I Left My Balls In Tijuana

I came into 2025 with a crippling fear about my safety as a transgender woman. I was not alone in that, and I do not blame myself for feeling that way. The steps I took to keep myself safe could be generously described as "paranoid" and more accurately labelled "fucking crazy". This is an account of those steps.

Fearing some sort of interruption to the availability of estrogen for transgender women, I learned to navigate crypto wallets and used them to order two vials of grey market estrogen from a home-brewing transwoman in Europe. They arrived packaged like bottles of perfume, complete with a faux label of "Rose Argan Oil" over the actual medical label. I didn't even pay a tariff on it, I felt pretty clever.

My brain, which was in early February seized by extreme fits of anxiety and panic from the crumbling state of the world and the stress of my new job, figured that would last me a good twenty four months. In the meantime I could stockpile my prescribed pills and build a reserve. This was, however, a temporary solution and I still felt there was a possible future where I could be forced to detransition. I would, and still will, die before that happens. So I began looking into permanent solutions.

I looked into orchiectomies, which for those unfamiliar is the removal of the testes. Without naturally producing testosterone, I figured my body couldn't re-masculinize. I still didn't like the idea of having a flap of skin where my testes used to live, and around this time I started reading experiences of other trans people who had made changes to their bodies, including Neo-Genitals Evangelion, who was particularly informative and influential on my decision. It occurred to me that, in this nearly completely uncharted territory, I could really do whatever I wanted downstairs.

There is something very liberating in realizing that. My government doesn't like me, my existence is an affront to patriarchal power structures, the pot is boiling and I am but one frog in it. Those ingrained heteronormative lessons about having good manners, planning for my future and my family, and keeping up respectable appearances suddenly felt stupid and insignificant in the face of my actual situation. Let's get weird with it.

I was able to get a consult with a urology center in my city about four months out – early June. I waited patiently, went to the consult, and it was pleasant. They'd performed many orchiectomies that were later turned into full vaginoplasties, and while I was disappointed they couldn't do a full scrotectomy (that's an orchiectomy but they just remove the baggage left behind, too) I felt good about the possibility. No more balls, no more testosterone, no more t-blockers. I'd even fit in my underwear more comfortably.

Then came the logistics. It was not my first surgery, not even my first gender affirming surgery, as I'd gotten my face worked on the year prior. I spoke with the surgery center and unsurprisingly, the first step was getting a letter of reference from a therapist. If you're unfamiliar, that's where a trans person asks a cis person with a degree to confirm that they are in fact trans enough to need gender affirming care. I imagine it's a little bit like being on a cooking game show, where the haughty British chef tastes the thing you worked very hard on and then tells you to slit your wrists with the nearest paring knife – longways, and preferably over the work sink, you stupid tranny.

I asked what it would cost without insurance – about twelve thousand USD. Even with insurance, I figured I'd need to hit my deductible, which was sitting at a pleasant eighty-one hundred USD. I cried a little, then I ran the numbers on what it would cost if I just did the procedure myself. I figured I'd go to the waiting room of the local ER, slip into the bathroom, and with a few rubber bands and a sufficiently sharp box cutter I could just take the parasites off myself. I mocked it up at home and was a bit uncomfortable, but I figured it would only be a few seconds of pain before my screams were heard and someone rushed me back into the ER for a fentanyl cocktail and some emergency sutures. Then I considered, after the surgery, they'd almost certainly put me on a psychiatric hold and I'd be stuck in the hospital for three days, that couldn't be cheap either, I'd likely have to talk to more psychs which I did not want to do, and by then I'd have spent as much money to do the procedure myself as I would to have it done for me. Neither option felt good and I was crying a lot.

This had me back online, reading about other options. A few dolls on Reddit talked about having their surgeries done in Mexico, and I dug deeper into that idea. Mexico Transgender Center – delightfully unassuming, a few actual reviews on other places, and a website new enough to not feel like I'm looking for hot singles in my area that want to fuck and fuck good. It was really everything I wanted. Exactly the surgery I was wanting to have, no compromises. Less than half the price of doing it in my home state. Almost no waitlist. No references needed. It took me just a couple days to get a phone consult with the doctor where we talked about my desired outcomes. Lasted maybe 10 minutes. I put down a $500 deposit, sent over my paperwork, and was put in touch with a representative via WhatsApp to coordinate. Communication was sparse until about a week before surgery when I got specific instructions. My contact loved sending voice notes and referring to me as "honey" or "beautiful". It was different.

I paid extra – about $200 - to have a driver pick me up from San Diego airport, ferry me across the border into Mexico, then take me back the day after the operation. She was an older woman, which made me feel more comfortable if not entirely at ease. San Diego is beautiful at night and the ocean breeze was actually much cooler than I'd been in Oregon's wildfire season. I had some anxiety about crossing the border without a Spanish speaking companion, and my chauffer spoke better English than I spoke Spanish. The border guards didn't even stop the car to look at my passport, just waved us through. I assume she had a special sticker on her windshield.

The front desk at the hotel – which was part of some new development that seemed lost in an otherwise traditional looking strip south of Independence Boulevard – quoted me for forty-four hundred as I was checking in, and I only briefly panicked before realizing they quoted me in pesos, not in dollars. I paid, got to my rather nice room, and slept.

The next day I walked to a pre-op appointment with about three thousand dollars in my pocket. Tijuana is not a walkable city by any stretch of the imagination but I wanted to, however minutely, experience the city. As a white girl medical tourist, who did not speak any Spanish that one couldn't learn from Dora the Explorer, I couldn't help but feel like an invasive species. Not that the city was doing something negative to me, far from it – but that I was here taking advantage of them. A dog followed me for a block as I walked through a densely packed neighborhood, rows of houses separated by roads that felt far too narrow to accommodate cars. I asked him to stay, but I realized he probably didn't understand English commands, so I let him follow me until he got bored.

I was buzzed into the pre-op center and found myself in a medical spa. It was clearly built with privacy in mind. I waited for about an hour for my contact to arrive and talk to me. While I waited in the sterile white room that had been decorated to the height of girl boss chic, I watched as two other white women paced around the perimeter of the enclosed patio outside. Recent visitors to the doll factory recovering post-surgery. I wondered what they'd gotten done. Can you walk after a BBL?

Eventually my fairy dollmother did arrive and she was everything I expected. Obviously no stranger to going under the knife, surgical with brow pencil, stilettos for nails and incapable of referring to me as anything other than "beautiful" or "sweetheart". I straightened out my arrival time and the address for the surgery center itself and slipped her an envelope full of blue-faced hundreds. She was shocked to hear I walked to the appointment, and arranged for a car to take me to my surgery the next day. I'd later find that Uber drivers in Mexico make next to no money, even by Uber standards, and I wound up tipping more than the cost of the actual fare to every poor soul who ferried me around Baja California

For my surgery the next day I was paired with a nurse that didn't speak English, so we communicated mostly with a translator app. In the waiting area I saw the whiteboard that listed the other surgeries for the day – another orchiectomy and a phalloplasty. Busy day for the doll factory, they were even working on Kens. I was brought back and given a shot in the back that left my lower half numb, and I experienced the surgery while awake, if not totally lucid. A veil separated me from the work being done so I didn't need to watch myself be neutered. I could vaguely feel my parts being tugged at, snipped, and manipulated. It was odd. The operating room listened mostly to Latin music, until near the end of the surgery when someone decided to play Black Sabbath. My stitches were being put in to the instrumental break in Iron Man.

The doctor asked if I wanted to see what was removed, I shook my head and intimated that I didn't want to see those parts even when they were attached. I was held in the post-op room napping for a few hours, and was finally allowed to leave when I proved I had the ability to piss. My lower half consisted of a thick gauze pad that had been taped to my operating area, with my clit hanging out of the top like a sock clinging to the edge of a clothes hamper. It was surreal, and not exactly comfortable, but I staggered out of the surgery center around four thirty in the afternoon. I staggered the mile or so back to my hotel. Along the way I stopped at a street side taqueria, and flexed my tenuous grasp of Spanish to eat four carne asada tacos that may have been the best food I'd ever tasted. Pigeons flitted around waiting for patrons to drop something edible. I think the clothes I wore that day still smell like the smoke from the grill, and I'm not particularly mad about it.

It never really did improve my anxiety about the world. Therapy did, a good combination of meds did, but this didn't. That's a funny thing about me, I'm usually so preoccupied with doing something that I forget to ask if it's the right thing to be doing. It did, however, make me feel better in my body. I crossed the border on foot the next day, eager to get home. Even after removing the surgical pad, I found that over the next few days I was spotting blood in places as my wound scabbed up, and for the first time I had good reason to wear a pad. It felt almost gender affirming. It was two months of healing before the stitches were all the way out and my scar developed. I was immediately, and still am, enamored with it. I love how smooth it looks, how easily I fit into underwear, how I have hardly any bulge.

The next question you may have is about sex. I like thinking about sex, I think many people do. No, this really didn't change my sex life at all. My clit still works, she gets hard. I was several years deep into my transition before surgery and had already lost the ability to have a "cumshot", though my body does still produce pre-cum: did you know that isn't created by your testes? It's two glands near your prostate. Do with that info what you will.

Below I'll share some pictures of the "after", if you're curious how it all came together.