I'm not an amputee, but I have had sex reassignment surgery. I don't think I'd say there are "phantom pains" or a sense of a phantom limb. During arousal, blood flows to the area and there's a slight feeling of tightness, I guess. It's soft tissue, though, so it feels very different from an erection. Nothing is really moving or growing. Feels pretty normal to me now. There's no erectile tissue there anymore.

Right after surgery things were pretty messed up. Of course some bits were painful and some were numb, but as feeling came back it was kinda mind blowing. Like, I could touch a bit of tissue and imagine exactly where it used to be. My hand was touching a labia minora, and my brain was telling me where that used to be. Over the course of a few months that all went away and it all maps to something that makes sense now. There aren't sensory "mistakes" anymore. My vagina feels like a vagina, clit feels like a clit as far as I can tell. Being penetrated feels like being filled up and and not at all reminiscent of the opposite (though the first few months of that were bizarre).

The other aspect (I guess) with phantom limb is a sense of what "should" be there. That really doesn't happen to me. Everything feels fine and normal now. At most I've had a couple of moments of kind of expecting a penis there. Like I sat on the toilet a few months after surgery and put my hand between my legs as a reflex to, you know, push down to make sure I was aimed into the bowl. I felt kinda dumb for a second. There have been a few moments like that. Not really a feeling - more of an subconscious habit that hadn't adjusted yet. Nothing like that has happened for the past year or so, though.

Anyway, no regrets. No more nights spent crying over it. No more attempts at sex that end in tears.

I'm reluctant to share, honestly, because people make this stuff so political and I'm sure people will think I'm making shit up to score legitimacy points. But I've felt for a long time that there's a vague "phantom vagina." When I was a kid I learned to masterbate by tucking and rubbing just below my public bone. I had to watch porn to learn how you're "supposed" to do it. Now that there's a clit there it just feels like it always should have been this way.

Lastly, fun fact: those muscles that you use to stop the urine stream - Those work! I can do kegels and squeeze things. It's not something I really thought of before, but I figured out really quickly to not squeeze those muscles until I was more healed up. That's probably my biggest surprise, and I knew a lot about it going in.