—

I have lived the overwhelming majority of my adult life in a body that most closely resembles that of a woman and for whom socially, legally, and medically has been (and continues to be despite the best attempts at a certain group of people) treated to be more female than it is male. My body been ignored, talked over, sexualised, used, raped, sold, dismissed, and opened up by people who are more committed to seeing it as the body of a female than I ever have been or will be.

My very transsexual willingness to accept and acknowledge myself as a woman, comes not at some desire to posses or attain a social standing that has been denied to me by curse of my state at birth, but after extensive efforts to interrogate and understand exactly what I am. It exists as a form of acceptance that I cannot force the world to see me as anything but that which it does. The men I have been blessed (and cursed) to love and / or fuck have been men for whom women are the sex they are attracted to. The people who have been my closest friends and those who have stood alongside me as I navigate my 13 years of adult life have been people who are female, and have without effort nor contrived desire for some politically correct action to be perceived, treated me as the same, or at least, a variation of the same.

The reason this insane mental arithmetic has been bouncing around my head for the last few weeks is because I have seen over and over this insane gotcha lauded over trans women on the internet “how do you know you are a woman?”.

I’m not sure babe, maybe it’s the tits on my chest, the (neo)vagina between my legs, the misogyny I experience both at work and at home, the years of fighting for a place at the tiny table that is the opportunities afforded to people in the world of work who are not men, that at some point you have to resign yourself that against all protestation to the contrary, to some vaguely important degree I am in fact, just, a woman.

—

“Wow you’re just reducing womanhood to sexual organs”, “you must have skipped the bit of schooling where they taught you you’re either a man or a woman”, “so you really just think you can claim this thing that isn’t yours?!?! Just because you have a revolting ROT POCKET between your legs, that doesn’t mean ANYTHING it’s not even self cleaning, Typical MAN.” (In the incredibly unlikely instance that anyone of a gender critical background reads this blog, and thinks theres some insanely useful gotcha that will garner you a few hundred likes to laugh at the dumb tranny that thinks she’s sussed it all out, I’ll just spell it out for you here, I don’t think I am you, and I don’t think I have sussed it out.)

—

Unlike what the internet will beg you to believe, it’s not agony for my nearest and dearest dolls to hear that you believe of us to be men.

We spent our childhoods being told we were girls by our families and peers because we refused to play sport with the boys, which switched to early teenage years being told that we’re actually men the moment we begin to adorn ourselves in fashionable outfits, experiment with makeup and god forbid, begin the arduous task of changing our sex.

To speak on behalf of my friends to some degree, we embark on this journey not because it’s fashionable nor because we expect society to jump at the chance to affirm our lifestyles but because years of childhood effort to try to resist the inevitable and live up to the demands and expectations of our families, educators, and social norms, have proven to ourselves that the only way we will become functional humans existing actively within our communities and leaving an impact on the world is to quiet the humm of external voices demanding we just be fucking normal and to walk into clinics that will deprive us of our dignity and humanity to undergo expansive and expensive remodelling of our physical selves in line with what routinely feels like a last resort.

Funnily enough, cutting your dick and balls off, taking synthetic oestrogens to alter our secondary sex characteristics, and having portions of our faces peeled off like an orange just to get our skulls shaved down with electric drills isn’t something we choose to do on a whim, or because of some silly little stupid faggot feelings. These radical actions, tend to exist as last resorts for people who have already tried and failed to live up to the standards of people who most likely are the very internet trolls posing most proudly like a republican holding a prize bass on a boat in camouflage, a barrage of tweets that read “but why do you think you are a woman?”.

I know that I don’t have a womb. I also know, much to my continued dismay as I battle with the repercussions of being raised in a society that places success for women predominantly on their ability to birth their partners child, that I will never carry my boyfriends children. I would, in fact, suggest that us dolls are potentially more aware of these differences than even the most rabid of internet trolls who spent 15 hours a day screaming MAN at every trans woman who dares to take part at a quiz show, or PREDATOR at every (very sweet) doctor who dares to save someones life whilst trans.

Quite simply, my position on the topic of my very own life is that when over the period of 13+ years you inhabit the positions within society that are given to women over and over again down to the most rudimentary and stupid things like being someones sister in-law, or assigned to clean the women’s toilets at your stupid service job, or are continually talked down to by a male boss, or are treated for recurrent UTI’s by a doctor who specialises in female anatomy , and so on and so forth, that to stand there and demand everyone look at you and deny the voice inside their heads and every natural instinct they have, and acknowledge that you are VERY MALE IN FACT, is fucking dumb.

Not to cringe post, but if Simone De Beauvoir posited that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”,

let it be known that dumb tranny instagram page Tr4nbie says:

“When insisting you are the very sex you have changed becomes ridiculous, you have to, to some degree, acknowledge that maybe you have been successful”.

I know I am a woman, because every single aspect of my life indicates to me that I am far more of a woman than I am a man. That I am far more female than I am male. And that to argue against this would be perceived to be lunacy to the majority of people who have known me for years without being privy to the intricate details of my medical history.

Maybe, somewhere along this sex change journey upon which I embarked when I was a teenager, I have to come to acknowledge that I did in fact change my sex.

—

Tr4nbie
xox

—

I sold access to my most intimate body parts for prices as low as 60 pounds an hour. I worked in brothels, in dungeons, in fancy schmancy London hotels, in clients houses, and in tiny windowless bedrooms. Every time the story was the same, a guy who needs to let off some steam, a loving husband who can’t get what he wants from his ailing wife back home, children grinding him down so much he has to bust a nut into a girl who needs his money to pay for her rent. I played the slutty student, fascinated with the world and getting my rocks off whilst making some spending money because I was SO insatiable I needed their unwashed cock to feel content.

You see, the secret to successful hooking is they have to think you’d do it for free. If they realised you felt about your time with them as work, the fantasy would disappear. They want to think you want it, they want the transaction to be as small as possible, the fantasy is that you want them.

Everything is a lie, from my name to my age, to the names of my friends, to where I grew up, to my biological sex.

There’s a funny thing about transsexual bodies, we have value, we’re exotic. Rich British men want slender white girls with big hard dicks who WANT to fuck them and make them gag on their dicks before they drive their cocks into our buttholes and fill us with their jizz. Once we take a scalpel to our divine feminine penises, carve them into something we can tolerate, we become unfuckable.

Men really don’t want to fuck something they view as a mutilated impersonation of the real thing. If they want to fuck a vagina they want it to be on a woman, if they want to fuck a tranny, they want her to have a dick. When you’re neither biologically female nor biologically tranny, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. And it was right there I found myself just a few months after I’d been spat out on a hospital bed kicking and screaming, “it’s a girl!” the nurse proclaimed as I sat in a puddle of blood and piss, the hole where my penis used to be hidden under wraps of bandages. The eternal tuck. Self worth? I didn’t have any. Employment opportunities? LOL. A mixture of my own ego, the unwillingness of businesses to hire transsexuals throughout the early-mid 2010’s, and a fractured familial relationship that couldn’t handle the psychotic nature of the post operative mind left me burdening one of my few friends with my presence, no money, only half keeping up with my dilation schedule, I fell backwards into a brothel.

—

You like that don’t you, you filthy stupid whore? You love feeling my cock in your throat, go on play with yourself. Your holes are mine.

I wonder what I’m going to have for dinner, I think I’m meeting up with my friend, maybe noodles. I rustle up a mean stir fry… have to remember to swing by Tesco on my way back.

Fuck you feel so good, uh you’re so wet for me, wow, oh my god. Take my cock, tell Daddy you love it. FUCK I’m going to C…

Got another in an hour, time for a cig and a cup of tea before I have to get ready.

—

Brothels don’t make a habit of hiring trannies. They’re pretty against it, the managers anyway. About 60% of my rate that they set, taken for their fees, Charge 130 and I keep 60, and for the privilege of their continued willingness to put up with my presence I get the pleasure of getting pressured into giving them ‘my services’ for free, and I get to hear their opinions of us when they come up on the TV. There was a tranny on a daytime show once, he always watched Jeremy Kyle or game shows, “that’s a fucking MAN I can see his fucking adams apple” he shouted at the TV. Instinctively I dropped my chin.

She was being socially raped by the audience, tearing her apart for not wanting to live how the world thought she should. I was being physically raped by men upstairs, ring the doorbell, hand me over some sordid notes that forgave the unwilling entrance into my still raw and unhealed cunt. 70 to M, so he could afford his blow, 60 to me, so I could afford my dinner. I survived it, but not without scars. I never let anyone see how raw it was, lies upon lies to hide the lines the booze, the fags just to keep moving.

As all things when you’re trans, my life fell apart 6 years later. I’d shot porn in big studios, flown around europe to service men with my holes, worn every manner of gross cheap costumes to please and delight arrogant arsewholes who refused to tip on the dinners I had to sit through. Smiled as they devoured my body, cut holes with their words about how I was “statuesque” and how tight I was, smiled as they raped my body and my soul, built just enough to have a nice bedroom, nice pets, nice friends, a nice tv hanging on my wall I could rot in front of.

“I think you need to come clean”

10 thousand followers who’d paid me for sex or jerked off to my tits and cunt, and everything I’d post would get the same reply from tens of anonymous accounts all made by the same man that to this day I know to be one of three people. Photos of me as a teenager ugly and clocky and deathly sad, haunting me now after I’d clawed my way from the literal gutter into a medium of comfort.

In the flick of a switch everything was silent, my career died, I saw a few clients I trusted for a couple years, but she was dead.

Back to the drawing board.

It’s been about 7 years since that day in June 2019 when it started, old now and serving pints to jeering old men who keep looking at my tits for £13 an hour.

Everything changes, everything stays the same.

Dearest Reader: I’ve wanted to write this piece for years, but have always struggled with the complicated feelings that it evokes. Decisions made out of a need for survival, lying and deceit, actively gaslighting people, the ugly truth of parts of my life I never see reflected anywhere. I hate myself for some of this stuff, and I have a lot of resentment towards a world which made me feel at the time that I had no other choices. x

That’s the text one of my besties sent me at 23:55 on Monday the 28th of September 2026, whilst I was at work. I look it up and yep, there it is. The body of a transsexual woman standing in a shower staring back at me from my glowing mobile phone, the noise of the bar humming in my ears as a wave of anxiety and disgust washes over me. 

“Nooooo”, i instinctively respond, “I know it’s just a body but I hate it”.

Fell on the sofa to pass out just after 2am after a boring close, rustle up a quick story post with a bit of George W Bush twin towers humour, and conk out into a deep sleep. 

—

Disgust? At the body of another trans woman? If anyone else had this response to her body, or god forbid my body I’d be mortified. Why do I feel it acceptable to punish her with my own disgust? Am I any better than the men who rip us up and consume our bodies either with their own fear at the trans feminine or their lust for something exotic? 

What is it about a woman with a dick that makes me revulse and recoil in fear and disgust? My body doesn’t look like that, my body has a small mound sprinkled with a soft covering of hair leading down to two soft lips that reach between my legs like a normal woman. If you squint, you almost can’t see the scar lines that follow the folds of my labia, signalling the prior presence of something uncouth, something unbecoming of a woman like myself. 

I think the depths of it all stems from this deep discomfort at my own transsexual experience. A horror at the existence of something I utterly hated that was attached to my body and the utter disbelief that anyone could be a girl like me and not feel the same. Secondhand shame and embarrassment about that part of my body being seen reflected onto someone who clearly doesn’t have those same experiences, that same horror. 

I should feel happiness, that transsexual experiences are so expansive, and how someone who has walked a similar path to me, is able to exist so confidently in a body that has done nothing but exist. The trauma of nonconsensual fetishisation from my own girlhood being flashed before my eyes as someone chooses to share something so mundane as flesh and blood and skin. 

Why does it bother me? 

Why can’t I look at it? 

Why do I hate her for it? 

Why do I hate me for it? 

Theres something so wonderful in women when they are able to take back control of bodies that are too often stripped from us. To be a woman is to be policed, and I know this as well as any other woman. My whole life my appearance has been dictated to me and ridiculed by men and women who thought I was too camp, dressed too weird, was too out there. I spent my entire late teens controlled by other people, doctors dictating if how I held myself were female enough to deserve healthcare, if I was wearing skirts or trousers. I fought tooth and nail through sex work and trauma tens of different jobs to find my way to a place where I can own my own body and feel comfortable presenting it in a way that feels authentic. Why then do I feel it’s my place to judge some girl I’ve never met who chooses to show parts of herself I wouldn’t judge another girl of showing, if her parts more closely resembled my own. 

“It’s internalised transphobia obviously” - yea but it’s not, it’s more than that. It’s a visceral screaming in my body that her willingness to be seen that way says something about who I am, of what I am at it’s most core. If she could do that, why did I have to cut mine off to feel normal? Why has my trauma turned her body into a knife that cuts directly at all the bits of me that hurt the most? If she can show her genitals to the world and overcome what must have been a bucket of shame she had to unpick to do so, why am I then feeling entitled to think, or joke, or criticise her? 

Why does another woman’s body make me want to die? Why does her penis feel like a very astute personal attack on my everything? 

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t necessarily sit here asking you to give me them. That said, a body is a body, and my discomfort at her decision says more about me than her.

Gocks out 4 harambe I guess.

xox 

At least, that’s what I tell people.

The truth is, deciding if I want to let someone into my life that much is a massive undertaking, examining what this fact about the path I have walked to be where I am today will do to our relationship, whether it’s worth the risk of them hating me for it, or even worse still, telling me I’m “brave”. My trans-ness has never been a core part of my identity, to be defined by it would be a walking nightmare, and to have to express it to people feels little more than a ritual of humiliation.

“By the way guys, before you decide if you like me or not, I need you all to be fully aware that I was born with a dick”.

Being trans has never been something that felt worthy of being celebrated, for me, it was something that could get me hurt, something that did get me hurt. It has always felt more like a curse rather than a blessing, even now years after I last knocked on a hotel door to meet a stranger from a website so I could make my rent, I have had to remember that I still live in the same city where I did these things. If I take up too much space, take too many risks or speak too liberally about my past, it could come back to haunt me. If I’m not the stupid dumb whore who’s desperate for cock how will I please the man who’s about to help me pay for my groceries? If I’m not the studious daughter, how will I make sure my parents aren’t deathly ashamed of their freakshow child? If I’m not suitably normal, how will this straight white man know I’m safe for him to hire to work in his bar?

I spent so long hiding my transsexuality because it was imperative to retain housing, to retain a job, to get clients, that any time I have had to acknowledge it in public I shut down. My fingers tingle and go numb, my heart races, my head fills with what if’s. Creating Tr4nbie was the first time I acknowledged I was trans online in any capacity (even anonymously) since late 2016, when I had to make a call about my sex work to maximise my earning potential. I made a deal with the devil, forever be ashamed and hide who you were, for a few good years of making cis-level money, before it all comes crashing down amidst allegations of the transsexual variety.

I don’t even know how it feels at this point to feel trans pride. I’m proud that I survived it, but proud that I am this thing that stole my youth amidst a flurry of doctors appointments and psychiatry appointments only to have politicians 14 years later declare me to be a dangerous monster who the general population has to be protected from? I don’t get it.

You become numb to being told your self hating, riddled with internalised transphobia that over time you begin to wear it like a badge. “Transmedicalist? Lol yea”, “self hating tranny? Fuck yea I hate myself”. I’ll let you in on a little secret, I don’t hate myself, nor do I hate other people who do this trans thing differently to me, it’s all just a defense mechanism because everyone wants me to play the role of the happy grateful tranny and I won’t fucking do it and it makes people uncomfortable.

These days, I accept it for what it is for me. A part of my medical history, an aspect of my past that holds very little power of my current or future potential, and something I will only talk about openly with a few people. If I’m around trans people I stick to a tight script, if I’m around cis people, I stick to a different one.

“Yea I knew when I was a kid, did it all as a teenager and I’ve moved on now”

“I just hope they’re happy, I knew a trans girl once and she seemed nice, idk why it’s such a hot topic these days”

I can count on about three fingers the number of people I feel able to sit and truly open up about my relationship with this weird mental condition. How I hate it for stealing my youth, how I resent it for damaging my ability to seek medical assistance now as an adult, how I hate being associated with a certain type of person by virtue of this arbitrary label, or even more importantly, how much I love and feel supported by the efforts of the dolls who came before and lit this wonderful path from which we in turn can follow and light our own paths for the next generation.

See, I’m deathly ashamed of being a trans woman, but deathly proud of being a doll.

I just don’t talk about it, trans people don’t like it when you do trans differently than them, don’t include them in your own definitions of your own experiences. It’s easier these days to not even clock yourself to another tranny rather than have to explain that yes you make those memes and yes you really did mean the thing you posted in 2024 that someone on tumblr said was a microaggression against the polyamorous nonbinary community. Our experiences are so wonderful, so ripe with nuance, beauty, and strength, that every time we share them it hurts a little bit. Every time we have to clarify our own histories, reframe them in new ways to fit new narratives, we lose a little bit of ourselves.

One day, maybe I will feel like opening up about my past is something that feels comfortable and safe to do, or maybe I won’t. Until then, I’ll continue to be this weird thing that so many of us throughout history have done:

I’ll be a doll with my dolls, and I’ll just be a person with everyone else.

This helplessness follows us everywhere, simple tasks and life skills completely neglected, opportunities left unfulfilled because we feel unwelcome in society, jobs go unapplied for, education squandered, and we just get stuck. It’s understandable, but it’s not something we should accept. What’s more, taking steps in their own transition seems so unmanageable for some girls, “reddit help me how do I start hormones?”, “reddit help me who should I go to for FFS?”, “reddit what is my bra size?” “REDDIT HOW DO I STYLE MYSELF?!?!”. Girls, lets all take a step back and take stock of our own situations, and take some responsibility to remedy our own problems without burdening everyone around us!

Nobody is coming to force feminise you!

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen or heard of trans women minimising themselves “until I’ve got my ffs” or “until the HRT has kicked in” or “until I have the right updated ID”. This weird lock-in gooner culture has normalised playing videos games and hiding from the world as core trans experience, whilst trans content creators farm clicks through stoking the flames with sensationalised reporting and clickbait titles.

“BREAKING TRANS NEWS THEY WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR HORMONES”!!

Not only does this rhetoric keep trans women locked away from society, the literal goal of all of these anti-trans bills, it keeps trans women stuck in this perpetual cycle where they don’t see the point in learning basic skills because of the perceived risks both directly in engaging with society in the moment, and also due to this existential risk that is proposed against our lives. Why bother learning how to do basic skincare, or cleaning the kitchen, or getting a job, when the whole world is conspiring for your downfall? There’s always a perceived block, there’s always a very rational ‘reason’ excusing inaction, self righteous apathy often self medicated by a cocktail of prescribed and recreational drugs exalted by someone who then goes on to claim they’re planning to flee the country to (insert name of country they have never been to before but claim is safer for trans people).

I think a huge aspect of this all is that for so many of us we are used to being spoonfed, for those of us who were able to exist as boys, the experience of being someone’s beautiful perfect son is often very different to the experience of being a daughter. The years of someone doting over your presentation, ensuring you’re eating all your dinner, praising you and promising you the world are very different to the ways in which daughters are often expected to step up and behave like adults from an early age. Many of us feel that shift as we grow into our acquired sex and associated roles, some of us experience a small taste of it through the immeasurable joy of being someones faggot son. All of this to say, you are not in Kansas anymore, your mom is not coming to bail you out of this predicament, you’re a tranny, grow up and act like it.

“I’m just a girl”, cool, well all my girl friends have jobs, know how to write a CV, are working on basic goals, understand having to balance time between work and play, keep up basic cleanliness of their living spaces and can maintain a simple skin and haircare routine so what are you on about? Escapism is vital, we all need it, but no your gooner video game is not a replacement for setting and achieving goals for yourself, and discord is not a replacement for a friend group that loves you and spends time with you. I promise you there is a life that is worth living out there for you just waiting for you to discover it, but it will not come to you, you have to go out and find it.

It’s no secret that the political and commentariat class, especially here in the UK at the moment, want to keep trans women out of work, out of the public eye, and in spaces where we can be demonised as predators and freaks worthy of fear. Their worst fear is people engaging with us every day and realising we are funny, working alongside us and realising we have the same struggles as everyone else, sharing our goals with each other and learning that we all want the same things. By giving in and sitting inside, by hiding from society, not working on your future, acting like you’re incapable of taking any ownership of your life you’re not rebelling against a society that is intolerant of you, you’re letting them win. Unemployment is their goal for you. Not having a local support network of friends is their goal for you. Keeping you unable to advocate for yourself is their goal for you.

In addition, if you can’t even get your life together enough to wash your hair once a week how can you expect to keep up the upkeep of 3 dilations a day for the first month after srs? If you get out of the door to go to that interview how are you going to get out of the door to get a photo for your updated ID? If you can’t save up to move out of your parent’s spare room how will you save up for that type 3?

For so many trans women in the western hemisphere right now our biggest barriers aren’t losing our rights, they’re proving to ourselves that we are worthy of the effort that is required to thrive. When you perceive yourself coming out in a world where things can only get better only to rapidly see things get worse, feeling shit is understandable, but rolling over and giving up because it’s too hard isn’t. Giving up isn’t cunt, it’s embarrassing, it’s entitled, and it makes a mockery of every trans woman who died for your right to exist today.

It’s not something that’s radical, a woman in her 30’s having her “I think about it all the time” moment, except when your vagina is a inverted penis and your capacity to procreate was burnt in medical waste when you were 21, it often feels like it is.

Every transition is different, and every trans person has their own outlook on this stuff. But for me, the ability to have a child was never on the cards, severe sex dysphoria and a love of being fucked by bears made the chances of my life leading me to a wife, 2.5 kids, and a dog being little more than a pipe dream. But fuck me, do I feel completely lost in a world where my friends are settling down, my formerly non-binary buddies are mothers and wives, everyone is talking about how having a child is life changing and their purpose come at last.

All the while my inverted dick still lacks the capacity to grow my partners seed into a screaming, shitting, bundle of joy. And it makes me feel like a freak.

It’s nothing new of course, some women have been unable to conceive forever, but I never expected to be able to conceive, I chose this alienation for myself and still it batters me every day. Awkward looks when I reiterate that, no, I can’t have a child, or in most circumstances, trying to dance past the conversation without even acknowledging the barren nothing that lives inside my abdomen.

Sadly for me, and other 30 something life-long transsexuals with fertile looking titties, “Nah, I don’t think it will happen for me, idk, it’s complicated” is rarely taken as it’s said, people don’t like women not fulfilling their expected role of mother, there’s always follow up questions, there’s always a well meaning cis person ready to offer up solutions they think you’re too dumb to have ever thought up yourself.

“Have you considered IVF?”

"Have you looked into surrogacy?”

…

or my absolute most hated offering proffered frequently after I have spluttered through tears that I’m a repugnant transvestite:

“You can always adopt though?”

Fuck me why didn’t I think of that?! Surely, government agencies are chomping at the bit to give vulnerable children to trannies at a time like this. Not least, trannies with complex histories of sex work, drug use, risky sex practices, and alcoholism.

I used to laugh and go “oh yea” and then walk off to cry by myself, then I started looking them in the eye and regurgitate something similar to the paragraph about. It’s only in the last few months I’ve reached a point of speaking my truth.

“No, I've obviously considered all the options, and have had to start the agonising process of accepting that I will never be able to be a mom. For so many reasons, this cuts me up in ways nothing else does, I feel less than every woman I meet, I am reminded every time I see a child that I’ll never be able to be woman who can provide her partner a child, and it makes me feel lesser than you’d ever be able to imagine.”

Fuck, when did the trannies become self aware?

I am the sum of the choices I made, choices that were made under duress of poverty, choices that were made when I was deeply mentally unwell, choices that were made when I was still legally a child. And some day in the future I hope to be able to find a way to accept the beauty in my ability to put myself and my immediate safety and security first even at the cost of this most human desire.

It shouldn’t be seen as scandalous for trans women to mourn our incapacity to be mothers, I shouldn’t feel shame for feeling upset that this transition came at the cost of so much that, even if I hadn’t loved myself enough to put my transition first, I wouldn’t have been able acquire anyway. I’m not even jealous and bitter towards women who have, can, and do have children, I’m just fucking sad that I can’t.

“Am I even a real woman if I can’t?”

I don’t have the answers to this stuff, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, this is the stuff I’m too ashamed to actually talk about most of the time. I don’t think “womb transplants” (where are the womb’s coming from gang???) will save us, I don’t think I can “trans women ARE women” my way out of feeling sad about this.

All I know is I have a beautiful cat who loves and trusts me enough to think my legs are the safest place in the world, I have a beautiful niece who loves to hang out with me, and a beautiful nephew who I will never understand unless he becomes a raging faggot (I’m prayin divas), and I’m working really hard to reach a place where that is enough, and god willing one day, I will get there.

It’s cringe to write notesapp apologies, and frankly, I don’t believe exploring these concepts how I did was wrong, but I do believe recognising unintended consequences, and talking about how I interacted with the ideas would be valuable both to myself, and to the people who may have been impacted by them.

Anyway, if you followed me on Instagram, or just, were vaguely exposed to the memes I used to create, you likely came across me crossie bashing, AGP joking, and transbian mocking. I want to talk a little about the psychology behind the memes, what I thought I was doing, why I continued doing it even when the dead horse was well and truly flogged, and why I wish I had stopped sooner.

When you run a page like Tr4nbie, where I acquired quite rapidly a sizeable following by creating ‘controversial’ content about the trans experience that directly prioritised a specific trans experience, you are constantly getting feedback. On the one hand, you have people who agree with you praising you, on the other hand you have people who disagree with you painting you out to be a monster. In addition to this, you have numbers, likes on posts and follower counts acting as their own metric for success, and lemme tell you as a diva who is actively in recovery for alcoholism, that dopamine hit for growth and praise goes HARD. Content that was ‘controversial’ did better, and I loved doing better, so I’d double down on doing bitesize discourse, getting posts shared onto other platforms where people would hate me, or being shared by accounts of trans women I looked up to which just fuelled my ego. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that my decision to stop posting memes and my decision to engage with Alcoholics Anonymous coincided, after two years a dry drunk, I had to break the cycle, because as the cringe sign on the wall of one my local groups says “nothing changes if nothing changes”.

Somewhere along the way, I began to realise that the stuff I was posting had a negative impact on people beyond just online outrage, not just directly (I’m not that big ego’ed'), but also indirectly. Trans women who saw much of their experience mirrored in content I produced would feel ashamed to admit they liked women, were bisexual, or had histories where they were romantically involved with other women. I didn’t notice it at first, but I had a few experiences where I came to realise the stuff I was saying didn’t just impact the annoying polycule transbians I had no contact with, but was actually causing psychic damage to trans women I’d interact with on a daily basis. Trans women I WAS in community with, and who I saw myself in. Somewhere along the way my constant protestations that “lesbians are chill it’s just the fucking predator trans women I hate” ended up null and void because no matter how many times I was making sure the divas knew it wasn’t about them, the divas were still feeling ashamed for their own sexuality, feeling ashamed about their own identities, and I was just being stigmatising for no reason.

Leaving the social media-sphere, stopping consuming any trans content, and taking myself out of any situations where I’m exposed to the internets never ending ‘freak of the week’ processions has allowed me to tune out all this noise and focus on my own relationships with my own trans community. That has involved actually marking out for myself who the kinds of people are that I view as being in shared community with, and allows me to not let some psychopathic sex pest who takes the same medication as me, come between me and other trans women who maybe fuck the opposite sex than I do. I’m by no means claiming I’m healed, and I’m not going to sit here and promise to be better, but what I did want to do was to recognise that there’s hurt that can be caused in some cases unintentionally, in some cases intentionally, and in many cases as a direct consequence of my own actions, that I have been working on recognising and seeking to remedy in my own behaviour going forwards.

I don’t want dolls sitting in their own shame over who they’re attracted to because they saw a meme about AGPs on my page. I don’t want dolls thinking I view them like some sissy fetishist just because they have a girlfriend or are open to having a girlfriend in the future.

I absolutely still believe that we have to have serious conversations within our own community about how we handle the abundance of predators who are identifying themselves amongst us, but my god I hope as I move forward with my life my lasting impact isn’t just forcing a bunch of dolls back into the closet because they’re ashamed they like eating pussy.

IDK, anyway, just brain dumping my thoughts somewhere I guess.

Every single trans woman who has had vaginoplasty has their own experience, and will have internalised and reproduced that experience over and over again. The comments of this document probably have a lot of people disagreeing with my own reproduction of my own experience, and refuting my experiences and opinions as inaccurate or disproved or not relevant because of their juicy perfect vagina. Take everyone’s takes (INCLUDING MY OWN) with a pinch of salt. Sex change surgery is truly the definition of your mileage may vary. The only thing I ask, is you don’t insult other women’s vaginas.

I got mine at the ripe old age of 21 in 2016, performed in the United Kingdom, and received a penile inversion with scrotal graft. In the years following I’ve see-sawed on the decision, weighing up the physical and mental cost on my body, as well as all the range of benefits it’s provided me, most notably, that I am still here to write this little substack post. I’m going to write with pretty brutal honesty, about the procedure, the emotional toll, and (to some degree) the limitations of the result I have received. I’m also going to talk through all the things I wish I had been able to do for myself in the run up to, and time immediately following, my sex change surgery, so you can learn from a diva who’s had to deal with the consequences of that lack of foresight.

(TLDR if you stop reading now because I get our ability to read content like this SUCKS due to social media, get therapy, like get therapy and lots of it in the build up to, during, and immediately after your surgery. I cannot stress this enough.)

The limitations of a vaginoplasty:

A neovagina is not the same as a biologically created vagina. There are next to no results that produce a result that is bioidentical to a cis vagina, (yes, even Suporn’s clinic does not produce a bioidentical vagina regardless of the marketing material). You are not trading your genitals for the other variation, you will be getting something new, something different, something that it’s own way, is wonderful. But you also gotta realise diva, this is a surgically created hole in your abdomen that is likely made up of your dick skin, some intestine / colon, or you “peritoneum” or whatever it’s called where they scrape some of your inside skin membrane off. Needless to say, none of this is vaginal lining, these materials do not magically morph into a vaginal canal lining. It also sounds insanely dumb to have to point this out, but genuinely you have to sit with it and become comfortable with it. My paperwork from the surgeon says “[redacted] has a vagina that is functionally the same as that of a woman who has had a hysterectomy” and let me just go on record to tell you that it is not.

None of this is to rain on your parade, this is to help you realise that a neopuss is a neopuss is a neopuss. Do not let people make you feel shit for the neovagina you are able to access (or already have) and if you are able to get the shiny new methods, don’t make people who have an alternative type feel like shit for theirs! There is SO much disinformation floating around about neovaginas, which ones are basically horrendous and unusable, and which are perfect with multiple orgasms and so we you can fuck without lube. Basically all of it is probably nonsense. The vast majority of trans women who undergo this surgery will land somewhere in the middle. Functional in some capacity, not perfect, things they would change but things they appreciate. Expecting perfection will only lead to abject misery, being so scared that you’re guaranteed to be botched beyond belief will only prevent you from prioritising your happiness.

The physical toll on my body:

My body has never been the same since I went onto that operating table in 2016. Next year will be 10 years since I underwent this procedure, and it would be utterly remiss of me to not acknowledge that the surgery has fundamentally damaged my physical health. I am exhausted constantly, my immune system has never fully recovered, I have random strange pains across my abdomen and shooting pains in my vagina that have never ceased despite assertion that it’s “just nerves reconnecting”. It’s hard to overstate the impact this surgery has on you, both literally, and by virtue of a whole month and a half of basically being unable to do anything outside of sleeping and dilating.

This surgery is a truly grueling endeavour, it’s not like “she’s a girl” you don’t open your eyes to a beautiful new vagina. Just like birth you are dumped into a pile of blood and piss and shit and instead of being a blissfully unaware newborn you are fully aware of the horror that has happened, and is happening to you. Your surgically crafted hole is wedged open by packing, your scars screaming with every movement, and for a week your independence and personhood is denied to you as you are confined to a hospital to bleed, piss, and beg for pain killers from people who can’t understand why you’re not overjoyed at your new body. There is very little joy to be found on the sex change ward of a hospital, relief, certainly, but you have to mentally prepare yourself for a solid week that will probably be one of the worst weeks of your life. Sorry to break this to you now, but it’s better to realise this now than I did, about 3 hrs after waking up from the surgery.

The mental toll on my body:

Yea so you know I said therapy? I really mean it. The one thing that could have helped to improve my experience to the point it would not have been forever damaged by it would have been therapy. In the build up, but most pivotally in the time in hospital and the weeks immediately following the procedure. I was shit broke and 21 so I did not have the ability (or foresight) to deliver this for myself, but in hindsight, and having since gone through FFS where I did provide therapy with myself, I can firmly say that therapy would have made the experience far less trauma inducing.

It’s impossible to fully describe the damage that this procedure did to me, in giving me what I view as being the only chance I had at a happy life, it also completely destroyed my trust in doctors, left me broken and actually riddled with regret for a solid year. That’s one thing, you expect to come out the other side, and feel confident and comfortable with your decision, but I lived solidly with regret for a whole year. It’s not even that I wished I had my penis back, it was just like a complete shock response to the surgery itself, any complications which followed, and remembering the whole experience. The lack of personhood afforded to a surgical patient, and how my life just became taken over by aftercare jump out as things that had a huge impact on my mental health. In the longer-term, ramifications from the surgery and coming to terms, years after the fact, that what I had between my legs was not in fact a vagina, but was a neovagina, also took a very large toll on my mental health.

Dilate me, baby!

Lets talk about the D-word. DILATION. It’s awful, there’s no two ways about it. For three months you are married to a few little hard lumps of plastic or silicone, they hurt, you bleed, you’ll cry, and you’ll be tempted to give up. Please know, that literally every single trans woman I know to have gone through this process found dilation to be at best, deeply unpleasant, and at worse, ‘like micro-dosing sexual assault’.

The most important things to keep in mind, is that one dilation is always better than no dilations. If you are falling behind on the schedule and are feeling like “screw this I can’t do it”, just reduce the amount you do. If you’re 4 weeks in, and 3 a day is making you suicidal, but you can do 2 a day and feel a little less horrendous, just do two a day. There is no pass/fail exam at the end of this. You still have to live, and there IS a life after your sex change. Little walks, little treats, lots of time to let yourself heal, and surround yourself with people who will allow you to express how you feel and don’t make you feel small or pathetic for struggling.

Also, treat yourself! I had NHS issues clear plastic dilators for the first few years that I hated. I upgraded, got some good ones for my neopuss and now dilation is not as awful. Do your research, treat your fanny!

Sex after surgery

Pop a broom stick under your arm pit, push it up and down with varying degrees of intensity. Congrats that basically what penetration feels like. Sorry if you wanted more than this lol. Great news is, a) you own a clitoris now, and b) you still have a butthole.

Also get one of those vibrating wands, my bestie, fr fr.

Considerations

Idk about you, but I was a full blown can’t touch this can’t look at it diva. But in getting the surgery, not only does a doctor knock you out and cut your dick up, but they have to look at it and assess it before the surgery during a consultation. This means, you will have a (definitely sociopathic probably male) surgeon, touching your junk. This was one of the worst experiences of my life and I found it insanely traumatising so just like, prep for that (remember I said therapy).

In the UK, hair removal before surgery is pretty rare, which is great cause no way could I have someone at my dick with an electrolysis machine without literally killing myself, but it does mean that you will probably end up with a little fanny mohawk. Sorry. </3. If you live somewhere else where genital mutilation of male children is normal you will probably need electrolysis to clear your genitals before surgery. (again, get therapy).

It can go wrong, there’s a ton of possible complications, thankfully some of the worst ones are pretty rare, but they are still possible. Fistulas do occur, as does necrosis of the clitoris. You are choosing to not have a penis, and if there is one thing I can guarantee you, it is that after your surgery you will not have a penis. But what you actually end up with could be different than the pictures you’ve seen online. Take the time to sit with that, internalise it, chew it over.

Anyway, that’s my little two cents about vaginoplasty, I regret a lot about how I got mine done, I wish I’d been mentally well enough to wait a little longer, I wish I’d been afforded therapy, I wish I’d not been in the midst of my terf-token era, I wish I’d had better support around me in the aftermath, I wish I’d not ended up in sex work within 3 months of it. But we move! I can sit here now over 9yrs later, and say that I am truly greatful for being afforded a life that otherwise I would never lived long enough to experience. Sex change surgery is genuinely one of the most life altering experiences anyone can go through, and I wish you all the best with yours if you are getting one.

Ciao for now <3

So anyway ‘bricks’ can stay mad as fuck. Let’s talk about being shady in a community that demands you lick its arse day in day out.

NO DARLIN, that puppy girl leash looks GREAT on you. You really ate, you’re giving dog pound realness with streamer diva flare, it’s gonna be in the next Harper’s Bazaar for REAL diva.

We live in a society. That’s it, the evergreen tweet, the perfect answer to every single debate. And in 2025, the transgender world we inhabit insists: 1) everyone is valid however they choose to live, 2) identity trumps all material conditions, and 3) realness is a crime against your own community. It’s a fun time to be a diva doll who likes to call people slurs and not beat around the bush when someone dresses like a pornsick agp, but alas apparently this kind of attitude is ‘uncouth’. Who’d have thought it?!?! (disclaimer my use of AGP here is a joke and not a reference to the debunked theory by sexologist Ray Blanchard, in 2025 Blanchardism in any capacity is a crime punishable by social death so don’t misrepresent my JOKE as a real critique I’m sure none of these girls have EVER worn a cock cage).

Now, I was forged in the fires of early 2010’s surged up diva spaces as a clocky little british girl with too much fringe and not enough breast tissue to fill out a AA cup bra. You better believe the tank ripped me a new one daily, “you’re clocky”, “you’re delusional if you think you’ll ever make it”, “time to get saving for surgery cause you need it, bro”. OUCH. I witnessed girls be ripped down from pedestals, told not to get SRS cause men will find you revolting and not wanna date you, seen girls inject bathroom caulk into their legs in the quest of beauty, those times were tough.

Being exposed to women who were far ahead of me in their transitions, unapologetic about who they were, and frankly a bunch of bitches, made me who I am in every conceivable way. It helped me grow, it helped me cover my brow bone with hair, it helped me put down the maybeline dream matte mousse, it helped me log on to a cam site to start making money when I was under age…. Ok maybe all of it wasn’t great but still! I am very grateful to every single trans woman who during my formative years (16-20) I was exposed to in all their wonderful, funny, mean, and sometimes downright disgusting ways. There was a sense of community and ability to come together away from the eyes of people who wanted to fuck us to actually build something akin to a really arrogant, substance abusing and dysfunctional chosen family structure.

There’s something about being read by a sister that prepares you for the unpleasant realities of life as a trans girl. That’s not to say that the unpleasantness of our lives is something we should stand for, but it is the reality we have to deal with, and rolling over and pretending it’s not will only make it worse for us when we find ourselves in a situation that can only be described as grim. We mollycoddle each other, pretend that we’re all so gorgeous and perfect that you could never clock your tea, and then you go out and realise that isn’t true. Who does this benefit? At every time in my transition even my most delusional years, I knew at the root what I was dealing with, how clockable boots I was, and what I could expect from entering cisciety.

I think places like Reddit call it “hugboxing”, surrounding people with affirmations even if they’re not grounded in reality. I think these people are assholes, for the avoidance of doubt, and deliberately grinding people down with critiques in the name of helping them to accept the truth is as unpleasant as deliberately gassing people up with inaccurate compliments. Every doll you look up to will have gone through a period of looking clocky boots, not knowing how to dress properly, acting like she’s tuna tartare and not just the aged herring she actually serves. Knowing how to deliver a read, and when not to, is the secret to wether or not that read helps a diva improve, or if you’re just traumatising some internet tranny by projecting your own personal insecurities.

There is a super fine line between reading a bitch and being a bully. I’d know because at least 50% of the time I fail to get it right and get a flurry of screenshot stories posted about me calling me an awful brick who’s too mean for how ugly I am in reality. But in general, knowing that some dolls will grow from a read and some girls will crumble is vital. You can’t just lob insults at internet transgenders and think you’re actually helping them realise they’re just cis people with pronouns even if it’s therapeutic, all you’re doing is bullying someone who 9 times out of 10 is a child. Reading a bitch also isn’t just sending a barrage of insults at someone in the learning stages!

You don’t actually have to tell a girl she’s a brick, that’s not actually a read. The girl already knows she’s a brick, you skip that insult and tell her she’s so brave for going out into the world and that you really really look up to her and could never do what she does. Now THAT’S a read.

Another aspect to this culture that is slowly becoming lost is the understanding that a read is not an insult. One of the defining things my friends (yes I have friends) find out about me over time is that, if they’re also dolls, I generally show my affection by calling them slurs and telling them they look like men. If I am in your comments under a selfie with a “wow I really could never tell” then I love you, if I’m only ever saying “you look so good babe” then the secret sauce is I don’t feel able to be myself around you. Compliments are cheap, sisterhood with girls who were formed in the same fires comes in scathing cuts to the bone. “You’re boyfriend is so brave for being seen in public with you diva, he rlly is the one” tells you in no uncertain terms I would die for you.

This culture stems from ballroom in some way but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that the bastardisation of that culture from which we use the same words for, but with none of the weight behind the concepts, is like true lineage. But I recognise that for decades drag queens, street girls, transsexuelles, and the dolls have been reading each other to help each other grow and improve, to form our own exclusive brands of humour, and to take the bite out of the insults we receive every day. There is a whole world that is begging for you to be palatable, to bend over backwards for everyone, to make space, hold your tongue, affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm.

It may be 2025, but I’m going to continue to be a mean girl sometimes. This does not mean I’m going to target people, stoop so low as to put people on blast for coming for me, acting shitty, or just plainly being ugly, cause I’ve matured, but if you cannot stomach reading an idea that might graze your ego, or a see a meme that might make you think “holy shit OUCH” then you’re probably not cut out for this life. I refuse to tone down myself for other people just because affirmation is in vogue right now.

If you are my sister I will help you wash your cuts, I will help you get hormones, I will support you through surgery, I will clean up your face after you get beaten on the street, I will help you hunt down that trick who under paid you, I will help you source hormones, I will promote your work, and I will pick you up from your shitty boyfriend’s house when you finally get it together enough to leave.

But I will also call you a fucking manly brick sometimes, because that is the sisterhood that raised me into the woman I am today.

Is there anything the internet likes more than a righteous excuse to bully a tranny?

The high-octane blood-pumping hairs on the back of your neck standing up excitement literally palpable in the thick air… like you’ve been waiting forever to say it:

“I just heard about what (insert trans woman) said, they really are a stupid vapid privileged liberal oh my god!!! I am genuinely DISGUSTED!”.

~ send tweet ~

What fascinates me about the spectacle of the fallen tranny, is how reliable it is. You can set your watch by it, the rise of a new trans woman into a platform, the first murmurs that she is ‘problematic’ from a certain crowd, then as soon as one thing is found that can be jumped on she is hounded, ripped apart like a chunk of meat by a pack of dogs, and utterly devoured. Like the virgin mary, held on a plinth, the perfect trans woman must be knowledgable, wise, pretty (but not too conventionally that she is to render herself unclockable), and endlessly educated so as to have perfect views that she is able to accurately recount as and when demanded of her.

As soon as this idealised trans girl she shows a fleck of humanity, that is a single flaw, she is dragged down from the plinth society put her on against her will, and forced to atone for her sins. Rarely, if ever, are these sins more ‘bad’ than anyone else who happens to not be a trans woman, but they are used time and time again as a tool for deploying righteous punishment on trans women. Punishment they deserve of course, because they have dared to be wrong, to be too pretty, to fuck the wrong person, or to have an impure acquaintance.

It is, therefore, not out of the scope of logic to assert that in the eyes of the contemporary commentariat (internet posters) the perfect transsexual, is a dead transsexual.

Think about the trans women heralded as icons, Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Venus Extravaganza. Trans women who didn’t live long enough to tweet whilst taking ketamine, too poor to afford FFS or a BBL, and extensively referential for all those who don’t dare to examine their lives beyond the surface. There is no room for the true mess their existence no doubt encompassed, mess that makes us dolls so joyfully fallible, wonderfully neurotic, and packed full of contradictions (all of which make us genuinely fantastic imo).

To paint a mural of one of our foremother’s faces on a shirt and say “trans power ⚧️`✊” is infinitely monetisable. You can plaster it on your Etsy store without the fear that tomorrow she will wake up and post something utterly disgusting like “Lol this is what Sock looks like when they are asked to do the dishes” with a picture of a person crying into a bottle of hair die threatening to kill themselves, or comment 3 exclamation marks under a post by Piggy Taiwan about the threats we face as trans women.

To view trans women as truly human, requires you to accept that we might not all be gods perfect transsexual. That our childhoods might not be clean from edgy tweets, that we might have been shitty as teenagers, that we might make bad-taste jokes, that we might not be perfectly educated on a topic, that some of us might grow up to be ‘small c’ conservative (cringe, but inevitable), or that some of us, dare I look in a mirror, might post “lol agp” memes on instagram. These behaviours, things which: cis people, heterosexual people, trans men, non-binary people, and your garden-variety homosexuals, are routinely afforded the dignity of, are rendered utterly immoral and worthy of extreme punishment when enacted by a trans woman.

The reasons for this, in my opinion, is twofold, one is that trans women are uniquely punishable, the other is that trans women are overwhelmingly viewed as revolting and deserving of abuse because of our revolting-ness.

We live in a society where justice is borderline impossible to acquire against people in positions of power, and where oppressed people are clamouring for the opportunity to feel that they are afforded any dignity or access to justice. When the people who are actively committing and signing off on harm are untouchable, infinitely re-elected into positions of power, surrounded by well paid lawyers, and often literal billionaires, you kinda don’t stand a chance. If you critique the nazi-loving owner of an electric car manufacturer you get an army of men telling you to kill yourself, if you critique a trans woman with a small platform you get an army of men lauding you as sticking it to someone who deserves it.

Another great thing about cancelling trans women, on top of the ease of getting traction, is trans women are routinely poor and often likely to have a history in sex work. This content if dug out from the depths of the internet is prime content to plaster over the internet in a ritual of shame, and to send to their employer or partnered brands if they’re an influencer to get their income severed. You can feel all the joy that comes with effectively de-platforming someone, get the full thrill of righteously exposing someone, and even get unanimous celebration for your work from people you are naturally allied with, and not.

None of this is to say that trans women are never wrong. Oh boy, so many trans women are wrong. Heck, I’m wrong and downright hideous sometimes! I’m not here to pretend that what (insert recently cancelled trans woman) said is actually right, and I’m not here to argue about the politics of it. My politics are inherently flawed, biased in favour of things which specifically impact me. I don’t pretend to be the arbiter of what is moral, but I will continue to defend my right to be both wrong and biased in favour of my own experience because that is something literally everyone else is afforded. Our unique abuse-ability is taken advantage of by everyone from doctors who can freely botch us without consequence, to employers who view us as easily fireable or men who view us as subhuman toys who can be mistreated without consequence. We are, in the eyes of society, perfect victims. And it appears that everyone, including ourselves, takes advantage of that.

We are literally replicating the way cis people mistreat us, time and time again. It’s gross that we do it with trans women who we view as having institutional power because they are musicians, tv personalities, youtubers, or whatever, but we also replicate these patterns in our own communities, hyperlocally. “Have you heard about (x) I heard that she’s a (insert hyper-right-on sounding critique)” is like, a literal soundbite you hear over and over again every time you try to catch up on your local trans community. Women who are a bit shitty sometimes, who fuck too many people, who have the wrong opinions, who said the wrong thing about someone, who are too pretty, who are too vain, who are too straight, who think too highly of themselves, who are too ambitious, who are too lazy, who don’t fuck enough people, who don’t fuck the right people. It’s a never ending cycle of perpetuating harm against each other because we feel helpless in the face of our own oppression. I’m guilty of it. I’m willing to bet that you’re guilty of it.

What’s the answer? Idk, I’m just a diva.

I’m famously a bitch, an alleged transmedicalist, ‘catty twink’, or whatever other homophobic / misogynistic slur I’m being called this week on reddit (hi r/4tran4 users). I’m just saying, it’s one thing to think a thing about a trans girl, fuck knows I hate most other trannies I meet. But it’s another to actively undermine their ability to access community, to tarnish their name in the pursuit of a purity that the accuser damn near never possesses.

All I’m saying is, and ironically this idea comes from an old gender critical friend when I was a teenager (shoutout to you babe hope ur alright etc) who said “women are people are some people are assholes”, that if we are going to begin at the absolute basic position of trans women are human beings, made we have to accept that we’re not going to be perfect.

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When life gets low-key overwhelming, what can you fall back on? For me, it’s grounding myself in this silly little theory I came up with whilst desperately clamouring for some kind of meaningful life.

The Long Line Of Dolls.

The long line of dolls is a simple idea. That we are just one doll in a long line of dolls. It extends as far as we can see in front of us and as far back as we can see behind us. In front of us, walks every single doll who has come before us, tracing a path and leaving their mark to guide us and open opportunities. Behind us walks every doll who has begun this journey after us, following us and the marks we have left on the world to guide them in their journey through trans womanhood.

The long line of dolls doesn’t act as a framework to tell us how we should live, even though it can be interpreted as teaching us to honour the dolls who walk ahead of us and to live a life we are comfortable being followed by the dolls who walk behind us. Instead, at least personally, it serves to give me purpose for the things I have survived, placing that amidst a bigger picture. This contextualises the things I have endured within the harder times endured by our foremothers and the softer times endured by those who have begun this journey after us.

The long line of dolls gives us a lineage within which we can understand our own struggles, and at times suffering. That the deaths of foremothers like Venus Xtravaganza, Tiggy, Connie Norman, Islan Nettles, Vanesa Campos, and thousands of others weren’t lost to no end. This is not to say that they died for us, in a christ-adjacent manner, but that the raw tragedy is a part of our collective doll history. That even in their deaths they shon pathways that have helped pave the way for future dolls to actualise our dreams.

For me, this framework gives me a purpose, and that purpose is simple:

I simply have to try to walk slightly further than the doll in front of me, so the doll behind me can walk even further than me.

Metaphorically, this means that whatever my path, to survive as long as I can and to live a life that is as true to myself as possible has to be the only goal I have to prioritise. In practice, this means making sure that every decision I make is done with the spirits of my foremothers in my heart. Whilst survival is often messy and traumatising and difficult, remembering that not only did our mothers die for our right to work ‘boring’ retail jobs, to cut hair in a salon, or to type emails at a fake email job is a privilege that we have only begun to have been afforded in the last couple of decades. Is any of this to say that the dolls of today shouldn’t dream of bigger things and brighter lives? No, but it’s to say that for those of us who struggle to find self-worth when our friends, family members and colleagues who are the same age as us appear to be far further along in their ‘lives’, that grounding ourselves amongst the dolls of the past, present and future is always a better barometer of our life trajectories.

On a personal note, there are some silly things I’m ashamed of having done in the past. There are videos etched into the internet of me doing some things I truly wish did not exist. Similarly, there are undoubtedly records of me engaging in some forms of work that I would simply rather forget about, and they haunt me to this day. There’s no denying that I’d prefer it if my time between 21 and 27 was not spent selling sex, shooting porn, doing cam-shows and dealing with addiction and substances to cope with it. Every single time a manager at a civ job (non-sex work job) has called me in for a “quick chat” very specific images and videos I know to exist online flash before my eyes. People who do not understand the very real situation dolls often find themselves in where the choice between taking a client and going hungry will never be able to empathise with us enough to understand that we have not been afforded the opportunities they were to get to where they are today without these scars that can then be used against us.

For those of us who have had to build our entire adult lives as transsexual women in society, comparing ourselves to others who haven’t had to face these choices and problems, will only ever lead to sadness and dissatisfaction with our material conditions. By contextualising our lives amidst the long line of dolls who come before us and follow after us, we instead manage to get a much clearer picture of our successes. Owning a house, having a family, reaching middle management, and our parents being proud of us in the same way they are our siblings are things that most of us will simply never achieve. Fostering communities, helping out the next generation, being able to earn enough to donate £5 a month to FiveforFive and still be able to make ends meet, having reliable access to hormones even if they are sourced from a French transsexual with a rudimentary understanding of chemistry. These are the privileges our foremothers could never imagine. Even as the tide of rising reactionary extremism against our existence continues to rise, these successes -when contextualised against the full scope of dollhood as the long line posits it- provide us with achievements that cannot be looked at as anything other than fucking incredible.

As a member of a certain subgroup of transsexual women, it is very easy to dismiss myself as ungrateful for wanting more, or ashamed for achieving less and having done things that I wish I did not have to. Collectively, as dolls, we are not afforded an easy life. But, in 2025, we are given the opportunity to live a wonderful one.

By tracing our collective herstory, grounding ourselves in the women who took flights to Casablanca, worked on Davie Street and in the the Bois du Bologne, swallowed pills of conjugated horse urine, took grand prize for Femme Queen Realness in Harlem, or even those who tore up friendships and denied ever even knowing sisters they grew up with on national TV so that they could fulfil their own dreams, our position in society within our long line of sisters feels a whole lot more manageable.

I also want to be very clear here before I continue, I do think that sex work is bad. Having sold sex, in person, online, and in porn for 6 years, and before that in the way I described above through online stuff, I believe that the act of PURCHASING sex & sexual services is morally repugnant, and at its core misogynistic. I do not believe that this means sex work should be criminalised, I am 10000% pro workers rights on this topic, so please do not twist what I am about to say about the emergence of trans women as a sex-buyer class to pretend that I am some kind of SWERF exited woman.

Can you name 10 famous trans women?

Probably, right? April Ashley, Candy Darling, The Lady Chablis, Amanda Lepore, Sasha Colby, TS Madison, Octavia St Laurent, Laverne Cox, Alex Consani, Caroline Cossey. Boom, easy.

But you should ask your local discord polycule to do the same.: “Finn5ter, Abigail Thorne, Natalie Mars… errr….. Hunter Schafer…. My GF with an OnlyFans… My other GF who streams on twitch…Ok idk.”

Now the problem here isn’t that different trans girls have different tastes, or that Abigail Thorne truly believes that at the time she came out as trans she really was “the most famous trans girl in the UK” (ok diva, whatever you say hunni), the issue is that we have a whole generation of people who identify as trans girls who understand their trans-ness and position within a community through a singular lens. Sex, sexuality, kink, polyamory, porn, fallout new vegas, dungeons and dragons, and board games… It's a wonderful life.

It really is a tale as old as time, as a social group who up until very recently were certifiably considered unemployed in mainstream, and who have breasts, sex work was a fairly normal part of transsexual life. In some capacity, unless you were exceedingly lucky (*cough* rich parents who don’t hate you *cough*), if you transitioned before you got a proper job with experience in the world; chances are you had to do sex work. It’s been such a mainstay in the world that cities literally wrote laws that claimed if you were a trans woman on the street you were probably selling sex, and thus liable for arrest. As times changed, and strolls shut down through gentrification, the internet emerged the marketplace for trannyussy, and there was an explosion in the dolls working on camsites, filming porn, and putting an ad up on (redacted).

Part of this, led to trans women with social platforms blending their sex work with their usual social network usage, on sites like tumblr and twitter, trans women with followers shilled cam shows between posts about HRT progress updates, and due to really tight lines around how and specifically where we were allowed to exist online without abuse, we often posted stuff to our community, and stuff to potential clients on the same accounts. Similarly, we used these accounts to build our wardrobe of clothes… enter amazon wishlists.

For trans girls, like myself, who began physically exploring transition related stuff from the age of 16 when I simply didn’t have access to money, one way to acquire goods was to essentially engage in a form of digital sex work where you would trade photos for goods, through digital gift cards and wishlist items. One really easy way to bulk up your makeup collection, was Amazon, and thanks to my childhood tumblr where I posted my little #mtf posts, there was no shortage of men with access to resources who wanted to see my butthole and were willing to buy me a new eyeliner. Amazon also sold clothes, and you bet I got a few ugly ass dresses, and lingerie sets gifted to me by guys in return for photos.

As you gain more notoriety / followers online, the demand for more photos in more outfits would continue to spiral, and with girls competing, creating niches and styles that would attract more potential clients was a must. This meant that how we were displaying ourselves as trans women online (for me, this was in the years 2011-2014 when I was 16-19 years old) was heavily geared towards what would help us to get more things to further our transition, and that specifically involved pandering to the male gaze. To us at the time, this was like, lowkey damaging and traumatising and having to process this stuff as an adult is really hard (RIP my therapist sorry babe), but to see the long term impacts of this be that there is now a huge mainstay of the contemporary trans community who seems to believe that there was nothing else to who we were than what we had to do to get by, it’s kinda devastating.

Underneath all the activities we engaged with, was a core understanding of solidarity and shared struggle, we were all in the same boat, and those of our followers who were sisters lucky enough to not need to also shill tranussy would respectfully look away as we got our bag. Our friendships and connections ran deep, girls I met through this era are still friends to this day (shout out my big sister who without her help I would not be the woman I am today), and I still remember fondly the girls I met in the TGirl FB Network, one of the few spaces we had where we could exist away from the ever-judging eyes of people who also wanted to consume us. We bonded over a shared love of fashion, would gloat about whatever fancy new sex change surgeries or treatments we just got, and would absolutely drag each other for our makeup choices, and most prominently our choice in men. We had a lot of bitching and shit, but we also had sisterhood, and that was genuinely life changing for many of us.

Today, many of these aesthetics and outfits we posted pictures of ourselves in for men, have become core aspects of the trans community today. We see a modern twist on the same core hypersexualised fashion items, ordered from the same internet stores, but worn not because that is the only thing they have access to (shout out coding jobs), but because that is their understanding of how they signify their association with this culture. It cannot be a coincidence that the variations of the stuff that those of us who transitioned in the early 2010’s would wear to sell shows on chaturbate, is now the de-facto uniform for trans women in many western countries. This clothing is easy to buy without ever having to leave your house, you can buy multiple sizes to make sure it fights right when it arrives, and instead of developing your own sense of style and going through the steps of finding what works for you, an act we all have to go through as trans women sooner or later, you can just add the specific trans girl uniform to your basket and have it delivered the next day free of charge. Instant gratification. Slay.

But this is not that I am bitter about the adoption of a, frankly repulsive, fashion style; it runs far deeper than a skater skirt. It’s the emergence of this view of trans womanhood as a consumable object, that should be consumed by your sisters, and that you should consume the trans womanhood of people who could be your sisters. The fact that general trans ‘discord channels’ are consistently full of #nsfw channels packed with nudes to be consumed by other trans women, is something that you simply cannot convince me is about body confidence, it’s about sexual gratification. The normalisation of pornography, and the consumption of pornography, within the trans community (as a by-product of it’s normalisation in society) has created a whole generation of trans girls who do not understand themselves beyond the end of their own dicks.

The fact that making videos on how to style skirts for trans girls is now a viable marketing strategy for your tranny onlyfans account (shout out Icky), or how normalised it is for trans girls to assume you are open to having sex with them just because you are both trans, is genuinely frightening. Historically, shame enabled sissy crossdressers, who for a decent while paid my bills thanks to their internalised shame about their arousal at being viewed and subjugated as women, to remain as men and indulge in their erotic crossdressing with their dominatrix / prostitute of choice. In 2025, and specifically after the covid pandemic where many of us were stuck at home online with only our own thoughts for company, that shame isn’t as present, and the social costs associated with transition are far more reduced, especially if you transition over the age of 25. So we now get the joy of living in a world that to me 15 years ago was unimaginable, trans women have emerged as a part of a class of sex buyers.

In my opinion, the act of buying sex or sexual services from someone you are supposed to be in community with, is an act of class traitorship. But to many trans women, often self-identified leftists for whom sex is only ever seen as a joyous and empowering act, they lack the awareness that a lot of the time the (normally younger, less well off, and far less social stable) trans girl they are purchasing from, is not having their same experience. That we have a community that is now welcoming to people who will buy sex from their sisters, is a damning indictment of the community we now get to seek with our trans siblings.

Not only is the trans community welcoming to trans women who buy sex, the trans community has now evolved to a place now where it exists as a defacto cruising spot. Where involvement within it is viewed as an openness to be objectified and sexualised, and consent is provided by the simple fact of your existence as a trans girl. I’m going to stop short of saying that I believe this is, in part, due to the prevalence of chasers who realised they could take estrogen to get with more trans women, but I’m also not going to pretend that thought doesn’t cross my mind a lot when I get the joy of meeting new trans girls whose eyes can’t leave my breasts, and whose first question after I disclose that I have had a sex change, are deeply personal questions about my sexual function.

I genuinely mourn for the next generation of trans girls who have never got to experience their own community as something other than one large messy polycule. I don’t write this silly blog to mock or jeer at others misfortune, nor to poke at people who are lucky enough to find sex a joyful experience, but I really do feel that the core aspects of sisterhood that has sustained me through being a trans woman since I was a teenager, are being lost to a culture of porn-obsession and sex, and the normalisation of hypersexuality without a critical eye to the harm that is often perpetrated alongside it. Sure, sex can be fun, but communities built only around what makes your sisters get their nut is never going to be able to fully nourish your soul.

To understand my early trans life when I was still a child, and a time where I was being intensely sexualised by people far older than me, has been a really difficult process, but throughout this I have not had to re-examine my relationship with the sisters who supported me through that time. I’m going to spend forever remembering and dealing with the emotional scars left by the men who bought me lingerie when I was a child, or would give me a £20 amazon gift card in return for a picture of my small barely-there breasts, and the men who, after paying me a fee felt they had full unfettered access to my body for the time they paid for. These man damaged me in ways I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully understand, and have forever altered the relationships I am able to form with other men as a result.

I feel genuinely blessed that all my memories of my sisters, even the ones where (unnamed) now internet celebrities who ‘make videos for hot people’ would call me a brick, are heartwarming to me, and form a core part of my own understanding of the transsexual woman I am today. But my heart genuinely aches for the young girls who are finding themselves in this new era, and I really, truly, hope that they are able to somehow carve out corners of sisterhood where they are viewed as more than just an easy lay by a predator posing as a sister.

I’ve made no secret of my dislike of the phrase “trans joy”, similarly the concept of “gender euphoria” has evaded me my whole life. Repeated attempts to cut off the parts of my body that make me sad continue to only provide me a lessening of my perpetual cycles of body dysmorphia, rather than a euphoric moment of “AHA! I SEE IT! I AM NOW, A GIRL!”. But why do I mock it? And how can my own personal politics on this be written out in a way that doesn’t make another 19 year old try to scream at me for being transphobic?

My own experience of transition, in the physical sense, began back in 2013 when I started hormone replacement therapy (HRT) at the ripe old age of 18. This came after a year of psychological and psychosexual assessments at the hands of doctors who thought “assessment” meant, sexual harassment and badgering a young person to open up about their non-existent sex life. And what followed was 3 years of 1-2mg doses of estrogen delivered by a doctor who fetishised the growth of my breasts, and lauded his ability to refer me for my sex change surgery over me like a parent might that new eyeshadow palette you asked for for christmas.

After being spat out of the Nuffield Hospital in Brighton on the 28th of June 2016, dickless and still bleeding at 21 years of age, my transition healthcare experience in the United Kingdom came to an end and the doctor who had overseen my transition declared me a woman, with a letter to my GP stating I was “similar to a woman who has had a total hysterectomy”. I was complete, no longer a transsexual, now ready to be a normal woman in society with my fully functioning vagina (lol).

This is not to say that, at times during my 3 year long transgendering I did not sometimes experience joy, I was a student at a crappy university who would spend nights drinking in shitty bars with my friends and planning house parties and performing gigs, my life was full of joy. But, that joy was just joy, not “trans joy”.

I have recently returned to the medical world and undergone surgery on my face, one of those newfangled “gender affirming care” things, where a doctor insisted I was not trans because my breasts were real and a nurse couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that my name was Carly, ‘but, is Carly your real name?!’. After a night in hospital (and thankfully much less blood), I got to spend a week in Paris surrounded by my best friends recovering from surgery, visiting the Palace of Versailles, watching Amanda Lear perform a play in french (none of us spoke french but it was still iconic) and eating my body weight in croissants, I realised that my ‘gender affirming care’ experience was much less trans joy, as it was simply… joy.

All of this is to say that, elevating or denigrating the emotions felt by trans people to be “unique”, for joy that a lowly tranny feels to only be “trans joy”, implies that we are only capable of joy under specific circumstances. That sitting in a circle talking about our lives and childhoods after a night drinking cocktails in the 16th arrondissement and belly laughing about silly moments in our life cannot possibly fill our hearts with joy in the same way that a cheap plastic skirt with thigh high socks made by an underpaid worker and delivered to you next day for free, possibly could.

‘Trans joy’ ignores the fact that ‘trans’ is not something that pervades every single aspect of a transsexuals life, but instead, is just one small aspect of who we are. For me, that is I view it with the same level of relevance to my life as my time spent working as a prostitute and dominatrix, or the fact that I have a severely in depth knowledge of, and passion for,roller coasters. I am a marketer, I am a cat mom, I am a theme park fan, I am a former prostitute, I am a girlfriend, and I am a transsexual. All of these things have the capacity to deliver to me, joy, (yes even the life changing friendships and bonds I made during my 6 years working in sex work), but none of them define me.

My gender has never been affirmed more than when my history of transsexualism is viewed as irrelevant. My joy has never been more prevalent than when my friends gave me space to exist without patronising me with conversations about identity, and instead just took me for how I presented myself to them, as a person with varied and wonderful experiences, that provide me with a colourful and vibrant view of the world.

Prioritising trans joy or gender euphoria as a mobilising call, does a massive disservice to the fact that the things that provide the grounds for joy to grow are at first: housing, education, medication, and access to resources. Contemporary movements around this have taken concepts with clear meanings and watered them down to the point where “sex change surgery” is now “gender affirming care”, paving the way for “you cannot change your sex” to be responded to with “yes but I am valid”.

Sex and gender, separated through concepts such as gender identity or “sex is between your legs, and gender is in your head” have left a whole community of male women and female men, forced to face accusations of trespass in the UK if we dare to piss in the wrong bathroom, even if the ‘right bathroom’ is the one for people with different genitals and bodies to us. Trans women are still trans women even after our transition is complete, and the prioritising of emotions felt by a certain subgroup of trans people in the first few years of their trans life ignores the fact that after you have completed your transition and you’re kicked out into the world, the life that we get to inhabit is fucking shit.

There is so much joy to be found, even by us miserable old trannies, but it is not just this vapid ‘trans joy’, it’s not just ‘acceptance’ when we come out to coworkers, it’s grown internally and in our communities of friends after our housing, medication, therapy, employment opportunities, education, and social integration is not being ripped apart whilst advocates and activists chant about trans joy and gender euphoria whilst clutching their Blåhaj.

Tr4nbie