Announcement

I am putting something here that I haven’t even told all my freinds, many of them might read it here first [HI]

I am stopping testosterone, well technically I have stopped, and I am currently waiting for it to leave my system.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, firstly their have been some big personal changes in my life, which many know about but which I don’t want to talk about online here.

I have had some medical issues which are probably connected to T, which I want to deal with first, it’s not a standard risk, but it is an issue which is probably testosterone related, I am being vauge again, but you will just have to deal with that.

I have been dealing with feeling, having made this decision that I am _not trans enough_  and this makes me feel like it is a good idea for me to stop, or at least pause here, because this should be about my own comfort, not about my gender being good enough for someone else.

I was afraid of loosing femaleness, losing connection to women community, to my history, and all of this was important to me.

My politics haven’t changed. I am some what worried about people saying, well I know someone who changed their minds so some other trans people should be forced to wait longer/ jump though more hoops/not transtion at all. I am glad I went on T, I love what it has done to my voice. I still think the gatekeeping is shit, and harmful and hell didn’t stop me from accessing hormones, just made it harder for everyone.

So yeah, on would and up would.

ft* phobia (or oh god, it’s butch flight again! )

You know, I probably wouldn’t have written about this, cause in a lot of ways the “butch flight” dog wissule isn’t my issue, I am not exculively gynophillic, I am femme as fuck and I tend to laugh at those who talk about butch flight.

So why am I writing about it? Because kate fucking bornstein linked me to this peice of transphobic crap.

The Kate that wrote gender outlaw has decided that hating on trans guys and other ft* people is totally feminist and not at all buying in to the same cisexist crap that she herself dealt with.

I don’t want to write up all the ways it is wrong, I don’t have the energy and that wasn’t why I started writing this blog.

I write this blog, because their wasn’t a whole lot of useful stuff I found when I started really dealing with the medial system on stories of femme trans boi/genderqueers, about how feminism and gender idenity interact and colour our perceptions, and that is what butch boi and Kate bornstein miss in totality, they make the same assumptions about my gender and sexuality that the wider  cis community do they assume that I am butch (darling? really? ) that I date women exclusively (don’t get me wrong, the right kind girl can make me weak at the knees but I dig the boys and the those who are neither as well)

One thing that frustrated me when I into the medical system was the way I was treated as if this had been something that occured to me yesterday, rather than something I had been struggling with for a very long time, I was asked within the medical system to prove my male-ness by proving my masculinity, it was expected, and treatment would be withheld if I didn’t perform a butch dyke script, I avoided parts of it, I refused to misgender my partner to produce the butch femme narrative they where expecting, even though on the basis of his house,  his cd collection and his cats I am clearly dating a lesbian.

I am reminded of the older style gender clinics that complained about how transexuals (women) lied about there histories to access hormones, knowing that if they didn’t present “the narititve” they wouldn’t be able to access treatment.

Butchboi sets up a senario of insufficent bulling of ft* people, zie wants me to have suffered more, I would have explored butchness instead of genderqueerness.

Further more, butchboi seems to be obsessed with gentials, here zie agians fits right in with the doctors, who are also obsessed with trans peoples gentials, to a much greater extent than trans people themselves, I believe that the vast majority of ft* people never get gential surgery, and of those who do get gentail surgery the more minor* procedure metaoidioplasty is much more common than more major* surgeries.

In the end, what kate linked to, and what butchboi wrote assumed that ft* people, where/are lesbains, belong to lesbains more than to themselves, will or should regret medical treatments and go the extremes rather than seeking the treatments which they need to deal with there dysphoria.In the end butchboi idenifies themselves as moving towards being a trans man without transtion, which I totally support, it is hir pissing on everyone else to do it that gets on my *not yet surgically mutilated tits*

I don’t believe that trans people are stupid, or misguided, or need to be talked down to, not by butches and not by gender outlaws who want to stop them experiencing their gender.

If you are worried about trans people regretting their transitional treatments, I recommend first talking to some latter transtioning people, as many of them may regret not transitioning earlier, who may talk about the difficulty of continuing a life where most of your resume says, “jill” and if you don’t, and if you don’t empathise with those trans people, please ask yourself, what are you doing when you talk about the what trans people should do for their own good?

Edit to add: And this doesn’t even touch the butch dykes who are trans, and probalby aren’t going to detranstion, who seem to be always missing from the conversation (I was guilty of that in my post about sewing suits)

*With regard to surgically complexity, recovery time, and so on.

Actually, I am crazy, and their is still no reason to disrespect me.

The medical records will probably not be expunged so when they fill out an application form and omit that their medical records state that they had a mental illness they will be committing fraud.

Some will never ever be able to work with children, get certain jobs, or be considered as trustworthy and reliable because of that medical record. Some medical schools are still teaching that transsexual, transgender or trans anything identities are mental illnesses. [link]

I am tempted to write, well fuck you too, and leave it at that, because of this, this is more of a rant and less of a conversation than I would have liked to have had, but then I get irrationally annoyed around those who piss down the social order.

You know what, it sucks that trans * people can’t work with children, get certain jobs or be considered trustworthy and reliable because they are actually mentally ill.

that continued the illusion that trans people were crazy and howling at the moon.

You know, they are right, that is how you tell the mentally ill ones, every mentally ill person I know howls at the moon, and totally don’t bitch about meds and trying to cope and trying to get funding for treatment and how much there coworkers shit them and ….

yeah no.

Moving on.

It seems that WPATH is now dominated by the transgender fascista who believe only people who agree to call themselves transgender are the real sane ones.

All other trans people such as the transexed or transsexuals – like yours truly – are still as nutty as a fruit cake. In fact we are not only non-compliant, difficult, refuse to accept our ‘transgenderness’, we should also be excluded from the proper workings of that association.

Does anyone smell prejudice?

I support people identifying however they want, while I use trans* or transgender as an unbarllera term, I am happy to talk about why it isn’t perfect and the issues that some within our community have with it, but I am yet to come across any medical literature suggesting that those within the trans */Sex and gender diverse  community who id as transgender rather than  transexual (like myself*) are more sane, more reliable, more anything than those who describe themselves as transsexuals. But then, as a therapist as you state in your article, I sure you would know much more about the state of mental health than I would.

*To me, transexual is a word I am uncomfortable with because of both its binary conintations and because it is a word which is generally defined with respect to the medical system, and I don’t like that system enough to define myself within it constraints.

Dear Dr Kennedy, I have some issues with your methodology

Some time ago, you wrote this piece.

I would like to disagree, so I will.

In addition to the referral letter we ask that everyone provides two photographs and an account of how gender issues have impacted on their lives

Ok, why the photos, cause that seems kinda creepy, frankly?

Only about 25% F-M come to surgery. This is probably a good thing

Leaving aside the idea that not getting treatment is a good thing, how do you? do you do follow-up, are
you sure these men aren’t seeking surgery though the kind of people who don’t think it is a bad idea that they have it? Why is surgery the end point? many trans people live in their identified gender without surgery, I don’t know if I will get chest surgery, I currently don’t have any plans for it, is my living in an ambiguous body, identifying as non binary and on T so that I can pass as male a good thing? Because I am guessing you wouldn’t think so.

Make no mistake, transition is difficult: physically, psychologically and socially.

Having started T, I feel better physically and psychologically, social life seems fairly good, most people have reacted well or at least not badly, so no, I disagree yet again, and ask do you have any evidence for this, are there studies which show that this is a more difficult time for trans people than say, staying closeted?

All in all, transition is the biggest decision of your life

You know, I think deciding to do honours, and to persue an academic career was harder, and speaking of which I am currently transitioning and doing honours, guess which one causes more stress, more insanity and more late night finishing essays, oh wait, that gives it away don’t it.

god is dead

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? – Friedrich Nietzsche.

Note, links in this post may not be safe for work, and may contain confronting pictures, and medical procedure descriptions.

I am not a fan of gatekeepers, I am not a fan of doctors who appoint themselves as experts on transgender lives while often knowing very little about us. I wrote about this before, but I went back and forth about writing this piece because I fundamentally like doctors, not when they are choosing who gets to transition and who doesn’t, but when they are supporting their patients, doing blood tests, keeping an eye out of the things that can go wrong, and this is something that people who transtion, or seek medical realated gender treatments out side of the medical system often miss out on.

But they still do it. (NSFW, genital pictures) If you have a choice I would strongly strongly recommend going to a doctor not a cutter, but not everyone has that choice, I remember a women I knew online who was in the US, facing the lost of health insurance and trying to get an Orchiectomy, so that loosing access to health insurance wouldn’t mean having to risk further masculinization. The surgery got pushed back several times and she considered doing it herself. This post is written for her, and for young trans people like her, scared, without support or resources, considering desperate measures. I wrote it because none of these things are hypothetical.

Many people who do medically transtion start hormones before they start the medical process, either by getting birthcontrol pills or HRT from female friends or relatives, or ordering homones online, or for trans men, using the same sources that bodybuilders and the gym crowd access steroids. If you are going down this road, try not to share needles, many places have needle exchanges where you can get no questions asked injecting equipment, if you can’t access new injecting equitment bleach will lower the risk of infection

To avoid the doctors, we must become doctors ourselves, if you are in a position like this, read everything you can, if you can find people to talk to, talk to them. and good luck.

Links:

Castration

Permenent changes

1. That I have started using dictation software and I apologise for any mistakes that may be made.

I was talking to a friend recently and they commented that they were scared of the permanent changes that HRT brings. I struggled with this for a long time, and I believe because I placed to much value on permanency I suffered more gender dysphoria than I needed to.

Everything is to some extent perement, people who stretch their ears are fond of saying that the size of no return is 18g (standard earings) because you will always have the scare tissue, your ears will never really be the same. I think the same can be said of medical transition but also not medically transitioning. Male assigned trans people in particular can find that delaying transition has permanent ramification because socially male secondary sexual characteristics are given more weight than female secondary sexual characteristic. However the same is also true of female assigned trans peoplewho may by delaying transition deal with more breast growth as well as legal and social history as women which makes it harder for them to blend into cissexual Society.

If I was to decide de-transition and live is female my situation would be in many ways identical to that of a trans-woman at a risk I’m willing to take the what feels right now and for what has already brought me a decrease in anxiety and other mental illnessespart of the reason why am willing to take this choice is because of the wonderful trans people that I have known who were open and honest about the transitions there fears their hopes and the frustrations.

it is my hope is that people reading this question question the medical model which focuses on the idea of a pure unmodified body as an ideal and sees trans-intesex and other mollified or “abnormally” gendered bodies as less.

Energy

I felt better, more energetic after r my first shot, I’m not sure if this was placebo or not, but it seems to have gone away, which would make sense as far as my understanding of dosage goes, the up in energy and the totally lack of bad side effects makes me seriously want to push the dose up faster than was planned, because damn it, I liked having energy.

Things I wish I could have told my 12 months ago self, that is the things I wish I had known before I started dealing with the medical system.

This got kinda ranty, but behind everyone of these points are stories, tears and blood split that shouldn’t have been, because doctors mistreat trans people

Things I wish I could have told my 12 months ago self, that is the things I wish I had known before I started dealing with “the system”.

So Young one, you wish to transition medically, ideally without having to get black market drugs, in most of the world this means doctors, lots of doctors. I didn’t really talk about non binary identification because I felt it would lessen my chances of being allowed hormones.

1) leave gender theory at the door.

I had a lot of conversations like this.

“So you would say that you have more male than female interests”

“Well yes, but that is true for many butch dykes who don’t feel the need to transition, I feel that my male identity isn’t connected to my stereotypical butchness ” (Also really, I am about as butch as  carson kressley)

I think answers like this lead me to being delayed to get hormones, because this made me a risky case, in the end I wish I had said “yes, as well as gender dysphoria, I code, I do generally geeky things, and I like cars and girls and beer and butch butch butch things, in fact this add is pretty much all I want in life.

It doesn’t make you a bad person, or a tool of the patriarchy or a failed feminist, it makes you someone who puts your quality of life as a high priory and who recognises the reality of the world trans people have to navigate.

A friend of mine, in a cynical moment commented “it’s like any drug dealer, you have to spend a while sitting on their couch and listening to their weird theories before they will actually get around to selling you the drugs, it’s annoying but it happens.

Don’t talk sex, particularly if you are queer, particularly particularly if you are queer and male assigned.

Thanks to the totally scientific two type hypothesis their is the idea that queer trans women and other male assigned trans people are really just fetishist who get of on the idea of having sex as a women, carefully avoiding the fact that many women, and female bodied people enjoy the idea of themselves having sex, sadly many cis “experts” on transgender people believe that when trans women and other male assigned trans people think about themselves having sex that this is fundamentally different and a fetish and may see this as a reason to deny treatment, although as far as I know their is no evidence to suggest that queer male assigned trans people are any less likely to benefit from transition than anyone else.

Don’t talk sex, particularly if you have sex with your “bits”

Their seems to be an option that trans people must spend their whole lives being crippled by gender dysphoria, and any sign that they didn’t, that you have shown your genitals to others, and or enjoyed sex particularly hetrosex in your assigned gender will often count against you.

This is particularly problematic for those who work in the sex industry,  I am not a sex worker and so I don’t think I have anything of value to add here (anyone want to jump in, go for it) but my guess is that avoiding mentioning your work, or bending it so that you work “at a bar” or “as a massure” is probably a very good idea.

Your doctor could be cool,  your doctor could be crap, but you might not know until it is too late

Not every doctor is bad but their are those who will, and the problem is you may not know that yours is until you mention stuff like this. The doctor I saw was suggested by a bigendered non-passing trans women, who he was great too, I thought it would work out, and I still think I got stuffed around because I was honest, I wish I hadn’t been. I am not the only person to see this side of the trans medical system.

Here’s what I’m after: a surgically constructed male-appearing chest, no hormones (for now–maybe forever), no first-name change, any pronouns (except “it”) are okay, although when it comes to gendered generics I happen to really like “Uncle” better than “Aunt,” and definitely “Mr. Spade.”[9] Hausman writes, “transsexuals must seek and obtain medical treatment in order to be recognized as transsexuals.  Their subject position depends upon a necessary relation to the medical establishment and its discourses.”[10] I’ve quickly learned that the converse is also true, in order to obtain the medical intervention I am seeking, I need to prove my membership in the category “transsexual”–prove that I have GID–to the proper authorities.  Unfortunately, stating my true objectives is not convincing them. - dean spade, muliating gender

day one, 15 hours since first T shot

So 15 hours after my first T shot I have

Started telling sexist jokes
Started breaking the speed limit

Had a nose bleed

Not any noticable psychological effects as of yet, maybe a bit more energy?
I am quite vain, and now that I have started testosterone I feel very motivated to do more body work/exercises I hope I can keep this up.

Well that was fast

So some background.

I am 23

I have been aware that “something” was wrong gender wise since I was quite young.

I tick a surprising number of the classic transexual history check boxes , but it took me a long time to work out that transition was a good thing  for me.

I am currently terrified.

I entered the transexual medical system, a little under a year ago, and I sit here writing this on a laptop sitting slightly uncomfortably 4 hours post my first shot.

Today was the appointment with the nice doctor at the nice queer clinic, and given my experience of the hurry up and wait, and while you wait  we need your life story that, so much of the trans medical system seems to love, I was expecting  this to be more of the same, and I am happy to say, that their are good people in the world, and that this doctor is one of them, he treated me as a reasonable adult, he didn’t flinch when I say up front that I was at risk of pregnancy, and then he proscribed a starting dose of testosterone which he then administered. I am hoping tomorrow to have more updates on how I feel on T, as I can’t really say their is anything I can point to yet and go “there that is T”