Life with anxiety is like a game of whack-a-mole. If you deal with one thing, another will just pop up. And adding more estrogen to my system shakes it up and switches the game to advanced mode. I am (re)discovering so many things that I thought I had dealt with hiding beneath the surface.
The What
Affirming photo
So often when there’s a photo of me I go back and look at it only a few days later and dislike it because of dysphoria. But I took this one the other day using my iPhone portrait mode that I’m really loving. It feels like I can actually see myself looking back at me. My hair is extra curly here because my spouse had just helped me style it.
Breasts are cool – HRT week 9
Last night I was admiring how different my breasts feel now. Before I took estrogen I did have some fairly visible breasts due to my weight and low testosterone levels but they were just pockets of fat with pectoral muscles deep below. Now there is definitely tissue underneath and they feel totally different. My spouse described them last night as “somehow soft yet firm” because underneath the initial layer of squish they have a layer that is clearly not muscle but also not fat. I think my nipples are already bigger than hers too but she disagrees.
One of the funniest parts is watching how they grow unevenly. The pattern seems to be that my left breast will grow one week and then my right will catch up. Sometimes they are the same size but right now the left is significantly bigger. Currently they are pretty tender and painful with pressure but don’t actively hurt. We just redid my measurements last night so I guess it’s time to start trying out some bras.
Last week I increased my dose of estrogen to 6 mg a day which seems to really be helping my mood. I no longer appear to have the radical mood swings. At first I was taking 4 in the morning and 2 at night but I was seeing a dip in mood and energy in the early afternoon. I spoke to my doc and she recommended spacing it out evenly which seems to be solving the problem. Apparently my body likes estrogen, just not low levels of both hormones.
Realization of the day
I think I’m a transwoman in a nonbinary body.
I’ve talked about this before but when I think about the steps required to bring my body into alignment with my internal gender I get extremely overwhelmed, not only by the amount of work but the realization that I wouldn’t be doing it as much for myself as I would to change how people see me. I have no problem with my beard or 80%+ of my body. I don’t want to spend years trying to learn how to change my voice so that I can pass. And I don’t want to give up a perfectly functional penis to gain a vagina that I don’t even know if I would like as much.
What I do want are breasts (working on it), less body hair (need to get back on that), and a more feminine distribution of fat (hopefully that will start soon). I also want access to motherhood which seems like the far more challenging thing to achieve since I can’t/won’t do that alone. I want to be treated like the woman I am without needing to jump through the unattainable hoops of passing.
But the more I think about it, the less I think my internal gender is actually nonbinary. As in I don’t know of any masculine traits that I identify with. I have the gender of a lesbian woman and the gender blurriness that comes packaged with perceptions queer femmeness. I am just as much a woman internally as any lesbian and probably more feminine than most. I just happened to not be born with a cis woman’s body and I can never attain that no matter how hard I try.
In other news, I am toying with the idea of trying out she/her pronouns but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to make that switch yet. So many complex feelings where I’m torn between what I feel I deserve and what I feel I can reasonably fight for.
HRT Week 8 update
I just got the results back from my first checkup post-hormones. My estrogen is twice the maximum for recommended male range and on the low end for women (90.5 pg/mL). My testosterone is almost nonexistent (21 ng/dL). I’ve been swinging pretty radically between extremely depressed to extremely euphoric throughout the course of the week and my breasts continue to grow. I talked to my doc about the mood and she said that there is a 50/50 chance that more estrogen will make that either better or worse. So tomorrow I start with 4 mg in the morning and 2 mg at night (currently 2 twice a day). We’ll see what happens!
PS – I’m not taking spiro to suppress my testosterone because my T levels were already below the male range before I started and clearly I don’t need them now.
Affirming selfie
It’s been too long since I’ve shared a photo. Here’s the one that’s giving me joy lately from my first attempt to put on my own eye makeup.
Dysphoria and depression
I’ve been experiencing a lot more dysphoria lately, mostly about the shape and hairiness of my body. I’m very self conscious of my masculine fat-distributed belly and how hairy my chest in particular is. I think the changes in my body and brain are bringing that into sharper relief.
Partly because of that and partly because I see people and communities I care about dying and suffering all over the world, I have been experiencing a lot more depression this week as well. And between the two I’ve been feeling very unsexy which is contributing to my already lowered libido.
I’ve been longing a lot lately for the simpler times in my life when it was easier to ignore who I was and what was going on in the world around me. Sometimes it does feel like ignorance is bliss or at least less painful. But now that I’ve woken up to those facts I can’t go back. And I feel powerless to change most of it so I feel stuck in this terrible place.
There are definitely days I wish I wasn’t an empath or trans. But then I wouldn’t be me. And I’d probably be contributing to the problems instead of trying to make things better in the little ways I can. I hope that my actions do some good to make this worth it.
Hormone update – week 5
Potential TMI warning ahead!
I’ve been taking estrogen orally for 5 weeks now and last week I definitely started to see some changes. Last Wednesday I noticed one breast was tender and even though I couldn’t really perceive it, others agreed that it was getting bigger. What I did notice last week is that there were a couple times I was talking about emotional topics that I found myself on the verge of tears far more easily than before.
This week I can definitely see a change in the shape and size of both breasts and the areas under the areolas have been tender on and off. I really didn’t expect to see this much change so quickly but I’m very excited! Some friends have already mentioned being able to see the changes through my clothes. I guess it’s nearly time to go bra shopping.
In the meantime, I highly recommend silicon nipple covers for anyone with prominent nipples. Even before hormones I needed them with femme clothes since they are often made of thinner material. I’ve found the Nippies brand works great for months of use.
What’s in a name?
For a lot of trans people, changing their name is a really big and meaningful step. But for me, I have a hard time figuring out exactly how I feel about the idea of changing my name. Some days I feel apathetic about it and others I feel conflicted. Never once have I felt strongly that I should either keep my name or change it. So for now I take the easiest path which is keeping my first name, although I did change my middle and last names when I got married which was a much bigger paperwork ordeal than I thought. I changed my middle name to something gender neutral so that if I decide to change, I can just go by that name.
The part of me that wants to change it is driven by the idea that people would make less assumptions about me if I didn’t have a male-gendered name. But realistically I know that people make those assumptions regardless based on my voice and appearance. The other reason to change is because of the religious baggage associated with my name. The cult I grew up in treated your name like it was your destiny and when you met the leader, he would tell you the meaning in a very creepy way. All the children in our family had biblical names because of that background. And this month I had a difficult conversation with my dad where he made it clear he would never use a different name for me because this one was “god ordained” and that’s always who I’ll be. And while I had no plans to change my name before that, my first instinct is to say “well if you’re going to shove your “gift” down my throat, then I will reject it.”
The reason I haven’t done that yet is because I have seen how difficult it is for my trans friends to have their new name respected outside our own community. Trying to get coworkers and old acquaintances to switch sounds overwhelming to me and I know it would just increase tensions with my parents when I am still just trying to get them to use my pronouns. I wish I had the courage to be more assertive about these things but right now I am so tired of fighting.
As much as I want to start using my gender neutral middle name with my chosen family and friends, I am also afraid of getting used to it. And more importantly, I don’t feel any stronger a connection with my new name than my old one. To some degree, the name isn’t important to me, at least relative to my pronouns. Is it normal to never feel an emotional connection to your name?
On relationships
I just want to say how incredibly thankful I am for my spouse/anchor partner and the chosen family I’ve built. I cannot emphasize enough how helpful it is, especially during transition, to have people in your life who love you both for who you are and for how you change. Because change is inevitable no matter what your circumstances. As Octavia Butler says in her Earthseed series:
“All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.”
I’ve had too many relationships in my life, both romantic and platonic, where I was expected to remain the way they saw me when we first met. Where their idea of who I am was more important than actually getting to know who I am. I spent 7 years in a relationship with my ex-wife where I was denigrated for becoming who I truly am. And life is too short for that. As far as I know we only get one shot at this and I’m not going to spend it pretending to be what someone else wants me to be.
It’s not an easy path to leave those people behind and venture into the unknown but because I’m living my truth, I have found people who love me for it. The hardest thing to find is the people who can honestly face change and love you through it and for it. Sometimes change means that relationship structures need to change as well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to lose that person. I’m particularly grateful to my platonic long-term partner who not only has remained part of my family after we stopped dating but lives with me and supports me daily.
For all of you in unhealthy relationships or who are despairing of ever finding people who can love you like that I just want to say that you are unique and special and deserving of love. And I promise that there are people out there who can love you for who you are. I despaired for so long because I was convinced that I could never be lovable for the aspects of myself I feared or hated. But life has proved that belief wrong many times over. So don’t get desperate and compromise your values or self-worth. Keep living your truth and becoming the best self you can be.
Finding Haven 