roll it up, leaving a hollow channel in the middle that will become the new urethra.
Then, while it’s still on the forearm, they make it look real, by doing some magical penis origami shit.
While this is being done, the labia are turned inside out to make little scrotum, and the clitoral nerve is exposed. That’s the important part. The arm dick is then carefully transplanted to where a dick should actually be, and the sensitive forearm nerves are connected to the clitoral nerve.
In about nine months, everything heals together, including all those important nerves. This allows for erotic feeling the length of the new dick. I told you this shit was cool. Add a boner implant and ta da! Yes, the new dick does everything a dick should do, except ejaculate, which is the gross part anyway.
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nbsp; Here was a medical professional finally recognizing and acknowledging that what I had was a medical diagnosis. Gender dysphoria was an actual thing that was serious enough that people like him had engineered incredibly complicated surgeries to remedy it. Even after spending so much time living with how I was and accepting that this happened, this moment was a big and validating one. I hugged the shit out of that doctor. Then I introduced myself. Not everyone at the hospital knows that I’m in the wrong body. Many just think I’m a silly dyke with a good haircut and a coffee cup that says, “STEVE: The Man, The Myth, The Legend.” But my friends there who do know were happy for me and started asking me if I was going to have the surgery.
Was I going to have the surgery? I hadn’t even known that it was an option. I just figured I had to tough life out with my cute little vagina. But now here we were making dicks!
As an ICU nurse, it was my job to inspect the new “flaps” (medical term for newly made penis) every hour. I had to listen for pulses and assess color and turgor (firmness) to make sure they were maintaining adequate circulation, which means I had to listen to, squeeze, and boop dicks almost constantly. In one month I’d gained exponentially more intimate exposure to dick than in my previous entire life. I had never actually listened to one before.
I got to say things like, “Congratulations! Want to measure it?” (always met with a giant yes). And, “Your balls look great!” because I am very professional. I was so pleased that we were doing this for people, and I couldn’t help but be excited for them to finally get what they wanted their whole lives. There were many high fives and dick selfies and talks about underwear. I had never met this many people like me before, and I was absolutely reveling in it in between all the dick-booping.
But after the pressure and intensity of the new program settled, I noticed that I was having feelings that were not just happiness and excitement. I noticed that I was feeling jealous. At first, it was just jealousy of how good these guys looked with their top surgeries. All people like me will tell you that while not having a dick is really bad, having boobs is publicly humiliating. Boobs embody everything in our society that is feminine and sexy, and the last thing a dude like me wants is to feel boob-sexy and feminine. One of my greatest desires is to be able to wear a white T-shirt with nothing under it. My boobs keep me from that because they are really nice and perky, and extra humiliating.
I soon started feeling jealous about the whole thing. These guys had the opportunity to overthrow what biology had done to them, and they were brave enough to grab it. They took hormones, changed their names, came out to their families, changed their driver’s licenses, grew facial hair, had top surgery, and then underwent an eight-hour surgery to complete themselves and make their outside match their inside. Meanwhile, here I was, busting my ass to take care of them in a room turned up to eighty degrees, and I hadn’t even paid myself the respect to consider doing the same for myself, this thing that I’d wanted my whole life. How could I not consider it when it was literally staring me in the face for twelve hours a day?
Which brings us to what I’ll now call “The Dark Week,” where I became very dramatic and called my friends to each come over and sit on my porch while I cried about how conflicted I was and how terrible it was to be like me. I called my girlfriend who was out of town on business to ask her if she’d still love me if I changed my body, my voice, and potentially became a bald and pimply Steve, as hormones do all kinds of crazy things. I even called the producer of the show I was supposed to be writing a piece for about the sexualization of nurses but couldn’t manage to do, because the only thing I could write about nurses was also about dicks and not having one. It really was a dark week, especially for my porch friends.
To answer my question, my girlfriend assured drama queen Steve that yes, even though she would miss my perky amazing boobs, she would love me no matter what, unless I kept being so fucking dramatic. So I stopped being dramatic and just tried to think about what I wanted instead of how cruel God was to me and how terrible my struggle was. This is where I was now. Did I want to transition? Did I just want top surgery? Did I want to take hormones or officially change my name to Steve? Did I want the dick that I’d been dreaming about my entire life, except it wouldn’t be black like my favorite strap-on and would unfortunately have the word “Dad” written on it thanks to a poorly timed forearm tribute tattoo?
The answer settled on me quietly like snow. The answer was no, I didn’t want to change at all. None of it. Maybe if I was twenty or even thirty, the answer might be different. But I’m forty-seven, and that’s a long time to have lived with myself. It’s not that I’m too old to do it. Some of our patients are over fifty and they have no qualms about charging ahead with the whole thing. And I mean no disrespect to my brothers and sisters who decide to fully transition. It’s a deeply personal decision that we all have to make for ourselves. It’s just that I’ve spent my whole life becoming who I am. I’ve grown up with this struggle, and it has shaped just about every area of my life. Now it’s part of my identity to be a tall, gender-dysphoric, handsome girl with a decent sense of style, a better sense of humor, and the nickname Steve. I’ve grown comfortable here in the middle. Sure, I wish it had been different, that I’d been born in the correct body, that I had a dick that wasn’t imaginary, that I could have sex the way I do in my dreams. But then it would be different. Everything would be different. Maybe I’d be just an average-height guy who was going bald and wasn’t funny and didn’t have any good stories to tell. Ick. For me, that’s even worse than no dick.
Now I’m back to celebrating surgeries with the patients that have them and feeling proud that I somehow landed in this ironically magical place at the right time to be able to help people with a condition that I understand. We can laugh and share horror stories and marvel at how quickly the world is changing. I have the privilege of being a part of their journey, and that makes me very happy. I can tell them all to come back and visit me, but that I probably won’t recognize them with their pants on. I also get to tell them to text me when they get their first blow job that they can feel, because, as I told you, I am a professional.
I went back to visit my hometown and hung out with some friends I’d known since grade school. We were drinking on a porch, having non-dramatic time, and we all took little Internet tests to determine what animals we are. The Internet told me I am a butterfly. My friends, who had known me for so long and had seen me go through so much, all agreed that I was indeed a butterfly. So now I have a question: Is a caterpillar something that has to change to become a butterfly? Or is a caterpillar always a butterfly that just hasn’t grown into it yet? Because caterpillar I certainly was: kind of green and pudgy, ambling around slowly, trying to not get smushed or eaten. But now I’m a goddamned butterfly, and I didn’t have to change. I just had to grow into it.
loose change
Thirty-seven cents. One quarter, a dime, and two pennies. Loose change. What you might get back if you pay cash for a tallboy at the convenience store, or I don’t know, a tube of lipstick. Some coins that you drop into your right front pocket and walk around with. You might hear them jingle occasionally or feel them with your hand when you stick it in there, but mostly they’re nothing to you, until you take off your pants at night and go to hang them up and the coins fall all over your closet floor. Then you kick them into the corner because you never pick shit up, and your sweet girlfriend picks them up and puts them somewhere.
Thirty-seven cents represents the hatred I’ve felt about my body my entire life. Just this thing I carried around in my pocket and would think about only occasionally. Like, if I needed to put on a bathing suit, or had to get a mammogram, or if I tried to buy the shirts I actually wanted at Nordstrom. That’s when it would flare up the worst, but even then I just kicked it to the corner of my closet. This is what my body is. I can deal with it.
I’ve told you about my dick and how pissed off I am that I didn’t get one that I don’t have to keep
in the bedside table in a Taco Cabana bag. Yes, that’s been difficult. But that really only bothers me when I can’t have sex the way I was meant to have it. I assure you I am not having sex all the time, because I’m middle-aged, and we have HGTV. And then there are the Little House on the Prairie reruns that I dig because I like seeing Laura Ingalls kick Nellie Oleson’s ass.
The part of my body that really bothered me was my lady chest, only I didn’t realize how much because it’s just my everyday loose change, right?
When I was twelve or thirteen, my mom gave me my first training bra because she said it was time for it. I wasn’t very well-endowed, but my mom had rules. It was a ratty beige hand-me-down from my sister who used it when she was eight or something, because she really had some knockers. Every time I put it on, I felt stupid and humiliated and wondered what exactly this was helping me to train for. It certainly wasn’t going to do anything for my softball game. I was not elated about the prospect of puberty like some of my friends, who would all giddily show each other their bras in the locker room and act like this was an exciting thing while I hid in the corner behind an open locker door and got really fast at taking my shirt on and off.
But, you know, you get used to stuff. I’ve seen people get used to not having an arm or having an allergy to every food they love. If you absolutely have to, if you have no choice about something, you can get used to some pretty heavy stuff and just keep moving forward.
I kept moving forward and grew up and knew my body was all wrong, but I sure as hell wasn’t ready to say anything to anyone, like, “Hey. This isn’t right. I hate myself. Someone help me figure this out.” Nope. I just kept going. My breasts weren’t very big and luckily baggy shirts were in in the ’80s, so I could at least hide a little. Then sports bras showed up: big win.