Emilia, your writing is beautiful. I can put some words to my experience, that seems very similar to yours in struggling with the tension that comes with having ‘loose change’ below. The way I feel it is that I was taught very early that a penis and testicles were the evidence of, the cause of, and the active agents of a need to assert my presence- to go outwards to affect things around me rather than be affected by them. That, of course, was ‘to be a man’, and by virtue of its cultivated insensitivity led to all the things we know that masculinity is guilty of.

I am not going to have surgery, so I have to manage that sense of demand from my genitals. I imagine a virtual vagina, which helps. I reinterpret that sensations I have, and I have also gradually come to realize that I simply have a feminine sexuality, both psychologically and functionally, even if not a female body.

It is difficult for cis-drenched minds to realize that feminine and masculine are not determined by anatomic birthright, but deep in their memories I am sure most know that as very young children they felt they had more options…