Okay, personal story time:
In 1994, after having gone through a year-long dry spell (which was a long period at the time but would be a drop in the bucket for me today), I finally found a woman who wanted to date me. She seemed a little bit matronly, but there was nothing else out of the ordinary about her. She was also a nice kisser. We had a good time together and soon went over to my place.
As we got more intimate, and I was sliding in toward 3rd base, so to speak, she said, “We really have to talk.” She was uneasy about the subject at first, but eventually got around to telling me that she was an intersex person (a hermaphrodite) who’d been raised as a male and had realized she was female-identified only recently. She had ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, a cervix, a scrotum, one undescended and one partially descended pseudo-testicle, and a small penis-like phallus which, when she was sexually aroused, emitted vaginal lubricant. Because she’d been living as a man previously, she was going through the standard transexual Real-Life Trial of living as a woman before she could get sex-reassignment surgery.
What was my biggest disappointment at that juncture? That she was pre-op. That she didn’t have a vagina. It meant that we couldn’t have intercourse, which to me is centrally important to any romantic relationship I’m in.
But it didn’t end there. You see, I was her very first boyfriend. A year earlier, before she’d started taking estrogen, she thought she’d end up as a lesbian after surgery because she wasn’t attracted to men. The estrogen had transformed more than just her physique; she had started “noticing” men a few months earlier. But she was totally unprepared for the strength of the feelings she had for me when I first kissed her. She was scared of losing that, which was one of the reasons why she avoided telling me about her unusual plumbing situation until the moment when I was about to have found out anyway. It would have devastated her if the first man she’d gotten romantic with dumped her because she wasn’t a complete woman – so to make sure that didn’t happen, she unzipped my pants, reached in and pulled out my own plumbing, and got down on her knees to pleasure me.
For a brief instant on her way down, she suddenly looked to me like Scott Collins from 9th grade. You don’t know him. Never mind who he is. The point is, he was a boy. A woman who looked (even if just for an instant) like a boy, and who had previously been a boy, and whose description of her external genitalia was more male-like than female-like, was about to get extremely intimate with my own genitalia.
I was damn scared. But I also knew exactly how much it would hurt her if I turned her down, having felt the hammer-blows of rejection myself so often in the past. And I was desperately lonely, and craved the love of a woman more than words can say. Here on this alien shore, I had to sort through my feelings and decide – in the space of a couple of seconds – whether to let her continue.
I had to become secure in my sexuality really fast.
We stayed together and dated for another 6 months after this. Eventually, I broke up with her – not because of her plumbing, although her lack of a vagina centainly didn’t help things, but because she was a total flake who continually stood me up for our dates. (She always had an excuse and was terribly apologetic, but there are only so many broken promises a man can put up with.) After she stood me up 3 times in a row, that was it.
Except in Britain, they’re not called “folks,” they’re called “biscuits” or something. 