#the testosterone is skyrocketing and god do i hate it

[im-sorry-what-ii]

fighting my way through 911 2x01 rn and its pure pain

[queeranarchism]

There and back again, a non-binary tale

Time for a longish personal trans story thing.

Back when I was transitioning, it was common for trans groups to have 0 non-binary people in it and for trans people to say that non-binary people were extremely rare and most people were solidly trans men or trans women. That was also something doctors said, and accessing transition care while non-binary was extremely difficult or simply impossible.

Some of that lingers today but it has gotten significantly less. Above all, non-binary visibility has skyrocketed. To a far greater extend than 10-20 years ago, trans people know that being non-binary is an option and can name a few non-binary people. Let me repeat that: the fact that trans people know that being non-binary is an option and can name a few non-binary people, is very recent.

Back when that wasn’t the case, non-binary trans people who needed physical changes often had a ‘there and back again’ kind of transition. They identified as or pretended to identify as a transman or transwoman, did the full transition that way and much later went on to identify as and present as non-binary from that new physical place.

So a non-binary person might first do the entire ‘trans woman’ transition and then start binding their chest and wearing suits and maybe using he/him pronouns. Or a non-binary person might first do the ‘trans man’ transition but then start presenting femme and maybe using she/her pronouns. That was pretty much my journey and the first fellow non-binary people I got to know had journeys like that. Not every non-binary person did that, but over the years I’ve met quite a few who did. 

And let me be clear: we were not ‘regretters’, even if some of us reversed a few physical changes. We were not ‘actually cis’. If anything, we were about the queerest, transest genderrebels you could imagine. We took the road that, according to most doctors and most trans people at the time, was forbidden, was too weird, was too queer.

This journey still happens. Some non-binary people still physically transition because know deeply that who they are meant to be is a very femme person in a testosterone shaped body, or a very masc person in an estrogen shaped body, etc. And that’s awesome as fuck. All my love to all those people. I feel a spark of kinship with people who shape their non-binary identity in that way.

But due to the very fortunate circumstances of increased acknowledgement of the existence of non-binary people, it seems to me that this journey has become less common. And as a ‘there and back again’ non-binary, I can’t help but feel a little bit sad about that sometimes. Back then, I hungered for other non-binary people, because it seemed like there was nobody like me. Now, I hunger for non-binary people who go on this particular journey, because it still feels like there is almost nobody like me.

So if it seems that I rail with a special kind of rage against people who try to group all trans people in ‘transmasc’ and ‘transfemme’, or assume that all ‘afab’ trans people have a specific kind of experience and a masculine gender representation while all ‘amab’ people have an entirely different experience and a feminine gender representation. (God, I hate those afab/amab words. they’re terrible), I am angry because that is the denial of the experiences of paradoxical, weird, there-and-back-again trans people. Which means it is a denial of me. And I have heard enough trans people tell me that my experience doesn’t exist to last two lifetimes. I’m done with that.

Not sure where I was going with this. I guess it’s a simple: let trans people be paradoxical. Let us be difficult to explain. Let us disturb your narratives. Let us go there and back again. Let us take estrogen and groom our beard. Let us inject testosterone and wear dresses every day. Let us change our pronouns again and again. Let us be as fluid as we happen to be. Let us transition more than once

& if you can’t see the beauty of all our paradoxes, leave us the fuck alone.

[lachlanwrites]

Black market hormones: How red tape is forcing a trans generation to self-medicate

 HORMONE THERAPY: Treatment for trans people in the UK is woefully inadequate, forcing many to consider risky alternatives

Lachlan Mykura reports on the difficulties of treatment for transgender people, documenting his own experiences and the bureaucracy surrounding them.

Transgender issues have long been a source of controversy and debate. In recent years, these issues have come under the spotlight. Younger generations are more able to explore their gender, and the concept of a strict binary is being slowly replaced with a far more fluid and flexible umbrella.

Not everyone who is transgender will transition medically, but for those who do it can be an arduous process bogged down by bureaucracy. While it is important to note that those who choose not to transition, or have no desire to transition, are valid, this article will specifically focus on the people that do.

I am Lachlan Mykura, and I am FTM - female to male transgender. My transition has been marked by wait times, delays, gatekeeping and uncertainty, so I did what a growing number of transgender people are doing. I decided to start taking hormones without a prescription.

To understand why I, and many other trans people do this, we need to look at the system and its failures. There are currently seven NHS gender identity clinics (GIC’s) in the UK, with plans for three more in Manchester, London and Merseyside. In 2015 there were 1,408 referrals to these clinics. In 2020 there were 2,728. With only seven clinics for thousands of referrals, wait times for NHS GIC’s have skyrocketed, and many clinics no longer publish their times, estimated to be years. Indeed, many of them seem to have completely ground to a halt.

One such clinic, The Laurels in Exeter, has 2,592 people currently on its waiting list, and yet saw only 2 people in 2020. One patient has been on the list for nearly 6 years, 17 times the NHS legal guideline of 18 weeks.

Many GP’s are uneducated or unused to trans issues, and don’t know the proper procedures for referring patients on to a GIC. I found this myself when I was beginning to consider medical transition, with one GP outright telling me they didn’t know how to help me.

Nearly a year later I managed to get a referral, and my waiting game began.

These wait times add to an already time sensitive process. Transgender people under 18 cannot go to most GIC’s. Tavistock is currently the only GIC that will see underage patients, and even getting to this clinic before you become 18 is a struggle.

Although transition can be successful at any age, the younger you start medical transition, the better the results are likely to be, especially for male to female (MTF) patients. By the time you can start hormones on the NHS, you will likely have gone through puberty entirely, and will have the sex characteristics of your assigned gender at birth (AGAB).

The NHS is a clumsy beast when it comes to gender care, and with the rapidly rising number of referrals, it may fall even further behind.

The NHS is also not currently very supportive of non-binary people looking to transition. A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is necessary to start hormones, and while the NHS has become more accepting of non-binary identities in recent years, some non-binary people may struggle to meet the criteria.

If you don’t want to wait for NHS treatment then there is the option for private treatment. In the UK this comes in the form of two providers, Gendercare and GenderGP.

Gendercare is a private network of doctors, and is staffed by some of the most experienced gender specialists in the UK. Unfortunately, this means it also has a price tag to match. Each of the doctors working at Gendercare set their own prices, but most tend to be around £300 for an initial appointment, and then £150 for follow ups, which are necessary to start on hormones.

GenderGP is a cheaper alternative, although the quality of treatment they offer is arguably worse. They are a telemedicine service, working on a system of ‘informed consent’. This means that during their consultations, they will tell you about any possible risks and effects of the treatment, but the end choice to start hormones is down to you. They don’t require any formal diagnoses. On paper, this sounds like an excellent choice, and I originally decided to go with them, paying my £65 initial appointment fee and talking to one of their psychologists.

However, GenderGP is not the most reputable service. Doctors Helen and Mike Webberly, the couple who started the service, have both been struck off by the GMC for providing hormones and puberty blockers to those under 18. This gave me cause for concern, but having seen firsthand the politicization of trans treatments, especially for those under 18, I thought that this wasn’t enough for me to stop using their services. The nail in the coffin for GenderGP came in October 2020, when their pharmacy, ClearChemist, said that they would no longer be working with GenderGP. This put GenderGP’s ability to prescribe hormones in jeopardy. Even though their services were cheaper, faster and accessible online, I didn’t know if they could fulfil what they promised. I decided to switch to Gendercare instead.

“The NHS is a clumsy beast when it comes to gender”

TESTOGEL: One of the forms of hormone treatment available to FTM transgender people.

I contacted two of the doctors working for Gendercare, who I thought would have the shortest wait times. One of them said that he could not accept me as a patient, and the other said that he could offer me an initial appointment in January 2021. Progress.

This January appointment would be followed up by another appointment or two with one of Gendercare’s endocrinologists. I would have paid around £1000 without even being sure I could get a prescription. As a student, I had more important things to spend money on, like instant ramen and rent.

I was sitting with friends one evening and the topic came onto hormones. I was lamenting the trials and tribulations of transgender treatment in the UK when one of the friends I was with, another trans man, piped up “I could give you my spare bottle.”

 Bingo.

 I thought about the prospect for a while, I knew people who took testosterone without a prescription and their transitions were going well. However, I was really nervous about it, I had no way of knowing my hormone levels, I wouldn’t have a consistent supply and, well, it just wasn’t a very good idea.

I did it anyway.

A few weeks of soul searching later I realised that I had known I was trans since I was a young teenager. I had been sitting on these feelings, hoping they would ‘go away’ or second guessing myself as to whether or not I was ‘really trans. But they hadn’t. They had stuck like toilet paper on a shoe throughout my teenage years and into my twenties. My excuses of waiting until I was an adult had no weight, after all, I was an adult now. Years of waiting, doctors appointments, and questioning and now here I was, being offered hormones on a silver platter over a glass of wine. I had to take it.

I contacted two of the doctors working for Gendercare, who I thought would have the shortest wait times. One of them said that he could not accept me as a patient, and the other said that he could offer me an initial appointment in January 2021. Progress.

This January appointment would be followed up by another appointment or two with one of Gendercare’s endocrinologists. I would have paid around £1000 without even being sure I could get a prescription. As a student, I had more important things to spend this money on, like instant ramen and rent.

I had no way of knowing my hormone levels, I wouldn’t have a consistent supply and, well, it just wasn’t a very good idea. I did it anyway.

Gel is, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to take testosterone, the other popular one being injection. Gel is a daily application which means that your hormone levels don’t suffer from the same rises and falls that weekly injection causes. However, with these smaller doses comes slower changes, on average.

I wasn’t too worried about this, since I didn’t really want incredibly quick changes when I had no access to a specialist to help monitor my levels. Injections are also cheaper than gel, but I didn’t need to worry about that, after all, I was getting mine for free. Besides, even if I didn’t hate needles, I wasn’t about to go injecting myself with drugs unless a doctor had told me to.

In order for trans men to do their injections, they need to be shown how to by a nurse, generally at their first appointment. If done wrong, injecting testosterone can cause pain, swelling, and infection.

The gel I use is called Testogel. Testogel dosage is measured by pumps, the bottle is designed so that each pump will give the exact same amount of gel. I started on one pump, since I wanted to stretch out the amount of gel I had for as long as I could. I didn’t know if I would be able to get another one on time, and I was fully aware that I was relying only on the generosity of my friend.

The changes have, as expected, come rather slowly. I have been on testosterone for around a month and a half now, and, unfortunately, I’m no closer to resembling Chris Hemsworth or Zac Effron than I was when I started. All in good time. What I have noticed is that my voice has dropped, and I’m plagued by embarrassing voice cracks at the worst of times. Every man has to go through them at some point and I’m no exception. God help me when I get stuck trying to grow a beard.

None of my fears about making a mistake have come to pass. I have been happy with all the changes, which is not something I could ever say about going through my first puberty.

The reasons that people choose to self-prescribe hormones are vast, not least because of the cost and time that goes into getting a prescription legally. The reasons, however, run much deeper than just personal cost.

Transgender treatment is a subject of fierce debate worldwide, and the UK is no exception. Recently, a lawsuit was brought against the Tavistock GIC by a woman who started taking puberty blockers when she was a teenager, and then detransitioned at 23. She believes that the NHS did not take enough precautions before prescribing her puberty blockers - which are fully reversible.

As a result of this, under 16’s in the UK may now no longer be able to give informed consent to start taking puberty blockers before they start on hormones at 18. While people who detransition are facing a very difficult time in their lives and deserve support, the backlash falls on actual trans people.

TERF groups (trans exclusionary radical feminists) see these detransitoners as martyrs who have been brainwashed and victimized by ‘the trans cult’. As a result, actual trans people face not only increased waiting times and inaccessible appointments but also increased media scrutiny and online vitriol.

Trans issues are in the limelight. Recently, Elliot Paige, who plays Vanya in The Umbrella Academy, came out as FTM, becoming one of the most high-profile celebrities to come out transmasculine. Trans men are often left out of public conversation, as trans women are more often the focus of transphobic tabloid media and TERF rhetoric. With more and more people coming out, either as transgender, or in support of transgender rights, trans treatment should hopefully become more and more accessible.

Written December 2020 By Lachlan Mykura

[awolspaceman]

how my dysphoria manifests i guess

just gonna warn u right here: this is gonna get in depth talking about dysphoria. if that triggers you, keep scrolling and have a lovely damn day! (also, i anticipate that this is going to get l o n g)

so i’ve seen a ton of shit coming from tucutes about how us “nasty horrible transmeds believe you need to despise yourself to be trans!!!!!!! they’re so harmful to the trans community!!!!!!!” so i just wanna dispel some of those myths. please keep in mind that i’m one person and my experience is totally not universal. i have trans friends who do hate themselves due to dysphoria, and i have friends who aren’t super dysphoric but still experience gender dysphoria. it’s a varied experience. here’s mine. 

i don’t hate my body. if we add up all the things i like/love about my body and then subtract everything i don’t like, we still end up with a positive. i got blessed by the genetics from my parents that i have a relatively masculine face, as well as a pretty pronounced adams apple by female standards. i have really nice eyes in my opinion, and i have some of the thickest eyebrows that i know of. so yeah, i got a masculine face. 

i am very unlucky with the rest of my body. from the neck down, here’s some of the things i like about myself: my collarbones, my shoulders, my hands, my arms, my calves, and my feet. those are all pretty masculine if you ask me. i’m 5′7 and wear US men’s size 9 shoes, and i’m a broad dude (my dad is disappointed in me for one reason and it’s that i don’t competitively swim). unfortunately, i’ve got a big chest. i don’t just have a big chest by trans guy standards, i have a big chest by female standards (if you wanted to put me in a size i’d be a 36 DD, which means i have a bulky ribcage and an even bulkier chest). i’m never perfectly flat while binding, and trust me, i’ve tried on a lot of binders. i live in sweatshirts. i’m also pretty damn curvy, with a smaller waist and thick thighs (mostly muscle, but it still makes me fairly hourglass). apart from my shoulders (which are probably the reason i don’t have that “perfect” hourglass figure thing), i have a super feminine build. that’s just how it be. we’re not even gonna talk about bottom dysphoria because i think you get how my entire body is contradicting itself.

so how does my dysphoria manifest, i hear you asking. my dysphoria is this weird thing that never really goes away. however, it’s not complete and total self hatred. let’s use the shower i took tonight as an example. when i look at myself naked, my body doesn’t register my feminine “bits” as mine. seriously. my brain cannot comprehend that my chest is a part of me. it cannot comprehend my lack of penis, so its circuits overload and i just feel... nothing about it. that feeling of nothingness is then replaced with a similar feeling to touching raw meat. just kind of “huh, that’s weird and kind of gross. i’d like this to be over as quick as possible, please and thank you.” i’m currently sitting in bed, and my chest is pressing into my stomach slightly. i’m not constantly focusing on it (yes, it’s physically uncomfortable, but it’s not making my dysphoria make me want to die), but in the back of my mind, the “ew raw meat” feeling is constantly running. not a fun time. my brain would like to be rid of that feeling as soon as possible. problem is, i’m kinda stuck with it. no matter how much i bind and how much pointless youtube i watch, it’s always there and isn’t going to go away until after i’ve had surgery. 

you know those cursed images that make you go “yeeeeeeeeesh, that’s n a s t y oh god it gets nastier the more i look”? yeah, that “ewwwwwwwww” feeling is the feeling i get. it just feels wrong, and i sure would like it to feel right. do i feel this way all the time? pretty much, unless i’m super distracted, which i try and do all the time. does my dysphoria get to debilitating self-hate sometimes? yeah. lemme explain, with a few choice excerpts from my life. 

this was june, 2018. not that long ago. i needed some sports bras so i could work out, go on long road trips, etc, without binding dangerously or for too long. let’s just say, buying high support sports bras for people with large chests is.... difficult. so, since my mum is a Saint and understands how my dysphoria works, we measured me and bought stuff online. when the stuff came in, there was a return deadline, so i needed to make sure it fit. this is where my dysphoria becomes near debilitating. i ended up sobbing in my room and writing in a small journal i had about how horrible i felt, and this is the gist of what i remember: i want a knife to cut off my chest. i dont care how painful it will be, i just need it GONE. 

i’m on a medication called norethindrone. it stops ovulation and therefore, i don’t get my period (its a fucking blessing. i gained a little weight with it but it’s not too bad, no heavy mood swings, and so if ur a trans dude who wants to stop your periods, check in with your primary doctor about it! they can prescribe it to you, you don’t need to be in gender therapy or anything). however, my natural hormones overloaded it once, about a year ago almost to the day. i got my period for the first time in four months (i had only been on the medication for about that long), and it was hell. i was having more cramps than i had ever had, and my dysphoria was just skyrocketing. i’d had the privilege of not menstruating for a while, and so i’d gotten used to it, and wasn’t prepared for the mental toll of my medication failing. it was horrible.

tomorrow, i’m going into the city with my parents to meet with some people to talk about freezing my eggs. it’s the one thing i need to figure out before i start HRT, so hopefully we figure it all out rather quickly (testosterone is on the horizon babey!!!!! we’re talkin like hopefully under a year until i can start it but idk). however, the thought of even talking about my uterus makes me feel sick. my brain refuses to acknowledge that i have it, so forcing it to acknowledge a part of me i try hard to ignore is 1. exhausting and 2. really distressing. talking about it with my parents made me dysphoric, and when this special flavor of my dysphoria rears its ugly head, i swear i can feel my internal organs shifting with discomfort. so, yeah, my dysphoria gets pretty nasty. 

so let’s just review. personally, my dysphoria manifests as this weird thing my brain cant quite comprehend but definitely does not enjoy, and sometimes it spikes to those self-hating, “everything about me sucks and i want to die” levels, but those are normally induced by me getting deadnamed or misgendered or i’m forced to think about aspects of my body that i work hard to ignore. this is my experience and i’m allowed to share it. not everyone’s is like mine, but i think maybe, just maybe, one person who sides with tucute ideology will read this and maybe, just maybe, they’ll change their mind about the “horrible self-hating transmed ideology” that other tucutes talk about and demonize. 

have a nice night y’all. get some sleep and eat breakfast tomorrow.

[shinylitwick94]

Finished “Red Rising”, by Pierce Brown.

With due respect to the people who convinced me to stick with it because it gets better, it really didn’t.

I am unimpressed and I think this gave me testosterone poisoning.

Here’s the thing, there’s a couple of things this book does well, and a couple of things it tries to do that I can respect.

Yet, it seems designed specifically to piss me off. My suspension of disbelief broke early and never really recovered.

Under the cut for rant, length, and spoilers.

To start with my biggest problem: First person POV. Present tense. While stuck in the head of an egomaniacal asshole.

Reading this from another character’s POV, or from a third person POV might have been acceptable. From Darrow’s POV? Fucking torture. Dear God I wanted him to lose and die so so badly.

I can’t stand him, I can’t stand his ego, I can’t stand his arrogance, I can’t stand his lack of empathy for anyone who isn’t of immediate use to him or connected to him, I can’t stand his monologue, I can’t stand that he does everything right at first try, I can’t stand the fact that every other character wants to suck his dick, and I most of all can’t stand the fact that the narrative clearly expects me to be in his corner. He comes so very close to being an outright Gary Stu it’s difficult to put into words. Darrow is a male power fantasy given written shape and I hate his bloodydamned guts.

However, and this is what annoys me most about this book, and makes me think it might have been readable in third person, there are moments, and there are narrative reasons for a lot of this. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like I can see that there’s more to his character than just this, but the writing fails to make me feel any of it. It tells me he is in rage because of his grief, it tells me he’s crying, but I don’t feel any of it. I just feel annoyed that I’m trapped in his head. And the fact that there are moments like this and the narrative does try is why I won’t actually call Gary Stu, but really I wouldn’t be surprised if other people said he was. For me he struggles just enough and makes just enough mistakes that I can let it slide.

So the fact that I’m stuck in Darrow’s head and fairly early on decided I don’t give a shit about this guy kind of poisoned this entire book for me. But there’s a lot of other things I didn’t like and a few that I did.

This whole setting is monumentally stupid and there’s no way around it. Sure, all YA dystopias need a good excuse to put their characters in a fishbowl and sort them into hogwarts houses, but this one goes above and beyond. The Society (yes, it’s called that) is a caste system so basic and dumb that it sounds like something I would have come up with at fourteen.

It’s also what justifies Darrow being so insufferably perfect, because he is genetically modified into being like the Golds of the higher caste, so he is made stronger, taller, smarter, and more condescending and arrogant. But ok, he’s in with other kids who also share these traits once he gets to the institute, so the playing field is more level, except they don’t and it isn’t, other than the condescending and arrogance part, which is a fundamental aspect of half the cast’s personality.

Once the game actually starts the stupidity of the whole thing skyrockets. The game itself and its structure makes no sense (although if I understood correctly it’s stupidity is a deliberate narrative choice here - fair, but no less annoying), the way the other kids act in game makes no sense,  the way the proctors act makes no sense. The most annoying thing about the game for me is that it’s basically rigged in Darrow’s favor because plot. Not in-universe, of course, but there are so many dumb decisions other characters do so that Darrow can look smarter by comparison that it becomes ridiculous. I remember there was one scene where he was trying to convince some other kids from a different group to join them on a raid and he’s all ‘they had three choices, X, Y, Z, and I planned for all of them’...forgetting the fourth option which was to tell you to fuck right off and let your team keep wearing itself out. And most of it is this kind of thing repeated ad nauseam.

I can live with a dumb setting and a dumb game if at least the other characters are treated equally by the narrative, but they really, really aren’t. They’re all props to mighty Darrow.

And speaking of props, let’s talk about sexism for a minute here. There’s a LOT of it in this book. Most of it is, again, narratively justified by the fact that the Society, despite being centuries in the future and having produced a near god-like race of invincible humans, and being capable of genetically altering brains enough that this idiot is actually made smart, just can’t get over traditional gender roles. And the fact that we’re stuck in Darrow’s head and he’s steeped into this shit.

Most of the girls in the games, especially early on, are useless, weaker than the boys (again, why?? when you have magic genetic modification and you know you could die in there?), and primarily exist as props to the male characters. And to be raped. There’s a lot of casual rape in this. So that Darrow can get angry. And feel sorry for killing one rapist (but most of the victims are never even named), and ‘share the punishment’ of the other for political reason (because the girl who was raped conveniently didn’t want him to pay for it. There is a lot of this book that conveniently goes Darrows’s way).

I can live with the baked in sexism just fine, but it’s the fact that Mustang and Antonia are basically the only female characters with agency that drives me up the wall. Quinn is mentioned a lot early on. We barely see her after she’s raped (to further Cassius’ and Darrow’s character arcs, of course), and the next time we see her after Darrow’s departure is to tell us she’s Roque’s girlfriend now. So happy that’s the thing you decided to mention, Darrow, so, so happy.

The other thing I want to mention quickly, and that I don’t necesarily count as a dislike, but the similarities to the other big YA dystopias have to be mentioned. This was one of these books marketed at the time as ‘Hunger Games for boys’, which, yeah, I can see that it’s aimed at teenaged boys, for sure. I’m definitely not the target audience for this. It also does have a lot in common with the Hunger Games, and Ender’s Game, and even shares a Greco-Roman theme with Percy Jackson.

I don’t see this as a problem, for the most part. It’s a fishbowl. There’s only so many dumb excuses you can get to put teenagers in a fishbowl, and they’re going to repeat. The only bit that really made laugh was the cave scene with Mustang. That was a little too close to Hunger Games for me to see it as anything but a ripoff. Really, the MC’s love interest is injured and they can only get help  by appealing to out-of-game authorities? Really?

However, like I said at the beginning, there are a few things I did enjoy.

I like what this is trying to be. I like the revolutionary angle here, and I suspect that in the sequels to this it might be better done than in THG. I like that Darrow does continue to see the evils and absurdity of the Society, and I like that he does call out the stupidity of a lot of things here.

I like that we see how cartoonishly evil this setting makes everyone, not just the big guys in charge, but the other kids and adults at various levels. They do read like kids who were brainwashed to think like this, and it does feel like a tragedy in some way.

I feel like there is a book I could have enjoyed hidden in here. Maybe if the narrative didn’t bend so hard in Darrow’s favor, maybe if it weren’t in first person, maybe if the writing was better at making me feel his emotions, rather than just tell me again and again how angry he is. Or maybe not, I don’t know. I tend to resent this kind of character in general. I can’t stand puffed up boys who think they’re better than everyone, and ‘badass’ carries very little weight for me as a character trait, sorry.

It’s frustrating, because I can sort of see what people like about it, and I can imagine that under circumstances I might have to.

As it is, I really didn’t enjoy this, and I most likely won’t pick up the sequels.

I’ll still give it a 3/5 for what it tries to do, and because I don’t think it’s even necessarily a bad book, just a really poor match for my own taste.