I do not long for a dick. This comes easily to me, I don’t say it defensively. I am lucky to not long for a dick because I was assigned male at birth. As the story goes, when the doctor spilled my freshly birthed body into my mother’s arms, she held me and looked up, dopy, exhausted, into my father’s eyes and said ‘Robbie, what’s wrong with his penis?’ He replied ‘Kim, it’s a girl.’ This was obviously a lie. The correct answer was there is so much wrong with my penis. I was assigned fucked up dicked at birth. My mother says she was so used to birthing boys at this point that she assumed my vulva, swollen and red from the constriction of birth, was a penis. But that version of a dick – the engorged vagina – is exactly the type of dick, one of them, I have now and is, in fact, everything I want in a dick.

My mother is the person who has struggled most with catching up to my transition, or keeping in step with it, though she tries or wants to. I am far enough along now that I no longer try to do anything about it. When I call my parents and I hear her say, away from the mouthpiece, ‘Robbie, she wants to talk to you’ I just want to say to her, ‘girl, you knew before everyone’.

My dick is shaped like the absence of a dick and so it is both the biggest and smallest dick in the world. Amazing.

In Athenian plays there are these short kings named satyrs. Small, hairy, grotesque men who help Dionysian heroes with their quests. They drink heavily and try to fuck the nymphs and they have constant, enormous erections. As they appear on pottery their erections are about a third of the length of their bodies. As figures, they are intended to remind audiences of their civic duties, by contrast. But though they are objects of revulsion, they are also never punished. They knock about, small frivolous animals and at the end they are rewarded with wine and indolence. They’re like trans men. They’re weird little guys who chose the wrong sized strap, but people love ‘em.

Transmascs are the only people I consistently ogle, unable to stop myself. Not if I am introduced to one by a friend or if I know them already just from around, from the backgrounds of social media, but if I encounter one in the wild, by total surprise, I’m so excited by it that the excitement turns into desire, charged curiosity, the charge spilling out. I was moving house recently and one of the removalists asked to use my bathroom. When I went in afterwards to clear my cabinets I noticed he’d left the toilet seat up and I was so overcome by the mark of trans dick left behind that I had to go outside and take a deep breath. At the end of the encounter as I went to pay him, I couldn’t stop looking down at his dick, the conspicuous bulge of the packing transmasc, always just a little bit hard. The satyrian erection.

I have never packed. I bought a packer once online but I got the skin tone wrong. It looked ridiculous, blindingly pale against the rest of my skin. I tried to stain it but it was during lockdown and all I had on hand was betadine solution – it didn’t really take and just came out looking old and grimy. It was an STP and I kept taking it into the shower with me in the morning to practice; but in the mornings my bladder was too full, I couldn’t control it properly and so I never used it. Too risky. Didn’t really want to piss myself. When I packed even just walking around my room, I felt silly. The dick was too present. Too firm, too bulging. I’m not a big dick guy, I decided.

I’m sorry to make you read about my dick, I know it is a bit cringe to think so much about your dick. Why are you, as a man, making people think about your dick. I guess I’m just thinking about it because when I started transitioning, a dick had nothing to do with it. I never thought about the fact that I didn’t have one. It was just this concept: I didn’t really feel like a woman, trying to be one often led to a strange, immobilising feeling of failure, what if I just let go of that? And then when I let go of it, I also let go of all this shame about my body. My body felt new, clean, not clean like purity or innocence but clean like anything was possible now.

I was a late bloomer, and even though this is hugely irrelevant now – who cares? – I have embarrassment about it still, sometimes. I feel a little behind everyone else, less experienced, less cool about sex. When I was around 20 I think, my brother and his partner and I, once a week, gathered at my parents house for dinner. I sought their advice a lot. Every week I’d announce to them, “Well, I still don’t want to have sex,” And they’d explain that it was fine if I didn’t want to have sex but also it really wasn’t that big a deal if I just wanted to give it a go. When I told them that I found hard penises a bit aggressive–looking and intimidating, my brother and his partner set up a tumblr called accessible–penises.tumblr.com. It was all images of penises looking approachable, usually they were soft, sometimes covered in glitter or paint. It was meant as a sort of exposure therapy.

Obviously, I don’t think it was the ‘aggression’ of hard penises that had delayed my desire for sex. It wasn’t anything to do with anyone else’s genitals. I just hadn’t worked out what I wanted from my own, how I wanted them to be, what I wanted to do with them or make with them.

When I didn’t want to have sex, other people’s naked bodies seemed so far away. Even just the concept of them. They didn’t occur to me, except occasionally as a necessary thought, and even then the reality of the nakedness was distant – out in the cosmos or the quantum field or whatever, the space where our furthest thoughts intermingle. The reality that other people’s naked bodies had always been around, not far away at all, right next to me with just the layers of clothing between us is absurd now to think about, how present it was and yet how unaware of it I was, how disconnected.

To me, air travel is horny. It’s very 1960s of me. Whenever I am in the boarding gate of an airport or on the plane, everyone is sexy. Their bodies so close, and such bodies.

Now, when I find myself gripped with desire, the clothing seems so thin, no obstacle at all really to invited touch, no disaster or humiliation waiting on the other side. So what changed?