The Awakening
I knew I wasn’t a woman the first time I decided to try my vibrator a little bit farther back. Imagine my surprise, as at the time, I was four months pregnant.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. How could a four-months-pregnant person—more than likely a woman—simultaneously be something else? I asked myself the same question, shortly after I came so hard, I gave myself a series of low-grade contractions. My body sang. I was euphoric. And after twelve years married to only the second person I ever had sex with, my inner voice said, “Oh, no. I’m so fucked.”
Until this point, my sex life vacillated between, “Sure, honey, whatever you want,” and “God, please get off me.” My husband, ever patient and gentle, never forced me beyond my limits and sacrificed literal years of his own pleasure to accommodate my wishy-washy libido. As someone who wrote erotica in my spare time since I was sixteen, I was shocked to be completely nonplussed by sex when I finally had it. My hung eighteen-year old boyfriend should’ve been a muse for thousands of fantasies. Instead, when we gave ourselves to one another, a song in my head whined, Is that all there is?
Naturally, I thought I was gay. A pretty good assumption, since after two times with said boyfriend, I didn’t want to do it again. Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t in pain. It wasn’t unpleasant. It just didn’t rock my world like I thought it should. Sex was messy and tiring and dangerous and dammit, I had better things to do.
So I plowed ahead with my bi identity, too shy to pursue anyone in real life, so sex stayed on the page. But every time I thought about being with a woman—really trailing my hands down soft skin and forgiving curves—I felt absolutely nothing. No flutters, no jitters, no late-night fantasies. Was I just fucking broken? Why would I fantasize about hot, pounding sex, but feel nothing when it was actually happening?
Sexual opportunities presented themselves, and I passed. I wanted to have sex, but it wasn’t convenient. I couldn’t explore. And with my overbearing mother’s voice at the back of my mind, I decided it was better to be celibate than stupid.
At the same time I met my to-be-husband, I was recruited by a heavy-duty conservative religion. When dogma got in the way of our love, that same mother who otherwise told me my choices were bullshit encouraged me to suck it up and play the part of a faithful woman to keep him. After all, women had been faking things like orthodox worship for centuries so they could stay in loving relationships. And he was what I wanted: a good man. Never mind the fact he was a virgin and three years older than me—it took pressure off our dating life to know he didn’t expect something at the end of the night.
I figured, by the time the wedding came around, I’d be up for it. The sexual tension between us was unbelievable. The wait alone—eighteen months together, three years since I’d last tried—would drive anyone nuts. Still, he didn’t rush things. I was anxious about getting married too young, because I was twenty-one and aware of all the reasons why getting married so young was a bad, bad idea.
I never fantasized about weddings or children. I didn’t go to my Senior prom and never went shopping for a formal dress; my sister’s hand-me-downs were enough. In fact, my style tended to lean very tomboyish. Daily, I wore an oversized zip-up hoodie which made me feel safe, even when it was hot outside.
Despite all the signs and people saying we shouldn’t get married, we charged ahead anyway.
Our wedding night was spent in the cheapest hotel we could get locally. The first time happened fast and was as I imagined—in, out, done. Boom. We loved each other, though. So what if I still thought it was messy and inconvenient and kind of...meh?
I got off easily enough since I was well-acquainted with my right hand and bought all sorts of toys to enhance our experience. Yet whenever I took off my bra, I felt too exposed and crossed my arms—something I also did my very first time with aforementioned hung boyfriend. Comfortable nudity was out of the question. In most of my deep-seated sexual fantasies, the woman in my head always wore an oversized tee with a cut collar—think of the sweater in Flashdance—sexy because of the tease. My legs were for the taking, and he loved my long hair, but everything in-between was some kind of no-man’s-land of nonspecific yuck.
The great tragedy to my husband was the fact I had excellent tits: perfectly round and firm C-cups with nipples that weren’t too big and didn’t point in odd directions. In theory, I was proud of my great breasts and often introduced them like Gilda Radner in an SNL skit. My husband encouraged me to show off what I had simply because I had something worth showing, which motivated him to weed out my vast hoodie collection. We were both convinced my deep-seated insecurities were really a latent response to my mother’s cruel words about my ugly face, so I embraced his advice and wanted to explore what it meant to be a woman.
Since nothing worked for our bedroom’s stagnant status, he and I fell back on the same great dynamic we had when we were dating: love was enough. He forgave me for my lack of drive and I forgave him for always asking. I lost interest in spicing things up; oral didn’t impress me and backdoor was scary. Once in a blue moon, we’d have a wild night and remember the fun, which saved us in the early years. The best encounters featured laughter—once he and I called out math trivia: “Pi equals three-point-one-four-one-five-nine—oh, oh, oh!”
Our friends were none the wiser, of course. Who tells their friends that they have a great husband, an up-and-coming career as a doctor, big plans for the future, and almost no sex?
Less than a year after we were married, I got sick with what I would later find out was Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Fast forward to February 2014, and my MS came to a head, flaring worse than ever before: I woke up to a completely numb left side from the waist down, and part of my right foot was affected, too. Hubby and I blamed my shit sex drive on the MS while the rest of my body fell apart. He’d waited so long to finally have sex, and here I was, his foul-mouthed and objectively attractive wife, content to never have it again.
Curse you, degenerative brain disease! Your sudden appearance in my life happened to coincide with my wedding! Surely you were the reason why I never liked being naked around others and stayed celibate for three years on purpose!
Right?
To pass the time and ease the stress of hefty medications and infusion center boredom, I dove into a writing marathon of fantasies. Like the journal entries that speckled my college notebooks, I wrote erotica and spent a lot of time describing men opposite my female protagonist, relating more to my dark, long-haired anti-hero than to the heroine I invented. They thrived and I wrote a sequel. Then another. Another. Twenty years passed in the timeline of my books while their children became grown men. And one day, for absolutely no reason that I can recall, one of their sons told me that he was gay.
This was the beginning of the end for my cis life—the day I invented an elven lover: a tall humanoid with long hair and bowed lips that begged to be touched. So they were gay. So what? My mother hated that aspect of my stories and said she didn’t understand how gay men had sex at all. “Disgusting,” she sneered. Truth be told, I didn’t know or understand how they had sex, either. They were the only couple in my stories who didn’t get their own graphic sex scene. It felt wrong to write about something I couldn’t at least experiment with firsthand. Thus, they remained celibate, but happy. Not terribly unlike me.
In the two years following my MS flare, sex hadn’t improved, and at times became a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy: I didn’t want sex, but when I did, it hurt, which only made me want it less. Despite our unspoken issues in the bedroom, my husband and I moved to California for work and decided it was probably time to start a family. This came with a price of its own that I couldn’t express—I didn’t really want to be a mommy. I could see loving kids, and my husband was meant to become a father, but the idea really bothered me. Pregnancy bothered me. I had a dream in my youth of dying during childbirth. To say it scared me was an understatement. When it came time to try, I stopped my many medications as agreed and quietly prayed to be barren. Of course, we got lucky our first time unprotected, and I got pregnant seven years into our marriage.
After my daughter was born, my mother passed, and suddenly I was freed from her overbearing grasp. She’d controlled so much of my existence up to that point, I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. Convinced Mom would haunt me otherwise, I changed my entire aesthetic overnight—went to a salon, had my long hair chopped to a pixie, and bleached it platinum. It didn’t fit my personality at all, nor did the new makeup and oodles of dresses. Oh, so many dresses. Dresses with peacocks and obnoxious patterns. Dresses that hugged or went down to the floor.
Before that summer, I could count all my dresses on one hand. This is what I call “the overcompensate phase”.
Sometime between then and the Covid pandemic, I took a genetic spit-kit test for fun. My dad was adopted, and I was curious. Over a year passed and I met a few lost relatives, enjoying the fact that my lifelong assertion of being one-quarter Jewish was proven with a perfect twenty-five percent.
But one night, I got a special email from the DNA company that their additional medical package was on SUPER sale, and if ONLY I could spare forty bucks, I’d get access to TONS of genetic medical test evaluations. Act now...
I figured, what the hell, can’t hurt, right?
Instantly, notifications flooded my inbox. The test results were already there, locked behind the paywall, just waiting for me to cough up the dough. With my hubby putting our baby to sleep, I clicked through the subtests until I found one with a highlighted banner at the top:
Important medical information. Please share this with your physician. Huh.
The test was for genetic predisposition of breast and ovarian cancer—a gene called BRCA. A mutation in the BRCA gene could astronomically increase one’s risk of these cancers; so much so, Angelina Jolie famously had a double mastectomy to prevent such a fate.
And whaddya know? I was positive.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Oh, no! What a tragedy! Multiple Sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, depression, dead mother, no sex life, now this? And I should’ve felt that way too, I guess, if I’d had the brain of a regular woman. Should’ve looked at the breasts that I didn’t appreciate and clutched them tightly—no, not you. Why?
Instead, I celebrated. Hell yeah, get them off me!
Of course, I didn’t recognize then what a big red flag this was. I looked at pictures of reconstructed chests and was perturbed—why would I trade what I had for that? I didn’t understand the urge to reconstruct anyway. Women would rather not have them.
Right?
Not ready yet to say goodbye to one of my husband’s favorite things, I planned for a mastectomy later. I could live with them for a few more years as long as I did regular screenings.
When Covid hit, things took a turn, and I got a wild hair up that untouched ass of mine for another baby. My husband was beyond elated since he craved a bigger family, and our now-five-year old daughter was just as excited. We’d be complete as a family of four.
Not to mention the sex. We had sex every day, sometimes more than once. We had sex so much in the three months it took to conceive that I’m fairly certain we outpaced our whole first twelve years. I embraced him as much as I could, all too aware that he’d leave me if I didn’t at least make an effort in the bedroom.
Late October 2020, we were off to the races with baby number two. Holy shit, was I sick. The migraines literally blinded me. I was irritable, depressed, and just fucking felt wrong. I’d been so distracted by Mom’s mental illness during my first pregnancy that I wasn’t aware how foreign it felt. So many mothers talk about pregnancy as a miracle—to me, it was a creative version of deliberate self-harm, and I really had a screw loose to want it on purpose.
To pull my mind away from the bullshit irritation I felt at my changing body, I started writing again. I pulled my gay couple out of dormancy and wrote them into the real world. In the process of writing these two characters, I obsessed over them. I drew them. I painted them. I talked about them constantly. The formerly elven lover became my new muse; he was a reflection of something inside that I couldn’t describe, like a hidden personality. The man I created on the page with my words was equally spectacular through my pencils, and more than once, I whined to my husband that I’d never be half as pretty as him.
The more I wrote about them, the more I felt it was time to be brave. I learned the mechanics of backdoor sex and what one, theoretically, needed to enjoy it. Their first time on the page was tender and special, done with guidance from a gay friend and loads of caution—I’d heard cis-het women sometimes fetishized gay men, and I had no interest in such things. My weird nonspecific queer identity was complex enough.
All the research left me wondering: was I missing something that could unlock my lost libido? Added to the already-potent second-trimester pregnancy horniness that brought me back to life, I now had secret plans to explore. So, one night, driven by curiosity to my empty bedroom while my husband played World of Warcraft downstairs, I put a towel on the mattress and locked the door.
Okay. Here we go. It’s just an experiment. Nothing too special.
My vanilla collection of various vibes fit in a small box under our bed. Anxiously excited at the prospect of something new, I pulled out the smallest one of the bunch. Hot pink, sleek, with a powerful buzz. Not sure what to expect, I rolled a condom onto it, certain the icky factor would be too much to handle.
Like legs in the stirrups, I propped myself up, back flat, staring at the ceiling. Decidedly unsexy. Pregnancy made me feel so gross that I considered getting up and forgetting my plans, but since I was already there, it was time. I turned on the buzzer. Thankfully, my lube bottle had a squirt top, and I blindly let the artificial slick drip down from above. Shifting my hips so I could actually reach, I aimed for the final frontier.
Strange. Naughty. The buzz rattled through me—unexpected pleasure. As I pushed to enter, my body forgave until it finally broke through.
Oh, god, yes.
This place wasn’t painful. Far from it. I loved it. I closed my eyes and imagined what my favorite character might say in this moment—finally one with the man that he loved, he would call out his name and slam his head into the pillow. I let go and was washed with new understanding: sex didn’t have to be painful and awful. Like this, I felt more connected to myself. It wasn’t awkward or shameful at all. Who cared about ickiness; I could stay clean. Maybe it was a side effect of pregnancy hormones, or maybe it was because I was in my thirties, but I now understood precisely why getting married at twenty-one was downright stupid. I didn’t know anything about myself back then. My whole life was ruled by what my mom approved of, and I hopped from her home into one with my husband. He offered security and kindness, and as such, I was willing to do whatever it took to stay by his side.
In the moments leading up to my powerful climax, I took inventory of the parts I avoided. My body felt like an amorphous blob. I was all ass and little else. No breasts. No vulva. No growing belly. In fact, my mind’s projection was a different soul entirely.
My character—the elven man. His eyes were closed with his legs propped up, being pummeled and pounded, not getting enough. I lived it alongside him, within him. My heart swelled as I pulled my knees into my chest.
Then he opened his eyes. He stared right through my psyche. My muse became more; his body was my own. I didn’t want him—I wanted to be him. I wanted his chiseled features. I wanted his strong body and long legs. I wanted his lack of breasts, and I wanted his cock. I wanted to never be pregnant again.
In the final seconds before I released, he screamed, “You idiot. I’m you!”
I knew nothing about what it meant to be transgender—or transsexual, depending on who you ask. Words like “passing,” “HRT,” and “dysphoria” were far-off concepts I’d never heard. Society and media set me up to think trans people knew their whole lives that they were trapped in the wrong bodies; they proudly declared to their parents at eight years old how they wished they were different. They weren’t like me, who tried to change my moniker at fourteen because I couldn’t stand the sound of my first name. It was nothing like that.
Right?
Soon enough, I understood that my want to cover my chest was because I didn’t want my breasts at all. My joy at finding out I had BRCA was a gift—the golden ticket to many trans mascs, who sometimes wish for such things so they’d have an excuse no one could argue with. My husband going down on me was foreign and unnatural because I wasn’t connected to that part of me. The general discomfort I felt during vaginal sex was echoed by many nonbinary folks and trans men I met online. And finally, last but certainly not least, was the hatred I had for my body as a whole. Amplified to the max during my pregnancy, I was nothing but a vessel.
I found a common thread among trans people was a love of oversized clothing, which helped cover the parts that made them feel like they weren’t really whole. When I started to explore the concept more, I sent a meme about “dysphoria hoodies” to my husband, who laughed and said, “Wow, it’s you!”
It was me. And if you like dysphoria hoodies, wait ‘til you find out about dysphoria cardigans: for the closeted trans masc who has to look professional!
Since that night in my bedroom, my husband and I have embraced one another in new ways. He’s describes himself as my “Beekeeper”, in play with the shortened label of enby. He’s accepted this newfound part of myself without ire; after all, the breasts were going either way, whether or not I really became the man inside my head. Once upon a time, I was more than happy to live in a sexless marriage for the rest of my life, merely accepting that I’d never find the joy I so readily wrote about for fictional people until I opened my real eyes.
I’m so glad I was wrong.
-Morgan Sloan
Jo Morgan Sloan is an audiologist, an artist, and a novelist in Northern California. Their debut novel will be released by Midnight Meadows Publishing in December 2024 with a second unrelated novel in July 2025. Jo’s essay work can also be found in online periodical Drunk Monkeys and with Four Palaces Publishing.