From a piece by Kate Bornstein that was published in the Stranger‘s Queer Issue in 2002:

I thought I knew everything about dicks. Hey, I’d lived with mine for over 30 years, so you’d think I was well versed in the subject. But no, I found out there was a lot to bone up on… especially after I cut mine off. Whoops. Did I say “cut it off”? I didn’t mean to. Well, yes, I meant to cut it off, but I didn’t mean to say that I cut it off. Because for a long time after I’d cut off my dick, I maintained that I hadn’t. Pardon my Zen, but first they cut off my dick; then they didn’t; then they did. No, really.

How does that work? Well, one of the very first things I wanted to know from all the surgeons I interviewed was how they were going to cut it off. They explained that first they would slice my penis open lengthwise, then they’d scrape out the spongy stuff. Next, they would sew it up and pull it inside out, sort of like pulling a sock inside out by the toe. So the outside of my penis would become the walls of my vagina-to-be. Are you with me? Finally, they’d stuff the inside-out penis up inside me (don’t worry, everybody’s got a lot of flexible erotic tissue there, and it’s very easy to make room for something like an inside-out sock). Et voilê! A new vagina! I paid my money, they did their magic, and that’s how they cut off my dick.

I was very happy with the surgical explanation of my genital transformation. I was no longer a guy: I was woman, hear me roar! I started hanging out with a group of highly educated lesbian feminists in my then-hometown of Philadelphia. I wanted to know everything about this feminism stuff, and they wanted to know everything about why I considered myself to be a real woman. They were concerned about my phallus, which they defined as my male privilege and sense of entitlement. Well, I proudly told them how the doctors cut off my dick. I figured that would wash well with my new group of friends: I’d heard how many lesbian feminists wanted to castrate men, and here I was, having done exactly that! But no. None of this went down very well.

“You didn’t cut off your dick at all,” my lesbian feminist friends explained. “You simply turned it inside out and stuffed it up inside you.” Aw, man!

Read the whole piece here.