u/Ancient-Active8421

I’m in my late 20s. SM started when I was 3. Didn’t say a word throughout school, never spoken to any friends. When I was a little kid, maybe until like 5 or 6, I could speak to extended family, but since then the number of family members I could speak to/in earshot of quickly dropped to 6. Plateaued for a long time, throughout my teens and early 20s. In my early 20s I recalled some experiences involving a parent and subsequently began to recognise and come to terms with abusive behaviours I had ‘tolerated’. I’ve never left home so I still live with my immediate family who I’d always spoken to. However since all of that came up I’ve found it progressively more difficult to speak to or around this parent - it’s been scary witnessing SM shrink my world even further as an adult when I somehow thought I had some level of control with it. Home has become an incredibly stressful environment for me. I’m constantly on high alert to avoid this individual - when confronted I can sometimes get one or two syllables out but no more than that before my brain become too scrambled to understand anything said to me or to know what I want to say and my throat closes up. I can’t even look at this person or pictures of this person anymore, and I shut down when any family members try talking to me about this person.

So that’s my home situation.

I don’t remember much of childhood but I know various professionals (and weird ‘alternative’ practitioners) were involved for my SM - probably everything aside from medication... I try not to think of ‘what ifs’, and I don’t know what I could even take now to help as I don’t knowingly feel anxious in relation to my SM, it just feels ‘normal’. Of course there’s more anxiety when put into situations where I know I’m going to be confronted by someone who doesn’t know I experience mutism, but I guess I still ‘own it’ and just gesture and type and people get the idea pretty quick and I feel ‘fine’.

Here’s the only success I’ve ever had though in overcoming my mutism: in my early 20s I managed to get counselling with a charity for 18 weeks. I was seeking help to cope with the memories/realisation of abuse but it was still too early then for me to even label it abuse so didn’t make progress there. Anyway, in a lot of ways the counselling was quite frustrating - I liked my counsellor but she just left so much space and I struggled to know what to say. She never put any pressure on me to speak or even to discuss my SM, and I think that actually helped quite a bit - it was so different from experiences I’d been forced into with professionals growing up. In private, I started reading aloud to myself, and then reading aloud whilst recording myself on my phone and eventually listening back to recordings of myself. I must have listened to myself reading the same couple of pages hundreds of times to desensitise myself and I eventually got to the point of sending this recording to my counsellor. That was huge for me, but it’s as far as things went - sessions ended soon after and I wasn’t able to see her again.

So yes, I had one tiny victory. But the journey to getting there just with one person in such a controlled environment took months and so much time and energy (I’m prone to obsessing a bit over things and have huge difficulty with task switching so just balancing counselling with uni was hard - it becomes all-consuming). I feel like especially since COVID I’ve become so much more socially isolated, I barely communicate with anyone anymore. So while I’m desperate to be able to speak to my friends, I feel like at this point I risk having no friends left because I can’t even seem to hold a conversation by text anymore. I just never know what to say and it can take me weeks just to reply to someone because I find it so overwhelming worrying about saying the wrong thing. I think part of it is because I’ve gone through so much, alone, over the past few years which I continue to bottle up and so now it feels like I’m not fully ‘seen’ by my friends, but I don’t want to be a downer by disclosing all the shit I’ve been trying to cope with - it feels like already by friendships are fragile and adding all that could just make me too much for anyone to deal with.

Sorry this sort of became a bit of a vent. I got drawn into AI for a while and feel like it’s just made my isolation and rumination worse too so figured maybe I should try communicating with real people who get it instead.

I don’t really have a specific question, just wonder whether anyone might have similar experience in terms of severity/duration and have any advice.

I was referred for lower surgery in 2021 (originally for phallo, but nearing the top of the list have decided to go with meta instead) and recently had an email from GDNRSS offering to transfer me from waiting for New Victoria Hospital, onto the Chelsea and Westminster waiting list.

The surgeons listed for meta are: Mr Giangiacomo Ollandini, Mr Giuseppe Di Taranto, and Mr Juan Tinajero. So far I haven’t been able to find any examples or descriptions of experiences/outcomes of metoidioplasty performed by any of these surgeons.

Does anybody here have experience with or knowledge about this C&W team?

I’m new here and haven’t really been online around trans stuff for years so apologies in advance if I get anything wrong.

I’ve been on the wait list for lower surgery (originally referred for phallo, recently decided I’d be more comfortable pursuing meta) for about 5 years (UK NHS 🫠).

My main thing is that I want to be able to urinate standing without having to drop my trousers to my ankles (I hike a lot and hate having to squat in the bushes to pee… don’t get me started on barren landscapes). So UL is a must (specifically out of the neophallus - I’m aware that sometimes they reroute but that’s just not for me).

Beyond that, while I like the bulk that testicular implants give, I’m not keen on the idea of having foreign objects inside me, so I’m wondering about what my options would be realistically without implants to still get a decent scrotum.

On one surgery video I watched they pulled a flap of mons (? anatomy is not my strong suit) down, tucking the new phallus up and under to come out higher up, and then formed the scrotum from the fat flap along with the extra flappy bits remaining down there. To me that would be ideal, especially with the higher positioning of the phallus and slimming down of the mons without too much scarring, although I’m fairly slim so I don’t know whether there would be much bulk. I also don’t mind the idea of the scrotum being more anterior rather than hanging (if it gives the impression of more of a bulge that’s always a win 😂). But from what I saw that didn’t involve UL.

I’m basically wondering what options there are for scrotoplasty without implants when also getting UL? (Even better if anyone has experience seeking this with the NHS either at NVH or C&W)