The woods between worlds
I am gender-queer, non-binary, an enby, if you will.
I was assigned female at birth, and I’ve been on low dose testosterone for almost 4 months. It is a journey without a lot of maps. I began it because it was not feasible to continue as I was.
It is scary to travel without knowing where you are going — but I was somewhere even more terrifying — so I decided to give the journey a try.
The experience has been very interesting — in many ways I feel I am learning more about gender than I even guessed I would. In a way I feel like I am in the Wood Between Worlds — dipping my toes in different ponds — experiencing different worlds.
What I like about testosterone
I can only speak for my own experience, but testosterone tends to have the effect of dampening my emotions and making them smaller and more manageable, as a rule.
Overall my mood is way better on testosterone. The instant I put the gel on for the first time I felt instantly just better overall. Just a general sense of well being. It was immediate. It has lessened somewhat as most secondary effects do but still my mood is overall elevated over my pre-T levels.
Since I started taking T my period pain has been drastically reduced. I went from being near bedridden while on max dose anti-inflammatory painkillers, with a hot water bottle, to not needing to take any medicine to manage my pain at all.
I also don’t experience the same kind of intensity of premenstrual emotional symptoms, though I still have a noticeable cycle, and there are still menstrual impacts on my mood.
I feel way more relaxed about things in general. I am sleeping better than I have ever slept in my life. I worry less in every way. I have very little general anxiety overall anymore, it’s pretty great — though again, living alone in a global pandemic is ratcheting that up again.
I think I am happier overall, even though, again, that is challenged by the global crisis we are all going though. I can’t imagine how I would be doing without it right now, though. It makes me feel much more secure.
My attachment approach is still messy — I still routinely feel left out, abandoned, lonely and sad, and all those other things from my childhood trauma, but it takes the volume down a bunch to where, before the pandemic (and even in the first month) I felt just normal with my neediness. It was great. I felt like I could maybe normalize in this way for the first time in my life, though the pandemic has thrown that into question. I’m still hopeful.
The pandemic is making things pretty hard right now though. Though T still helps a lot, it doesn’t make me invincible. And while a dose increase did help make things more manageable in some ways, it had some negative effects too, so I’ve had to take that down a bit.
What I don’t like about testosterone
As part of taking my emotions down like 10 notches, testosterone has also noticeably impacted my empathy. And while it is relaxing to not cry about so much so often, it is a bit strange to have a different relationship to the pain of other people. I worried about whether it was making me a worse person — I don’t think so, but I think I need to be careful not to lose sight of human suffering as my heart becomes less troubled.
It has made me less considerate. Maybe it is unfair to blame a hormone for this but I just don’t “overthink” my emails and my feedback etc as much — because I am more confident in what I am saying. And if you think about it … being “thoughtful” really is all about ~thinking~ things through. I just don’t do it as much because I am not paralyzed with anxiety, but as a result I am sometimes more harsh than I otherwise mean to be because I am not considering everything carefully before hitting send (otherwise known as being considerate).
It has also made me more abrupt and more blunt. I didn’t really need this enhancement, as I think I was already plenty abrupt and blunt enough. But again, lack of anxiety, increase in confidence equals just blurting things out loud even more than my ADHD self already did anyway.
Anger. I started getting really noticeably more angry after I first doubled my testosterone dose. This in particular is unacceptable to me, so I’ve taken it down a bit again.
Has my body changed?
Honestly, it really hasn’t changed much really. I think my proto-stache has gotten a bit darker. I am getting a bunch of dark wiry hairs sprouting on my neck. Yeah, so far the closest I’ve gotten to a beard is a neck beard.
My sex drive has changed — but strangely I would not say it has increased, which is good because it was big enough anyway. A global pandemic is not really the best time to be sex crazed when you’re single, right? But anyway, it is just an easier, rounder, fuller feeling. I’m into it, and I’m into seeing how it exists in relationship at some point.
What I’ve learned
It is incredible how much hormones influence. I think I understand some things about men a bit differently than I did before taking testosterone, even though my dose is not really taking me into man levels of testosterone even with my recent increase.
Like, I definitely don’t cry as much on testosterone. I don’t feel like crying. I don’t have crying emotions in the same intensity. So I’m seeing more of “stereotypical man things” as connected to hormones than I did before.
I think that people, especially cis women, have largely been harmed by the paradigm that sees hormones as gendered though, since we all have these hormones in varying levels.
All of the positive impacts of testosterone I got to varying amounts on a very low dose, and I wonder why it is something not explored more, especially for treating women with anxiety. The drugs usually used to treat anxiety and insomnia, especially, are pretty intense and largely pretty dangerous. I know this from my own personal experience.
I wish I had been offered hormone therapy earlier for my mental health conditions — versus only getting it when it was directly connected to my gender needs. I wonder why that’s the approach — when it feels like it could be more broadly applicable.
What I want from this journey
I want to feel like me, like the person I am and know I could be with my brain balanced and fueled by the right mix of hormones. I am into a lot of the physical changes that could be possible, but I am not really all that attached to any physical outcome. Though, really I think I’d look super cute with a beard.
I think I would rather not have my voice change but it is a side effect I am willing to brave if that is what happens on a dose that makes me feel good emotionally and physically otherwise.
Mostly I just want to feel ok. I think I would pretty much be there, absent this pandemic, but I am here in this pandemic sooo, it is hard to know what is me having a normal reaction to a bad situation and something which is out of balance.
My dose
I was originally prescribed 3 pumps a week, which I ended up rounding up to 1 pump every two days just because it was easier to remember. I preferred to have a more regular application, so I pumped the gel into an empty pill bottle and took half the gel each day.
I have since had my dose increased to one pump a day. It is worth noting the package says the “starting dose” is 4 pumps a day, so that can give some idea of the intensity of what I am taking versus what someone who is a man might be taking. It had a pretty significant effects on me at half a pump a day, and, while the larger dose has been largely good, at this time I think that a full pump a day is a bit too much(though I can see myself stabilizing on that dose, potentially).
It is weird changing your hormones, especially while largely being alone. It has made it easier to see the emotional and relational changes, in a way. However, the current situation makes it a bit more difficult to figure out what is a “normal” reaction to an abnormal situation (global pandemic! no touch for 60+ days!) and what is hormonal/etc.
