Tucking Loose Ends

In this last blogpost before heading for Charing Cross Hospital tomorrow, it's fitting that I deal with this subject. If you're MtF Trans, tucking is probably all too familiar to you. I've been doing it since I was a child. Tucking has been a lifeline. For me as a transgendered child who hated even looking down and seeing her (male) genitalia it has been a habit for all too long. Toilets at school became hateful places where boys 'went for a slash'. I 'went to the loo'; I couldn't bear to do anything other than sit down to pee. Safe on my own I could make my 'nightmare' disappear between my legs and pee in the way I wished, well, sort of. If you hate something and are ashamed of it, the instinctive thing seems to be to hide it. Tucking involves pushing the testicles up higher, back into the inguinal canal and pulling the penis down and between your legs. By the time I was nine I had found that my Mom's pantie girdles were tight enough to hold everything in place when I did that, hiding what I hated and helping me to pretend that I was the girl I so needed to be. Failing that I wore my swimwear which was also similarly tight. In time, it became so much a necessity that I couldn't leave the house without doing it, even under my school uniform. Wearing knickers under school clothes seems an idiotic risk to have taken, looking back. The days when we had Physical Education were the worst, I hated it, in particular the communal showering :(

There have been other downsides to all of this: The recurring urinary tract infections which caused my doctor concern until I finally came out and told him why; the rumors spread around school because other boys never saw me peeing like the rest; having to hide my girly underwear from my parents or washing out my swimwear myself and drying it secretly in my room. I got very careful. On the one hand I was so scared about being discovered, on the other I just wanted the agony to end.

Hating what was down there lead to self harming in my mid teens. Maybe I was trying to 'punish' myself for having been born like that. I used cigarettes to burn myself, candle wax and wrenching my pubic hair out with tweezers till I bled. As an adult it sounds like BDSM but It was far from erotic, it just hurt and I wanted it to do so. Hurting myself helped me control the emotional pain. I'm not proud of what I did but for short periods it helped me feel better. I was who I was and I am who I am....Except tomorrow, tucking comes to an end. I'll be having to do it for the last time. When I saw Manjit, one of the CNS nurses at Charing Cross a few weeks ago, she had to remind me that GRS is irreversible. Thank goodness is all that I can say.

Hugs, Jane xox

 

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