Late onset (yet always there)

[bryan (imported)]

Hi everyone,

Making an update since today has been a relaxing holiday.

...

The public men's rooms frequently have only one stall while the women's rooms have several stalls.

Hi Mac,

Not only that, the seat of that one stall in the men's room probably has some pee on it. Speaking as a "shy pisser" who's had to spend many a time cleaning the seat beforehand, it is such a pleasure now in the ladies' room where wet seats are rarely a problem.

And you know what else? THEY HAVE COUCHES IN THERE! And silk flowers, and hand lotion, and decorations. They are CIVILIZED!

Before I realized my gender had shifted, I was at a major league ball park (as part of a family outing). As we went up the ramps to our section, we walked past the men's room. You could already smell it, if I recall correctly. I told myself, "I am NOT going in THERE under any circumstances!" So I didn't eat or drink anything that afternoon.

* * *

My previous post offered personal reasons for not taking testosterone to ameliorate my GID. I failed to mention one of the biggest reasons: when libido rises, I end up wanting to break Mr. Penis. He had a rough time last night, sorry to say. This had never been an issue until Nov 2004 (five months prior to castration) -- when I started strangling it. Consequently, I need to keep libido low. I envy fellow transsexuals who say hormones have caused their members to stop working. I'm at full dosage but mine still works. (Must have good genes or something.)

In any case, my thinking is probably flawed if I think GID could remit via testosterone. Anne Vitale has an interesting article about "testosterone toxicity" in MtF transsexuals. (http://www.avitale.com/TNote15Testosterone.htm) She provides examples of MtF's who tried going back to testosterone. The result was increased gender dysphoria. One said:

"That's the third time I've taken testosterone and every time I've had overwhelming desires to present myself as a female."

Something inside me changed in Oct-Nov 2004 which made testosterone (and libido) a poison.

Interesting how life goes sometimes,

Terri

[bryan (imported)]

Hi everyone,

Today is somewhat special: it's the one-year anniversary of changing my name and getting a female driver's license. Hooray.

Reflecting on my transition, I see that I'm not aiming for full integration into female society. Rather, I've reached a "good enough" state where I pass as female for public purposes, and that suffices.

How do I characterize myself as this point? Good question. The philosophy behind transsexual treatment says, "You are one or the other. If you're not happy as a man, become a woman." But I've stalled [comfortably] in my transition before reaching full womanhood:

- Comfortable shaving every other day since most of the remaining hairs are white anyway.

- Thinking of other things I can do with the money saved for GRS.

- Not bothering to correct boss and co-workers when they refer to me by male pronouns.

Suppose I'm best characterized as a feminine eunuch... which brings me to the main reason for writing today. Seems like Western culture has lost the knowledge of what eunuchs are really like. Gender issues have really bothered me and I've done oodles of searches on Google about traditional eunuchs and came away with very little information.

We could attribute the lack of information to the fact that it's the winners who write history, and eunuchs were not the winners.

In high school, if someone had asked me what a eunuch was like, I would have said, "They are tall with a high voice," NEVER CONSIDERING AT ALL what their personality was like, whether they were androgynous or feminine in any way. NEVER OCCURRED TO ME! Apparently didn't occur to the scholars writing the textbooks either.

Anyway... (going out on a limb here)... if society offered the option of being a eunuch, I believe that would address many TG/TS needs. Folks with GID, like myself, are uncomfortable in our birth gender, but there's only one other gender to choose in Western culture. Hence, a TG boy will pray to become a girl. What if being a gender-variant eunuch were a culturally-acceptable option? Would that meet most of the needs? What about FtM transsexuals in such a culture -- would they be sufficiently happy becoming gender-variant "eunuchs", starting from the female side?

I may be off-base with the thinking above, but one thing I'm convinced of: Western culture doesn't have a clue what a eunuch is really like. They think of eunuchs as simply "Men without Testicles," never considering these two factors:

What factors in the person's psyche led him to agree to becoming a eunuch in the first place?

What effect does the lack of testosterone have on a person?

Try it yourself: picture in your mind a eunuch in charge of a harem in Arab lands. What does he look like? Is he big? Strong? Muscular? Doesn't sound like the eunuchs I know. Where do we get these images?

In the face of not finding historical information about eunuchs on the internet, I've turned to looking for images. I figured maybe an insightful artist from a time period having eunuchs would paint one realistically. The search wasn't fruitful. There are two historical eunuchs who show up all over the place, always the same image of each:

a Chinese eunuch showing full nullification

a fellow in a flowing gown and mighty tall hat, entitled "Habit of a white eunuch in 1749."

(Aside: I don't know about the second guy above... did castration make YOU want to wear absolutely outrageous hats?) Then there's the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip baptized in the Bible (Acts, Chapter 8). Most portrayals of the Ethiopian eunuch show him with a beard. WHAT ARE THESE ARTISTS THINKING?!!! Post-pubertal eunuchs of our time may be able to sport beards, but not historical eunuchs.

NOT ONLY THAT... As useful as the Eunuch Archive is for instructing us about real-life eunuchs, there's a filtering process in place which has skewed the results. Feminine candidates for eunuchhood identify as transgender or transsexual and are removed from the "eunuch" pool. Masculine or androgynous-leaning candidates for eunuchhood identify simply as males or eunuchs and are the ones remaining in the eunuch pool who can tell us what eunuchs are really like. So even here at EA, our views of eunuchs are skewed toward the male side.

So we simply don't know what the eunuchs of old were like. Historians may describe some of the physical characteristics of eunuchs or tell us scandalous sexual things, but we are met with silence when it comes to what eunuchs were like as people. Were they "one of the boys"? Or more like "one of the girls"? Or did it depend on the individual?

* * *

How am I doing, you ask? Doing very well emotionally. Still taking estrogen, but at a reduced dosage (4mg/day) since I'm feeling more like a "post-op" these days. (Realized boobies weren't getting any bigger, so only using estrogen for mental/emotional benefits now.) Feeling accepted well enough at work in my female state. I'll be a successful poster boy/girl for bilateral orchiectomies yet!

Terri, a feminine eunuch

[JesusA (imported)]

Hello Terri,

I’m glad to hear that you are doing so well in your quest to discover yourself. One of the major goals that ALL humans ought to have is to discover who and what we truly are, and then to become that person as best possible. You are further down that route than most people ever get.

That you still have many questions is not surprising. The more we learn, the wider the boundaries which we can question. Your post asks more than I can answer in a simple post, but I will try to provide a bit of information that I have found.

When I refer to publications, you can find the full citation (if you want to read the original) in the Bibliography (

http://www.eunuch.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=

17583), which is posted on the Nonfiction Board.

Not yet in the bibliography, is any reference to Bernie Goldstein, who taught the first university level course on human sexuality west of the Rockies and who taught the only course on human sexuality that I have ever taken. Bernie, as a biologist interested in the development of sexuality across mammalian species, has identified 21 independent dimensions of sex and gender in humans. If there were only two points on each of the dimensions, that would mean that there are two-to-the-twenty-first-power DIFFERENT combinations of human sex and gender. Most of the dimensions have more than two points, making the number of possibilities far greater. In a capacity-crowd football stadium, there’s no reason to suppose that any two individuals share exactly the same combination of sex and gender. Yet, most people want to cram us all into only two pigeonholes.

Western cultures are gradually moving beyond such narrow ideas and there is greater awareness and acceptance of the very real variation that is to be found. The medical professionals and sex therapists and counselors are beginning to catch up with the reality that is unfolding. The group of which I am a part has been pushing for greater recognition of “eunuch” as among the gender alternatives. We are working with others who focus on different parts of the field.

The article by Dick Swaab (2007), while aimed at medical professionals, is a clear statement of how the body and the mind may each be outside the male-female dichotomy and how they can be out of synch with each other. Johnson & Wassersug (2010) take the very solid data provided by Swaab and by Cohen-Kettenis & Pfäfflin (2010) to argue that about a quarter of those natal males who are diagnosed as Male-to-Female and obtain castration as a first step toward transition might better be described as Male-to-Not-Male or as Male-to-Eunuch, as their ideal end gender is not female.

There is much more in various stages of preparation and/or publication that I expect to be adding to the Bibliography as it becomes available. I know several researchers who are working in the field and there are some exciting things in the works.

While there are not as many good illustrations of eunuchs and castrati as one might hope for, there are far more available than just the young Chinese eunuch, who sometimes appears on the front page of the Archive and one of the Ottoman eunuchs in full court regalia. For the Russian and Romanian Skoptsy, there are some good photographs in the books by Engelstein (1999) and Pittard (1934). Some are occupational photos showing taxi drivers, photographers, farmers, etc. For the historic castrati, there are a number of excellent paintings available. My favorite is “The Musicians” by Caravaggio (ca. 1595), where the lute player in the center of the painting is the young Spanish castrato Pietro Montoya.

Caravaggio’s painting shows up as the cover illustration of Roger Freitas’ book “Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani” (2009). Melani, and at least three of his brothers (out of seven boys) were each castrated before age ten to preserve their voices. He went on to become a highly successful diplomat, and through his efforts the children of his intact brother were raised from lower class status to the Tuscan nobility. The book is far too expensive ($100), but should be available through your local library (by interlibrary loan, if they don’t own it). It is an excellent study of a successful eunuch.

There are many other sources I could write about, but this should give you enough of an idea that there is plenty of material available and a lot more that is somewhere in the works as so many of us are striving to explode the myth of the gender binary….

.

[gareth19 (imported)]

Caravaggio’s painting shows up as the cover illustration of Roger Freitas’ book “Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani” (2009). Melani, and at least three of his brothers (out of seven boys) were each castrated before age ten to preserve their voices. He went on to become a highly successful diplomat, and through his efforts the children of his intact brother were raised from lower class status to the Tuscan nobility. The book is far too expensive ($100), but should be available through your local library (by interlibrary loan, if they don’t own it). It is an excellent study of a successful eunuch.

You can order it from abebooks.com for about $75.00.

[transward (imported)]

The best information I know about historical eunuchs, is in the footnotes to Sir Richard Francis Burton's Arabian Nights, and his Terminal Essay in the last volume. Also in the footnotes to the Kama Sutra and the Perfumed Garden [which has instruction for eunuch on pleasing men] all of which he translated. They were written around 1885 and are hugely politically incorrect by todays standards. (He makes conclusions about the racial makeup of the Egyptian people vs Black Africans vs Arabs [which are largely correct] by comparing the size of their respective penises) The books are in the public domain and I believe they can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3435.

Transward

[Danya (imported)]

How am I doing, you ask? Doing very well emotionally. Still taking estrogen, but at a reduced dosage (4mg/day) since I'm feeling more like a "post-op" these days. (Realized boobies weren't getting any bigger, so only using estrogen for mental/emotional benefits now.) Feeling accepted well enough at work in my female state. I'll be a successful poster boy/girl for bilateral orchiectomies yet!

Terri, a feminine eunuch

It was great meeting you in December. Back then, I was impressed by how well you knew yourself. I'm glad things are going so well for you now.

[bryan (imported)]

Hi Jesus (EA's Jesus),

Thank you for your kindness in the outpouring of resources! I'm particularly taken by Richard Wassersug's writings, like this one (http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/full/27/4/634) and the linked article at the bottom of Wassersug's "coming out" story (http://www.psa-rising.com/upfront/Richard_Wassersug.htm).

Thanks again,

Terri

[bryan (imported)]

Dear Diary,

Think I received a key insight into my gender issues yesterday. It came after a 2-3 week stretch of reduced cross-gender feelings in which I:

Cut six inches off my hair. (Was getting tired of long-hair care/trouble.)

Sent a "I'm-a-eunuch-not-a-transsexual" letter to parents and siblings

Cut another four inches off my hair for an androgynous style, in preparation for returning to the men's room at work

Went to work as a male the past two days.

In fact, it seemed as though my GID had completely remitted yesterday. Was feeling like my old self.

GID all gone? DON'T BE SO SURE. The image that flashes to mind is that of Ben Grimm (of "Fantastic Four" comic-book fame), better known simply as "The Thing." Periodically, his orange-rock body spontaneously returns to ordinary human flesh, leaving Ben euphoric that he is normal again. But the human-flesh state never lasts and the orange-rock body returns, casting a spell of pathos over the reader/audience, leaving Ben an emotional wreck.

Similarly, GID can ebb at times, hence the "purge cycle" which crossdressers (and some newbie transsexuals) go through. Like Ben Grimm, I'm aware the GID feelings may return anytime. But this stretch has been prolonged enough that I have shortened my hair, not once, but twice. (Because I suffer from emotional lability, my rule has been "NO IMPULSIVE/SUDDEN CHANGES TO HAIR!" I have to wait two days before any contemplated changes. A famous female pop star's meltdown was instructive in this regard.)

Don't have anything specific to attribute this remission to (except maybe God's grace). Been wondering: Has thinking of myself of a eunuch brought about this change (or vice versa)?

* * *

Going back to the leading sentence of this post, the reason I am writing today: Think I received a key -- though UNBELIEVABLE -- insight into my gender issues yesterday.

Readers of this diary know I have been searching for the cause of my Oct-Nov 2004 gender shift, hypothesizing various things over the duration of this thread, yet never able to settle on any one thing.

Here is my latest (though I believe final) hypothesis: the gender shift was caused by sex/gender-related emotional turmoil. As I mentally probe this wound, the accompanying tears confirm that this is a touchy area which is uncomfortable to explore.

Explaining it briefly, events conspired in mid-to-late 2004 to make me hate my male gender. I ended up suffering a breakdown of sorts; the emotional trauma of the situation was akin to being in a locked room with a dead body. I hated my genitals but couldn't be rid of them soon enough. The upshot is a cross-gender identification developed. (Was this a case of identifying with the victims of that which you abhor?) The cross-gender identification didn't occur in a vacuum: first, I was predisposed to it by personality; second, it was further strongly fueled by the results of my castration.

And things just got worse from there, in the sense that new emotional traumas kept piling up as outgrowths of the old -- i.e., it snowballed:

Rejection by spouse sexually

Rejection by spouse emotionally due to GID revelations

Suicidal feelings

Kicked out of the house, losing all that was familiar on the same day

After moving out of state to an open-ended invitation at my sister's, was asked in a month's time to leave

Forced to resign job/vocation due to family situation

Made another out-of-state move, returning to the area of my youth (Chicago)

Parental rejection due to decision to transition and "being a bad father"

Alienation from family

The ordinary-yet-intense struggles of anyone with GID prior to transition

Lopsided divorce settlement with no visitation

... (you get the idea)

My situation went beyond emotional fragility to something more like post-traumatic stress syndrome. Seeing any sort of implied coitus on TV sent me into tears. Similarly, any drama invoking the theme of "absent father's impact on the son" sent me flying into tears. (In each case, I reached for the clicker immediately, but the damage was done.)

So the whole thing snowballed. That's what happened, plain and simple. That's why healing has been so long in coming. Time heals all wounds, but more wounds means more time.

Putting my gender transition into perspective at this point, I believe it was a necessary treatment/crutch at the time. Remember, I hated my male gender and suffered from suicidal depression. I was ashamed and embarrassed to be male, causing me to withdraw socially. Living as a female is what got me into life again.

But now, with the combined insights of (1) I'm a eunuch, not a transsexual, and (2) emotional trauma is at the root of my Oct-Nov 2004 gender shift, I feel armed to deal with gender feelings as they arise. During my crisis, I believed the gender issues were a revealing of my core personality -- something not to be repressed. However, I now look on myself as a damaged/defective male who will limp along as is. Casting my whole experience in terms of Biblical characters, I've gone from being a Stephen to Ruth to Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9), who was crippled in both feet because his nurse accidentally dropped him when he was five years old (2 Samuel 4:4).

In fact, the story of Mephibosheth is a wonderful illustration of God's incredible grace to the walking wounded. I am a living example of His "whatever it takes" kind of grace. Not saying that because of this current remission, but because He's been with me through this whole ordeal, just like in the marriage vow: "...in sickness and in health..." Recounting evidences of His grace:

Didn't commit suicide

Didn't become homeless

Found a good job and have been able to perform well in spite of a personal life in turmoil

Erica Ann's friendship and hospitality

Meaningful times spent in Scripture

Companionship with God though alienated from nearly everyone else at times

Graces which made passing as a female relatively easy

Renewed relationship with parents while still transitioning

Avoided steep cost of GRS while still transitioning

Songs which would come to mind reminding me of His presence and care

Authored a website dealing with Biblical prophecy

In other words, I "took a licking but still am ticking" -- though limping. [Didn't plan to go on so long about grace, but am really amazed I made it through the past 6 years!]

* * *

What does all this mean from a practical perspective? For the time being:

Will go back to being nominal male at work (with a purse -- purses are handy!)

Will avoid retail establishments where I am known only as female

WON'T purge my wardrobe

Any outings as female will be more for practical purposes than GID; hard to say at this point because the fuel behind my transition has apparently dried up.

And if these feelings remain, will eventually have to "come out" to acquaintances who know me only as female.

(Speaking from an absolutely practical perspective, it means getting in the practice again of wiping pee off the toilet seat before sitting down! Mac can appreciate that.)

So are my gender issues resolved? No and yes. I'm a defective male with a lifelong (though at times buried) preference toward the female side of life. But I'm a eunuch now, not a female, and I'm going to live with that. Still not sure what the outworkings of all this will be.

(NOTE: For readers hoping to solve their own or a loved one's GID: My GID was unusual from day one, having a defined time of onset (Oct-Nov 2004) and was apparently caused by emotional trauma. One cannot draw parallels between my experience and typical transsexuals. I don't claim to have the cure.)

Only time will tell if this remission will last. Thanks for your interest and care,

Terry -- with a "y" for now

[JessJames1968 (imported)]

Wow!

I'm practically speechless, which is actually rare. Your journey is one from which we can all gleen a nugget of wisdom. Thank you for your willingness to put yourself out there and share.

[Mac (imported)]

Terry,

This change is a big shock. I thought that you were progressing well as a woman. Hope that this is really what you want so you can rearrange your life for the last time. You lost so much of your previous life to become a woman and will be unable to recover most of what you lost.

Please keep us updated on your progress.