Dear Nadine Dorries,
I’ve heard that you’re really interested in other women’s uteruses. This fundamentally confuses me. As a big ol’ queer, I find other womens vaginas fabulous, but I’d only ever go near them with enthusiastic consent.
Uteruses just don’t do it for me. It seems all they do is bleed, often painfully and eratically, which is a bit rubbish, especially as in many womens’ experience doctors are often bad at researching and prescribing the treatments that could make the whole thing less agonising and unwanted. The other thing uteruses do is make babies, which is awesome, so long as those babies are wanted by the person concerned. Babies are amazing! Tiny fingers and toes and adorable shoes, and also they’re miniature people, which is a terrifying responsibility I’m sort-of-glad I’ll never have.
You see, I don’t have a uterus. My vagina sort of stops. I don’t have a cervix, although I can’t seem to stop receiving all those doctors’ letters inviting me in for a check-up.
This is because I’m a trans woman. Seeing as you’re all up in the whole wombs thing, though, my vagina will have to make-do, and tell you what it can.
My vagina is angry with you. It’s angry for all the sister-women, all the gender-queer people and trans guys who have uteruses. It’s angry because your anti-choice bullshit is just part of a wider picture of societal misogyny and oppression and control, and it’s especially angry because you’re a woman and you’re taking part in oppressing other women.
My vagina is angry because of the heteronormative assumtions behind your anti-choice BS. That women ought to have children, must want to have children, that womens reproductive health consists largely of making sure that she can and will reproduce rather than lives a full, free, unpainful life doing exactly what she wants to do. That vaginas are, when it comes down to it, boxes for putting dicks in.
This latter one does affect me directly. You see, my surgery didn’t go exactly as planned. It didn’t leave me with an “angry inch” (Hedwig is an awesome movie and you should watch it; it might open your mind slightly). It did leave me with a vag that needs to be dilated open every morning for the rest of my life, using the same kind of dilators other women use for vaginismus. This is bloody inconvenient, but it’s far from the last of it.
You see, after surgery my clitoris was left exposed, without any clitoral hood. This meant that walking (at least while wearing knickers) was agonisingly painful. It took a year and quite a lot of fighting before the surgeon finally sorted that one. Then I made the mistake of asking the NHS to sort out my internal pain, too*. “It wouldn’t happen if you had sex with a man”, I was then told.
You see, I was then in a long-term lesbian relationship. I supposed that, therefore, my daily pain was my fault, and I internalised the misogyny and homophobia and transphobia behind this vicious statement, and I tried to get on with my life.
It was only five years after surgery when I figured out, on my own, that dilating every day relieved my pain, the awful bladder urgency, the inability to think much else beyond “sore!” that led to depression. And, still, years later again, when I went back to the NHS again, to get my Gender Recognition Certificate, I was told again in passing “I suppose you wouldn’t be sore if you had sex with men”.
At this point I was able to call “bullshit” because by that point I had had sex with men. The first time was traumatic and dubiously consensual, and the second was ridiculous and fun, and neither had any healing powers at all! I had definitely been conned on that one.
This belief by trained consultants that penises have magical healing properties that penis-shaped dilators don’t isn’t just some wacky isolated symptom, however. It’s reflective of the underlying societal misogyny that tells women that they exist to please men, that oppresses women lifelong with narratives that insist she needs a man and babies, that oppresses trans women in subtly different ways that take a painfully long time to recognise.
You see, it’s often put about that the surgical results for trans women are quite good. Thing is, this is also bullshit. Externally, they’re quite good – to look at, to feel when you put your dick in. For us, they’re not great. Often we don’t have clitorises at all, a thing which in other women would be called genital mutilation. Often we have painful complications. Often, sexual function isn’t nearly as good as we’d like to believe. It’s a painful truth that our vaginas are designed by men, and this leaves a lot to be desired.
As a marxist vagina (albeit with a less impressive beard), my vagina is angry for you for a very different reason. It’s angry with you because this anti-choice BS is also part of a system of economic oppression where forcing women to carry and care for babies is only a small part of structures of gendered labour, of domination and control that fuck almost everyone over in one way or another, or even several at once.
So. Nadine Dorries. There are so many reasons you should sod off. Get your systems of domination and control away from my vagina, away from everyone’s uterus. Let us get on with our bloody lives, and fuck right off.
My beautiful, angry femme vagina.
* – I am pretty sure this is due to post-surgical adhesions, a thing that fucks up many women inside and one that doctors are only really just recognising exists.
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