thesmallone (imported) wrote: Wed Oct 23, 2013 5:55 pm
I spoke to my doctor today about the prospect of living without any sex hormones. She was cautious but totally open-minded as always, and suggested that I experiment with lowering my dose a bit first.
Sadly, for me, this is not an option. I found out the hard way last summer that if I lower my testosterone below a certain point, my body gets thrown into a funk that causes my blood pressure to drop dangerously low. It was a fascinating experience while it lasted though: I was incredibly confused but in wonder about everything, and I couldn't remember my own name. People kept calling me by my name, which I'd legally had for about a year at that point, and I kept thinking, "That's not right. That's not my name." But then I'd try to remember what my name was, and occasionally I'd come up with the name I was assigned at birth, and think, "That's not right, either."
While these medical complications were happening, I had similar problems with going into public restrooms. I remember walking up to the men's room, looking at the sign, and thinking, "Oops! Wrong one! I don't belong in there," and then walking up to the women's restroom and thinking the exact same thing. Took me a while to figure out which bathroom I belonged in, being confused as I was with the blood pressure drop and all.
thesmallone (imported) wrote: Wed Oct 23, 2013 5:55 pm
I totally have a love-hate relationship with testosterone. Having testosterone doesn't make me look wrong - in fact, it's made small strides towards helping me look more right, little as it's been - but for some reason, it makes me feel wrong.
I don't hope to find people who are like me, but I always try to believe that it's possible for me to meet most people on a higher level one way or another. And, I have a good sense that I'll be able to do so in this gentl
thesmallone (imported) wrote: Sat Oct 26, 2013 10:20 pm
e community, in a way that I was never able to in the "trans community".
Hi. So, you're not the only one.
I hope that someday I'll be able to reach a little more clarity or equilibrium than now. These days I feel like a failure of a person, because through all this pain and sacrifice I'm still inhibited by the feeling of disembodiment. Why me? Why was I made this way? I just know that I have so much creativity and potential that's all there and longing to manifest itself, if only this physical existence wasn't such a turn off to it.
Now, I can't even explain it to people. Body dysphoria makes sense when you're stuck in one side of the bin
ary and see yourself in the other. Now I just get crap like "does that mean you regret transitioning?" .... face palm.
It's not very often that I'm able to cry these days, testosterone being what it is and all, but this pulled it out of me. I've met people who are sympathetic when I express these same sentiments, though they're incredibly rare, but I've never heard another person express feeling this same way until now. For the first year I was on T, I had some pre-existing problems with my endocrine system we didn't know were going on until I began transitioning to "male". This caused my estrogen levels to skyrocket, and the changes I was expecting associated with T proceeded awkwardly and with significant delays on account of it. I had surgery in August 2014 to remove my ovaries and have felt immeasurably better since my castration.
Four months later though, my body is finally changing toward a more "male" appearance as testosterone is now the only sex hormone noticeably present in my body. This happened to coincide with my traveling abroad for the winter, so I'm isolated from my friends and family back home until March. Looking in the mirror every day has made it increasingly apparent to me that when I get back, I'm going to have to deal with yet another coming out process, though I have no idea what that's going to look like. I'm clearly not a man, I've never really felt like a man, and I never really wanted to be a man. I just didn't feel like I had any other option besides "female", which was obviously wrong, too. And now I'm getting this very masculine-looking body, and people are commenting on my Facebook photos telling me how manly I look, like it's a compliment, and it's pretty awful.
It's the same kind of icky feeling in the pit of my stomach that I got when I told people I was only having my ovaries removed but leaving the uterus intact, and they were appalled to think a man might choose this for himself; the same kind of icky feeling in the pit of my stomach that I got when I bought my first prosthetics and harness, and my husband talked me into buying the one with testicles because real men have balls, even though I didn't want them and don't feel right wearing them.
I don't usually feel comfortable telling people this, because they do jump to the notion that it means I regret transitioning at all. And that's just not true. I regret that when I transitioned, I bought into the limitations of what people told me I had to become. I regret that society has such narrowly-defined constructs of what my gender can legitimately be. And, okay, maybe I regret some days choosing to wear the mask of "male" because I know it's a lie and I tell it anyway. But I don't regret abandoning the mask of a female identity that was clearly not right for me.
