I suppose my being autistic and my having studied biology at, and beyond college/graduate-school level starting in third grade puts me to terrible disadvantage in contrast with people who have had notably different life experiences that those I have lived through.
I have not taken testosterone replacement since my 1986 bilateral orchiectomy. My remaining genitals have yet to shrink. I have yet to have any difficulties having erections or orgasms.
Almost immediately following my orchiectomy, my physiological need for sexual release ceased. When, a couple months after my orchiectomy, I got my total colectomy with ileorectal anastomosis, as the second, far more draconian, cancer-prevention-intended major surgery, my being able to totally ignore erections and orgasms because my body did not ask for them was very helpful to me in my recovering from the colon surgery and its many unexpected effects.
I had far more than enough time between the orchiectomy and the colectomy to be able to accurately separate their effects on my life and my body physiology.
At the time of my orchiectomy, my brother, three years older than me, had already develolped terminal metastatic cancer secondary to his primary colon tumor. I had pleaded with him to seek colon cancer screening for more than two years prior to his terminal cancer diagnosis; his physicians refused to screen him and ridiculed my concern. And they continued to ridicule my concern after he was dead.
People have told me what would happen if I did something. They were sincere, I have no doubt. And, most of the time, during my lifetime of experiences, folks who did that were seriously mistaken about what actually ended up happening.
To me, the mind of a person is, to a large extent, the activity of the person's brain, therefore, the mind is, in that sense, physical; therefore, to me, the mind and the body of a living person are, in terms of overt conduct, functionally inseparable.
Suppose someone had told me, prior to my orchiectomy, "Your remaining genitals, penis,
littletits (imported) wrote: Fri May 25, 2012 12:04 pm
and scrotum will both over time, shrink a lot unles
s I took testosterone" post orchiectomy.
That person's accuracy score foir me, post orchiectomyu? Zilch.
Suppose someone had told me, prior to my orchiectomhy, "As a T free eunuch, you will not hve any
littletits (imported) wrote: Fri May 25, 2012 12:04 pm
fetish urge or any sexual drive to remove your scrotum.
"
When I had supposedly normal-range testosterone, I never had such a fetish urge or sexual drive, and my testosterone decline changed neither of those.
Had someone told me, "
littletits (imported) wrote: Fri May 25, 2012 12:04 pm
You will have no sexual urges whatsoever, in the short or long term without HRT following surgery,
" my sexual urges, except for the involuntary reflexes that drive nocturnal emissions in people who do not masturbate or otherwise attain enough sexual release as needed to allow sleeping without wet dreams through the night, are not diminished. I do not regard an involuntary reflex arc activity to be an urge; to me, urges are necessarily at least partly conscious, or a person would be consciously unaware of them and would not experience them as urges.
People who, in my view, have the tragically devastating condition I regard as "serious to severe autism insufficiency" are prone, according to my 70 and more years of living in a world having a human society of people, most of whom I have encountered are dreadfully lacking in autism adequacy, to the disaster of having devised some sort of "theory of mind" as a deceptive replacement for the authenticity of autism sufficiency. Theory of mind is, for me, an alternative term for "unrecognized confabulation."
For a person who finds eroticism distressing (not me), a practical reason for scrotum removal could be diminished eroticism.
But then, in all fairness, I regard it as wise and decent to mention that my validity as a person is totally independent of anything anyone other than myself can ever tell me. My sense and my awareness of who I am has never been affected by other people or by what other people tell me. My validity is inseparable from my being alive. No one can change that, not even by a wisp of a phantasm of an iota of a nothingness.
I waited until my life had settled down before deciding to get prostheses, not for my needs, but out of respect for other men I might encounter in public swimming pool showers who had lost a fair degree of their usefully necessary autism through accepting being bullied by others who had also accepted being bullied and had thereby become notably deficient in autism.
Autism insufficiency is a main factor in the social mechanism of groupthink; autism is the counterbalancing process for mirror neuron activity. In my bioengineering research work and its findings, damage to inborn autism is what allows groups of humans to develop group hatred and the terrible wars that group hatred necessitates.
I waited until a foreign body reaction told me that keeping the implants any longer had become stupidly foolish before getting them removed last summer.
So, I share what I have learned, without expecting anyone else to ever find, or not find, what I share to be useful or meaningful.
I choose to not "bully" other people in the process of finding myself. Perhaps because that is the result of my having never gone through the loss of self-validity that I have observed to be the essence of the infant-child transition since well before I learned to talk in ordinary English-language words.
Before my first birthday, I had quite accurately observed the deception and dishonesty which is the essence of the infant-child transition, and had adequately prepared myself to reject that transition, and the dishonest deception that is its purpose and function, and to reject it for what I plan to be my entire life.
When I first heard other children repeating what their parents had told them, and which my parents never told me, "The bogeyman will get you," I too that to be a testable and refutable hypothesis, one which I have, in my own life, absolutely refuted. That refutation is well-documented in my bioengineering doctoral dissertation.
My life effort is now directed toward sharing how I have rejected being gotten by the bogeyman, because I find that anyone can learn to reject the bogeyman at any stage of life, provided the tools are made available and are used sufficiently well.
I am working at making the tools available to anyone and everyone, doing so to the best of my practicable ability.
In my view, I would need to have some sort of utterly psychotic theory of mind to be able to expect, or not expect, anyone other than myself to put such tools to viable use.
The late neuropsychiatrist, Abraham A. Low (1891-1954) had a saying, "If my patients had patience, I would not have patients."
(That saying works best for me when said aloud.)
In my life, patience is a decent realm between reckless haste and dastardly procrastination.