I’ve recently been thinking of whether I could take up a sort of sport. I know I should do more excercise, and I know myself too well. I know that I’m not going to be motivated to excercise because it’s good for me (too far away in the future)  or because it will help me stay slim (married so no point). I’m going to be motivated by several other possible factors.

1. To tick something off on a list. I’m likely to go up a mountain so that I can say that I’ve climbed every mountain over x feet in a certain county. I then take a photo of myself at the top and post on facebook. Being a transsexual doesn’t stop me doing this.
2. To not look stupid. If I have raised sponsorship money and agreed to compete in an event then I am damn well going to train for it otherwise I will look stupid, again I can enter all sorts of events as a transsexual and no one need know.
3. To win. I know I am quite competitive, but I’m never really going to be able to take up a sport and get good enough at it to compete against biological men.

I love football but again I’d never be able to compete in a local Sunday league, it’s especially difficult for football as I haven’t played it since childhood, whilst most biological men would have played at school. I could just play badminton for fun but if you can’t be the best it seems a bit pointless, that’s rather a ‘medic’ attitude. I’ve started running because the goal in running is often very focuses on beating your personal best. But I am secretly a bit sad that I’ll miss out on the fun that is team sports.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1008161?query=featured_home#t=article

It’s great to see transsexualism treated as just another medical condition..

I’d love to hear you talk more about your thoughts on transitioning vs. creating out a butcher version of femininity, as the tension there (please forgive ineloquence — new baby, no sleep. and now it turns out ineloquence isn’t a word.) is something I struggle with. I don’t mean to deny the existence of trans people or say people shouldn’t transition, but sometimes, as a fairly femme lesbian who still doesn’t like the “traditional” boundaries of womanhood all that much,  it can feel like being abandoned — particularly in the case of those who transition and seem to immediately get drunk on access to male privilege.  I don’t mean to say that it IS abandonment or that those people are wrong to follow what it in their hearts, mind you, only that it can feel that way.

I think that this is an interesting point. It’s a variation on the common question of ‘why not just act like a masculine woman’ which is something that trans people are asked a lot.  Society has roles set down for men and women to act in, the roles that say that women stay home and raise children and that men go out to work. But these days there is nothing at all stopping women going out to work,  and men stopping staying at home and raising children. There is nothing stopping men wearing women’s clothes, and women wearing men’s clothes.

My answer is that there’s a difference between what you do and what you are. When I was at woman at first I tried to act like other women, I wore skirts, and tried to do the things other women did, played rubbish games like netball instead of proper games like football. I quickly established that being a woman was shit and I didn’t like it. I realised that just because I had the misfortune to be a woman I didn’t actually have to do anything just because I was a woman. I made a conscious effort to act completely like a man, but still being a woman.So I stopped playing netball, I stopped wearing skirts and make-up, I got my hair cut in a man’s style, I started having sex with women.

In fact it got to a stage where every activity in my life was the same thing that a man would do, I would walk home through a dangerous area at 2am because that’s what a man would do. When I was 17, and rather drunk, a unfortunate boy offered to walk me home and I punched him in the face to prove that I didn’t need walking home,  he refused to hit me back, so I punched him again. He kept saying that he wouldn’t hit a woman, and I got more and more angry with him.  I forget how it ended, but I remember walking home with a group of straight girls who tried to explain to me that it wasn’t sexist to refuse to hit a woman. By the time I got home I was really really upset, and I cried and told my parents about something awful a boy had done to me,  no, not rape, but refusing to fight back because I was a girl.  When I was 18 I went travelling around Europe on my own, I remember my Dad saying ‘Well I would have thought I’d be really worried if my  daughter did that, but I’m fairly sure that if you got into any trouble you’d be able to get out of it physically’.

But once I was effectively doing everything that a man would do in life I was still miserable. I was miserable because blood kept dripping out of my body where it shouldn’t, I was miserable because I had weird lumps of flesh growing out of the front of my body. I was miserable because however masculine I looked people kept treating me as a woman. I was miserable because of the bizarre rollar coaster of hormones that is the menstrual cycle. Acting like a man didn’t make me happy about being a woman, in fact it almost made being a woman worse, because it drew attention to the way that I just couldn’t change.

Could I have stayed as a masculine woman? Yes, I could have done, would I have been miserable? Yes. Is by transitioning harming women? I see that many people who would have been masculine women in the past are now transitioning, that may mean that there are less I too worry that some of them are doing it too soon, without really exploring whether they could be comfortable as a masculine woman. That worries me a bit.

Would I want to be continually suicidal to keep other people happy? No.

Sustanon

Injections of hormones every 2-3 weeks. This is the form of testosterone I started on, meandered off, and then came back to. It’s ok, not great, but it works for me. It’s got upsides, firstly it’s cheap which means that GPs are willing to prescribe it, also if I am caught out and need a private prescription it’s easier to organise. It’s licensed for treatment of transsexuals and a lot of GPs aren’t willing to use unlicensed products without hospital supervision.  The big upside for me is that I can inject myself, which is great, I couldn’t afford to take time off to go to a GPs to get a nurse to inject me. A lot of GPs haven’t been entirely happy with  me injecting myself, but once I point out that I can put a central line in they give up.

The downside is that that the injections themselves are fairly painful, and they sometimes mean that I walk with a limp for a day or so afterwards. If I’m actually sticking to my running training I have to time my injections so that I am on a rest day the day afterwards. It’s actually really difficult to stick a needle into yourself knowing that it will be painful, I have tried to persuade my wife to do it but she can’t really manage it.

The other downside was the fluctuations in hormone levels, before I had a hysterectomy I found that if I was low at a certain point in my cycle I would have a period. I was initially prescribed it every two weeks by Russell Reid which was ok, but then it was reduced to every three weeks by a NHS endocrinologist, which was the dose he used for hypogonadal biological males, and things turned into a rollar-coaster. This was annoying. Also my moods would go all over the place. Now I’ve had my ovaries removed (yahay) this isn’t an issue, and I can easily go for about 6 weeks between doses without noticing a problem. Other than the increasing risk of hip fracture that I get if I am low testosterone for that long.

Testogel

A clear colourless gel that you put on your skin. I tried this before I had my ovaries removed,  I was hoping it would surpress the menstrual bleeding that was happening on high does sustanon. It was great – with a dose every day the hormone levels were stable, and the mood swings were much better. There was one big downside: it made my wife’s hair fall out as she developed male pattern balding! Of course she wasn’t my wife then, she was the totally hot girl that I’d just started dating. Of course I should have made sure that I had a shower before I cuddled her skin to skin, but our relationship was in a very passionate stage and was just got carried away a little too often. Fortunately she wasn’t pregnant or this could have caused a miscarriage. A lot of FtMs who start on the gel report that the changes seem to be slower, though I can’t help wondering if there is an element of placebo effect here, as it’s well known that injections cause a greater placebo effect than tablets.

Buccal Testosterone:  ’Striant’

I can’t even remember what the brand name was for this, but google tells me that it was ‘Striant’. It was horrible. It was a small tablet that you had to put under  your top lip and suck gradually throughout the day, it tasted dreadful, and made food taste dreadful. Also I worried that if I kissed my then-girlfriend-now-wife she would get some more male pattern balding.

Andropatch

I nearly forgot about Andropatch! It was a patch that you put on your skin and it slowly released testostone throughout the day, or at least that was the plan. Usually it would fall off around lunchtime, my hormones would dip, and then if I was unlucky I would have a period, oh, and it made my skin really greasy, some people find that it makes their skin bleed. It’s not available anyone in the Uk anyway, which is a shame, because it wasn’t as bad as Striant.

Nebido

I may be the only trans man who has never taken Nebido, as it is rapidly becoming the most popular form of testosterone. It’s a an injection that you only have to take once every 12 weeks. That’s the up side, the downside is that you can’t inject it yourself, this doesn’t seem to bother most people but it does bother me, as I really value my independence with hormones. If I can’t make my own I can at least inject my own. I have had some limited successful experience with using it professionally and it seems to be ok, no not treating trans people, treating bio men who need hormones for other reasons.  The main downside is cost, I don’t think it’s ethical to use taxpayers money for the more expensive option when sustanon is so much cheaper. I know that the drug company that makes Nebido is trying to make ‘male androgen deficiency’ into some sort of hormonal disorder and I despise this  disease-mongering. Therefore I shall, on principle, refuse to be prescribed Nebido in an ineffective one man boycott.

I’m sure someone will take this post and use it as evidence of why artifical hormones are bad. So it’s worth taking a minute or two to consider the alternatives to artificial hormones.

Ostrogen and Progesteron

I did try living without any testosterone at all. Before I transitioned I tried coping just on female hormones. On the surface it seemed like quite a good solution, my body made the hormones itself so it didn’t require any prescriptions, and it was the ‘natural solution’. But it had some big disadvantages as they kept trying to turn me into a woman which was weird. Also instead of a consistent supply of hormones there was this strange ‘cycle’ thing, with a gap where there were no hormones at all, and where blood kept appearing out of places that blood really shouldn’t appear from, which made sex really messy for 1 week a month. If you have having sex with a woman that means that for 50% of the time sex is off the cards because one of you is bleeding. Some women, presumably finding this totally impossible, resort to having sex with men, but this carries a very big downside:  Pregnancy

Pregnancy is a truly awful business, in the days before modern medicine it used to kill about 1 in 5 women, which is actually quite a lot,( and my wife thinks that paragliding is a risky hobby). The worse thing about pregnancy is how it ends. Have you ever actually seen a child being born? No? I advise you not to.  That large baby is clearly not meant to fit through that small hole. If you like to have sex with men on a regular basis you could get pregnant about 12 times throughout your life. Maybe even more.

The only way to make being a woman vaguely bearable is artificial hormones,  you have to take artificial female hormones to stop you randomly bleeding the entire time, and having 12 babies. Given that you’re going to have to take artificial hormones anyway you  might as well take testosterone which has all of those benefits and more  as you get admission to the land of male privilege where can to oppress women all day long.

Being born with XY chromosomes

Ideally I would have chosen this option, none of the awful pregnancy / bleeding / random hormone rollar-coaster, and all the cool things about testosterone without having to actually inject it. For some reason this just isn’t an option. XY guys, you really don’t know how lucky you are, you think standing to pee is the coolest thing? You’re so wrong.

Sometimes I wonder whether we should dispense with this model of transsexualism being a ‘disorder’ that requires ‘treatment‘ and instead make it a that we make a free choice whether to have hormones or surgery or not. There would still need to be some medical professionals involved, hormones need to be prescribed and monitored by someone competent and medically qualified, surgery  requires both a surgeon and an anaesthetist. I also think that there would need to be some form of screening to check that you were of ‘sound mind’ or something and were capable of understanding the consequences of your actions.

Of course this would have a lot of downsides. Firstly it would mean that if you regretted treatment it would be your own fault, and you would have no one to sue, you would have to take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions about medical treatment. I don’t think patients really get this concept, in general most people don’t understand balancing risks and benefits and like to have someone to blame if things go wrong.

In the UK  treatment is sometimes available on the NHS to transition, but it is not available for cosmetic surgery, because that’s a ‘choice’. So if it was thought of that gender reassignment treatment was a choice in that way then there would be no chance of funding being available. So their would be no chance of free treatment.

In the UK we have pretty effective legal protection against discrimination, this is based on the fact that we have a disorder that we cannot change. If I got a facial tattoo I could legally get fired from work, if I had a sex change I do not get fired from work, if that happens I can sue my employer. If it was seen to be a choice then people would be able to fire us if we changed sex.

All in all I think that transsexuals benefit quite a lot from the current model, and it should really remain that way. What do my readers think?

The way she makes her point is downright ‘nasty’ and generally unethical. She subscribes to ‘trans only’ groups, where people publish information they think will remain confidential, and then takes posts out of context and puts them on her blog. This is a horrible violation of what felt like a safe safe (she says that as MtFs go into women only spaces and violate them, then it’s ok). She takes videos of kids transitioning on you tube and mocks them. Oh and the comments… she deletes the ones that she disagrees with, I know because two of my carefully crafted ones were deleted.

Annoyingly Dirt has a point, not one I agree with, but one that’s certainly worth thinking of. I actually urge anyone who is thinking of transitioning to read her blog throughly. If you are thinking of transitioning, you should be really sure that you have fully explored the option of being a masculine woman, and decided that it isn’t for you. If you are a young girl who isn’t comfortable with being a woman, in the way that you see your mothers and sisters being then you should really make sure you have explored all other ways of being a woman before deciding that you’re actually a man. If you have done this, and you have come to the conclusion that you are a man, then by all means transition.

But transitioning will involve hormones and surgery, and these have their downsides. You will be on regular medication for the rest of your life, and if you inject it is a bit painful, surgery has side effects which include death, long term infection, disability. If you feel that the only way towards happiness is to take the risk of death – then go for it! But do make sure you’ve explored all options, and don’t just jump on the bandwagon. Not that there are enough FtMs to form a ‘bandwagon’ anywhere I’ve ever been.

I said that it was likely that a trans man would not want to date a lesbian, so the relationship may be doomed. I wouldn’t want to date a lesbian.  Dating a lesbian is not something men do, it’s not part of the social role expected of men, much like wearing high heeled shoes to work in an office. If men date lesbians or wear high healed shoes to  it doesn’t mean that they’re not men, but it does mean that they are transgressing the male social role. I also ventured to offer that most lesbians wouldn’t want to date men. One of the responses was that plenty of women labeled themselves as lesbians and still dated men, I had no right to challenge this because everyone had the right to label themselves.

Does everyone have a right to label themselves?

I can label myself as a man because I know that I am a man. But I can’t label myself as cis man, because I am not a cis man. It would be lying. When it comes to gender we in the trans community take the fact that yes, everyone has a right to label their gender. But my colleagues who work in gender reassignment don’t take this as a right, they expect trans people to have adopted the social role of the opposite sex prior to surgery and hormones.  I’m not sure whether I agree with my colleagues or other transpeople. Which is why I don’t get involved in that sort of work.

But we don’t have a right to label ourselves anything we please. For instance I might wish to declare that I am a vet, and start treating animals. But as it is I am not qualified to be a vet, and don’t know how to treat animals, so I can’t label myself as one because it is not true.Now back in my day lesbian, gay and bisexual was a label that described who you wanted to sleep with now and in the future. Lesbian women were women who slept with women and not men, when women realised that they were lesbians and came out they would often end their relationships. Now it seems that’s something different is going on. Now it seems that you can identify as a lesbian and still sleep with men. Apparently lots of lesbians do this and I am out of touch for not knowing this.

That may be true but if lesbian is a political identity and not a description of who you sleep with then several things happen:

• - It means that the label lesbian is actually something you choose. This will really confuse people who you have told that it’s something you can’t change.

• - More men are going to make sexual advances at lesbians. At the moment most men don’t make a sexual advance towards a woman who has told them that she is a lesbian. Now if it’s known that some lesbians choose to sleep with men then some men are more likely to make sexual advances towards lesbians.

• - It has medical implications. The international society of lesbians hasn’t told doctors of this change in definition. So most doctors will assume that lesbians don’t sleep with men, so are unlikely to ask if you are on contraception or at risk of pregnancy. I’ve seen lesbians who were really offended when I double checked that they couldn’t be pregnant before giving drugs or radiation that would harm a foetus. There are a number of drugs that are contraindicated in early pregnancy, and when they are given to women of childbearing age they have to be on reliable contraception. And that doesn’t mean condoms. I would insist that a heterosexual woman was on proper contraception, I wouldn’t insist that a lesbian woman was. I would assume that if a woman told me that she was a lesbian she was unlikely to have an accidental pregnancy. She may choose to get pregnant,but she is really less likely to be accidentally pregnant. If you are going to identify as a woman who is a lesbian, but sleeps with men then please do tell your doctor without being asked. Most doctors aren’t queer, and aren’t going to be aware of the change in definition of lesbian.

So it seems that the queer world has changed since I left it. Sexuality is about identity, not who you go to bed with.

There is no point doing something just because it was your childhood dream. There is certainly no point ruining your marriage because your life doesn’t quiet match your childhood dream.

The bizarre thing is that I have no idea where this dream came from. I was raised by hippies on a council estate. There was no one there who lived that sort of life. I suppose I must have seen it in colour supplements or on TV. Maybe it was in a Joanna Trollope novel. But it was a dream. And a dream I’m trying to let go of.

But at the moment holding onto a dream is likely to ruin my marriage, so actually a dream isn’t making my life better at all. It’s making it considerably worse. I need to give up on the dream to get my life better.

We’ve moved to a new house. A house we would love to stay in for ever and grow old in, This has reminded me how much of a full and active life we have now, and how happy we really are. I’m the sort of person that is always focused on going somewhere, to the extent that I often forget to enjoy the present. I just hope I don’t become one of those people who is so focused on the present that I forget to plan for the future. Life will be different without children, but not necessarily bad. Just being happy helps.

I’ve injected testosterone. It didn’t make the desire for children go away, but it does make some of the pain go away. The aching void of childlessness, the pain that was so great I didn’t know if I could bear it, disappeared within an hour of injecting. I would still love to be a parent, but with testosterone. I’d been a bit late with testosterone for a variety of reasons, mostly connected to the hassle involved in registering with a new GP, and having the ‘I’m trans’ conversation. I find the fact that testosterone made me want children less is confusing. I had believed that I could want children and still be male, but now I am starting to doubt that. I have had a hysterectomy so I know that there aren’t any oestrogen molecules hanging around and causing trouble. So it must be that testosterone makes me want children less. Odd. But it does explain a lot of things about the world.

And finally we’re discussing the possibility of weekend fostering. We haven’t applied, we’re just thinking about it. I don’t know what the outcome will be. I don’t even know if we’d be approved if we did apply. But just the fact that we’re thinking about it a nice thing.

When considering whether or not to adopt we need to consider what would cause the most pain. Adopting or Not Adopting. If you’re going to decide which would cause the most pain you need to decide how to measure pain. This is done with a unit called the ‘Ouchie’, which is the amount of pain that causes you to drink an entire bottle of wine, whilst crying.

Our problem can be expressed in the equation

P + i < 1/ 3f

Where:

P is my pain from not having a family.

i is her irration with my whinging on about it.

f is the amount of pain from a failed adoption.

If we don’t adopt the total pain in the household can be summed up as P + i. But the thing we are scared of is an adoption that doesn’t work out, the amount of pain from that would be ‘f’, however only about 1/3 of adoptions don’t work out, so we use 1/3f in our calculations. At the moment she feels that the total pain from not adopting (P + i) is less than the total pain from adopting (1/3f). I think it’s the other way around the total pain from not adopting is much less than the total pain of adopting.

So now we only have to accurately quantify the parameters, and put it together with some other factors to devise a Quality Adjusted marriage year.