To My Penis on His Birthday 🎂🍆
I DON’T KNOW what happens for most people when they catch a glimpse of themselves pulling up their pants in the bathroom mirror. I know only what happens for me: A quick, thick jolt of knowing that I can accomplish anything courses up my root chakra.
That’s not to say that I always feel like I can accomplish anything. It is to say, I guess, that I should look in a mirror when pulling my pants up more often.
Today is the fifth anniversary of my waking up from the best decision I ever made: to, finally, after 40 forlorn and lost years without one, get the dick that the universe left me without in an epically torturous experiment.
There is no overstating this trauma. Even after all this time, I saw an AFAB person in tight pants the other day and still thought, as I have since I was sentient, Where is her penis?? It’s automatic, unstoppable—cognitive coping gymnastics I developed as a child in immeasurable pain, forced to believe it would show up later to survive.
And show up it did.
Gabriel Mac
Five years of having my penis doesn’t erase the 40 years that I didn’t. Old terror and emptiness live in my cells; terror renews that the emptiness could return. There was very little chance, medically, that my penis wouldn’t survive if it made it five days past its creation, but though it’s been nearly 2,000 days now, our viability is so tethered that I stay scared.
Or I did, until this week. Rounding into this fifth birthday, I found myself standing in my RV kitchen, spooning guacamole from the awesome food bank into a bowl, and suddenly leaping with relieved joy, light of heart and feet as I finally believed: It’s not gonna die. It’s not a coincidence that in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself increasingly thinking: Oh my god—I’m gonna live.
Gabriel Mac
GETTING A PENIS didn’t solve all my problems. It didn’t even end my dysphoria.
That took four more surgeries. I had a glansplasty, which is the surgical term for getting your dickhead shaped, then the second step of my two-stage top surgery, to remove loose skin. I also had an erectile device implanted earlier this year (!—more on that later), and finally, two months ago, I received body contouring, in which fat was sucked out of places where it was ruining my life.
I don’t mean just that it landed like a knife when some woman in a food co-op ran up to tell me I looked exactly like a lady from behind. I mean that when I was sufficiently recovered from my October lipo to go to yoga two weeks ago, I felt the conspicuous absence of my insides screaming why, why, Jesus fucking mommy oh my fucking god why.
While the birth of my penis had deeply mitigated that screaming, it hadn’t eliminated it. Prior to the week before last, I’d thought for twenty years of yoga classes that everyone felt their insides screaming during yoga—or at least all the other incest survivors. But after my seventh transition surgery in seven and a half years, the one I knew would be my last, I learned that, to me, that was just what dysphoria felt like.
Gabriel Mac
“YOU ARE SO lucky,” my great-great-great grandmother, who was trans, said to me recently, dead as she was. She was murdered, on her way home from coal-mining one night, in circumstances that the last relative to tell the story still euphemistically referred to as a freak accident.
“You are so lucky,” said my Grandma Martha—that was her real name. And she was right. I am.
So fucking lucky.
I am so lucky to have been born with citizenship, courtesy of my ancestors who emigrated from Eastern and Western Europe to this magnificent, violent, magic, shit-hole country, where our transcestors fought and died to ensure that if I could just survive decades shackled to a virulently anti-trans sex abuser and in the closet—then just get myself to the right cities at the right time to hustle, jockey, and suffer for health care across three different states, taking two of them to court to get surgeries they were theoretically already required to provide by law—if I had the resources and resource to do all that, while being invisibilized and dehumanized again and again and again—all the time—then I could get the treatments I needed to feel for even a second, let alone a whole yoga class, what it is to breathe free from dysphoria.
I’m luckier than if I’d been born in Hungary, the home country of half my maternal ancestors. I’m luckier than if I’d stayed in my home state of Ohio, where Medicaid was banned from covering my health care. I’m “lucky,” that is, only by the standard of what “lucky” means for trans people, which isn’t what “lucky” means at all.
Gabriel Mac
TO MY PENIS on his fifth birthday, our collective rebirthday:
I wish we hadn’t been apart for so fucking long. If I had to rip out my ribcage to save you, now—if in the end, it was just you and me in a weird, horror-movie puddle of parts, boneless, bleeding out—as long as we were still together, stitched skin to skin, it would be worth it.
I wouldn’t trade anything for the experience of waking up with you in a hospital and singing to you, there, a lullaby I didn’t know the words to. Or for any other moment I’ve held or touched you, thousands of moments since that I hope—need—to eventually comprise a trillion moments. I wouldn’t call it lucky, but I would call it rare, and awe-some, to know the different degrees of whole. So to my penis, on your fifth birthday, I beg you—however irrationally, haunted by your absence still—to never leave.
There is nothing on this planet or in my past or future that I cherish like you. Like us—like my Selfhood. Our union completed me in ways I tried to complete countless times with the bodies and affections of others; it made it possible for me to know myself in ways I could never have imagined.
Gabriel Mac
“You are so lucky,” Grandma Martha said, because she lived forever in dysphoria and the closet, until she dared peek out, and was killed. She couldn’t have dreamt this life, the internal and external freedom, that I live. I couldn’t have either. My own father, her tragic familial line, told me both during rape and outside it that it could—that I could—not be.
Now we both get to witness my embodiment. Witnessing some trans children now—many children, where I live—going to school and family events and the mall, out and supported, I’ve often thought, These kids are so lucky. But what they’ve been through and go through still isn’t what lucky means, either.
It’s practically impossible to not hate yourself when you grow up hated. But doing the impossible is quintessentially trans. I love myself, and I love my dick, and those things are interdependent for me, having pursued my dick because I loved myself just enough, then, to believe I deserved to get what I needed—and to try. Having it is a constant reminder, in a great, reinforcing cycle of self-love that every day heals the cycles of violence I break.
Happy birthday, Thomas Penis Esquire III. Happy magnificent, improbable rebirthday to us. Our sacred joining is the best thing that ever happened to me, and not even death will do us part.
Gift my penis a yoga class.
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