"Am boy, soon will be *more* boy!"

[cosmolinguist]

So it's about as close as I can get to saying I've been taking testosterone for a year.

I'm good at remembering dates and numbers and stuff like that (does anyone want to know my kindergarten best friend's birthday? or the phone number for my grandparents who've been dead for two decades?) but I almost made myself forget this one because I didn't want it to be a big thing for me.

I'm not quite sure why this is, and I do my best thinking in writing, so:

I feel strongly that I'm no more trans since testosterone than I was before. I don't think hormones or surgery or any kind of gender-affirming healthcare is legitimizing.

Another reason I might be feeling uncomfortable about this is that I had to wait so long to get that far, and I'm uncomfortably aware that many people I know are still waiting.

This list I made of hashtag trans joy came, like I say, from a friend who's about to start testosterone and is desperate to hear more about people's experiences with it, which seem so much harder to come by than estrogen-takers' experiences with that. This conversation has trundled along since then until yesterday a few people on my corner of fedi have started to share early memories of taking testosterone (my favorite is the person who had his first shot at the end of being up all night because he worked shifts, and apparently in his sleep after that he said "Am boy, soon will be more boy!").

So I'm trying to think about why I have so little to contribute to these early memories.

There's something about not wanting to make people feel bad, as I feel bad about what's still being gatekept from me (no one is having top surgery at me, someone else getting it isn't what's stopping me, but it can be difficult to be gracious all the time). I don't want to tax anyone else's resilience.

There's something about wanting to de-exotify it, to think of it like the rest of my meds -- I don't remember when I started taking my brain drugs, no one puts that date in their bio. I think I'm more likely to treat medical transition as effectively a chronic health condition than a person less comfortable with disability culture might. Which is not to say that it's a disease, but that I'm dependent on routine monitoring and a pharmaceutical supply chain in the way that people with diabetes or hypothyroidism or asthma are.

Also the social media where I understand people to be talking about the effects of exogenous testosterone -- YouTube and reddit and various discords I don't even know about -- aren't accessible to me.

And I don't mind because the impression I've gotten form friends who venture there has been that it makes them miserable! People them think their facial hair is coming in more slowly than it "should" or that their gel is somehow inferior to other people's injections. It seems impossible to separate the information from the hostility and factionalization.

This, by the way, is also what put me off "doing my research" to pick a surgeon, because when I asked about resources to do such research there was nothing even semi-official offered to me, it was just advice to look at these kinds of places and the inability to separate clinical information from everything else there is one of the (not the only, but one of the biggest) reasons I was too overwhelmed at the prospect of this to get it done quickly enough to get that one referral that would have been physically possible for me.

But!

I now realize that, in seeking to shun exotification for myself, I'm inadvertently contributing to it for others because there is so little information readily available about the quotidian experience of what taking T is like.

I'm a committed blogger, driven by the conviction that ordinary life is precious and deserves recording. So is something else is at work in my resistance to recording this singular aspect of my life? I probably wrote more about my unwanted puberty, on notebook pages I scrunched up immediately, than I have the wanted one. Again there are lots of reasons for that, but it still felt like a useful thought when I thought about it this evening.

Anyway I don't really have a point here, but I might start trying to contribute some memories or reflections to the relevant hashtags from my first year of taking testosterone, and from my second one now that that's starting. And I might try to blog about it more too.

Comments

[hafnia]

I saw that Fedi post, I think (and boosted it), and while I agree with the general sentiment and think it's greatly needed:

your perspective is valid and it's okay not to want to broadcast your larger experience. it is okay if you want to limit it to telling friends who ask you directly what your experience has been; it is okay if your thoughts on it are mostly, "this is a medication I take along with the rest of my meds for mental health" and you don't have any groundbreaking revelations to share. it's okay to have complicated and not-always positive feelings about the whole shebang. I liked your joy list, but like -- I hope you know that you don't owe anyone a breakdown of what it's been like for you.

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks so much. I absolutely do know that. I've seen the commentary around this as an interesting springboard to look at why I'm treating this thing as different from my usual King Of Oversharing personality, is all. I definitely agree that it's fine not to have any great insight and it's fine for anyone to not want to talk about it, whether or not they even know why they don't wanna talk about it.

But it's always good to have reminders like this. Thanks for being such a good friend.

[barakta]

It is one of those things where everyone who has this sort of story to share is invariably traumatised and fucked up by cis-centric gender-normative society that not only is every sharer-fucked up but all their potential audience are too, which makes for a very trauma-heavy area and inevitably it's going to prod buttons for some. Not everyone is as self-aware as you to know that you find top-surgery stuff hard for reasons and know enough not to reply factionally or horridly to someone who's joy/sharing hurts you... I wish we had more conversation about traumatised communities and how to hold boundaries but also kindness (not just trans-flavoured things but disability and deafness and and and).

I hope you find a place to be comfortable sharing what you want to share on your own terms cos you don't owe the world "representation" and there are more ways than just VERY public sharing, I do think the 1:1 interactions or small incidents are just as powerful, if not more so.

[silveradept]

No one is obligated to be a spokesmodel for anything, at least, not without a contract where they get paid for it.

I also wonder whether a lot of people who are taking T, seeking surgery, and posting about it are chasing a narrow ideal, rather than having the ability to accept whatever kind of body they're going to get on the other side of the process. There's often a smaller amount of "acceptable" on that side rather than the estrogen side, from my very limited experience.