ZestyChinchilla

Not OP, but I'll offer my experience as someone who has been on HRT, but has not yet had surgery (although I do have an orchi consult in a couple weeks).

Whether or not a trans woman can get erections is highly variable, based on lots of different factors. But HRT can make it more difficult, which is what happened in my case (I can if I really want to, but it takes quite a bit of effort and isn't what it used to be.) However, I personally don't care: if my penis fell off tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it (although it's kind of important for GCS surgery.) With that said, I can and do have orgasms most of the time. Sometimes they're elusive, but I also don't have to get off to enjoy sex -- if I come, great, if not, there's none of that physical frustration that used to be there if it didn't happen. I don't need an erection at all to thoroughly enjoy a sexual encounter, whether alone or with someone else.

To answer your question more directly: Right now I can still top, if I put a lot of effort into it, but HRT alone has made it much more of a challenge. However, I don't need to do that to enjoy sex with someone. And believe it or not, sex is a hundred times better and more enjoyable for me now than it ever was before! (And to answer a related question, little or nothing comes out anymore. At best it's a couple drops of clear fluid and that's it.)

I'm going to give you a little something to ponder. A quick glance at your post history makes me fairly comfortable in assuming you're a male, so I'll approach it that way.

So, how do you know you're a man? You can say "Because I have a penis" or any other number of tangible examples such as that, but at the end of the day, it's just something you know, is it not?

To look at it from another perspective, say you had some kind of horrible accident and your genitals were damaged or mangled (such as a war injury, or something like that.) Would you then say that you are no longer a man? I'm not talking about being upset that part of your body was injured, that would be totally understandable. No, what I mean is, deep down, you would know that you're still a man, correct? On a subconscious level, you just know -- it is something hardwired into your brain on a very deep level.

Well, guess what? Just as you just know that you're a man, regardless of whether or not you have functioning genitals, so too do trans people know who they are. It is hardwired into our brains, just as much as it is yours. Except somewhere along the developmental line, our brains went one way, and our bodies went the other. The exact mechanism still isn't entirely understood (although there are currently several very plausible hypothesis), but at this point it is pretty well accepted fact within the medical and scientific communities, and virtually every major medical organization in the US (and many globally) agree. It is not a mental illness, but rather a developmental "anomaly", if you need to put a word to it.

I'll leave you with one more thing to think about: Say someone is born with a cleft palate. They may be technically able to function, but it causes them all sorts of personal problems and a great deal of distress, so they decide to have it surgically repaired because it would massively improve their quality of life. Nobody would think twice about it, or tell them that they're making some huge mistake and they shouldn't do it. Nobody would say that they're less of a human being for fixing this physical issue tht causes them a huge amount of distress. Most people would say,"Hey, if fixing this issue makes your life better, go for it!" This same train of thought could be applied to all sorts of different physical "birth anomalies", I'm just using this as an example.

But why then, do people draw this arbitrary line at gender and genitals? Why, all of the sudden, is that something that shouldn't be corrected, even though the trans person themselves may be suffering a great deal of gender dysphoria because their brain wasn't wired for that anatomy? Trans people have an incredibly high rate of depression and suicidality, specifically because of this mismatch between how our brains are wired, and the physical body we developed. Transitioning has long been proven to massively decrease that dysphoria and massively increase the quality of life for the vast majority of trans people who seek it out (with only society's treatment of trans people being the main cause of depression and suicidality after that.) So why on Earth would you not want someone to be able to live the happiest, best life they could, especially when it harms no one else?

To expand a little on what /u/angelcake said, the testes are the primary producer of testosterone in AMAB people. Having them removed gets rid of the body's primary source of testosterone, therefore eliminating (usually) the need for an anti-androgen. Anti-androgens can be a bit hard on the liver over an extended period of time, so it's better if one can stop taking them at some point. Either an orchi or GRS (which also includes an orchi in the process) will take care of that.

Some trans women do not want, or cannot get, GRS, and orchi is a much less expensive (and far quicker and less invasive) option. It's often a stopgap, and a person can still have GRS in the future if they choose, but it at least eliminates certain worries. If for some reason a trans woman was unable to get hormones for a while, having had an orchi means they wouldn't have to worry about remasculinizing anymore (although it's important to note that everyone needs a primary sex hormone, whether estrogen or testosterone. Going for more than a year or two without a primary sex hormone of any type massively increases the risk of osteoporosis, among other nasty health issues. Hormones affect almost every part of the body, not just things that have to do with sex and gender.)

That's patently false. Based on all available data, the rate of regret for surgery is only in the 1%-3% range, and most of that regret is not for having had the surgery, but rather because of unsatisfactory results or complications due to the surgery.

Trans-related surgeries have higher success rates and positive outcomes than even many other "common" surgeries. The overwhelming majority of trans people have years to think about surgery, often simply due to cost or because surgeons are often booked out for months or years in advance. Nobody goes into it without having had a hell of a lot of time to think long and hard about it.

Also, it's "transgender", not "transgenderED".

So you think every human on the planet is born absolutely perfect, and there's no such thing as developmental anomalies?