Gilda

Short answer: Sometimes. It depends greatly upon, in order of importance the technique used, the skill of the surgeon, and the age at which the surgery takes place.

That's not much help, I know, so on to the long answer.

Long answer:

When sexual reassignment surgery was first attempted in the 20's and 30's, the answer was without a doubt certainly not. The surgery at the time was very crude, consisted of a simple removal of the penis and testicles, leaving no sexual function whatsoever. What was left would have been essentially an empty area where most people have genitals.

When the first attempts were made to fashion female genitalia, there was a very high mortality rate due to infection and/or blood loss, and there was no sexual sensation from the genitals whatsoever. Yet people still wanted it.

I point this out to illustrate that transwomen, knowing this, would still seek SRS in higher numbers than there were avaialble surgeons--they were willing give up any sexual function whatsoever and to risk death to have a body that matched their internal gender, it was so important to their psychological well being.

Modern techniques are much, much safer and more advanced. There are two goals in SRS. The first is cosmetic; genitals that look natural. The second is function, both practical and sexual. In practical terms, being able to pee correctly is very important. But your question was about sexual funtionality, so let's get to that.

First, though lets take a brief look at how natal women get sexual pleasure, because we are talking about women here, not men, and women get sexual pleasure differently from men. Natal woman have many more erogenous areas than men, but let's narrow it down to six for this discussion. First, a woman's skin is more sensitive throughout her entire body. Second, women's nipples are sexually sensitive; indeed, some women can have an orgasm solely through nipple stimulation. Third, the clitoris, which is the woman's glans, and which develops from the same tissue as the glans in a man's penis. Fourth, the labia, which are formed from the same tissue that becomes a mans scrotum. Fifth, the interior of the vagina. Women have a g-spot, located inside the vagina roughly next to the interior of the body wall just behind the fat pad on a womans lower belly. Sixth, the anus, which is hit or miss, some liking it and others not, and which is essentially the same for both sexes, but with an important difference, which I'll get to in a minute.

Now let's look at these one by one. Hormones change the skin. Since skin is fully renewed periodically, over a period of years, the elevated estrogen levels and lowered testosterone levels soften and thin the skin, help develop a thin layer of fat, thin body hair, and some report, cause the skin to take on a bright, almost transluscent appearance. This is the only way in which the MTF will have function that is identical to a natal woman. She will have female skin.

Second, nipple sensation increases greatly with breast development, but as with everything else related to the breasts, it likely isn't the same as it would have been in a natal woman. This depends very highly upon when hormone treatment begins; those who begin in their teens, like Sissy, tend to get a much better response, both in terms of size and appearance, and in terms of sexual sensitivity and ability to produce milk than those who begin treatment much later, like my friend Jen, who began treatment in her mid thirties

I'm going to skip ahead to number six for a moment. This is the one area in which an MTF has an advantage over a natal woman. The transwoman still has her prostate gland, and it still responds to stimulation through anal sex.

Now on to number four. Let's stop for a moment, and look at how a woman gets pleasure from vaginal penetration. First, for many women, perhaps most, the sensation of being penetrated, all by itself, is pleasurable, even if it never leads to orgasm. On the physical side, vaginal sex by itself seldom leads to orgasm. Why? Mostly it's because, save for the g-spot, there is no sensation inside a woman's vagina. Sexual stimulation during vaginal sex occurs primarily as a result of friction on the labia minora during thrusting. There are positions that can simultaneously stimulate the clit, or possibly the g-spot, but for the most part, the sensation occurs at the surface. And keep in mind that much of the pleasure is psychological, a result of the penetration itself making the woman "feel like a woman".

Now let's take a moment and look at the neo-vagina of a MTF. Modern SRS surgery uses skin from the shaft of the penis, turned inside out, as the lining of the neo-vagina. As a general rule, the MTF will get about an inch less vaginal depth than the pre-op erect lenght of her penis. This has in the past been unsatisfactory, so most surgeons currently use a graft either from the scrotal tissue or, in some cases, the colon to give additonal depth.

First, and more importantly, this gives the MTF the ability to be penetrated like a woman. This psychological element is all by itself very important, as it, as with a natal woman, can make her "feel like a woman", and feeling female is the most important part of this for most. But here the MTF has a slight advantage over the natal woman. We have physical sensation only at the "top" or entrance to the vagina, while the MTF has physical sensation all along the interior wall of her vagina, "top to bottom" so to speak. She doesn't have a g-spot, so it may overall be a wash.

Last there is the clit. The first penile inversion surgeries merely used the skin from the shaft, including the glans, which tended to lose much of it's sensation and also tended to be hard to stimulate way down at the "bottom" of the vaginal canal. A cosmetic clit might be formed using a skin graft, but it was non-funtional.

The most modern technique, now almost univerally used, reuses the glans penis as the new glans clitoris. At first it was just severed then reattached in the appropriate place, which destroyed most of the sensation. Within the last ten years, however, a new technique was developed, called a pedicled sensate clitoris. Instead of just removing the skin from the shaft of the penis then severing it, most of the spongosa, or spongy erectile tissue, is scraped off, leaving some blood vessels and nerves still attached to the glans. This is the pedicle. The nerves and blood vessels are in effect folded up and the glans whittled down to the appropriate size and reattached in the appropriate place, blood vessels and nerves intact. This usually enables it to retain much, if not all, of it's sexual response, and can later be stimulated directly as with a natal woman's clitoris. It isn't nearly as sensitive as a natal woman's, but it can, if all goes well, be as sensitive as it was when it was still a part of the penis.

This does, however lead to some strange body sensations post op. The brain has a physical map of where the body parts are, and that doesn't change instantly; it takes some time to catch up. The shaft of the penis may be inside of the body and the glans on the exterior body wall, but for awhile anyway, the brain still thinks the glans is attached to the end of the shaft which is outside the body wall. After awhile the body does adjust to the new locations.

What this means is that sex for a transwoman post op is very, very similar to that for a natal woman, though not exactly the same. Some women are easily orgasmic, some orgasm with difficulty, some never at all. Transwomen on average find it more difficult than natal women, and universally more difficult than they did as males.

Most transwomen, especially those of the more skilled surgeons like Sissy's, report sexual sensation and response. Many report the ability to orgasm--follow up studies by Sissy's surgeon seem to indicate a little more than half are able to orgasm and all have some sexual response. For psychological reasons, it's likely that sexual response is overreported.

But for some, perhaps more than half, orgasm is something that is sacrificed. Keep in mind, though, that these are women, not men, and for a great many women, sex need not lead to orgasm to be satisfying, both physically and psychologically. This may even been more prevalent among transwomen, for whom the ability to have any kind of sex in the female position is going to be psychologically confirming their identity as women.

Most transwomen who report the ability to orgasm find it easier pre-op than post op, but in both cases, report the gradual cessation of male orgasms which are gradually replaced by female orgasms. They also tend to report a dimished libido, and many report a diminished sexual response, though the degree varies greatly, and much of it is psychological in nature. The psychological component is that getting an erection frequently makes preop transwomen very uncomfortable, and this occasionally can occur even post orchiectomy, in the complete absense of testicles. This occurs pre-op.

While some have expressed doubts that the physical sensations are different for the male and female orgasms, I have no problem believing it. I know that my clitoral orgasms feel a lot different from my g-spot orgasms, and I've read of women who report a third kind from nipple stimulation. Post-op, the ability to orgasm tends to virtually disappear for awhile, but as the new genitals heal, they tend to gradually recover sensation. But almost all give something up pre-op to post op.

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