I wish I’d photographed my clit before starting testosterone

Did you miss me? It’s been a while since I took part in Sinful Sunday and shared any of my nudes. In fact, it’s been a while since I published anything on my blog full stop. It’s not that I haven’t been taking nudes, but I haven’t felt the need to post them on the internet. There’s a few reasons for this – mental illness, burnout, trying to be kind to myself instead of forcing myself to write like I would have a year ago – but also the explicit photos I’ve taken recently have felt more personal, more intimate. I take them to document how hot I’m feeling, and maybe to tease my partners, but I didn’t feel like I needed to post them online.

Until yesterday.

I have a confession to make here: I’m not going to tell you why I ended up photographing my junk yesterday in this post. The story is very embarrassing. I’m absolutely going to tell it – because I think that sharing moments of vulnerability is a great way to challenge assumptions and start conversations – but I’m going publish it as a newsletter instead.

You see, in the six months (fact check!) since I started I last posted on my blog, I’ve done something I’ve been thinking about for a while and launched a newsletter. Genderbent is a series of intimate essays about gender and transness, and it would mean a lot if you subscribed. So far newseltter topics have included wearing skirts as a trans man and why I want to use the men’s bathroom even though it’s gross. I’m planning to write about soft masculinity, whether I want to “pass” as a cis man, fatphobia in trans healthcare, how cis people weaponise their tears, and why I use the term ‘transsexual’ to describe myself.

I’m really excited about Genderbent and if you’ve ever enjoyed my writing, found my tweets about trans inclusivity helpful, or jerked off to my nudes, this is a totally free way to support me and my work.

After you enter your email address and click ‘subscribe’ you’ll have to head to your inbox to complete your sign up and confirm that you do actually want to receive the newsletter. For folks who have already signed up to get an email notification whenever I post on Twitter, this is an entirely different mailing list, so you’ll need to subscribe too if you want to get Genderbent directly in your inbox every other week.

Why did I start a newsletter? I’m going to be honest: part of it was to get myself excited about writing again. But additionally, while my blog has always centred queerness, I want to keep the focus of my writing here on sex, relationships, vaginismus, queerness, and sexual shame. There’s definitely overlap between these themes and the ideas I want to write about in Genderbent – and my transness absolutely is central to the sex I have – but the newsletter is going to be significantly more SFW.

I’m also not aiming for every issue to be perfectly polished: I’m trying to take the pressure off myself to create educational content about transness, and instead just share more personal thoughts and talk about navigating the world as a trans person.

(Don’t worry – we’re getting to the explicit photo soon. If you want to skip ahead and just look at my dick at this point, I won’t judge you.)

Photographing my clit at twelve weeks on testosterone

As of yesterday, I’ve been on testosterone for twelve weeks. I’m in awe of the small changes my body has made and how amazing each of them feel. There’s hair on my stomach now that definitely wasn’t there twelve weeks ago. I can’t always hit the high notes in songs I knew I used to be able to sing without my voice cracking. Whenever I’m impatient for faster changes, bigger changes, I play myself the voice notes I’m recording every week and experience the pure euphoria of my voice getting deeper.

I’ve always hated my voice – I wonder how much of that was dysphoria?

I haven’t meticulously noted down every new spot or recorded the day I noticed that I was sweating out of every single pore on my body during yoga in a way I definitely hadn’t at last my class. I do have photos though, photos of how my body used to look, how my face used to look. I’m documenting my experiences on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) through voice notes and selfies. Selfies where I feel like I’m smiling far more than I used to. I have lots of photos to compare these to when I need to remind myself that my body is changing.

I don’t have any photos of my clit though.

One of the things I was most excited about changing when I started testosterone was bottom growth – which is the informal name clitoral hypertrophy: how one’s clitoris grows in length and width when taking testosterone. But when I looked at my junk yesterday after jerking off, I couldn’t work out if my clit had grown. I’ve called my clit my dick for years at this point, but I’ve been waiting weeks for the moment when I look down and it to look like the dicks I’ve seen belonging to other trans men and trans masculine people who are on testosterone.

I’ve always had intense gender dysphoria around my junk. I used to think it was just the sexual shame put on me by a society determined to stop anyone but straight, abled, allosexual, white cis men from enjoying sex. I used to think it was just discomfort from years of internalising the message that vulvas are gross. It’s not. While my vagina doesn’t make me any less of a man, it’s also the cause of acute gender dysphoria that kept me scared of sex and of my own body for years.

Somewhere on my blog, or on my laptop, or in the Google photo storage I pay for, there are probably photos of my clit that are detailed enough for me to compare my clit now to my clit twelve weeks ago. But if there are, I couldn’t find them yesterday. I want so badly for my dick to be bigger that I’m worried I’ve fooled myself into thinking it is. I wish I’d photographed my clit before starting testosterone, just so I could compare it to my clit now and know for sure that it’s grown.

But while I can’t go back in time to photograph my junk on my first day on testosterone, there is something I can do.

While I didn’t photograph my clit before I started HRT, I absolutely love the photos I’ve taken of my dick after twelve weeks on testosterone.

Click the kiss for more nudes and lewds, and please do subscribe to Genderbent!