4.15.2010

My Vagina Monologue

Today I went to an Alternative Vagina Monologues. Inspired to speak about something I don't often speak about and what others around me were talking about, I got up and improvised. Here's the gist of what I said, in full of what I wish I had said, but it still turned out well:

I get up and talk in front of people all the time. I tell them really personal things. I tell them my life story as a trans person. There is one thing that I don't talk about, though, and that's my vagina. My vagina and I have had a complicated relationship. When I first really become aware of it, when I got my first period, right before Halloween in 7th grade (which was the worst trick-or-treating experience ever), I despised it. I was so...something, a feeling that I don't have a word for...about having my period, that I hid it from my mom for two days. Eventually I told her by slipping a note under her door. As the rest of puberty continued, I hated all of it.

When I became sexually active, I liked my vagina a little more because, well, it made me feel good. But I still didn't like to talk about it. Or think about it. Or acknowledge that it was there.

When I began to question my gender, I hated my vagina a lot more. For what it represented and for what me having it made people think I was.

But as I stand here today, as I have gotten this far in my transition, and the voice I hear coming out of these speakers back at me is a voice that sounds right for one of the first times in my life, I'm really comfortable with vagina. I don't talk about my vagina, now, however, because instead of making me uncomfortable, its existence makes other people uncomfortable. And I'm finding that the more I continue my life as a guy, the more important it is to me that people know I have a vagina and the more important my vagina has become to me.

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