What It’s Like to Have Sex for the First Time After Transitioning“I’ll always reme
What It’s Like to Have Sex for the First Time After Transitioning
“I’ll always remember the first time I had sex after [bottom surgery],” Rebecca Hammond tells me about halfway through our Skype chat. Hammond, a registered nurse and sex educator from Toronto whose short, asymmetrical haircut gives the impression of a bleach blonde Aeon Flux, speaks in a sleepy, seductive tone that almost verges on a purr; her words taking on an extra bit of vibration whenever she’s trying to emphasize her point.
It’s been 10 years since her procedure, and Hammond’s had a number of sexual experiences — good, bad, and somewhere in between — but that first experience of sex with a vagina is one that has stayed with her. “If I had to sum it up for myself, I’d say it just felt right,” she tells me. “There just wasn’t the tension there that there might have been beforehand.”
And yet, even as she fondly remembers that blissful feeling of congruity, that sense of intimacy in a body that felt “right,” she’s loath to give too much power to the idea that first-time sex is somehow transformative or earth-shattering. “[Virginity] is just a cultural idiom for speaking to innocence and loss,” she reminds me, and one with an uncomfortable, complicated history that doesn’t sit well with her.
As we chat, Hammond shifts between these two conflicting narratives of post-bottom surgery sex. On the one hand, she notes wryly, “You’re just putting stuff up your cunt,” an act that hardly seems worth a great deal of fuss and introspection (“I don’t get it!” she cries giddily, her voice rising a few octaves as she laughs). And yet she can’t shake the awareness that, even if “virginity” is an outdated concept — one that’s deeply connected to a cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) worldview that many LGBTQ+ people outright reject — it’s a notion that carries a great deal of weight for a number of trans women. “Something that I know from running post-op groups, and from my own experience in talking with people, is that it’s something that people by and large do place some significance on,” Hammond says.
It’s not hard to see why that is: First-time sex carries a lot of importance in our culture. Even if you, personally, didn’t think punching your v-card was a particularly big deal, there’s no question that “losing it” carries a lot of weight — particularly if you’re a woman. Our culture presents losing one’s virginity as an act uniquely capable of transforming a person from innocent girl to mature, experienced woman; as though some there’s a fundamental bit of female knowledge that can only be accessed through vaginal absorption. No matter how progressive your sexual politics, it can be difficult not to get swept up in the idea that our first experiences of intimacy are still significant.
