Something was wrong, of course, and the fact that I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for the last year as I transition to living openly as a woman is definitely indicative of that. About this time last year, I sat in a doctor’s office at the LGBT Center in Los Angeles holding a form telling me about all of the side effects that HRT would have on my body, and one of them was a possible reduction in sex drive, and a decrease in enjoyment from sex in the traditional sense. Well, I figured to myself at the time, I’ve never had all that much of that anyway so it wasn’t a huge loss. The same document did inform me that they encourage patients to explore these changes and learn different ways to enjoy the changes in our body, and that was pretty much it.

Life continued much that same way for the next eleven months or so, which is what I expected so I thought nothing of it. Until I saw this meme on Facebook:

And then everything changed. The first card was just a reference to a South Park episode, not a gamechanger. But the second and third cards? Wait, could this be true? Could the hormones I’ve been taking the last year actually mean that I could, you know, do stuff? This had to be a joke, right?

Under this post were a bunch of comments from other transgender women. The general consensus was that this was no joke. That the introduction of estrogen into the system slowly has reprogrammed a lot of my nerve responses to things, and flipped on a bunch of switches that had previously been off. Suddenly my mind was awash with the idea that maybe, just maybe… I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time? Or more to the point, I had an actual physical barrier that was keeping me from a climax? I had to investigate this.

And, y’all, it was true.

A little bit of trial and error and quite a bit of internet research later, and I had my first ever orgasm, brought on by my very delightful new Magic Wand.  And for the first time in my life, I can honestly say that I totally get what the appeal of sex is, and why so much of our society is all about it. Because holy shit, that first time that I used my Wand, the sensation was so unexpected, it came on so strong and so much at once, that I actually had to put that thing away in a drawer and leave the room. This is a thing? This is a real thing that can happen to my body? Are you kidding me? No wonder all of you keep making such stupid decisions in the quest to doing this in more and more interesting ways.