I've consciously wanted a hysterectomy since I first came out. At the time, my desire was largely due to the emotional discomfort I felt with menstruating. But then when that stopped with the aide of testosterone, it was less of an urgency. The desire only really came up again in the summer of 2011 when I started randomly spotting. Then there was rare bits of abdominal pain, and a growing annoyance over my gender marker still being legally female. I'd also reached a point where PAP smears were increasingly distressing and tedious (samples my doctor would take were, more often than not, insufficient, and therefore not worth the pain, trauma, and anguish they would cause).

My therapist at the time recommended a surgeon when I casually mentioned that I wanted to take this step. She told me she'd referred many of her trans male patients to Dr Yvonne Gomez-Carrion at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and that she was "magic".

My surgery (LAVH) was at noon on May 10 2013, and took about two hours. On the 0-10 pain scale, I woke up at about a 5, and from there, I was anywhere between a 0-3. The most unpleasant thing for me during my overnight hospital stay was the foley catheter, but my the rest of that experience was otherwise really good.

Recovering at home was fairly easy. Pain continued to be perfectly manageable (it felt like as if I had pushed myself too hard doing crunches at the gym) and was taken care of with ibuprofen and not overdoing anything in general. I was worried that post-op bleeding would be distressing, but it wasn't as horrible as menstruation had been for me. Still, I was overjoyed when it finally stopped! In order to prepare for that part, I purchased a cheap pack of briefs and "panty" liners. I was using pads for the first week, but I got those from the hospital.

One website which was an ENORMOUS help for my recovery was the forum on Hyster Sisters. Don't let the title scare you. Pretty much every top result Google had in response to random questions pointed me to that site. Plus, everybody seemed really nice to each other, including trans men who posted, which is not something typically found on a forum. Even if most of the people's reasons for their procedures was different from mine, a lot of advice still came in very handy.

I got my pathology report at my six-week appointment. I also had to do a quick internal exam, but it was over in a few seconds. My internal incisions had healed well and my report showed nothing worrisome about my organs, which was a little surprising. I was expecting the report to come back with a couple benign ovarian cysts or something. The pictures that were taken during my surgery showed very early signs of endometriosis, but otherwise there was absolutely nothing remarkable to report.