Estrogen makes you calm and crazy

I am sitting on an emotional swing.  Each day it gets more intense.  Genetic females have had a lot longer than me to come to terms with the rollercoaster of moods but everyone who experiences it has to start somewhere.  I can’t ‘man it out’ anymore, 40 days and 40 nights of HRT and I’m already losing subjective cognition of my testronic existence; slowly the maleness falls from grasp.

I’ve had to ask friends to remind me sometimes that I’m just going through the side effects.  Again, I don’t know if it is because I started hormones, or their actual effects, but doors are unlocking in my mind.  I’ve really learned about friendships I’ve needlessly strived for that are beyond their sell by date – I visited one of the old friends I’m having to let go of and noticed for the first time in a long friendship the light behind her eyes that process any way to avoid talking about either of our real issues.  A year after the fact I finally recognized the emotional abuse that is still a large cause of suffering from my last relationship – I told those close to me and they say they knew for a long time, they tried to tell me.

There are other revelations now that force me into a new life.  A cornucopia of general life issues coupled with constant hormonality combine into painful birth squeezes of a new life; the water broke, the contractions are more frequent, powerful – there’s no stopping it, it is coming.

My aesthetic transition is really suffering now, not just because of facial hair but because of the emotional pressure.  I spoke to a woman who apparently had GRS but lives satisfactorily as a male without heavy dysphoria, content in the knowledge she is female.  Hearing this struck a chord and she said there were only a few in many years she had met who are like this.  Again, when I was a young child I wasn’t thinking about sneaking into my mother’s room for clothes and make up, I was trying to get rid of my penis, not as a Skoptic, but because I was female.

I don’t really care often enough who knows I am female so long as I do, and the people I care about do.  It still hurts to be called by masculine terms, but I feel I’m constantly facing off between constant counterbalancing weights of dysphoria.  It’s less urgent, but I’m still thinking about and I wonder if I can ever come to peace.

After some diligent sleuthing by Mia, we found that this woman had in fact de-transitioned because she had passing issues and other issues that are her business.  I myself am not trying to cop out of transition, although it really is taking time finding my way.  There is much more to the story with this woman for another time.

The point I want to make here is that it is important to be gentle with yourself.  On top of everything going on in life, there are also the unquenchable effects of cross sex hormone therapy and trying to figure out how to transition and do it in a world that isn’t always happy to let you live your life.  Even without external grief, the internal experience is such a battle that I can understand putting oneself at risk.

I feel the level of personal risk is the same, but different in nature.  I’m just as on edge, I’m crying like crazy, freaking out, hating the world.  I was so wrong about the crying; cries feel different, more frequent, because as before I cried when I was desperate, now I cry because I need to cry.  It needs to come out just as I need to talk more about stuff – if I don’t vent, I break down.  I’m notoriously bad for talking about my issues with people, now I have to.  Afterwards, I don’t feel as bad as I would before, sometimes I just switch and I feel good again for a while.

I have less violent urges, lower sex drive, lower sexual functioning.  After a week without an erection or a real desire for release I decided to try and force it.  After a long time of distraction and confusion about what I was doing with what I was touching I got there and it was as arbitrary as expected from something so forced.  Straight afterwards I grabbed a toffee crisp from the fridge and bit into it.  The chocolate made my senses explode!  I loved chocolate and was iffy about sex anyway but the gulf widened considerably and that’s just what happens sometimes. Now I don’t have ‘morning wood’ so much as I have ‘morning tofu.’

I was naive in not listening to other women way ahead on HRT, I thought I was special, aware enough, emotionally centred enough to beat back the waves of hormonal change.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s only like that sometimes, often enough I feel as good as I ever have.

I was really worried about how much my emotions would intensify and whether it would put me in more danger, and it is hard, it is very hard.

My mind is working overtime absorbing all this new emotional information.  Sometimes I panic, other times I am just a sponge for information and beautifully contemplative thoughts that will take a long time to unravel.

Tough as it is, I rejoice in the new challenge, the new lease of life.  This is a perfect time for realisations that lead to effecting positive personal change that will fuel hopefully the release of a lifetime of untapped potential for the rest of my lifetime’s emotional strength.

This is only the beginning, it has to hurt to get better, this is how we heal.  We show ourselves now in survival so we can prosper when we come to truly thrive.

Use my third arm

I will never give respect to the cage but to the captor.  Shifting faces, but why must you hide behind so many different kinds of masks?

Look back, look in, see yourself, with the key to bring your freedom.

Give up, give in, let go to your own strength that won’t let fear dictate who you are.

Deceptive mirror.

Gaze upon a darkened form, reflected by the ever present light of your truth, there’s no escaping what your heart is.

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Phew.  This is going to be the first week I’ve had to myself in over three years, so much gruelling work and responsibility now come to an end.  Now I can totally relax….Not going to happen, right?  It’s tough when every time this year I’ve searched the word ‘transgender’, I am greeted by a trail of death.  Too much death, fight back by living.

What does the dysphoria actually want?  Does it get paid for every time I reference it?  Disparity still abounds, a war rages between gender identity and personal identity.  The concepts of gender, terms of expressions and traits melt away into mutually inclusive nothingness.  It’s all just words, a philosophical debate on truth to try and ascribe meaning to what is called a ‘condition’ or a ‘variation’.

I read too many comments and opinions on news-sites etc, pseudo-science.  Any argument can be battered back, and generally it all gets lost, confused, and nasty.  My political mind firmly switched off as soon as I had my revelation, and thank goodness for it.  Hence this blog is a discussion of the heart, not science or ideology.

I’m kind of glad I chose to wait a day to write this, my therapist had her rotten way with me a dozen times, she kicked my ass.  Good, challenges deep to the core of the psyche.  Here’s the problem, I spend a lot of time trying to rationalize, legitimize, intellectualize the nature to the extent of which I should medically transition based on my concepts of gender; my male body and life; and my ‘female’, or dysphoric mind.  I rail against these arguments simultaneously by explaining that my disparate experience as a transsexual is simply an unavoidable condition of my nature.  I do this by intellectualizing about it.

She called me out about that.  ‘But how do you feel?’  She asked.  Well I was taken aback.  Guh. (Huh, Iuh, Juh, Kuh…).  It’s just weight, weight on the psyche.  Instead of an angel and a devil, it’s a man and a woman, and the man is a woman too.  I anticipated that acceptance would have to come several times and in several forms on this journey, but that’s what it comes to, how do you feel?

I feel that having inhabited myself unknowingly as male for so many years, the pull is strong.  This is how the argument for gender traits falls apart for me.  Theoretically I could present as I do now, heck I could fully transition, surgery and all, and if I wanted to, I could still call myself a man.  This isn’t radfem bait, I’m just saying it’s possible.  Born natal female, I could dress how I have my whole life, ostensibly wore a daily beard, bound my chest and called myself a woman.  If I was born female I would wear a shaven head, because you can keep gender presets, these invisible restrictions.  Indeed, that’s exactly why I grew out my hair, getting into a heavy metal crowd was perfect cover, and heavy metal is awesome.  Maybe one day I will shave it all off and prove myself right.

The point, if there is a point, is that not one element of social transition can change a person’s ‘gender’, I think it’s all about the brain.  It is disparity between mind and body, one is incorrect, and to change the mind in this case is to erase the person, so, it’s the body.  Like I’ve said before, if there was a pill that removed dysphoria, would you take it?  It’s not like an illness, it isn’t harmful to be another gender.

Saying this shows how deeply ingrained the trans mindset can be, because the answer should be, yes, of course I should take it, why would I want to be trans, make my brain like my biological sex!  Life would be so much easier.  But the pill doesn’t exist, and I imagine some transpeople would not want to sell out a defining feature of their lifetime identity.  That all comes down to how psychologically phenomenal you believe your mindset to be, or whether it is viewed as a mental illness.

I can’t describe what maleness or femaleness is, I just know there has always been a block in my brain that irrevocably claimed that I’m female, not male.  I argue even against life experience causing this, merely that it shapes the perceptions and coping mechanisms we have when dealing with our innate personal dysphoria.  Using all these life skills, people from all walks of life still come to meet at a similar foreign destination, which shows how the experience of being trans can trump everything you may ever know.

All this thinking, seemingly never ending, how nice would it be to just let go.

Cross-sex hormone therapy, seemingly by no coincidence can realign this balance, and even though I’m not psychically scrabbling at the walls to get HRT, I am willing to try it, even if it turns me describably female, which would be fine because that’s what I am.  I feel less desperate because I see this as more of a medical decision than the holy-crap-I’m-a-girl condition.  That being said, I don’t underestimate how much I feel I need them, which is completely odd. I guess it’s like a brain hunger, my body cries out for a nutrient it was designed to have but doesn’t get.

The hormonal, medical, surgical, transsexual treatment is as much a racket as each other part of the globally controlled megaplex.  Hormones mimickers and chemicals cause interesting sexual dysfunctions in the animal world and no doubt has effects on people.  Vaccinations, GMO’s and all that stuff could be messing all our brains up in unique and incredible ways, as much transfolk as the angry and imbecilic.  Of the two trans people I have had real interactions with, two of them are on the autistic spectrum.  There’s a lot of messed up stuff – maybe it’s the New World Order theory to feminize the male population so we don’t fight back against our global enslavers.  How misogynistic!  Transpeople have been around since way before all that.

In a perfect world, I believe if I could pass perfectly and non-judgementally as [trans]female I would still not feel right without medical intervention.  Maybe it is a product of the modern world, it would be very useful to know the experiences of those in cultures past who were able to fully integrate without medicine, how did they feel?  Were they content, or like those who may pass pre-HRT and still really need something that wasn’t there?

So one last time, am I trying to forget my maleness? Am I trying, unconsciously or not to disconnect of disassociate from myself?  No, and it doesn’t matter!  Again this is attempting to use logic and reason to assuage a biological condition, like telling jokes to a depressive expecting them to be happy, or asking a wheelchair user to walk because God gave them legs.

I remind myself, that anytime I feel like I may be in denial, I am a female in denial, I would ask the exact same questions, because that’s what I’m doing.  Concurrence.  If I don’t want to be a woman, it’s because I’m a self-hating woman [read: individual].  If I don’t want to be a man, all I have to do is be myself.

Fudge your expression.  Fudge your traits.  Fudge your gender constructs.  They, I believe, are mutually exclusive from the biological nature of trans-identity.  Much everything else is a product of personal identity moulded by some inescapable adherence to our society and to its extent, physiology.  Wanting to express notions of perceived masculinity and/or femininity is not a reason to transition, it is a reason to express beyond generalisations.

At the GIC today I passed an older transwoman (tough to be stealth coming out of the therapists waiting room) and said hello. She tutted at me, I think at my pink hair….in pigtails, or my purposely crappy makeup. It just shows people may come to chastise your expressive choices no matter what you do.

Transition doesn’t make me anything, it confirms who I am.  I am still early on my journey, and I warn myself and anyone else with doubts – labia made from scrotal sack is to be considered a positive outcome.  Having a vagina made of colon is a possibility, if you want this, be prepared to be ok with things like that.  ‘Wow, I’m really enjoying this two week camping holiday, but please excuse me for a while, I have to go dilate again.’

I can’t say I feel like a woman, because I don’t know what that is, physiologically.  My cis-girlfriends don’t know how it feels either, apart from that it is annoying. Aside that, I believe people are people, not ‘brain sex’.  It’s about making weighed medical decisions, and considerations for all future well-being, thinking about it is important. It’s better to be having these cyclical discussions now, because I can imagine it may always remain somewhat of a battle, and some sort of peace must be made early, transient though it may be.

And it’s through all this I miss the point entirely, still.  It’s all just deflections from self-acceptance.  Not the self-acceptance I should have for the body and life that I was blessed to be born with, but from the self-acceptance that the part I’m missing is a part of myself I should embrace, and that it’s ok.  It happens. At any point something unexpected could happen and chance everything. It’s just life.

As much as one may need to…[alter]… on this journey, remember you are already awesome while you are doing it!  It’s not a contradiction of the need to transition; it is a continuation of the unique brilliance of each consciously-wrought individual.

Rock on,

Amy Xx