On the 12th of January 2026, I’m getting a vagina.

I’m back at the W Hotel in Bangkok. It was the final hotel I stayed at when I came here for my facial feminization surgery, and I was treated like royalty by the staff. So I came back.

It’s immediately obvious that I’ve picked up exactly where I left off. Miss Stevie, the minor celebrity of the W Hotel, is back.

The car door opens and a smiling member of staff leans in.

“Miss Stevie. Welcome back.”

I step out and stride across the lobby with my suitcases trailing behind me like a diva’s train, greeted by three more staff in quick succession. All that’s missing is a chihuahua in a handbag.

“Miss Stevie. Welcome back.”

“Welcome back, Miss Stevie.”

“Miss Stevie. Welcome back.”

By the time I reach the reception desk, I’m almost laughing.

“Welcome back, Miss Stevie,” the woman says, smiling as I smile back.

I start to feel like the other guests must be wondering who on earth I am. Some sort of local celebrity, perhaps, judging by the amount of attention I’m getting.

So why am I here again?

I’m here because the time has come to do the final surgery.

This is the end of the road. The last big intervention. Mr Penis is off to the salami slicer. Peeled apart like an overripe banana and repurposed. There’s no delicate way to put it, they will chop my knob off in a matter of days. On the 12th of January, in the year of our Lord 2026, I’m getting a “designer vagina”.

The journey to Bangkok was the usual blur. Train to Dublin. Flight via Abu Dhabi. Then Bangkok. I’ve completely lost track of whether I arrived yesterday or the day before. Time zones flatten everything into a kind of soup.

On the Dublin to Abu Dhabi leg, I was seated next to an old City stockbroker. We got chatting and got on like a house on fire. Lots of the conversation is non-publishable here. I certainly attract those sorts, I think. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he ‘thought I looked fucking tidy when I walked on’. He added that he would ‘absolutely have done me, right up until I opened my mouth and he realised I was trans’.

I thanked him politely for his half-compliment.

He then told me he was flying to Bangkok to get his penis fixed after prostate cancer. I said I was going the other way. We both laughed a lot. It passed the time nicely.

I don’t mind confessing. This time around, for this surgery, I am shitting it. I’m quite nervous, in a very different way.

When I was young, this wasn’t called “gender confirmation surgery” or any of the newer, kinder phrases. It was called a sex change. Have you had a sex change? You were either pre-op or post-op. That was it. There were no refinements, no menu of facial procedures, no nuanced discussions about embodiment. This was the line. Had you crossed it or not?

By the mid-90s, I thought about it a lot. Fantasised, if I’m honest. And once, high as a kite on ecstasy and utterly desperate, I tried to do a DIY version myself. The logic, such as it was, went something like this: if I didn’t have testicles, I wouldn’t make testosterone, and if I didn’t make testosterone, maybe I wouldn’t look like this anymore.

It was an extreme way of coping. It’s also proof of how long this has been present. I’ve been Stevie, quietly and persistently, since I was about five.

The thing is, I was never desperately attached to my male anatomy. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t care about it. It barely served much purpose when I was presenting as a man. Sex was cursory. Interest was low. Friends would tell me they were having sex three times a night and I’d stare at them in genuine amazement, thinking, how on earth does your body want that?

Mine never did.

Whenever I did have sex with a woman, I imagined being the woman. That was the only way through it. I never masturbated successfully as a man, not once in my entire life. No interest in porn. No interest in male sexuality. The only way anything worked at all was by turning the whole thing inside out, mentally and sometimes literally, and using vibrators. Some people would call that asexual. I wouldn’t argue too hard.

So if you take sex out of the equation entirely, would I still do this surgery?

Yes. Absolutely.

Because my penis serves no purpose whatsoever. It didn’t, really, before. And now it doesn’t at all. It’s just… there. Incongruent. A leftover. A thing I manage, conceal, work around. An object that produces anxiety rather than meaning.

I don’t pretend there isn’t another thought rattling around in my head, one I’m not supposed to admit. Somewhere deep down, I do think that “real” transsexuals do this. That it’s more legitimate. That you go all the way or you haven’t really committed. I’m not proud of that thought. I’m also not pretending it doesn’t exist. What matters is that it’s not why I’m doing this.

I’m doing this because aesthetically, practically, psychologically, this is what I want.

People often ask me about design. What do you want? What shape? What technique? What’s the plan? And I never quite know how to answer, because I don’t see it that way. I’m a systems thinker. The design input happens at the choice of surgeon. Everything else is downstream of anatomy, physics, and experience. You’re operating within a narrow band of what’s possible anyway. Obsessing over customisation feels like false control.

Ironically, I’ve put far more thought into my cheek implants than my vagina.

That’s not a joke.

I know exactly what I want in my face. I’ve studied implant shapes. I understand malar versus submalar projection. I know where my midface sags and how to scaffold it. I’ve looked at thousands of before-and-afters. I’ve written a brief in my head.

Why? Because it’s visible. Because it’s social. Because I want to be beautiful.

Downstairs is private. This is about congruence, not performance.

I’m not particularly frightened of pain. This will be my fourth time going under for transgender-related surgery. I know the rhythm of it now, the half-life of pain, the slow taper back to normality. What terrifies me is waking up and seeing everything for the first time. I am genuinely, profoundly terrified of that moment.

People tell me it takes months to get used to it. That the body changes instantly, but the mind lags behind. That feels more accurate. The physical reality arrives all at once, but the internal map takes time to redraw itself. Your sense of where you are in your own body has to be rebuilt. The centre moves. The shape moves. What was once forward no longer is. What was once external is now lower, tucked away, quieter. I understand all of that intellectually. I’m still not ready for what it will feel like to inhabit that shift. That, more than pain or recovery, is what frightens me. Not the injury, but the re-centring. It isn’t emotional. It’s architectural. Profound feels like the right word.

So, I’m back in a hotel room in Bangkok, killing time before something irreversible. I unpack my bag. I look out over the city. I feel scared and certain, and absurd, all at once.

There’s one more thing I keep coming back to.

At the very start of all of this, before any surgeries, before anyone knew, I recorded a short video of myself. I’m sitting there talking to the camera. I’d taken a small amount of hormones. That was it. Day one, really.

I watch it sometimes. I’m normally quite shy about showing publicly old videos of myself, but I’ll let you see.

What strikes me isn’t how different I look, because of course I do. It’s how happy I am. Not performatively happy. Not relieved. Just… quietly, unmistakably happy. The kind of happiness that leaks out of you when you’re no longer fighting yourself. I’m so happy in that video it’s almost embarrassing. I look like I might burst.

If I ever doubt myself, that’s what I go back to. That moment, right at the beginning, when nothing external had changed yet, but everything internal had.

Despite the grief that’s come with this path, despite the losses, that happiness is real. It’s mine. And it’s never gone away.

This surgery isn’t a leap into the unknown. It’s a continuation.

I know who I am. I’ve seen her at the start.

And I’m still going.