One year on T
Aug. 29th, 2020 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookhobbitThe 28th was my year-date on testosterone, so I wanted to do a reflection post for myself if nothing else.
This time last year I was thinking I'd only spend a year, maybe two, on T. So I was half-expect to be stopping now, or have stopped by now, maybe. Instead, I raised my dose again two months ago. I'm not even stepping it down yet. I thought at the time that I was mainly in it for voice changes and bottom growth, which wasn't precise untrue, but there's a lot of lost-if-stopped effects that I really like and don't want to give up.
I think I could see myself being on it for the rest of my life, were it not for the fact that hair loss runs strong in my family. It's kind of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, I guess, but I absolutely do not know what I would do if I started losing my hair, and I almost certainly will at some point if I stay on T, probably within the next 5, 10 years if I'm really lucky, sooner if I'm unlucky.
So I'm in this weird place of like, I'm not ready to go off it, but I'm also sort of anticipating the need to do so. I keep having weird stress dreams about it. I think it speaks to the degree that I like my body like this. I'm not read to lose the extra muscles or the facial structure or the way that it changes sexual sensation. I thought this would be the end of the journey but it really feels like the beginning.
I haven't really been overtly interpreted as anything other than a woman yet, which is really frustrating. It's hard not to feel like I'm doing something wrong. But I don't bind frequently because of my health issues, and I haven't had top surgery. (Still scheduled for December, knock wood, though obviously the pandemic situation makes things uncertain.) I don't know if that will change things or not.
Something that's frustrating me in all this is I haven't done a legal name change so my name in the uni system is still heavily gendered, and I can't change it without having a legal name change, because my school is the worst. There's a form that lets you change it on the LMS, but not on the registration system or the email system! Which means even if I change it in the LMS my students will still be getting emails from DEADNAME MIDDLENAME. So that makes me feel frustratingly tied to my agab.
I've said before on tumblr there's stuff I don't like about changes I've experienced: I don't like how my body fat is redistributing, and I'm not really keen on the extra body hair. I'm warming to the body hair a bit. On a sensory level it's still Eugh, but on a gender level it's kind of nice in a way that I didn't expect. I'm getting used to the body fat, but still feel weird about it for a lot of complicated reasons. Obviously the extra acne and the sweat and the hunger and to some degree the extra libido are annoying, but those, I think, are mostly things that everyone gets annoyed with about puberty, so they don't feel like Bad T Stuff so much as Puberty Sucks Stuff, and some of them will go away as I'm on T for longer.
Most of the rest, I think I like. My voice change is great -- although I still struggle to use the lower part of my voice because I'm just not in the habit. It means I still have voice dysphoria, but it's not due to the actual sound of my voice so much as how I use it. So I have to keep working on that, although being Aware Of My Speaking Style is annoying and frustrating.
Pretty much all the small body changes -- extra muscle, changes to the shape of the face, etc -- are nice. I didn't think I'd like the muscle, I thought I'd be neutral on it, but I actually love it. I don't know that it actually looks good, but it makes me feel stronger and butcher, even though it's not like I work out or anything. I almost have cheekbones now and I'm VERY excited.
I don't actually like the tactile realities of having grown-out chin hair, but having short, just-shaved stubble is very nice. I'm actually looking forward to having the potential for a full beard, even though i probably won't grow one. I'm getting sideburns and I might grow those a little when they're filled out! Just enough to hit my cheekbones maybe, not super long. A beard will take probably 5+, maybe closer to 10, years to fill out, so I may never get there.
I think I've talked before about how much joy bottom growth has brought me. I really love it; it makes me feel a lot better about being touched. At the same time though, it's really brought my bottom dysphoria to the forefront. I am really, really certain that I want to get simple meta as soon as I can. I won't be able to do so until at least 2 years on T and who knows where I'll be then in geographic terms and what my insurance situation will be.
A lot has shifted, I think. More bottom dysphoria, more top dysphoria, more comfort with being in my body, more feeling that my transness is embodied. My sense of my relationship to gender has changed a lot, too, I think. Before I started T I didn't consider myself in any way transmasculine. I'm not sure that's true anymore, but only for a very specific value of "transmasculine". It's sometimes used to mean "trans men and people who have man-adjacent genders", and that's not true of me.
But I do feel a certain sense of bodily kinship with medically transitioning trans men. I don't really know how to talk about this because obviously in the trans community we tend to emphasize breaking down bodies-as-genders, and that's good. At the same time, though, like...there is a kind of connection that is forged, I think, in the shared experience of physical transition, and....things like....seeing people with bodies like mine feels good, and gives me a sense of community. The body of an average AFAB trans person who has transitioned, in various ways, is not identical to either the average cis man's or the average cis woman's. And so, seeing things like....top surgery scars, or bottom growth, or hearing voices like mine, I feel a connection with that. So that's forged, for me, a connect with transitioning trans men that I didn't have before. I'm still not the same gender as them, but I feel more like we have some shared physical experiences, if that makes sense.
I am also transmasculine in the sense that I am trans, and my gender presentation is masculine. Not "man", and that's important: for me it doesn't work if the masculinity is part of manhood because that's a...different thing. I'm a butch, not a man. But in the sense that butches are sometimes referred to as transmasculine, so am I.
It's an as-needed label for me -- I use it mostly in reference to transition, for umbrellaing myself with other people doing the same thing -- rather than an essential part of my identity, but that's okay, I think.
This time last year I was thinking I'd only spend a year, maybe two, on T. So I was half-expect to be stopping now, or have stopped by now, maybe. Instead, I raised my dose again two months ago. I'm not even stepping it down yet. I thought at the time that I was mainly in it for voice changes and bottom growth, which wasn't precise untrue, but there's a lot of lost-if-stopped effects that I really like and don't want to give up.
I think I could see myself being on it for the rest of my life, were it not for the fact that hair loss runs strong in my family. It's kind of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, I guess, but I absolutely do not know what I would do if I started losing my hair, and I almost certainly will at some point if I stay on T, probably within the next 5, 10 years if I'm really lucky, sooner if I'm unlucky.
So I'm in this weird place of like, I'm not ready to go off it, but I'm also sort of anticipating the need to do so. I keep having weird stress dreams about it. I think it speaks to the degree that I like my body like this. I'm not read to lose the extra muscles or the facial structure or the way that it changes sexual sensation. I thought this would be the end of the journey but it really feels like the beginning.
I haven't really been overtly interpreted as anything other than a woman yet, which is really frustrating. It's hard not to feel like I'm doing something wrong. But I don't bind frequently because of my health issues, and I haven't had top surgery. (Still scheduled for December, knock wood, though obviously the pandemic situation makes things uncertain.) I don't know if that will change things or not.
Something that's frustrating me in all this is I haven't done a legal name change so my name in the uni system is still heavily gendered, and I can't change it without having a legal name change, because my school is the worst. There's a form that lets you change it on the LMS, but not on the registration system or the email system! Which means even if I change it in the LMS my students will still be getting emails from DEADNAME MIDDLENAME. So that makes me feel frustratingly tied to my agab.
I've said before on tumblr there's stuff I don't like about changes I've experienced: I don't like how my body fat is redistributing, and I'm not really keen on the extra body hair. I'm warming to the body hair a bit. On a sensory level it's still Eugh, but on a gender level it's kind of nice in a way that I didn't expect. I'm getting used to the body fat, but still feel weird about it for a lot of complicated reasons. Obviously the extra acne and the sweat and the hunger and to some degree the extra libido are annoying, but those, I think, are mostly things that everyone gets annoyed with about puberty, so they don't feel like Bad T Stuff so much as Puberty Sucks Stuff, and some of them will go away as I'm on T for longer.
Most of the rest, I think I like. My voice change is great -- although I still struggle to use the lower part of my voice because I'm just not in the habit. It means I still have voice dysphoria, but it's not due to the actual sound of my voice so much as how I use it. So I have to keep working on that, although being Aware Of My Speaking Style is annoying and frustrating.
Pretty much all the small body changes -- extra muscle, changes to the shape of the face, etc -- are nice. I didn't think I'd like the muscle, I thought I'd be neutral on it, but I actually love it. I don't know that it actually looks good, but it makes me feel stronger and butcher, even though it's not like I work out or anything. I almost have cheekbones now and I'm VERY excited.
I don't actually like the tactile realities of having grown-out chin hair, but having short, just-shaved stubble is very nice. I'm actually looking forward to having the potential for a full beard, even though i probably won't grow one. I'm getting sideburns and I might grow those a little when they're filled out! Just enough to hit my cheekbones maybe, not super long. A beard will take probably 5+, maybe closer to 10, years to fill out, so I may never get there.
I think I've talked before about how much joy bottom growth has brought me. I really love it; it makes me feel a lot better about being touched. At the same time though, it's really brought my bottom dysphoria to the forefront. I am really, really certain that I want to get simple meta as soon as I can. I won't be able to do so until at least 2 years on T and who knows where I'll be then in geographic terms and what my insurance situation will be.
A lot has shifted, I think. More bottom dysphoria, more top dysphoria, more comfort with being in my body, more feeling that my transness is embodied. My sense of my relationship to gender has changed a lot, too, I think. Before I started T I didn't consider myself in any way transmasculine. I'm not sure that's true anymore, but only for a very specific value of "transmasculine". It's sometimes used to mean "trans men and people who have man-adjacent genders", and that's not true of me.
But I do feel a certain sense of bodily kinship with medically transitioning trans men. I don't really know how to talk about this because obviously in the trans community we tend to emphasize breaking down bodies-as-genders, and that's good. At the same time, though, like...there is a kind of connection that is forged, I think, in the shared experience of physical transition, and....things like....seeing people with bodies like mine feels good, and gives me a sense of community. The body of an average AFAB trans person who has transitioned, in various ways, is not identical to either the average cis man's or the average cis woman's. And so, seeing things like....top surgery scars, or bottom growth, or hearing voices like mine, I feel a connection with that. So that's forged, for me, a connect with transitioning trans men that I didn't have before. I'm still not the same gender as them, but I feel more like we have some shared physical experiences, if that makes sense.
I am also transmasculine in the sense that I am trans, and my gender presentation is masculine. Not "man", and that's important: for me it doesn't work if the masculinity is part of manhood because that's a...different thing. I'm a butch, not a man. But in the sense that butches are sometimes referred to as transmasculine, so am I.
It's an as-needed label for me -- I use it mostly in reference to transition, for umbrellaing myself with other people doing the same thing -- rather than an essential part of my identity, but that's okay, I think.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 09:45 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I have other words, beyond that this whole post makes me happy. :)
no subject
Date: 2020-09-07 08:37 pm (UTC)It sounds like there have been a lot of positives for your year on T. I'm glad you can feel a connection with other trans people.