The Beginning of the (Long Road to the) End
The Beginning of the (Long Road to the) End
What I was thinking in the lead-up to stopping testosterone
A couple of old journal entries today. No reflections this time. They pretty much speak for themselves. The only context needed is that I was pretty much permanently stoned at this time of my life. I stopped taking testosterone shortly after this (but didn’t fully detransition until 2020).
April 12, 2016
So this has basically been like the worst high ever
Because first I was getting intrusive thoughts about killing my cat while I was petting her
And then I felt really dissociative so I went and lay down on the couch
Then for something like twenty minutes my brain convinced me that I identified as a woman and gave me a vivid imaging of what would happen if I decided to detransition starting right now
(And I'm still not fully certain where my identity is sitting even after I managed to stop having that train of thought)
I just feel weird again. I feel like I'm not a person. I feel like everything that I do in --
I lost my train of thought. I looked at myself in the mirror and then I felt like it wasn't me and I was confused for a bit.
Okay I think where I'm at with gender is that I want to feel like identifying and expressing myself more femininely is okay. I mean I want to be okay with myself and I'm not. I think that's the problem right now.
Earlier this year I changed from [old username with the word “boy” in it] because I didn't want to keep associating myself with men because that's not how I identified. There was never a complete connect with the other side of the binary after I decided to transition. I had to force one when I wanted the type of treatment that was right for me but being able to reflect what I wanted my gender to say socially was --
Sorry I got caught on the detransition thoughts again. They're kind of just making their way in and then the concept of actually doing it kind of blows my mind. If I told my family that I wanted to use she pronouns again I feel like they might disown me. Wow that sounds awful. Can you imagine, though? Would I change my name back to my birth name or would I just stick with [trans name] because it's gender neutral?
Honestly, I look forward and I know I'm going to be genderweird in some way for the rest of my life. If detransition was ever a thing that I chose, unless I were to disappear and restart myself elsewhere where no one knew me when I identified as male, the person that I am is always going to be coloured by my past history of how I presented my gender. My identity as male is part of the rest of my life no matter what my identity is in the future. When I say that, though, I also think about my identity as female before I identified as male, and I think my experiences living as that gender are also important to who I am at this moment. Those are both part of me.
Anyway I kind of fully stopped identifying with men and started identifying more with... I don't know. Neutrois. I don't want to say "more in the middle" because it implies gender is a line somehow. As if we could ever make it that simple.
But now I'm feeling even more on the feminine end/corner/area of things. Who knows why. Maybe it's just because I'm really high right now. Because a lot of these thoughts about it are feeling very wrong, like they're coming from someone without any fundamental understanding of being transgender but somehow I'm believing every word of it and feeling shame. I don't like it.
But what if the past six or seven years are just one part of my identity and now I've decided that I don't really need to do anything further about my hormones and I just decide I'm going to stop T and just deal with my body the way it does on its own because I don't really even care anymore about what the outer part of me looks like. I totally need to book an appointment with my doctor about it.
I had a dream about myself looking more like I did pre-T a few days ago and it didn't make me uncomfortable. I feel like expressing that again. I don't think I necessarily didn't like how I looked back then, I was just ready for a change at that point in time. Maybe now I just want to go back and see how it feels again. But I'm afraid to. I'm afraid of what it means for how people at look at me socially even though it shouldn't matter.
These are really weird thoughts.
I'm also feeling very drawn to the whole idea of starting my life over somewhere completely new where no one knows me but I can't really say that would be a fully good idea.
But also having that thought makes me think I should probably just end this one since life is never going to be exactly the way I want it to be and I'm just very overwhelmed right now.
[…]
I still feel weird. I still feel like I'm on the cusp of doing something drastic with my life that is going to be completely different. I've felt like I'm moving into a different phase of life for most of this year so if there's going to be some kind of turning point this year, it would be really great if we just got on with that right now.
April 14, 2016
The effects of spending time with myself and having my best friends be the family members that I’m living with have really brought me back to who I felt I was pre-transition … not specifically just right before I transitioned, but at the end of high school ten years ago right before I dropped out of school – or better yet, before my then boyfriend’s mom died. Summer 2005. That would have been peak [Michelle] happiness (though it started going down very quickly because of that relationship).
I remember earlier this year I was looking at pictures from around that time and feeling very nostalgic and also feeling the need to be kind to myself. This was near the beginning of this year, I think. I also felt like the person in the picture wasn’t me, and it was bothering me. Like I thought she should be.
In order to get things I wanted from transition, I had to assume a binary gender. There is no question that hormones and surgery have gotten me to a place where I’m comfortable with my body. I just had to convince others (which convinced myself) that I was a man so that I could get those. Or I felt like I had to anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I figured that people don’t get non-binary genders so I might as well stick with a binary one presentation-wise. But to be completely honest, I’ve had the same feeling of being a fake when I’m hanging out with people who think I’m a man as when hanging out with people who think I’m a woman (which, obviously, hasn’t happened in years). No matter what I do from this point, I’m always going to be transgender.
Anyway, I’m going to go off testosterone for good, I think. I need to talk to my doctor about it first.
I’m not sure what that means. Or even if it means anything at all. But I think it means that I’m comfortable enough in my gender being non-binary that I’m done repressing traits that I’m expected to repress on both sides and maybe being a woman is actually part of my identity in some way and not just as something I identified as in the past. I think it means that I’ve come to a place where I’m okay to just be, without requiring hormones. (I don’t mean for this to sound like some sort of generalized ideal, just that it’s a place I’m moving to for whatever reason.) I don’t know if I’m going to make any changes regarding pronouns or names or not. Probably no name change. I might let family members use my birth name if they wanted to. (I might already do that without their knowledge.)
I keep having a weird feeling when I’m writing this, and I had one while I was writing it yesterday as well, and it’s the feeling of ownership of the words that are on the screen when I’m typing? Like I see the word “myself” and I’m like “yeah, that’s me” and for some reason the ownership feels different than it did, like, three or four days ago.
Hm. Maybe I just have an identity disorder.