so, I should start by saying vaginoplasty significantly reduced my genital dysphoria, and in general has helped me feel more like a woman - it’s overall quite clear it was the right choice for me (and same with transition overall).

… but I’ve struggled a lot with continued bottom dysphoria and anxiety that I made a mistake or the surgery was problematic or wrong in some way

for example, my labia continue to look and feel like scrotal tissue, and I feel insecure about this - they can sag and look wrinkly at times, which makes them look scrotal to me.

I also seem to have no labia minora as far as I can tell, or perhaps it’s too early post-op to tell, the clitoral hood is just a tighter part of the same labia majora - so maybe as swelling goes down there will be more of a sense of inner folds vs outer folds?

Anyway, lots of insecurity and concerns that my genitals are still male. Any time I’m aroused and my clit becomes engorged, it feels so much like an erection that I become dysphoric and I struggle to stay in the moment and maintain arousal.

Last night I had a dream that a stitch popped or something changed in my recovery overnight, and I woke up with my labia sagging even more and bunching into an empty scrotal sack, and my clit when engorged would become erect and push out several inches into an erect penis. It was very distressing in my dream, I was panicking and trying to find a private place to capture photos to send my surgeon. (In some ways this nightmare was clarifying or affirming - knowing my unconscious is not secretly coveting having male genitals again makes me feel more confident I made the right choice.)

I guess I never expected to have so much bottom dysphoria post-op, or to struggle so much to see my vagina as female. Sometimes I even wonder if this is what it’s like to be a trans man, to “feel male” internally and to have female genitals (though obviously this isn’t how trans men feel, trans men generally want to feel male in body and mind, something I don’t experience - and my “feeling male” is more like insecurity and imposter syndrome than whatever trans men experience).

It still hasn’t been six months since my surgery, and I’m so early in my transition in general - I just trust it will get better over time … but right now anyway, I am struggling more than I expected with challenges I perhaps naively expected or hoped the surgery would just immediately solve.

I have noticed that the dysphoria I would feel when I lay on my back and twist my lower body in a way that allows me to feel the length of my clit embedded in me, and it would feel like my penis was sewn onto me, has gone away - with the healing I think inflammation has gone down and I no longer notice that sensation of length in me, and when I do twist or pull in a way that seems to engage my clit, it feels more “normal” and doesn’t create dysphoria. So already the dysphoria I had earlier in my recovery is subsiding, which is good!

I think this was mostly a vent post / brain dump, but I did want to ask about others’ experiences - I wanted to invite general sharing of what surgeries were like for others (esp. what wasn’t expected or isn’t commonly discussed).

If anyone has advice for me, I’m completely open. Thanks for reading 😊