I haven’t been on these forums since Una posted her “Ask the” thread, and a lot has changed in those five years w.r.t trans visibility.
I’m 33 years old. I started estrogen therapy last March (so about 10 months ago). I have no reason to believe that I am intersex. I’ve been in a longterm relationship for eleven years, married for five. We live in Los Angeles.
OK, let me get the laundry list of standard questions out of the way… after saying “thank you”, sorry. So, first of all, thank you.
And now:
married to?
when did you realize you were trans?
when did your spouse learn about it? What was their reaction? I mean, given you’ve been together for 1/3 of your life they clearly didn’t run out of the room screaming, but there’s a difference between “O…K…” and “oh, OK!”.
how have other relatives, friends, coworkers, employers prospective or actual, reacted?
what changes have you noticed in how people treat you as you presented differently?
are you super-femme or not? If not, did you have an ultra-feminine stage? (I’m one of those women who never had one)
Any kids? How are you accepted at work?
I’m curious how - or if? - the estrogen therapy has affected you mentally. I read an essay years ago by a woman who had to take testosterone (not for gender dysmorphia issues - it was temporary IIRC) and the changes she described in her mental state were fascinating. Not radical Jekyll-and-Hyde but subtle stuff that really did align with some of the most common gender-based differences we all observe.
… dang, now I wish I could find that essay again.
Anyway, thank you for starting this & for sharing with us.
Are you still able to get erections and ejaculate?
Thank you for being willing to open the thread and face all these questions.
Do you identify as a straight woman, lesbian, bisexual or…?
Any plans to change your username? 
And thank you for the thread, I’m looking forward to reading more.
And lord knows there are going to be some really dumb and inappropriate, some on purpose, questions.
Are you considering surgery soon?
My wife is cis. We were in the same dorm together as undergrads – the “queer druggie” dorm. My fourth year of college (it took me six to finish), we were living together on campus. I started having some initial electrolysis work then, and my upper lip swelled up to maybe three times its size. I hid in the dorm room for about a week while she brought me food. At some point, I showed up with some Premarin (conjugated estrogens extracted from mare urine) with the intent to start self-administering, and this did not go over well – not because she’s anti-trans, but because she was worried about what this meant for our relationship, my safety, and my future. I didn’t bring it up again for about a decade. At the end of 2017, my dysphoria got significantly worse. This was exacerbated by the much increased visibility of trans people. Previously, I had resigned myself to living in the closet with a moderate level of anxiety. It seemed preferable to the alternative of being a social pariah. With increased media coverage, I began to feel an incredible amount of shame for not having come out ten or fifteen years ago – as though I were guilty of living a life inauthentically. In November of that year, I got shingles from the stress, and my wife was essentially like, “You’re thinking of gender stuff again. You should probably transition.”
I’m not really sure how my wife and I got together. When she was an undergrad, she was out as a lesbian – buzzed hair, cargo pants, an occasional mention of a past girlfriend, and a rainbow flag pin that she wore always. I catch her checking out other women on occasion. I don’t question the good things that happen to me. Heck, she once got me a private lunch with Kate Bornstein. Our first date was to a drag show in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. There’s a reason I married her.
Most of my friends are some flavor of queer. Homophobia and transphobia have always been absolute deal-breakers for friendships, so I didn’t have any problems. I used to work in academia. I lost my job a few months after coming out. I’m told it was due to a lack of funding. My coworkers were predominantly undergrads, grad students, and postdocs – all my age or younger. My generation doesn’t care. The PI is only a few months older than I am, and he was working on getting tenure. His priorities were elsewhere. I have not attempted to find another job.
I’m not close with much of my family. I’m not even sure how many of them know. My grandparents are all dead. My father is coping with his mortality; some of his older siblings are on their death beds. When I came out to him, his response was essentially, “You’ve always been unhappy. Do what you need to do. I’ll be dead in five years.” My mother is, according to her, “very supportive of the trans community”, but did not take my coming out well. She has a remarkable tendency to say something thoughtless, like “Well you’re not going to make a very attractive woman”, or “How are you going to be a woman with no hips?” Again, everyone in my own generation doesn’t care.
How femme am I? Not terribly. Just kidding. Actually, that picture is very atypical. I simply don’t have the time. Putting on makeup makes me highly distressed because it means I have to stare at myself for long periods of time. I’m still working on beard removal, and my beard shadow is so dark that I need plenty of makeup to hide it. It’s just not worth it to me. I usually dress like a goth Diane Keaton who moved to Santa Fe and became an art teacher. A lot of Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen, and All Saints. Big, chunky jewelry and geometric prints. Being 5’9" with a 25" waist means I fit into a lot of fashionable clothes off-the-rack. I understand that this is atypical for most trans women, so I just count my blessings. My wife likes to exclaim, “I’m the butch one!” – and I guess that’s very true. Honestly, despite not wearing makeup, I can tend to be a bit draggy – I mean, I carry a designer hand-fan that I snap open for dramatic flair. I wouldn’t call that “femme”; no cis woman does that. It’s more an acknowledgment that, if people are going to stare at me, I’m going to give them something to look at.
Straight (and I use the term to mean cis-hetero) men are usually oblivious to how I present unless I go very over-the-top. Occasionally someone will sneak a peek at my breasts and then get a look of panic. Lyft drivers see a feminine name when they come to get me, and when they see that I’m trans, they shut down. Absolutely no communication. I see no difference in the way gay men treat me. Some still want to fuck me. Women are now much more open. Sometimes, particularly among younger women in the service industry, there’s a great deal of “ma’am-ing”, which feels forced and performatively woke. Maybe they’re afraid that I’m going to explode in a fit of rage if they don’t gender me correctly. Older people give me the stink-eye. I’m threatened with violence maybe once every two weeks, always in broad daylight. I feel safer at night, surprisingly, because no one can get a clear view of my face. Usually, someone will come and restrain my would-be assailant – which is fortunate because if someone were to attack me, I would have no choice but to roll over and let them wail on me. I have had to fire off some warning shots from a stun device a few times.
I first started feeling dysphoric when I hit puberty, maybe around 12 or so, although I have memories when I was much younger of seeing gender-bending folks in public – I didn’t have the understanding to parse whether these people were drag artists or crossdressers or just dumb college kids having fun – and thinking that that was incredibly cool. It took me until college to realize that, yes, I was likely trans. A big stumbling block was a preconceived notion of what a trans woman “should” look like, and this idea that dysphoria meant I should be desperate enough to do something like cut off my penis with a steak knife. As my therapist recently pointed out, 9th grade cis boys do not regularly crossdress at school, nor do they research trans surgeries in their spare time, particularly in 1999. My introduction to trans people was also when I was 12, through the Internet – back when no one older than say 35 knew what was on it. I identified very strongly to the “weird” ones – Reverend Chris Korda, Genesis P-Orridge, Amanda Lepore. There’s nothing inherently “female” about founding a suicide cult, or replacing all of your teeth with gold casts, so I just assumed I was a weirdo. Most of my friends will tell you that I am, independent of my transness.
No kids. Psychiatric problems run in my family, and on balance I think life is pretty shitty. I don’t think it’s moral for me to bring another life into the world. We can always adopt.
I’m currently unemployed.
My hormone regimen differs from the standard WPATH recommendations. I’m not on any sort of anti-androgen. Instead, I’m on massive doses of injectable estradiol, which is enough to completely nuke my testosterone. My estrogen levels are much higher than those of a typical cis woman, though.
I was never able to cry before starting E. On E, I involuntarily cry to very stupid things, like top-40s radio. It is embarrassing. I recently started taking Effexor, which eliminated my ability to cry again, so it was a good 9 months. My sex drive is completely gone. Thinking of sex makes me physically ill, in the same way that being offered a slice of cheesecake when you’ve already eaten too much will make you sick. No thank you. Aside from those effects, not much has changed, to be honest. If I’m late for a shot, I start getting crabby and lethargic.
If you want to maintain your erections, you have to masturbate regularly. That doesn’t sound like a problem for you dudes, but on E, your sex drive vanishes, and masturbation seems like a terrible chore. If you don’t masturbate, your penis atrophies. Most dudes have enough spontaneous erections where this isn’t an issue. If I were to get an erection now, since I rarely have them, it would be incredibly painful. I do not ejaculate when I orgasm. I fire blanks.
A lot of trans women that I follow on Twitter seem to be fucking all the time. I don’t understand why or how. One of them who is a sex worker posted a video of her injecting TriMix into the base of her penis, and that cleared up a lot for me. For being stereotyped as some sort of sexual deviant, I find my lack of libido to be pointedly absurd.
I’ve always identified as bisexual. If “pansexual” were in common use when I was younger, I’d probably identify as that. I first had sex with a man at 14, and with a woman also at 14. Most of my relationships with men have been out of the public eye, although my bisexuality was always an open secret. I once asked my wife, “Why does everyone assume I’m bi? I don’t explicitly tell people that I am. Do I give off queer vibes?” and her response was, “Oh, it was probably all those guys you fucked.”
I don’t know how to change my username. I recall having two accounts is against the SDMB rules, so I guess I’m stuck.
Thanks for starting this thread. I’m a parent of a transgender child: well she’s now officially an adult, I suppose.
I have no specific questions, but am interested in following this conversation.
As I recall, PM TubaDiva and ask her.
Rhonda Raygun? Ronnie? The Magnificent Gerbil? The last just to be silly…
I’ll get an orchiectomy as soon as I’m able. I’ve never felt any genital dysphoria, and so have no intention to get a vaginoplasty.
I’m getting three facial surgeries over the next two years. Usually, facial feminization is a one-and-done procedure, but I sat down with my surgeon, and he just stared at my cephalograms for a good minute before exclaiming, “Well you’re an interesting case.” I currently wear braces in preparation for surgery #1, which will involve a modified Le Fort 1 osteotomy, where they split my upper jaw into three pieces and reposition them. I’ll also get my jawline tapered and a mandibular setback. Surgery #2 will be primarily a browbone reduction. Surgery #3 will be a nose job and a tracheal shave.
I don’t need a breast augmentation. I think it’s sorta fun to see what I grow on my own. I wasn’t expecting anything at my age, and my low expectations were very much exceeded.
I honestly don’t care. You’re all a bunch of strangers on the Internet.
I’m going to update this, because you asked how I “identify”. When I came out, a number of people excitedly told me, “So you’re a lesbian now!”, and my response has always been, “I guess…?” I didn’t grow up particularly attuned to lesbian culture. I snuck into gay bars when I was young, I slept with gay men, and I got called a f*ggot growing up. When my wife mentions the lesbian literature she read growing up, I am very clueless. So, definitionally, I suppose our relationship is a lesbian relationship. I don’t think of it in those terms though. I will say that, after eleven years of being in a “straight” relationship, we’re both happy to be visibly among our people again. Bi erasure sucks.
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think I have a gender identity. I don’t even like talking in terms of sexual or gender identities. The “is-ness” of it seems too private, in a Wittgensteinian beetle-in-a-box sort of way. I rarely mention this, because these views run counter to typical trans thought, and they’re very similar to arguments used to deny trans people their genders. I much prefer to think in terms of actions and desires. I sleep with these sorts of people. I find that person attractive. This part of my body distresses me, and I would like to alter it in this way. I wish to be treated socially in this manner. I suspect that in ten years, I’ll be seen as a relic, in the same way as when I talk to people who transitioned in the 90s and I hear the stuff that comes out of their mouths. Wow!
Despite my philosophical heterodoxy, when people tell me they “identify” as X, I make the mental adjustments to see them as they wish to be seen. We all want to be taken seriously as who we say we are, and we’re just making the best out of the hands we’ve been dealt.
I have a reputation for being very dumb and inappropriate. That’s OK.