Transition update
A new way to do hormones!
I’m female-to-male transgender (I actually prefer ‘transsexual’, but that’s a can of worms for later and might make sense by the end of this), and my body has run on testosterone instead of estrogen/progesterone for just over two years now.
Honestly, the physical change(s) associated with that have felt so anticlimactic and right that it’s ridiculous to attempt to write about them — like asking any ordinary young man to sit at a desk and do poetic musings about his puberty when he’d rather fidget around and go normally or joyfully about his boyish business.
Contrary to popular belief, ‘gender euphoria’ (mine, anyway) isn’t histrionics about hair and strength and sweat and ‘he/him’; it’s just feeling like a human for once.
It’s experiencing changes that others point out affectionately that you might not have even noticed, except with the occasional ‘huh, that’s nice; I guess so!’
It’s a freedom from grayness and listlessness and dread about other sorts of changes that you’d resigned yourself to until you realized it didn’t have to be that way. It’s growing up normally, and it’s awesome.
I guess I mused anyway. Oh, well.
Anyhow, I was incredibly fortunate to start a new way of doing my normalcy (a.k.a. hormone replacement therapy) this month —Testopel. Instead of injecting myself weekly with an oily little suspension of testosterone cypionate, I show up at the doctor’s office and have five or so Tic Tac-sized little pellets implanted just above my butt. It costs me $90 USD with the current insurance, and it should last 3–4 months!
The insertion procedure was a little harder than I thought (I swear, they didn’t wait quite long enough for the local anesthesia to set in), but within 15 minutes, I had a third-of-an-inch incision (at most), a Steri-Strip on top of that, and a sizable but unobtrusive bandage to top it all off. I was told it would bruise a bit and feel like I slipped on some ice for the next week or so, and the analogy was spot-on. The soreness was more than manageable with ibuprofen, though I really wished I wasn’t a literally-anything-but-stomach sleeper (I don’t know about you, but I just cannot lay on my stomach for long. It makes my lower back feel unbearably squashed together and stiff!)
As it turned out, the first few days of Testopel gave me a sobering scare and reminded me of just how finicky (and important) hormones can be. The insertion was scheduled for just two days after my usual weekly injection, and I didn’t want to skip doing it or even adjust the dose, because I was terrified of messing up the routine.
What if I briefly lost the psychological relief I’d experienced for the past two years on testosterone, having never missed a dose before? What if I fell into the horribly anxious and dissociated dumps again? It was really so stark of a difference — before T and after T — that I didn’t even want to call and ask about it, for fear that the doctor would indeed advise me to just skip a shot. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to that place again.
So I did my injection and didn’t think much of it.
Then, the morning after my pellets were put in, I woke up feeling like a shaky, wounded little animal and hated everyone. I assumed I was just more than ready for the following week’s vacation, but I also found every Slack ping, even the ones not meant for me, to evoke the sort of combined dread (‘I’m gonna get laid off; I just know it’) and paranoia (‘They’re mad at me, aren’t they?’) and impostor syndrome (‘I’m a horrible engineer; look at how that thing I’m working on had an issue again’) and jadedness (‘Same. Shit.’) and rage (‘Can you all just LEAVE ME ALONE?!!?!!’) that I hadn’t felt since the PreNorman Times. What the hell was going on?
On one hand, there was a tiny bit of a reality check — if this was what the ‘before’ I had almost forgotten about felt like, it clearly wouldn’t make me drop dead on the spot as previously and dramatically hypothesized. On the other hand, there were definitely moments where that wounded little animal in me would have been perfectly fine with doing so. I’ve never been actively suicidal, but I distinctly remember this very feeling throughout my teens and twenties. No particular zest to leave, but none to live, either. Doubleplusungood.
The whole situation put the few remaining self-aware regions of my brain into a panic. Was the dosage wrong somehow, and was I doomed to three months of this? Was there too much testosterone at once, and was it actually true that the stuff can convert back to estrogen when that happens? Was my cruel and original poison coming back to bite me? (I am not an endocrinologist and have no actual idea, but maybe not.)
Would this all go away, and would the doctors even believe me if it didn’t, given how frustratingly little non-trans people seem to know about the whole mental miracle thing? I eventually did ask, admitted to injecting myself right before the pellet procedure, and was assured that my reaction was not unusual and was probably just the result of that. Still, I insisted that the irritability on top of the abysmal emotional stew I was now drowning in was not normal for me and never had been (testosterone as the ‘anger hormone’ is a myth I had always loathed, in the limited ways a now-placid person can express such a thing as loathing). I was comforted either way and figured I just had to wait it out.
On day 3, the first of the gray clouds lifted. I was still in a bad sludge, but the wounded little animal didn’t want to bite anyone anymore. No more fight.
Around day 4–5 — right on schedule, around when I would normally be due to inject again — the rest seemed to fall away, too. No more flight, either.
To my incredible relief and delight, I felt like my favorite self again. My perceptions of everything once again fell on the scale from ‘tear-jerkingly beautiful’ to ‘pretty neat’ to ‘amusing’ to ‘harmless’ to ‘eh, I can handle it,’ and I’ve been back to that baseline ever since. Thank God, thank Fel, thank the universe, and thank goodness!
So yeah. That’s how Norm’s been doing lately.
My annoyingly pleasant headspace is now enjoying a week off and some quality time in Colorado, where I’m excited to continue stuffing my face with brewery Tex-Mex and Safeway brand cake slices (the best, when it comes to regional grocery store bakeries) and strawberry milkshakes and…oh, I guess the whole ‘city walks and Netflix and a Muse concert(!) with someone I love’ thing, too.
What a wonderful slice of life!
And, uh…hormones, man. Scary but neat.
