On Becoming A Human Fleshlight

By Greta McGee

/ Nonfiction /      

On September 27, 2024, my uterus is removed from my body. I shall be unconscious the entire time, but it will happen sometime between the hours of nine a.m. and noon.

When I see her (my uterus) in a snapshot taken by my gynecological surgeon before being tossed away as bio-waste, I beam with pride. Oh my god! Look at her. She looks like the alien baby from Prometheus. Disarming myself of all those potential lives, creating space where there had been a foreign squatter, is unlike anything. “She” who has weighed on me in a heavier manner beyond the literal.

At the age of seventeen, I tell my mother I’m never having children. I believe it is best to crush a dream early on, let it not fester into sheer delusion. I tell her this after she shouts, one day you’ll have a daughter and you’ll understand. I tell her, no Mamma, I won’t. It is empowering. It is a minor revolution. 

It is also at this age that I discover that most seventeen-year girls don’t look at their stomachs and imagine taking a scalpel to them, carving out their uteruses and holding them up like a fisherman with his seventeen-pound treasure. They did not seem to feel diseased in the way I did. Infected with something undesired. Like any landlord with a squatter, I decided then I was to do everything in my power to expel this unwanted occupant from my establishment.

The day of surgery, my mother is screaming at five a.m. about cat litter. She is tight-lipped until I’m waving at her from my gurney as it’s driven towards the operating room. I tell my anesthesiologist that my mother is still not too happy about her trans child having a hysterectomy. She replies, ahhh I see, that’s why her face is like that. I laugh before I secede from consciousness. 

* * *

I awake grunting with a dry mouth from intubation. My pelvic area is bloated and a phantom pressure has taken over where I used to carry my uterus. I pee the bed for the first time in over a decade, missing the dusty rose bed pan and soaking through two pee pads. Like a cancer-ridden fourteen-year-old dog. My nurse has me hold onto the bed railing and push my ass up using the heels of my feet in order to lift and roll myself so that she may swap out my dark yellow-stained pads for dry ones. I am a limp asparagus. I smell of urine, water-based lube, and generic Cheerios. I have the faint sensation similar to that of a tester moisturizer on display. 

Unfamiliar with such genre of abdominal pain, I meet my hurt with desperate wails. In the midst of my groans and whimpers, I manage to ask, does this TV work? I point to the monitor hanging precariously above my bed. The nurse presses a button. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is on. She takes my vitals, cooing at me as I cry, assuring me relief is on the way. I snarl. I bark. I nip at the nurses shuffling in and out repeating relief is on it’s way. I am not proud of my behavior, however I forgive my most primal self.

I shout for relief for twenty minutes before my doctor and the pharmacy finally approve the nurse’s request for Dilaudid. My pain gradually falls from an eight to a four. It won’t take away the pain completely, but it’ll make it manageable, my nurse says over my cries. I no longer understand what ‘painkillers’ are. I do, however, understand what ‘relief’ is. The word becomes as concrete as I will ever know it to be in the matter of ten minutes.  

The first thing my mother asks me to do as I lay in a hospital bed after major abdominal surgery is kegels. Then, she proceeds to ransack the room. Bathing wipes. The extra hospital gown. Non-slip socks. Adult pee pads. She stuffs them all into my backpack, shoving things further and further down before the nurse comes back. 

I am in my hospital bed watching the TV monitor overhead. My mother is sitting up in the empty bed across from me. She senses a hesitation in me. I sense a fear in her. We said no more secrets, remember? I remember. I tell her that I’m considering starting gel testosterone. I thought you said you weren’t going to go on hormones? I know, I tell her, I know. I’m just considering it. Her face contorts as if she were tasting something she didn’t like but still wanted to maintain her manners. I’d been considering it for two months. I don’t tell her this. I don’t tell her I feel guilty that who I am and who she intended me to be are in such opposition. I don’t tell her I peed the bed. I don’t tell her the nurse gave me Dilaudid. My mother is very paranoid of pain medication. She believes one should “tough it out.”  

I cannot go home until I am able to walk and pee in a bathroom. When I am ready, I tell my nurse. Ok, take it slow to start. The first time is always the hardest. There are circulation cuffs velcroed to my calves that must first be removed. My mother lays back in the empty bed with her ankles criss-crossed and watches as I relearn how to lift my body into a sit-up position. My abdominal muscles are no longer my core. They tremble as I attempt to use them as usual. The nurse adjusts the bed settings so that I am in a seated positioned. So that I don’t strain my belly sutures. Now, I must simply use my legs. “Simply.” I see my legs as legs for the first time. Not mine. Just legs; a separate entity that I am not entirely sure how to command. I push myself onto my feet using the bed railing. Everything feels unstable; liable to fold like a deck of cards. The nurse gives words of encouragement like a SoulCycle instructor. My mother watches as if I were taking the very first steps of my life. In a way, I am. The first steps of life as a peaceful homeowner. The first steps in a body I am crafting from my mind’s eye. 

The day after surgery, my mother has overturned my studio apartment, obsessively cleaning. My cats smack at the Swiffer she has bought, along with Windex and a box of duster sheets and small trash liners. As usual, I have done nothing right. I haven’t deep cleaned. I’ve turned my cats into spoiled brats. I’m a lazy, do-nothing shut-in. I am no child of her’s, dirty as I am. 

At the age of ten, my nanny took me to the apartment below her’s in Queens to visit her friend. She had just given birth. It was the first time I met a woman who’s had a C-section. Fourteen years later, I am waddling around my apartment in the same way she did. In a penguin-like fashion, side-to-side, hindered by a gaseous bloated belly. My mother yells at me about dust. I hobble alone to the dining table in order to reach my pain pills. I ask her to help me get up from bed. She says, roll. On day three, she kicks me out of bed to take apart and clean the outside of my window. Move! Get the fuck up! I need to clean. Look! Look at the dust! Motherfucker, she curses. I am still in my surgical mesh underwear with a liner pad inside to catch the spotting blood from my brand new vaginal cuff. 

* * *

In December of the previous year, I tell my mother I’m getting top surgery. She asks me if I’m planning on doing anything else. I joke that I’d get a hysterectomy if I could, but that I didn’t think it possible. A part of her is relieved. I see it. The way the tension in her shoulders loosens ever so slightly and she gives her focus back to her morning cup of coffee. 

A month later I am crying in my primary care provider’s office. Dr. Bisgrove is a disabled woman with a trans child whom she is gifting with top surgery for their eighteenth birthday. I am sitting in an empty patient room for half an hour, crying, because she has just become the first person to ever affirm my desire to be rid of my uterus. You can always get a hysterectomy. She says it so casually. As if gender-affirming care just is. As if it didn’t need to be argued or defended or gone to battle for. I could only reply with, wait really? I can do that? She writes my referral a week later. I call my insurance provider. I cry after they tell me that hysterectomies count as transgender affirming care and would be covered. It is the only time this year that I cry for joy. Hope emerges in me through a warmth like that of tanning oil rubbed on a body laying in the August sun for an hour. It’s suggestive of more to come; more good. 

Dr. Tam, the woman who would become my gynecological surgeon, is at first just a number from my insurance provider. One number out of eight gynecological surgeons in my area. She was one of two surgeons that performed hysterectomies as gender-affirming care. Most office receptionists gave a rushed no and hung up. They only operated for those in “true” need of medical intervention. Gender-affirming purposes were not that. It took months to find Dr. Tam. In moments of desperation, I’d plead with office receptionists to just ask, maybe see if they were just willing. I call for weeks during my work hours. I am a private nanny. One afternoon, while the youngest naps, my boss asks me, so did I hear you’re looking to get a hysterectomy? I confess that I am. She replies, wow. I feel guilty rejecting childbearing to a bearer of children. 

I realize we are not the same. We never will be. I will never know her life as a white middle-class stay-at-home mother of two children. Nor do I want to. Yet, the guilt remains. 

* * *

Dr. Tam is a thin Asian woman in her fifties. She is cut-and-dry. Our first appointment she tells me to spread my legs and checks out the squatter invading my body. I am not her first trans patient. She asks, so we’re doing a hysterectomy? I confirm unsure if I’m being asked a trick question. She snaps off the pale yellow latex gloves and gets down to brass tacks. For the first time I hear someone say, and then we’ll deliver your uterus. Deliver. I am delivering. A word that was once dysphoric—that made my lips curl in disgust and my vagina clench shut from preemptive discomfort—is now one that makes me squirm excitedly. This shall be the first and last time I deliver anything vaginally. I exclaim to my roommate after my appointment, I’m gonna be a human fleshlight! With no other context, this confuses them. To which I explain the gory details explained to me by Dr. Tam about what a hysterectomy consists of. I go on, beaming, about how three incisions are made on my belly for the laparoscopic equipment and then my uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes are severed from the threads that connect us and then, once pulled out through my vagina, the top of my vaginal canal is sown shut into a cuff. So, basically, I’m gonna be a human fleshlight. My roommate laughs. We google photos of fleshlight sex toys. This is going on my Hinge profile. 

At my second appointment with Dr. Tam, it is decided that I will keep my ovaries. A suggestion, she tells me, that she gives to all her trans patients. You don’t want to be going through menopause right now. I ask her how bad can it really be? I don’t say that part of me wonders if the critics are onto something and women are just being dramatic. Trust me, I’m going through it now. We settle. I’m keeping my ovaries. I attempt to negotiate for one over two, believing that my body would make less estrogen if done so. Dr. Tam enlightens me that that is not the case. Also, if you end up developing ovarian cysts or anything like that, at least this way you have a back-up. Better to be on the safe side. This is the moment I become enamored with my gynecological surgeon—the superhero that is freeing me of my biological burden and making sure I live to see the day my body is fully curated. 

* * *

I am assigned a surgery date after my third appointment with Dr. Tam. I haven’t yet told my mother that I am having a hysterectomy. I decide that top surgery is the only thing she needs time to mourn, and that I have given her the ample time to do so. In response, for the first time in a decade, my mother goes to therapy. Her therapist is a trans-woman. She asks my mother to ask me to express what I think my mother’s perceptions on my having top surgery are. I write back: 

I think a lot of my mother’s understanding and perception around my desire for top surgery come from a very external, surface-level viewpoint. Something I’ve gathered by the word choice and language she uses, i.e. when she asks if I’m only doing this to “look hot” or her expression of concern over the fact that this won’t make me “like myself.” She, herself, verbally expressed to me in December that top surgery is a superficial procedure akin to a boob-job or mommy makeovers. I don’t think she grasps how truly amazing it is, my dedication to living in a body that I love—one I don’t want to hurt constantly or have deep internal shame around. I don’t think she’s managed to grasp the sheer significance of that. I also think she’s hell-bent on understanding things that fundamentally she will never understand about trans-ness as an existence. I can try to explain to her that a big barrier to her understanding comes from the fact that we don’t perceive womanhood the same. It is not an existence that she wakes up wanting to physically tear off her body until she’s nothing but a muscular skeleton, a silhouette of a genderless human form. She doesn’t understand that these individual truths are things she doesn’t need to understand, she simply needs to respect. And, more often than not, she can extend that modicum of understanding to trans / queer people at work, because I believe she does understands that to posit such questions would be inappropriate and harmful. Yet she cannot seem to extend that same luxury to me. 

Months before surgery, once I’ve come clean of my upcoming procedure, I am in a Lyft as my mother is on the phone telling me she thinks this hysterectomy “thing” is a bad idea. I am being driven home from therapy. She tells me that she’s consulted a family friend, a doctor, who agrees this is not a good time. She tells me I am not in a good place mentally for this. I tell her that that is exactly what makes this a perfect time. I tell her, getting this hysterectomy is the one thing that makes me happy these days. She tells me our family friend mentioned that many experience depression and a decline in mental health after a hysterectomy. I tell her, I think she’s referring to cis-women. You realize this is a gender-affirming surgery, right? She still thinks it’s bad timing. Are there any other secrets you’re keeping from me?, she implores.

* * *

Three weeks before surgery, my mother insists that I fly back home for Labor Day weekend. I deem it the “before” trip. I tell myself my mother deems it such as well. I agree to come back, very reluctantly. I tell myself that she needs this. 

On my way to the airport, I am on the phone with my mother scared about leaving the cats home alone. If you don’t want to come, just say so, she says to me. I pause. I don’t want to come. We both know I don’t want to come. Yet, I cannot firmly refuse her. I’m already on my way to the airport. It’s fine. I travel twelve hours from O’Hare to JFK to the LIRR to Southampton to reach my mother’s summer cottage. She picks me up from the train stop in a white Jeep rental. She is using her friendly, eerily cheery voice in the car. She’s happy I came. She’s made dinner at the house. I’m just really really tired, I tell her. And I miss my fur babies. 

For the next four days, I languidly sit in a familiar routine of ours. I wake up having barely slept, take my iPad into the living room and cozy up on the couch with the dewy smell of dawn around me. My mother wakes up an hour later and bids me ‘good morning.’ She starts a pot of coffee. She asks if I want any. I say yes, please. She asks what I want for breakfast. I ask if I can take the car and go get scones from the farmer’s market up the street. She huffs and tells me how bad they are for me, and then she caves but not before insisting she make me some eggs and avocado first. I agree to the terms. My mother urges me to come to the bay by the house every morning. Every morning, I insist she go on her own, that she enjoy herself. It’s just really not my thing. You go, have a good time. She pouts at my response, every morning. I know my mother wishes I loved the water as much as she does. I, who am too scared of the unknown underneath surface-level waves coupled with a sensory aversion to sand. My mother doesn’t understand this and I don’t explain it to her. I simply allow myself to disappoint her. 

My mother has made various plans for the Labor Day weekend. First, a bonfire hosted by some work friends. She spends the evening practicing introducing me as her “child” rather than her “daughter.” I’m getting it, see? It’s just going to take some time. I appreciate her attempts. I feel proud when she gets it right. I feel deeply uncomfortable when she gets it wrong. I tell her none of this. I mention to someone, who is also a mother, that I’m having surgery soon. She exhibits concern. No, no it’s a good thing. It’s a gender-affirming surgery. I’m trans. Her first response is an Oh of surprise. Our second appointment is an annual Labor Day brunch thrown by one of my mother’s closest friends. Most of whom are cis gay men. I spend the brunch quietly eating blueberry pancakes and breakfast sausages, exhausted and desperate for a nap. That evening, my mother asks me if I want to smoke some of our neighbor’s weed with her. I decline her offer, having already smoked earlier that afternoon and then drunk a glass of white wine. She commends me on knowing how to pace myself. We sit on the sun porch, my mother hitting a roughly-rolled joint in a rocking chair. I sit across from her on a light blue and white couch, drawing. We are in a conversation of sorts. One that is consistently interrupted by my mother giggling and telling me how high she is. It is between these bursts that she accuses me of being inconsiderate of her feelings regarding all these changes. You don’t even think about how I feel. This isn’t about you, I tell her stupefied. It is! I’m the one coming to take care of you. I laugh in disbelief, but not in shock. If there was anyone else, I promise you wouldn’t be. But there isn’t. And you’re right, I don’t care how you feel about this because this isn’t for you. It’s for me. I’m doing this for me. See, she says, inconsiderate. I gather my things to storm off. She starts to laugh, reminding me how high she is and to disregard her. I don’t have it in me to make her understand that there are some things you can’t take back, regardless of the state you are in. 

The next time my mother and I get stoned it is to celebrate my one week post-op. My treat is a trip to Whole Foods for junk-food. She has me on a fiber-conscious diet. Eggs and avocado in the morning. Yogurt with chia seeds and fresh raspberries and Miralax for my snack. Chicken or lean ground beef patties and spinach for dinner. She fights me because I want both ice cream and potato chips, but eventually caves. The fluorescent lights are twinkling or I am twinkling. I am unsure. My mother and I erupt into a laughing fit in the Whole Foods’ chip aisle at how bad I am at hiding things. She’d discovered the spot in my apartment where I stashed the junk-food my friend smuggled in during a post-op visit when she was cleaning. My skin is tingling in baby pink. My mother’s laughter is comfortable. It unfurls before my ears in gentle waves. This is the only time she laughs the entire visit. It is the only time I laugh with her the entire visit. 

I am sorry that the last time my mother laughed with her daughter, she didn’t know it would be the last time. I wonder if she thinks about the fact that I will never laugh with my daughter. If she does, I am sorry for this too. 

* * *

At my two-week post-op Dr. Tam sits on a lab stool and asks me with a laugh, So! Do you regret it? I have to ask. I chuckle. No. I feel great. My surgeon hands me a folder with all the laparoscopic images taken during surgery. I beam once again. When I get home, I lay the folder on my dining table and I stare at the photos in admiration and awe. Admiration of my feat. Awe at the sheer reality that something I carried for so long is now a tangible, physical external entity. 

My belly button, the location of one of the sutures for the laparoscopic equipment, has returned to some recognizable form. My mother is back in her own home. I get dumped a week after surgery by someone I’d been dating a month. I go out dancing. I get homesick. I cry and I cry and I cry. My hysterectomy is still one the best decision I’ve made for myself.

After I leave my surgeon’s office, I am terrified that I’ve stretched out the vaginal cuff. I imagine it like a seam ripping in slow-motion. I try to replay every time I’ve bent over or squatted in the last two weeks. Is sitting down considered squatting? I’m not sure anymore. How far does one have to bend to be “bending over”? If I keep my back straight and kneel to the floor to feed my cats, am I bending? Is sitting on my bench and curving my back over to tie my shoes considered being “bent over”? How will I know that my vaginal cuff is damaged? Will my organs start falling out my vagina, having now nothing to stop them from succumbing to gravity? Will I start to hemorrhage blood? Will it fall in pools into my boxer briefs?  Or am I walking around with a torn vaginal cuff and completely unaware? What if I realize too late? What then? I text my mother in a storm of anxiety. She responds, Why didn’t you tell me? Did she see anything abnormal? Take it easy then. Junk food is for the trash, not your body. Forgot exactly what the cuff is, but have a vague idea. It won’t be. Don’t be paranoid, especially at night. She tacks on a prayer hands and heart emoji. A sting of self-contempt punctures my chest. Will I always be a child in need of their mommy? No matter how many potential lives I’ve birthed. What then? 

* * *

My mother cannot put into words how she feels holding the knowledge of the death of her lineage. As her only child I will admit, I feel for her. In one day, I destroy any hope my mother had of continuing her generational line. I do not know how to ask her how this makes her feel. Perhaps because I am not entirely sure I want to know. 

My mother’s birthday falls on the week after she’s returned home from caring for me. I struggle to thank her. Mamma, I say over the phone. I just—I just wanted to—well, I know we didn’t really get a chance to talk about your feelings around the hysterectomy. So, well, I just wanted to check in. 

My mother clears her throat, slightly taken off-guard. No, no if you’re happy, I’m happy. I think that’s the bottom line. My concern was that fixing certain things wouldn’t fix the issues you have with yourself. But if you’re happy, I’m happy. I feel better that nothing went wrong. I—I felt odd when we didn’t hug goodbye before I left. I just—I don’t know how much you love me.

I—I do really appreciate you being there, I respond. 

I do the best I can. Use the broom. Once the eight weeks pass, you’ll do a big clean, yes? 

Yes, I will. 

All right, my love. I love you.

Love you too.

I think of all the mothers in my life. I think of all the lineages I have firmly stopped in one day. I hope my mother learns how to mourn this. She may not acknowledge it, but I do.