This will be the last entry of my post-op diary. If I continue, it will be post a different op. In one week, almost six months out from my initial sexual reassignment surgery, I will get a revision surgery with a different surgeon. My original surgeon has been coy about what complications had actually occurred, claiming it’s just a bit of excess swelling and wound separation. But this is not so: The urethra is on the side. The opening is around 3cm wide. The ridge that goes between the anus and vagina is inside the vagina and hairy (and while I have eliminated a lot through electrolysis, I won’t have time to eliminate it all). One side of the inner labia is almost the size of a golf ball. The inner labia hangs above the mouth. A lot of erectile tissue remains above the hood, meaning that my vagina currently gives a significantly bigger bulge than a tuck. Because my original surgeon tells me that this is just a bit of excess selling and wound separation, I cannot trust him to fix it.

The surgeon I am seeing next week has a stellar reputation. He sees my vagina as an especially challenging case. He thinks that, if the surgery goes well, he will be able to get it 80% towards his ideal, so I have a cap on my expectations even in the best case scenario. The erectile tissue is hard to remove, because there are lots of critical nerves around it, and it would be easy to permanently kill sensation; I think he will er on the side of leaving it still a little large rather than risk damaging the nerves. To fix the opening, he will bring the inner labia a little lower than is usual. He’ll smooth out the ridge at the entrance and the inner labia ought to hide the area with hair. He’ll make the inner labia more symmetrical and move the urethra to the center. He had some other complaint about the way my original surgeon did the urethra, something to do with leaving too much of my original shaft behind it, and I wasn’t clear on whether he can or will fix it. I’ll ask him in my pre-op on the 25^th.

After the surgery, I will wear a catheter for five days. I will stay at least one night in hospital. The initial swelling will mean I won’t be able to tell for a while how successful the surgery has been. There is a notable risk of wound separation occurring again; this is, in part, because I have asked him to connect the inner labia at the bottom. I will have a new scar that runs from the mouth of the vagina down one side of my thigh. The so-called ‘scarless technique’ that my previous surgeon boasted of means I have a strange scar lines going through the inner labia—which the new surgeon will open to get access to the erectile tissue—but I don’t have the usual scars that go either side of the thigh. I imagine dilation in the early weeks of recovery will be challenging, and I will have to take care not to rip any of the new parts.

The surgery was originally going to be on 14 June, but the surgeon couldn’t book his usual operating room on that day. I learned only a few days ago that this new date, just a week away, was now my only option within the timeframe that my insurance will still cover it. I had been planning to do more work on my manuscript, and since getting the news on the surgery date, my mind has halted all work on that, since it is not something that can be rushed. Instead, I’m just trying to get it in a readable-enough form that I can look at what needs removing and what will need filling in. I can get impatient and anxious when I know people are reading my longer-form work, so the fact I will be recovering from surgery will be a good distraction.

I anticipate the surgery with a mix of dread and excitement. Dread, for obvious reasons. I’ve been mostly repressing how intense some of the last recovery was. I will again be under general anesthetic for a long time. I know how badly my body reacts to it. The day and night after a major surgery is always a nightmare of nausea. Wearing the catheter will be unpleasant. All sorts of unexpected issues will arise, especially given that my body is prone to unusual scarring and wound separation. I am prone to anesthesia-induced post-op depression. Psychologically, surgery is always liable to take me to strange places. I do not know how good the results can be, and I cannot even be sure that this will be the final surgery.

The excitement is in the hope that it will be the final surgery and the results will be good enough that I can feel a little more comfortable in my body. It is my fifth major surgery in two and a half years. I also moved country in that time. I’m tired. I have been living these past three years always with a limited horizon, knowing that whatever I do, a major surgery will soon enough interrupt it and keep me in bed for one or more months. The third surgery was also a revision surgery, and the surgeon assured me that I wouldn’t be out of action for more than three weeks. My new surgeon has said the same for next week’s surgery. Alas, the last surgery knocked me back for almost two months, so I will also manage my expectations on this front.

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Knowing this might be the final major transition surgery—having only electrolysis as the only remaining disruptive medical-transition activity—I feel like a door is opening a crack, like maybe I can take up a new hobby, put more effort into developing friendships, try and date in earnest, and go to town on my book. Maybe I can start acting a little more in the world, rather than just writing in the day and hiding in my apartment every evening doing little. I know better than to assume everything will go perfectly. At the same time, when the surgery date came forward, I noticed the depression I have been living with in recent months start to soften. I haven’t had energy to do anything, because I haven’t had the motivation to do anything, and I remain hopeful that, with this surgery behind me, I will find more motivation and energy to start building a life, as cynical and exhausted as living in this world as a trans woman and a lesbian sometimes makes me, as difficult as I find it to find spaces, even in a relatively welcoming Thailand, in which I can feel some kind of psychological safety.

On Sunday, I am doing a shibari shoot in an onsen-style bath (pictured above). I like the photographer and the rigger (I have a mini crush, to be honest), and I think the results will help remind me, when I am stuck in bed, of the fun to be had. It will be nice to push my body one last time before the hiatus. I heard a rumor that the local lesbian bar now has a pool table, so perhaps my future will involve playing pool until my future wife turns up to challenge me (I’m not good at pool). I have told some friends that I’m getting the surgery, so I will hopefully have enough visits to get me through. My building charges double the government rate for electricity, meaning that the cost of air conditioning is extortionate. I try to use a fan as much as possible, but for this month, I’m just going to have to bite the bullet. Thailand is hot.

If you have the means, please considering buying a subscription to my Substack: for little more than the cost of a fancy latte each month, you’ll get access to more than 120k words of writing, which is the equivalent of two books. If you want to contribute without buying a subscription, you can also tip me at www.ko-fi.com/thaliavacha

I will keep posting Notes after the surgery, once I have the wherewithal to do so. I appreciate all the messages of support, and I hope all this writing is valuable to people who want surgery, people who have had it, and people who want to understand more about what these surgeries are like.

Thanks for reading. Have a lovely day.

This is part one of two. It’s simple and direct. Pa…

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This was my first attempt to write some scenes from a story I later summed up on here in Living as a Human Pet. I had wanted it to be a prequel of sorts to a sequence of sex work-related stories all written in the present tense, consisting of Work, Watching the World Burn, White Ladyboy, and Does My Pee Tast…

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The first part of my self introduction covers the political writing I did before moving to Thailand. I told a story there, but here I just want to give some order to the rest of my work. I have so much work on here now, and I write in a range of genres and modes, but there isn’t really a way, on Substack, to help people navigate to the kind of mate…

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The first half is available for free and is by itself longer than my average essay on here. The second half is available to paying subscribers. If you support me, instead, through ko-fi or f you are marginalized and lack means, please DM me for a special link. I am paywalling it, in part, because it is an excerpt from a piece of work I am currently in the process of tidying up to sell. I cannot account for the number of hours or the blood, sweat, and tears I have put into realizing this project, which I began in 2022, and which I believe deserves a wide audience.

Thank you for supporting my work.

She’s between the ages of two and five. That’s the best I can offer. She’s on a beach in Bali, and she’s walking beside her mother. I have a photograph that shows her walking on a beach in Bali, holding her mother’s hand, but I can’t be sure if the photograph captures the scene I remember.

Likely not. In the photograph, it is day, and in my memory, it seems to be night. In the photograph, she wears a red t-shirt with green sleeves and red shorts. Perhaps she wore it at the scene of my memory, walking alongside her mother, maybe holding her mother’s hand, maybe not, perhaps running about, skittish, a small child with a limited sense of the world and her place within it, moving safely through this land as good as if she owned it.

At some point, she and her mother come across a vendor selling translucent trinkets. A cool breeze blows. As they approach the vendor, she sees another girl getting her hair braided, the stylist threading the braids through a kaleidoscope of pony beads.

She’s beautiful.

The young girl points at the girl getting braids.

She says: Mummy, I want to do it. Can I?

No, her mother says. That’s for girls.

Between the ages of two and five the girl lived in Singapore, a white girl with rosy cheeks and blonde hair and a house so big she had to bounce a bouncy ball hard against the floor to make it hit the ceiling. Sometimes young couples would want to take a photo with her. She didn’t know what it was for apart from that her mom said her blonde hair was rare here. It made her feel pretty. Special.

At her primary school the boys and girls all sat together, but she would only play with the boys. It was what her parents wanted and what the school wanted. The world had decided. And she was mostly fine with it, although the boys would sometimes pick on her. Something about her seemed to make them uneasy. Was it the fact that she was the only girl in their friendship group?

One time she had to paint a picture of her mother in an art class and made a mistake on her mother’s face and tried to correct the mistake with another lick of paint and kept attempting corrections until her mother’s face became a green, blurry blob, like mold. Her mother, the one supposed to love and care for her, became mold. She was loved and cared for by mold. Loving, seeking safety, from mold. She cried so hard they had to call her mother, which would make things worse, because her mother would have to see the mold.

At some point, one of the boys said, Why are you being so sensitive? You’re acting like a girl.

What was wrong with being a girl? What was wrong with crying? Why does crying make you a girl? Was it different if a girl cried than if a boy cried? Was she not actually a girl? She didn’t look like other girls. Adults kept her away from other girls. She often didn’t think of herself as a girl. Or she didn’t think about her girlhood.

Didn’t dare.

Others called her a boy. Who was she to disagree? Better, among the boys, to act like a boy, to mimic their values even if in secret she aspired to be like other girls, girls and women; even if she knew that everything she heard about boys didn’t apply to her—their strength, their smarts, their competence, or whatever—even if she would have to fake all these things and live always at the precipice of a threatening exposure; and even if she knew that everything she heard about girls—their frivolous sensitivity, for example—hurt her, became her, and shaped the same self for whom she craved that same exposure. Better to pretend.

But why did they say that crying makes you weak? Crying hurt. Crying meant gazing at the pain without flinching, taking a nosedive through the storm’s eye. Surely avoiding pain would be the weaker choice?

All these thoughts and more, between the ages of two and five, ran wordless through her bones; structured her personality; outlined the contours of her omissions and displays; structured her brain around dark, forbidden zones; and drew circuitous pathways to circumvent these zones. In short, the thoughts divided her in two. Real girl. Fake boy.

When she was five her family moved back to her birthplace of England. It was cold. Why did they bring her to this awful place where the air hurt your skin and didn’t stop blowing? Her school made her wear shorts in winter, and it was terrible, and she promised she would always remember how alive she felt and how big the world was to a child, because all the adults around her seemed to have forgotten this or why would they make her wear shorts in winter?

It was a Christian school. The boys and girls had class together but parted in the playground. Most of the students were as pale her, but none of them had lived in Asia. When she said she was from Singapore, everybody laughed, and she at once thought she understood and refused to understand, so she gulped it down deep and kept it there, wherever it sank. She wasn’t from Singapore. Fine. But did they laugh at her for pretending or because they thought being Asian was bad? She should take note. She’d learn.

She didn’t like these people but wanted to be like them and, more than she realized, already was. The school made her stay late for special classes where they tried to teach her how to hold a pencil and write letters on the lines. The pencil wore a special plastic skirt to help her hold it. She wanted to wear a skirt. She struggled. With everything, she struggled. The other children were mean. The English were mean. There was one blond boy who was tall and wide and a bully, and she couldn’t understand his speech, and he didn’t understand the questions teachers asked, and she dreamed she was him, her perception so blurry she couldn’t navigate the classroom.

One time when her mum picked her up from the special needs class she ran so fast to hug her that her tooth flew out, and she soaked her mom’s dress with blood.

Other times, when her mother was late, she waited alone outside the school, her legs shivering in the cold, and she worried that her mother had died. She heard passages from the Bible in school assembly. She had to sing hymns in school assembly. She had to praise Jesus in school assembly. She had arrived as a stranger in a strange land where she looked and spoke like the strangers did and hated them all and herself even more. Was she strange? The English shared some barbs with the boys in Singapore: Why are you crying? Stop acting like a girl. Something had to change. It wasn’t going to be the world.

The only thing worse than being a girl, she learned, was being a girl who was supposed to be a boy. Or being a boy who was like a girl. The girlishness of girls could at least be blamed on the fact they were girls, poor things. She had no excuse: It was clear, by now, already, that she was meant to be a boy or to live as a boy, even if it wasn’t clear why. She didn’t really know or think much about genitals, as far as she remembers. Or did she? Did she look at them? Did she play with them, that young?

So she tried to comport herself as a boy. She made special compartments for her girlish desires. But what was a girlish desire? What was a girl? What was girlishness? What did those who attacked her see in her? Did they see a girl? The same thing she saw? Did they understand what she was before she could fully grasp it herself?

But whereas she saw it as right, being a girl, they saw it as wrong, so that she, of course, one against an insistent many, came to agree that she was, in some fundamental way, wrong. A logical contradiction. A moral disgrace.

Better to just be a boy.

So why did it still hurt her when girls were demeaned? And why did she feel jealous when she heard them praised? And why did she feel like she was less than both, the girls as much as the boys? Were there others like her? Was she the only one? The Girls: What lucky, precious, strange beings. If only she could understand.

The eight-year-old girl, who has been at school in England for a few years now, is now trying to tell me something. Which is to say I am finally listening to her, to all those words that got pushed down and locked up, kept almost always out of sight.

I’ve been teaching her, too, about all the things I’ve learned since she and I were one.

She says that she understands why I’m asking her for memories, she appreciates it, and she wants to help. She is glad someone is there for her; no one had ever been there for her in this way. But she has been pushed down, locked up: she never got to see much, so there’s not much for her to show.

The monster had mostly been in charge, she said.

The monster? I ask.

The monster, she says.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, she says. I’m talking about the one who pushed me down, locked me up—until you came along to listen—who saw my nature as a threat, who hated what I was, who tried to deny it was even there. I mean the part of that cared to listen to what others had to say.

Poor girl. How articulate she’s become, stewing inside me all these years. I don’t want to fight her. I’m here to finally listen, to support her, to let her be.

The monster was never a part of you, I say. You held onto its hatred only to survive. I’m here to help you cast it out.

Tell them about the happy times, the little girl says.

Why? I ask.

Because there are so many happy times, she says.

Really? I ask. But why do I need to share them here?

Because of what everyone is telling me, she says. You’re eight years old, they say. You’re from a good home, they say. Your parents are together. They don’t want for money. And you go to a private school. This is a first-world country, they say. Stop acting like you’ve been through some shit, they say. You’re just desperate, they say, for attention. Don’t you think they have a point?

Maybe some of them do, I say. And maybe most of them just don’t want to hear about your pain. How are we going to face the pain of others if we’re too afraid to know our own?

The little girl is silent. There are tears in her eyes.

You’re asking too much of me, she says. I’m just a little girl.

Slowly, she made friends, almost all of whom were boys. She loved video games. She would play WWF, Mario Kart, House of the Dead. She hated watching others play, always wanted to play herself, got jealous, felt bad for feeling jealous, felt jealous of others for their apparent lack of jealousy, their capacity for patience. If only she was patient, she would better fit in.

Nothing much seemed to have anything to do with gender, like if a scientific observer wanted to look at this girl at this time in her life and find evidence that her behavior or inner world oriented around a gendered reality at odds with how the world treated her, what would they find?

At some point her friends were the popular boys. At some point these boys were her friends no more. She got quarantined to the playground’s misfit quadrant. The boys here punched each other’s balls. She hated the pain of being punched, but something about it seemed… right?

Hmm.

She watched the girls play hopscotch or whatever. Do girl things. Open and close paper flowers. What would it be like to be like them? Sometimes she would feel jealous, would feel bad for feeling jealous, felt jealous at others for their apparent lack of jealousy, could hardly even believe they actually weren’t jealous.

She couldn’t repress the sensations themselves, only her interpretation. Her sensory field grew more confusing. Her world kept on dividing.

From across the playground, a messenger from the Girls approaches her.

We’d like you to join us, the messenger says.

When she joins the Girls, stands among them—excitement building in her fingers and toes—the most popular one speaks.

The popular girl wants to slap her face.

I want to know what it is like, she says, to slap a boy in the face.

The little girl consents. But why?

And how it stings and rushes blood to her cheeks, that single word: boy.

The eight-year-old girl is on a bus setting off for a school trip. She sits alone, and in the seat in front sit the messenger and the popular girl. Once the journey is underway, the two girls turn around, forming a pincer around her, and start asking questions.

She only remembers one of the questions: Can we see your penis? they ask.

Why? she asks.

Because we’ve never seen a penis before.

OK. Here.

Ew. Gross.

She sits in silence alone for the rest of the journey, wondering why she had said yes and why it had felt exciting before she said yes and awful after and even worse still after she’d shown the thing.

She doesn’t think about it for a while, but a few days later a teacher finds her in the bag racks before school starts; she is smashing her briefcase—because the children carry briefcases in this English private school—against the wooden beams of the bag racks, against the other bags, splintering the wood, sending fragments of plastic from the case’s casing all around the room.

She thinks she’s in trouble, but the teacher is concerned, shows a great amount of care, which in turn concerns the girl, distresses her, because what if she has to tell the teacher the source of her distress, which source and which distress she doesn’t anyway understand?

The teacher later tells her eldest brother about the incident, and the eldest brother comes to speak with her. She has some vague sense that the briefcase incident is connected to the bus incident but can’t quite grasp it, wants to express it, can’t understand why all of it feels icky and so bad.

But then she kind of does express it. She plants her face into her brother’s side and cries, and her brother’s blue blazer grows damp with tears.

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this woman she keeps talking about how she loves my abs, she loves my muscles, how it’s interest…

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I work so hard to bring you this Substack. I am always teetering on the edge of stepping back, so I want to see if I can make enough income that it can justify the time and effort, especially as I go back into editing mode for my larger projects. If you can afford to pay for access, I would greatly appreciate it. It costs little more than buying me a fancy matcha latte in an LA cafe once a month, so you can ask yourself how the idea of doing this feels, then consider just how much of my labor and love I bring to this platform (I think about 100-120k words, which is enough to fill two books).

If you don’t want to pay through Substack, you can also pay via my ko-fi page and DM me for access.

Thank you.

Part I — Transgender Politics

In this essay, I will share my journey as a writer on Substack. This will serve as a guide of sorts to the work I have on here—which now consists of more than 30 essays—but will also, I believe, echo a larger story about transgender lives in the US in the days since Donald Trump’s second inauguration on 21 January 2025.

I began this newsletter on 1 February 2025, less than two weeks after the inauguration. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and I was concerned by what I saw as an increasing sense of detachment in many people around me from the reality of the changes taking place in their country: it was almost as if the worse things got, the greater the detachment became.

My first essay on here was called Our Fear is Not the Problem.

At the time of writing, I was terrified at the implications of the new administration’s executive orders relating to gender, but many people treated my fear as a problem of emotional dysregulation rather than a reasonable response to a real danger. So I wrote about it and, to my surprise, plenty of people read it.

After I published it, some trans people wrote to tell me that I had described how they were feeling, too, while some cis people wrote to say the essay helped them better understand what their trans loved ones were going through.

I have been writing for a long time, but up until this point I had almost exclusively been writing narrative nonfiction and reserving my work for literary journals. But after seeing the response to this essay, I wanted to try, best I could, to do work that might help support and fight for the transgender community as our situation worsened.

I wrote my next essay, It Was Never Really About Trans Women in Sport, in response to an executive order published on 5 February 2025 called, “KEEPING MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORT.” While I am far from an expert on the subject of women’s sports, I wanted to show that the so-called good faith discussions about trans women in women’s sports were less about sports than they were about finding a way to stigmatize trans women—to present us as a genuine threat in a context that everyday people could relate to—that seemed to have a rational basis. I write about how much of today’s rhetoric around trans women in sport has been recycled from the moral panics that racists of previous generations had created around Black women in sport. I ask why suddenly, when it comes to trans people, so many people seem to care about women’s sport.

As early as November of 2024, I decided I would leave the US if the administration began detaining or deporting international students on a political pretext. I was scared. It felt impossible to tell how bad things could get or how quickly things might escalate. I knew that if I did not set a clear red line, then I would be forever moving the goalposts. My decision became resolute after I read the executive orders about “gender ideology extremism” and “foreign terrorists” in January 2025.

On March 8 2025, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, an international student who was living on a green card, on a political pretext. This moment had come sooner than I expected. But I desperately didn’t want to leave to US. I had worked so hard to get there. I had a life, a community, and a vision for my future. I was so at odds with leaving the idea of leaving that I began to keep suicide equipment in my bedroom.

Some close friends knew about this. They would keep asking if I’d let them come over to dispose of it. I have lived through some extreme experiences of capture and violence. As an international student with political writing online and a mismatch of my gender and name between my visa and passport, I felt that, even with whiteness on my side, a timeline in which ICE detained was becoming more and more real. The fear I felt at this prospect, especially as a trans woman, even if I only thought there was only a small likelihood, ran deep in my bones.

I felt haunted. I wanted to die. But I also didn’t want to die. So instead of writing a suicide note, I wrote an anti-suicide note: I had become so convinced that I was going to end my life that I resolved to write until I rescued myself from this fate. I dedicated it to the memory of Elisa Rae Shupe, a non-binary veteran whose body was found hanging, wrapped in a trans flag, a few days after Trump’s inauguration.

You can read that note in full here.

After this, I wrote two manifesto-like polemics, the first of which aimed primarily to help non-trans-women better understand my reality as a trans woman, the second of which aimed to diagnose why it seemed so easy for cis people—and especially cis women—to distance themselves or ignore the threats trans people faced, despite the fact that these threats also consistently and specifically targeted the bodily autonomy of all women and defined us only with respect to our biological function.

I wrote these essays in one short sitting each, but poured many years’ worth of reflection into them, and they both achieved something like Substack virality. They are still by far my most popular essays on here. You can find them here:

• Who’s Afraid of Sex: Why No One Understands What Gender Is (and No One Ever Will)

• No Cis Person Will Read This Essay

A few weeks after publishing the latter, I moved to Thailand. I did not publish anything for another five months.

In Thailand, I found it almost impossible to keep writing about transgender issues domestic to the US. I found it almost impossible to write about anything at all. I found it almost impossible to hold onto any cohesive sense of whom I was. I was in a state of deep grief and full of doubt about my decision, which many around me had seen as paranoid and unwarranted. “You should learn some breathing techniques,” someone had told me before I left. “Maybe if you were a little calmer, you would be able to see things more clearly.”

“I was calm,” I said, “until I started sharing my reasons with you.”

When I returned to writing, it was with an essay about the language in public discourse that surrounded the genocide in Palestine and the administration’s recent actions in sending men to CECOT, a torture camp in El Salvador. I also seemed, through this essay, to be working through questions of how I was supposed to write at all from this place of displacement. The essay is called Elsewhere’s Homecoming, and it is interesting not just for the work it does on its own merit but as an artifact that shows how much the nature of public political discourse has continued to shift in the seven months since I wrote it.

Part II — Everything

After publishing this Elsewhere’s Homecoming, the Substack took a big turn. I have so much work on here now, and I write in a range of genres and modes, but there isn’t really a way, on Substack, to help people navigate to the kind of material they’re interested in. I’ve divided the essays into five categories, as below. So I am going to organize the rest of my essays below according to the following categories.

1. Lesbianism

2. Sex Work and BDSM

3. Sexual Reassignment Surgery

4. Criticism

5. Memoir

I am so grateful to all my readers; the care with which people here read my work launches fireworks through my brain. At present, most of my archived work is behind a paywall. Marginalized readers with limited means are welcome to DM me and ask for a complimentary subscription. You don’t need to explain yourself: I am going to trust that people aren’t going to lie just to get their hands on a Substack subscription.

I work so hard to bring you this Substack. I am always teetering on the edge of stepping back, so I want to see if I can make enough income that it can justify the time and effort, especially as I go back into editing mode for my larger projects. If you can afford to pay for access, I would greatly appreciate it. It costs little more than buying me a fancy matcha latte in an LA cafe once a month, so you can ask yourself how the idea of doing this feels, then consider just how much of my labor and love I bring to this platform (I think about 100-120k words, which is enough to fill two books).

If you don’t want to pay through Substack, you can also pay via my ko-fi page and DM me for access.

1. Lesbianism

These essays are all about living a lesbian life and my love for other lesbians, who are the best ⚢, especially the losers.

cool lesbians, loser lesbians, and slutty lesbians is about slutty lesbians, loser lesbians, and cool lesbians.

can a lesbian be a slut? says that yes, a lesbian can be a slut, and explores what that might look like.

The Loser-Cool Horseshoe Theory of Lesbianism speculates on whether a cool lesbian is even a conceptual possibility. These first three essays make a trilogy.

lesbians (on words meaning things) is something like my belated response to the whole “lowkey, I chose to be a lesbian” debacle. Really, it is an opportunity to talk about the challenges faced by lesbians who can’t be any other way.

Invisible Lesbians is my love letter to lesbians for Lesbian Visibility Week. I also talk a little about femme4femme and being a lesbian who does sex work.

2. Sex Work and BDSM

These essays all revolve around sex work and BDSM. The first four make a series; I wrote them in the present, shortly after the events occurred, and included little no narrative reflection.

Work is about becoming a lifestyle submissive to a professional dominatrix, who later persuaded me to become a professional dominatrix.

Watching the World Burn is a sequel to Work. It takes place on the day after Trump’s second election, which I spent with said professional dominatrix, and recounts my early days working in a Los Angeles BDSM dungeon.

White Ladyboy captures some scenes from Pattaya in Thailand, when I worked as a professional submissive and shibari model and the line begins consent and coercion began to blur.

Does My Pee Taste of Coconut describes a kinky hookup with a sex worker in Bangkok, whom I later began to do work with. These first four essays all make up a single sequence.

because he could never make her come is a brief tale about two clients who came to me as a couple before breaking up and becoming separate clients.

Living as a Human Pet tries to fulfill its promise, describing the time I lived in a shibari studio in Tokyo that was owned by a professional dominatrix.

“i’m a real sadist: i don’t like it when they enjoy it” is a story about some abuse I experienced at the hands of a girlfriend in my early 20s, who was also a professional dominatrix; it is something like an origin story for all of the above.

3. Sexual Reassignment Surgery

These are all essays I wrote while recovering from my sexual reassignment surgery. I wrote most of them during my evening dilating hour, allowing the end of dilation to mark a natural end. I won’t give them blurbs, since they all read a bit like diary entries. I’ll just put them here for anyone who wants to read them in order. They cover the first four months of my recovery and the series is ongoing.

1. just another day

2. on music

3. just another fucking day

4. the trials of srs recovery

5. writing as therapy

6. Recovery / Healing

7. three months out, an eternity, the blink of an eye

8. it’s the size of the mountain (not your skills as a climber)

4. Criticism

These are more similar to my earlier essays, like No Cis Person Will Read This Essay. They comment on a topic, usually in list form.

Narcissisms within Narcissisms is my critique of the narcosphere.

Writing Advice for People Who Hate Writing Advice questions what counts as good writing or a successful career when you are a marginalized writer.

You Are (Probably) a Transmisogynist is something to read if you feel any kind of way about its title.

Girls I Grew Up With is about Lt. Lois Einhorn, Buffalo Bill, and other fine examples of 90s mainstream transgender representation.

notes on passing talks about some of the complexities that I have come across since I began passing more as a cis woman.

5. Memoir

These are examples of the kind of writing I do mostly outside of Substack. They usually tell stories from my life in a reflective mode.

The Silent Part: A Performance is (one of many versions) of the first chapter from my memoir that asks examines what happens when you frame a trans woman’s pre-transition childhood as another kind of girlhood.

The Switzerland Schedule is the only essay on here that I wrote pre-transition. It is about my mother’s assisted suicide in Switzerland. I wasn’t on Substack at the time; The Audacity. published it, and I am incredibly grateful to Roxane Gay and Megan Pillow for putting it out, since it in many ways it kick-started my career as a writer.

Boundaries follows on from The Switzerland Schedule and provides a deeper reflection of my relationship with my mother.

Eat, Pray, Flee: On Finding Myself in Thailand is about how and why I left the US for Thailand, shortly after the Trump administration started arresting and cancelling the visas of international students.

On Both Sides of the Globe covers my early days in Thailand and my efforts, through my phone and across time zones, to stay tethered to my life in the home I’d made in California.

On Suffering as a Bridge includes some short musings on James Baldwin’s description of suffering as a bridge that allows you to connect with others.

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Thank you, everyone, for being here with me. My Ko-Fi, again, in case you are more invested by the end of this article than you were at the start, is here. Or just Restack!

one reason i sometimes prefer not to disclose that i am trans is that i know that many people will scrutinize my behavior as evidence for or against the case the trans women are women. they may take behaviors they read as masculine as evidence that i am fundamentally different from cis women, ie ‘really a man.’ they may take behaviors they read as feminine as evidence that trans women, maybe, are woman enough to deserve the label. they may take behaviors they read as too feminine as evidence of a man trying too hard.

their preconceptions, as much as my behavior, will determine what they read as masculine or feminine. i know this, because i have enough experience of others reading me as both cis and trans to see how differently, in general, people read my behavior in either situation; i also get to witness the changes that overcome some people once they learn that i am trans. sometimes, little changes. sometimes, it is as if a spirit has possessed them.

i know that in how i behave i don’t just represent myself as an individual but trans women as an entire group, a group towards whose integrity politicians and the media have invested a tremendous amount putting into question. the fewer trans women someone has met, the greater the extent to which they are likely to treat me as a representative.

this is an exhausting situation. people who possess other stigmatized identities may experience related issues, although there will, of course, be variety in the ways they manifest. one of the more unique features for trans people is that people will put the core of your identity under suspicion: they will question whether you are a man or a woman at all. for trans women, if someone believes you are not a woman, it usually comes with the belief that you are dangerous and predatory. most slurs are derogatory ways of saying what one is, whereas one of today’s most common slurs against trans women—man—is derogatory by way of saying one is what one isn’t.

some cis people might respond to my complaints about the scrutiny i describe by saying, “well, i don’t scrutinize your behavior this way, nor do i treat you as a representative,” i know this, because they often do respond this way. and it is true that there is a great deal of variance in the extent to which people do this. but from my perspective, there is no way of knowing who does and doesn’t do this or to what degree they do in any given situation. i just have so many experiences of cis people making comments to indicate they are doing all this that i can comfortably conclude it as common enough to be wary of in more situations than not.

some cis people might also respond by asking why i choose to focus on this scrutiny rather than simply ‘ignore it and be myself.’ i know this, again, because they often do. but this implies that i am describing here a psychological phenomenon, as if the only thing at stake is what i choose to attend to, implying almost that i am willing it to be by doing so, when i am in fact describing situational awareness. i can pretend that i am on a mountain when i am at the beach. i can pretend i am with my brother when i am with my father. i can pretend that i have no idea of the attitudes people have towards trans people or that i have only a weak ability in detecting these attitudes. i can ignore the tells (probing questions, misgendering, over-the-top affirmations, “please tell me if i offend you,” and so on) that indicate what kind of attitude someone has towards me. sometimes people even go to too great a length to try to demonstrate of how little consequence the fact i am trans is to them. i can pretend to myself that i can take this at face value.

when i describe a situation, it is a situation is hare with others. people have an easy time telling others to ignore what is easy for them to ignore, easy enough that they can pretend it doesn’t exist, easy enough that they can imply it is mostly in my head.

it is important to describe this as a situation, in other words, so that the cis person does not reduce their role in it to a question of their own psychological response. there are better and worse ways of navigating the situation, but no one can equalize the inequalities of situations in the context of oppression by being nicer or saying the right thing. the local situation of oppression is as inescapable for the oppressor as it is for the oppressed and the only way out of this is to dismantle the systems that create the situation.

of course, not all trans people have the same situational awareness or are attuned to the same aspects of their environment—and trans people in different communities and different parts of the world with different intersecting identities and different personalities will all have different experiences and priorities—but it would still be wrong to take this as evidence that i am describing here a merely psychological phenomenon, since the psychological phenomenon depends for its existence upon a situational phenomenon.

some cis people and especially cis queers—i know this—might also wonder why, just because people might be evaluating me in this way, i still feel any need to cater to it, which carries the connotation that my desire not to disclose my status as trans is a mere form of catering. it is fair to wonder about this. but whether i cater to it or not, the evaluation still exists and shapes my experience. one function of this monitoring of my behavior is discipline: if i behave in a way that people read as either too masculine or too exaggerated in its femininity to convince them of my womanhood (and hence, to a degree, the womanhood of all trans women), i may lose out on opportunities and find myself unable to access a wide array of situations. in some cases, i may put myself in danger. cis women understand how this kind of policing operates, so it will be no leap for them to see that trans women merely walk the same tightrope on a thinner piece of string: i know this, because the range of safe behavior available to me when others believe i am cis is significantly broader than those available to me when they read me as trans.

i can still be defiant, yes, but some queers of an anti-assimilationist bent rely too much on heroic individualistic narratives when speaking of such defiance. the degree to which i can be anti-assimilationist depends on what i can fall back on. if i am in a town or city or country with no access to a ready-made trans community, then refusing to perform for the cis gaze at all would be an act of social suicide and jeopardize my capacity to take care of myself. sometimes, i am just tired of navigating this stuff and want to make things a little easier for myself. sometimes, i just want to pass as cis, and this exercise of the will seems every bit as politically important as an indiscriminate aestheticized attitude of defiance that offers no material gain for any political project.

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1. I want this essay to be short and simple.

2. Perhaps I want it to be just another thing that someone who, devastated by a recent break up, might stumble upon once their algorithms have locked them into the narcosphere rabbit hole.

3. Maybe I want it to offer s…

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This is a reader supported publication. I would really like to keep as much of it as I can free for everyone to enjoy. Please consider buying a subscription or tipping me at ko-fi.com/thaliavacha

Update: This essay, which focuses on loser lesbians, has become the first in a three-part series. Part two, on slutty lesbians, is here. Part three, on cool lesbians, is here.

I saw a note from recently saying there are three types of lesbian, the cool lesbian, the loser lesbian, and the slutty lesbian (and that it is possible to be all three). I would put myself in the loser lesbian camp.

In a certain sense, trans lesbians are loser lesbians by default, by virtue of the fact we always have a tenuous status in lesbian spaces. Some people hate us and some fetishize us and some take advantage of us. People with small dating pools can be easier to take advantage of. If we finally manage to get a date, we might be more invested in making it work than the other person. The best defense against this is to love yourself above all else, of course, but self love doesn’t rid you of the kinds of desire that might get you into trouble. Predatory people have a good nose for vulnerable people. Vulnerable people also often have a good nose for predatory people. You would not know, by looking at a bunny, how fast she can run, but sometimes the bunny herself forgets she has legs.

I can usually sniff out toxicity early, but I might choose to ignore the smell until it gets so rotten I have to jump out of the window, however far the fall. Maybe someone is fetishizing me or hoping to control me, but sometimes some attention feels better than none. Sometimes, some things are not equal in a relationship. Sometimes, one will gravitate towards someone who makes her feel the way her mother made her feel, a woman who is impossible to reach and impossible to please but always expects more affection and emotional labor than she’s ever willing to give. Sometimes, one seems to never learn. Sometimes, one learns but finds that learning is boring. Sometimes, people say: if the same thing keeps happening, maybe you’re the problem. Maybe you are the problem, and by you, I mean me. Maybe your problem is that the people who will harm you are too much fun at first. Maybe your problem is your aptitude for finding problems in the form of hot charismatic baddies. Sometimes, hot charismatic baddies are worth the trouble, for a while. Sometimes, no one but you will see them as worth the trouble: they’ll see only the trouble and your lack of self worth. Sometimes, you wish you did not find problems attractive. Sometimes, you know you will get there one day. In all cases, you are a loser lesbian. You need the cool lesbian to put this in relief.

But trans lesbians are also surely among the coolest lesbians. I mean, look how brave we are to live our truth! How inspirational! And the beauty standards we subvert! How unapologetically we wear all these unwomanly features! How we gave up our male privilege, that glorious life of closeted trans womanhood! Lol. No. A lot of trans lesbians are just cool because they’re cool. They wear cool clothes and eyeshadow in colors never before seen by a loser like me, colors that seem to come from beyond the color wheel, colors that only the coolest lesbians have the right rods and cones to see, so cool they are, with badass hobbies and mad talents and wise perspectives. Sometimes, the further the world pushes you to the margins, the fewer fucks you have left to give, at least about some things. Sometimes, this might lead you, of course, to double down on being a loser. The accumulated damage wears you down. The ongoing harm wears you down. It wears you down to figure out what you can wear to hide your figure. But sometimes, too, it might free you to be cool, to dress and express yourself in ways that some might find at once improper and enviable, enviable because they’re improper. Sometimes, you will be that rare creature who lives at least partially in reality rather than the comforting simulacrum that cisheteropatriarchy offers. You’ll be angry. Better not to be too angry, though, lest you slip back into loserdom. Cool to see you, maybe wouldn’t want to be you. It’s hard for me to comment. I don’t consider myself one of the cool trans lesbians, but I am lucky enough to be friends with some.

Some people think I am a cool lesbian. If I am, it is only because I go so hard on my loser. Or because they are losers too, and I’m among the biggest losers on the loser pile. Maybe I’m the loser-cool horseshoe theory of lesbianism. I make a spectacle of my loser. I march with loser pride. I am talented at words. I am perceptive and generous enough that I sometimes receive several phone calls a week from people who are seeking relationship advice. Perhaps I am good at giving advice because I know how bad I am at taking advice. Sometimes, we know what we need to do, we just don’t want to do it. Sometimes, my advice is: keep going, keep fucking up, you’ll know when it’s time for a change, and they’ll rebel by doing the right thing. Reverse psychology.

If you want something to believe something, you have to let them think they figured it out themselves. It’s a thankless task. Perhaps I am good at giving advice because I have porous boundaries and it is easy to extract labor from me. One would hope not. One rarely gets the credit one deserves. And offering such great relationship advice while so yearningfully single is surely peak loser lesbian. With all of that said, if you still think I’m cool, if my loser is your cool, I’m not here to yuk your yum. Don’t get mad at me. Don’t fight me on this. I think we all know that the loser lesbian and the cool lesbian are not mutually exclusive. The Venn diagram isn’t a circle but maybe something close enough to a full eclipse. It’s part of what being a lesbian is: You find yourself outside the entire semiotic system that defines what counts as a loser and what counts as cool, so you are a loser in the grand scheme of things, so maybe you think you’re cool beyond its boundaries, but it might turn out you’re a loser among the losers, too.

I think the coolest lesbians who are trans are the ones in stable, healthy relationships, which I am never. Not yet. I’m always impressed. These baddies always bring me hope, even if I find how well-adjusted they are both disturbing and personally threatening. I live, instead, in ways that some find at once improper and enviable. I dress in taboo to hide my naked, stigmatized body. It is not that I fear I will never find anyone who can accept certain things about me, my intensity, my infinity clown-pocket of trauma, the sex work, the kinks, the accidentally itinerant lifestyle. I just wonder whether they will understand what they are accepting. Don’t get me wrong. I’m awesome. Someone would be lucky to have me. I have so much love to give, etc. It’s just that you will surely need to be both/either as much of a loser as me and as cool as me if it’s ever going work. If you are merely well-adjusted, I will run away screaming.

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