I Want to Love Myself

Someone wrote…

It’s difficult to want a penis of your own without making your vagina feel shame. I want to love it too, but sometimes it’s so alien. I want to love myself.

What’s your experience?


And what are you thinking about gender right now?


Posted by on January 13th, 2012 at 08:00 am

Category: your voice 5 comments »

5 Responses to “I Want to Love Myself”

  1. Clare

    As for most of us, i suspect that the issue is not to do with genitalia but to do with the things that we associate with these organs. In other words, all our personal baggage is tied up in how we view ourselves and our bodies, and we become the battlefield, where all that we have seen and been, are in conflict.
    what the final answer is no-one can be quite sure, but it sure does take an act of courage to begin to forgive and accept ourselves – the person we have been – and begin to welcome what we may become.
    I have found that i cannot just slough off my male self, like a skin – it will always be there and will assert itself at odd times. I do however need to make peace with it – and this is a lifetime’s work…

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    Anonymous replied:

    I have a lot of issue with my genitalia. I’d say that the majority of my depression comes from the sexual characteristics of this body. I feel like I can’t get close or comfortable physically because these organs are in the way.

    The worst part for me about having a vagina is having partners who want to put things in it. That feels so very WRONG. And I feel so unhappy because I can’t be the one to be inside someone else. I’m under a lot of stress from this tension between wanting to get close, but asserting distance, and then the overall feeling of wrongness… I can’t even play with myself because it’s just not right.

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  2. Rowan

    Yes! It’s such a long road to really loving yourself. I’m more comfortable in the skin I’m in than I’ve ever been, and yet still longing for change. I don’t want to resent my girly bits and curves when I want to be masculine and I don’t want to feel guilt on days when super femme me struts her stuff. Breaking free of binary has been great in so many ways, but it hasn’t been an entirely smooth transition for parts of my mind still trying to settle into a new frame of reference.

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  3. Brett Blatchley

    You are *who* you are. Your body is merely a set of temporary clothes, and the will be shed sooner or later.

    I too long for my (male) bits to be gone. Through the years I’d tried to destroy them, and one day a few years ago, when God gave me my ‘appointment’ about my gender stuff, he said something difficult, but deeply poignant: “”Brett, love your body anyway. It is only doing what I’ve asked it to. If you must hate it, please hate whay it stands for. let it keep you until my appointed time.” God had snown me things about myself here before, so that I could trust Him with this hard thing. I did trust Him and I stopped trying to slowly kill my genitalia. He showed me much more and confirmed to me that I am transsexual and that He loves me as I am and that He will bless people through this. He has given me the grace to live openly transgender, though my wife depends on my remaining nominally male. So, for now, my path will not allow me to transition fully, and I both ache and am thrilled for my fellow travelers who are able to fully transition! In the meantime, God gave me a promise that I would be beautiful and graceful and congruent; it is He who (somehow) helps me endure, and this will be eased as I finally go on hormones soon!

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  4. Tualha

    Sigh. Don’t have that issue myself but I feel your pain anyway, just from your words. Hang in there. I think I read that about 1/3 of health plans cover SRS now? (Assuming you live in the US.) Survive long enough to win.

    Re your unwanted ladyparts, maybe think of them as someone you care for but just can’t live with? Or could live with, but only if they change some things you just can’t stand? I don’t know, maybe that’s asinine…

    [Reply]


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