Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 35

Time was moving faster than I could manage. I was being lined up for surgery almost before knew it, PBP was looming, I still hadn’t sorted a way of getting back across the Channel with my passport and official gender as they were, and my conversation months ago with Geoff was something I truly wanted to ignore. There was no way on Earth I was ever going back in that cage, no way I would ever pretend again.

Geoff and all the others had tapped a hidden well of courage in me. I had always been seen as having balls (yeah, very funny) and now, just to let you have your little laugh, it was about time I found some of the metaphorical kind before my physical ones went to the incinerator. Everyone assumed I was courageous; they never understood or guessed how it was actually my long, lingering, incomplete suicide.

Raj had asked if I wanted to keep them, perhaps in a jar of formalin, but let’s just say I gave him a short answer. He also pointed out that the longer I kept them, the more spare tissue the surgeon would have to play with for the final SRS.

It’s time for a confession. Every other TG story I had ever read seemed to dwell on delicate, short, slightly built chaps who fitted straight into a dress and passed with no effort at all. Having met some of the other girls that Sally and Raj helped, I knew that wasn’t often true. Fate seemed to take a delight in putting as female a soul as could ever exist into a body better suited for a doorman at a rough pub, or, of course a rugby forward. While I now passed very easily, and was actually comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life, I was not a naturally feminine boy. In fact…

I will simply have to come straight to the point, and admit that if I had been a boy I might have been very popular with the ladies. Despite the atrophy caused by three years of gradually adjusted medication, I was…

Sod it, Geoff was smaller than me. Let’s leave it at that, but unless I was planning on dumping him for one of those waxed monstrosities I had held at the club, I had enough to be going on with. Or should that be going in with?

This was the truly odd thing about my discussions with Raj; there am I talking about castration and vaginoplasty, blood and pain, and even comparing cock size with my beloved makes me realise how I can now never imagine life without him. I discuss surgery and it makes me drift off into fluffy clouds of affection.

No, forget “fluffy”. I love that man, deeply, viscerally. I’ve said it already, “mated”. All through the long, long process of finding myself there has always been that little voice in the back of my mind. I am sure anyone else cursed like me has the same thing going on: you KNOW who you are, but some little avatar of a parent or conscience whispers quietly n your ear, like the slave at a Roman General’s Triumph, “Are you really sure? What would mam/dad/people think? Can you cope with the changes? Do you have the balls?”

As the slave says, “Remember, you are only a man.”

Bastard. As I write this, I admit I am crying. All those years wasted, but then, without my Geoff, would I have ever been able to face those crowds? There is a huge difference between being “A bloke in a dress” and “His bloke in a dress”, and that is purely my description. Never his.

He had even persuaded me finally to be naked with him. He was a little uncomfortable with those extras, and never touched them, but he told me that he loved me, all of me, and he wasn’t going to pretend they weren’t there. That meant we could shower and bath together properly. There is intimacy in the simplest of actions, from washing your partner’s hair to not caring who is drinking out of which cup, that goes far beyond any form of sex. We had that intimacy, that comfort in each other’s presence, that true affection brings.

Yes, Sue, he is being very, very good to and for me. There are moments, like now, where a great surge of emotion comes up and I just KNOW how right this all is.

So. Deep breaths, and sort a date for some weight loss.

The assessment at the local hospital was hilarious, in its little way. When I walked in, wrapped in sweaty lycra, they asked me where I had parked. So, there I am, ostentatiously examining the cycle gloves on my hand and gently tapping an SPD cleat against the floor. Funnily enough, they found that I had no blood pressure or obesity problems. That’s what happens when you cycle everywhere….and when you are being constantly checked for blood chemistry as part of a hormone regime.

I have not yet said how I feel about needles, but just in case you were wondering, I HATE HATE HATE THEM!!!!!
There. That’s better. And once again the speed was catching me out. I found out that both Raj and Sally had found a few strings to pull, and I was booked in for the following week.

Geoff and I had talked about this at length. Sally’s comments about children had led to some soul-searching, but in the end it came down, for me, to the fact that any child of mine would have to be another woman’s, and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t deal with the idea of a stranger’s child, and a fanciful suggestion about Jan I dismissed immediately. Take away the child of someone we loved? Never. Adoption looked like a strong possibility, though, and once again the simple assumptions behind the conversation showed how much my world had flowered for me. So…is this a knife I see before me?

And there we were. Why is it that hospitals insist on wheeling you along the corridors in a wheel chair when you are more than capable of walking? Where do they get the crap artwork on the walls from? What happens in all the poor countries that we deprive of their trained nurses because we won’t pay our own a reasonable wage?

And what am I doing lying on a table awake while some masked man applies NEEDLES to my soft parts? At least I had a hand to hold…and crush when the pointy spiky things were produced.

A friend once told me of his vasectomy, how his wife had come along to watch, and give a running commentary. Geoff didn’t do that, He looked away. After all, what man really wants to see a knife applied to that particular area? More than a little close to home; I hoped he wouldn’t have nightmares later.

There was some discomfort, but nothing too bad, but at one point there was a really weird feeling, a dull ache as if a string were being pulled attached to somewhere near my liver. Very odd, and quite unpleasant.

Bye, bye little bags of poison. Hello John Wayne walk for a few days. What a curse, indeed; I suffer all those female breast-related worries, and now I have a pain in the balls. Even though they are…No. I am not going into the Dead Parrot Sketch, I’m just happy.

Geoff saw me home, with what felt like a small nappy between my thighs. The surgeon recommended I wear tight-fitting knickers for a while, to stop my penis from waving around and tearing the stitches. Waving them goodbye, perhaps, or should that be “see you boys later?”

No riding for a while, girl. But think of the excuses to get him to do nice things.

Life is good!