Well, as you should know, I started hormone therapy back in May of 2024. I really didn’t have the opportunity to do this sooner in life no matter how much I wanted to. And with 2027 coming up I figured that this was the only chance that I was ever going to have to transition.
May 2024 was when I started. This blood test was to establish what my base hormone levels were.
June was the first blood test after I had started taking estradiol. My testosterone levels were cut just over half. Estrogen was starting to make its presence felt.
The July blood test showed a nice jump in estrogen levels. By this point in time I had noticed that my facial hair growth had slowed down, my skin was a lot softer, fat on my body was squishier, and I was starting to grow breasts.
The August tests show that my estrogen levels can stand to go a little higher. Hopefully the “results are pending” for my testosterone levels indicate that my testosterone levels are so low that they’re running the samples again to make sure that they’re not misreading the results.
It’s going to take a few months for the changes to really start to set in.
I’m going to reside somewhere in between the worlds of male and female. Never wanted to be male, but won’t be 100% female either.
What kept me from transitioning earlier in life?
I would have to say wholeheartedly the environment that I spent my childhood within.
This was Canadian Armed Forces policy from 1973 until 1994.
Yes, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence will both wholeheartedly point out that I was not a member of the Canadian Forces. But my father, master corporal Richard Gill was. My social worker, Captain Terry Totzke was.
A report that was commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces in 1996 and released in 2001 entitled “Canadian Forces Response to Spousal Abuse in Military Families” had a few interesting things to say that might explain how catastrophic CFAO 19-20 was toward me.
I have never been able to find a corresponding report on violence against children in military communities.
Military social workers were seen by many to be “company employees”. And that they were. They were officers within the chain of command. They had rank over members such as my father, plus they also had to answer to their own superiors.
Military social workers were often lacked the credentials required to be a civilian social worker, and often simply remustered from other branches of the military. This was the same for military police back in the day. You didn’t join the Canadian Forces specifically to be a military police officer or a member of the Canadian Forces Special Investigation Unit. You could simply transfer from another completely and totally unrelated branch of the military if you decided that you wanted to be a member of the military police.
So…….. here we have Captain Totzke, instructed by his training in the Canadian Forces that ANY sexual abnormality was an undesirable mental illness that needed to be eliminated from the Canadian Forces at any cost, and here we have me, fresh off of CFB Namao and fresh from the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal in which the military police, the CFSIU, and the base commander Colonel Daniel Edward Munro knew not only about Captain Father Angus McRae having committed “acts of homosexuality” with children on the base. But the military also knew full well about the actions of the babysitter.
No doubt the military rationalized that we were all homosexuals.
If Captain Totzke didn’t really have any type of credentials for social work, this might explain why his actions were completely baffling to my civilian social workers. Might also explain why he thought that it was completely appropriate to threaten me with arrest by the military police if I ever kissed or touched another boy on base.
As far as the military was concerned, there was no difference between us kids down at the lower age spectrum, and the 14 year old babysitter, and the 50 something chaplain. We were all guilty of committing the criminal code offence of Gross Indecency , which was the crime of two males having sex.
So yeah, it would be safe to say that the Canadian Armed Forces, CFAO 19-20, captain Terry Totzke, master corporal Richard Wayne Gill, and pretty well the entire military hierarchy enforced by the National Defence Act slammed me into the closet, and slammed the door shut.
I’m almost 100% certain that the abuse at the hands of the babysitter and McRae on CFB Namao had no effect on my gender identity nor my orientation.
I’m of the belief, and science backs this up, that gender and gender identity rely on more than just XX or XY chromosomes. There’s the timing and levels of hormones released in the foetus, there’s the mother’s exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, and there’s just good ol’ variations presented by the expression of the genes.
The human foetus, just like the foetus of most mammals, is predisposed to become female.
This is why you can’t generally scan for the gender of a foetus before 10 to 11 weeks as all foetuses will appear to be female.
If the foetus has XX chromosomes its gonads will develop into ovaries, which will then start secreting minute amounts of estrogen which will allow the foetus to keep developing towards female.
If the foetus has XY chromosomes its gonads will develop into testicles, which will then start secreting minute amounts of androgens. This will halt the development of female external and internal reproductive organs, and start forming masculine reproductive organs. The brain of the foetus will undergo masculinization.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are both “hard coded” in utero.
If the brain didn’t have orientation or identity hardwired into it, human reproduction would have been almost absolutely impossible.
Nobody goes to school to learn how to have sex.
The brain is hardwired for this.
Only ignorant institutions or ignorant people would think that gender identity or sexual orientation are something that someone chooses on a whim
Beeshive 