Panty Gussets

Now there’s an odd post title. By the way, be careful Googling it as a subject. I advise against doing so at work – at the very least read the site titles carefully before clicking. I had no idea. I mean I knew there was a fetish, but really?

However, my reason for talking about that extra bit of cotton is much more prosaic. Before my surgery I assumed that it had the utilitarian purpose of dealing with those minor bits of liquid and semiliquid things that exit a woman’s body. The positioning, at least at the time, seemed reasonable.

Gentlemen, you can leave the room now if you’d like. You might find this off putting. On the other hand you might find it interesting, so go brew some chamomile tea and cozy up with an  afghan.

I had my surgery and for quite a while there was stuff to deal with and a double layer of cotton wouldn’t have been appropriate, but they sell things for that. Some time later when healing was largely done, I thought perhaps to let the underwear do what it was meant to do.

But I ran into this problem. Despite having been given what is, as far as I can tell from having seen genitalia of other women in person, and elsewhere, totally normal genitals in a normal configuration and in a normal position, somehow the underwear wasn’t doing it’s job. I became curious (and a little peeved because I have something which will take months to finish healing, and I’ve noticed that vaginas aren’t exactly dry places either, even those constructed rather than grown).

Here’s a picture of what’s happening (a drawing, not a real picture, I’m not going to do that thank you!):

On the right is a frontal sketch of a female torso showing the coverage of a typical bikini panty. In the bottom front is the front of the vulva with this labia majora pressed together thus making a vertical line. The seam of the gusset is hard to see but it is a small purple line at the bottom edge.

The left shows a nominal vulva as it might appear with a woman’s legs somewhat parted to show the anatomy. The horizontal purple line is the front edge of the gusset where it lands for me, for others it might be somewhat  forward or backward, apparently it even works out for some lucky girls.

Consider though that if the legs are not apart, the labia minora (labelled l. min above) will be together and might even adhere a bit together. Anything exiting the vaginal will therefore pick some path along the labia, not necessarily right below the vaginal opening. As a result about 50% of the possible points it might end up aren’t covered by the gusset.

I did do that dreaded google search thinking I was perhaps the odd woman out. Maybe if I had been born female any discharge would just exit more directly and not be problematic, or maybe this is a post op issue. I’m afraid neither is true. After carefully skipping sites about used underwear (yuck) I found a discussion among a group of cis females on this very subject.

My problem apparently is very common. It might even be the norm (I wouldn’t mind comments from both cis and trans women on this). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is yet another case of underwear for women being designed by men who don’t really fully understand the issues. As much as I love my former brothers, they aren’t going to get this problem without the right set of genitals in their pants.