"It looks like a Frankenp*ssy": What it really feels like to have gender reassignment surgery.

So many women fight personal and societal battles to be seen as more than just a set of boobs and a vagina, but what about the women that have to fight to have them in the first place?

The stories of high profile trans women like Caitlin Jenner and Laverne Cox are well known to us, but rarely do we hear about the nuts and bolts of transitioning is like. And while it shouldn’t be the focus of anyone’s personal story, shining a light on these issues can help us to greater understand one part of the overall process.

That’s why Jessica’s story is so inspirational.

Speaking to Breena Kerr of the Truth Speak Project, a site dedicated to sharing the stories of what it means to be a woman, Jessica speaks candidly about her transition. From hormone replacement therapy to her gender reassignment surgery and her ability to orgasm.

“One analogy I like to use is that I felt like I was Dorothy waking up in Oz. I’d been in black and white land for a really long time. Then, with Estrogen, I was seeing life in living color for the first time ever,” Jessica told Breena.

“I finally felt like my emotions had this crystal clarity, like they had a vocabulary to them, and like I could understand and process them without being so caught up in them. I could take a step back and look at them and be like ‘Oh! That’s what’s happening!’ rather than being confused and sort of flailing around and getting angsty and emo,” she continued.

“Prior to that, I knew I was an emotional being, that I was sensitive, but it was so much harder to do that. I just felt like things made so much more sense… It’s just a horrible reality of patriarchy that men aren’t allowed to show emotions.”

In addition to her emotional changes, Jessica spoke of the physical changes estrogen brought on. Her face became more round, her features softer, her hips began to fill out in a more traditionally “female” figure.

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But more importantly, Jessica says that the new hormones acted as a form of therapy. “I also felt that I was undoing a lot of what I saw as damage that was done to my body because of the first puberty that I went through — the first puberty that I didn’t choose.”

Following vocal chord surgery in South Korea, Jessica made the decision to undergo breast augmentation and vaginoplasty surgery. (Side note: she highly recommends spacing out the surgeries and not doing both at once like she did).

There are things that Jessica wishes she knew before the surgery: “There are going to be parts of you that are going to melt off.

“Vaginoplasty consists of a repositioning and folding of all these tissues using the existing tissues,”Jessica explains. “When that’s done, some of the tissues might not get as much blood flow as they did before, so they get starved of nutrients and oxygen.

“That’s when the surface tissue tends to die off  — which is as gross as it sounds. It is really really awful. Everyone knows that their pussy is going to look like Frankenpussy after surgery. It’s red, there’s stitches and it’s swollen, you can see the stitch lines,” she continues. “You expect that. What you don’t expect is this yellow-y, clumpy, almost mucus-y, looks-like-someone-sneezed-on-your-pussy kind of residue.

“So you might have a chunk of your inner labia just die off, just fall off, and it’ll just grow right back. It’s hard to believe because when you lose a limb or a toe it doesn’t grow back. But it turns out that your pussy does. It’s strange.

“And it’s gross and it’s funky and it’s awful and you think, ‘Oh my god, What is happening? My pussy is melting. I’m dying.’ But it turns out that it is perfectly normal,” Jessica says reassuringly.

“It’s something doctors should tell patients beforehand. Because you’re already dealing with so many changes, working with so many geographic changes on your body. Your clitoris, which used to be the head of your penis, is positioned in a completely different way.”

Following on from this, Jessica also discusses the topic of “coming out” to future partners, and outlines how her sexual experiences have changed since the surgery, both in terms of the type of orgasm she experiences to what penetrative sex feels like for her now.

You can read all about Jessica’s story in Part I and Part II of her interviews, as well as the stories of other fascinating women, at the Truth Speak Project.