Gender – Beeshive

Day Two

Nothing much to report here.

I’m on day Two.

I don’t really expect to see any results for a couple of weeks.

Mental changes should start showing up first.

Physical changes should be showing up in a few weeks.

Facial hair should be the first to slow down, followed by hair on the other parts of my body that females typically don’t have increased hair growth at puberty such as their backs or their chests. Arm and leg hair will slow down but not by much.

Muscle loss should be coming up shortly after that.

The neat thing is I’m off work for the month of June for my annual vacation and this is when most of the new changes will start to come into effect.

When I go back to work after my vacation there should be some noticeable changes.

I’m hoping that after my first three months on 50 ug patches that I can look at something stronger. But this will depend on the results of my blood tests.

As long as nothing goes out of whack and as long as my body processes the estrogen properly I can’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be able to step the dosage up.

One thing that I didn’t anticipate with transitioning is that blood tests will be a frequent requirement. For the first while they’ll be monthly. This is just to make sure that my androgen levels are decreasing like they should and that the estrogen is not harming my liver.

Estradot

Well, I got my prescription for Estrogen.

Because I’m over 50 my doc wants to work me up to the full dose of between 100 – 400 mcg of Estradiol

My starting dose will be two 50 mcg patches per week.

I’ll have to go for blood tests every four or five weeks to see how things are progressing.

The blood work will guide us in ramping up my dose of estrogen.

Once the estrogen is under control then my doc will start me on an androgen blocker such as Spironolactone.

Between the estrogen and the androgen blockers my testicles won’t stand a chance. They’ll start shrinking on their own.

It’ll be about a year before I can request surgery to remove what I want to have removed.

If everything goes fine then I should start sprouting breasts in about 3 to 6 months. My breasts will max out in about 2 to 3 years. And if I stop taking hormones my breasts will remain.

My testicles will start to shrink in about 3 to 6 months and will reach maximum effect in 2 to 3 years. This will be permanent even if I stop taking hormones.

My muscle mass will start to decrease in 3 to 6 months and I will have achieved maximum muscle loss in 1 to 2 years.

Decreased growth of facial and body hair in 6 to 12 months with maximum effect in 3 years.

My skin will start to soften between 1 to 6 months. It’s unknown when the maximum effect will occur.

If my gender dysphoria and my gender related issues resolve with hormone therapy, then I should be able to decrease my anti-depressants.

There are some side effects, such as an increase risk for stroke, blood clots, etc.

But to me the risks are more than worth it.

Am I happy that I’m finally starting to transition?

Yes.

This is something that I have wanted to do for so long.

Am I upset that I let the CFB Namao issue get in my way?

Honestly, had I started to transition back in 2008 when I had changed my name in preparation for transitioning I think that the CFNIS would have taken me even less seriously if I had shown up for my video statement in a dress with breasts than they already did.

I can only wonder what Richard would have thought seeing me after my transition.

Work is going to be wild over the next while. Yeah, I’ve worn dresses, skits, kilts, etc. for an eternity at work. But I don’t think that anyone at work has any ideas of what’s coming down the pike.

< 24 hours to go.

Okay, so I have less than 24 hours to go before I go see my nurse practitioner tomorrow to start on Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Many years I have waited for this.

Always something in the way.

Work.

Ghosts from my past.

A 13 year battle with the Canadian Armed Forces.

Have to take things one day at a time.

Transitioning is hard enough, but thankfully I’m no longer a military dependent.

If Captain Terry Totzke tried to destroy me because of the homosexuality that I had exhibited when I “allowed” myself to be molested by the babysitter and Captain McRae, just imagine what would have happened if I had told Terry if I felt like I should have been a girl.

My father’s disdain that he exhibited towards me after the CFB Namao fiasco and the absolute silence he directed towards me after I sent him the letter in May of 2008 explaining why I had changed my name tells me exactly how Richard would have reacted to me as a kid if I had declared that I wanted to be a girl.

And the fact that the community that I lived in and grew up in was governed by Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 should explain to you that growing up as a trans kid on base would have been absolutely impossible and not tolerated in the least.

I honestly don’t know what things are like on base these days. I moved out of the house when I was 16, and except for two months in 1990 I have never lived on a Canadian Armed Forces Base since.

Sure, the Canadian Armed Forces have attested that things are different these days. But they’ve been saying the same thing about their flawed military justice system since the days of Somalia, and they’ve been saying the same thing about sexual assaults in the military since the ’80s.

The Canadian Armed Forces is the penultimate “old boys club” and they’re used to getting what they want and they don’t and won’t tolerate what they don’t want to.

DNA TESTING

On another front:

I honestly don’t know what to expect from this.

My mother is potentially Chinese on her maternal side and Quebecois French on her paternal side, I expect to see some of that. How strong the Chinese ancestry will be is anyone’s guess. I never met my maternal grandparents. And Marie never spoke about her mother other than to say that she died young from an epileptic seizure in the bathtub.

On my father’s side I expect to see Cree ancestry and some Irish. My paternal grandmother was Swampy Cree and my paternal grandfather was Irish.

It’ll be interesting as mammals share more of their DNA with their mothers than with their fathers, but the father’s DNA controls the expression of some genes.

All humans carry the mtDNA of their mothers. That is the mitochondrial DNA of our cells come only from our mother, which they got from their mother, and so on and so on.

As I said, it will be interesting to see what my lineage is.

Also, I’m curious to see how many half siblings I have.

And how many extended family members there are.

Now, bear in mind this will only be as successful as the number of relatives that have also completed a DNA test.

So, May will be an interesting month.

Saturday May 4th, 2024.

People have asked if I have ever been involved with any type of queer support groups in the past.

No.

No I haven’t.

I don’t do well in groups.

Never have, never will.

I’ve always been on my own.

In Toronto as a kid I would always sneak down to the Pride parade but I would always enjoy it from the periphery.

Even though homosexuality wasn’t an outright criminal offence in the ’80s, the police were still mostly of the old school.

And of course there was the fear that I’d be caught in the vicinity of one of these parades or events.

I guess that I was carrying around the teaching of Terry.

I went to a few pride parades in Vancouver during the ’90s. Again just watching from the periphery.

What I always loved about the early parades was how “in-your-face” they were. It’s like the participants in the parades were wiping off all of the shit that society had thrown on them and were throwing that shit right back in the face of society.

But then the double aughts came.

And the pride parades started to become more corporate, more generic, and less offensive.

2006 was the last parade that I went to watch and the last pride event that I went to.

To be honest, pride events were never too appealing to me because of the overt presence of alcohol.

When my doctor and I first started discussing my desire to transition into something other than male he proceeded to give me a list of groups that I could join.

The thing is I don’t want to join a group.

I have been on my own all of my life.

I function better on my own.

I can’t see myself willingly becoming part of a group.

So…… off I go on yet another adventure.

Transitioning from male to not a male.

Anyways, time to head off and get my nails done.

I’m thinking something of a hot pink shade this time.

This time next week.

Well, this time next week things will be a bit different.

At this point next week I’ll have had estrogen coursing through my body for just over 24 hours.

And for the first time in my life since I was about 12, I’ll be experiencing diminished levels of androgens.

Tiresias transformed into a woman
by Pietro della Vecchia

“Take a little trip back with father Tiresias
Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through
I have crossed between the poles, for me there’s no mystery
Once a man, like the sea I raged
Once a woman, like the earth I gave
But there is in fact more earth than sea”
From “Cinema Show” by Genesis from their 1973 album
“Selling England by the Pound”.

The goal of this is not to become a woman.

The goal of this is to get as far away from being male as I can.

XY syndrome is a life altering disease and humanity should be searching for a cure for the defective “Y” chromosome.

Through my entire fucked up crazy life there have always been a few constants.

The first is that I’ve never felt like this body is my body. It’s always felt like it has belonged to someone else.

As I said in other posts, since I was young I was always certain that I was going to have breasts.

When I hit puberty and my hips didn’t widen it felt odd. I know it’s hard to explain, but starting at puberty and even existing to the very day is the odd sensation that my hips are not where they should be.

And the junk that I do have has always felt foreign to me.

And even though genetically I am a male, men have always been a source of fear for me. I have never felt okay around men. And that was well before CFB Namao.

Yes, I did often make pleas to the imaginary friend in the sky to make me into a girl when I was younger.

And there were times as a kid that I wanted to be a girl so badly that it was eating me up from the inside out.

Through my teen years and my 20’s and my 30’s I had always but my desire to me a woman off as being a side effect of the sexual abuse on CFB Namao or my involvement with Terry.

But, as I got towards my my 30s I began to realize that my desire to be a woman and the feeling that I was in the wrong body was not shaped by the sexual abuse on CFB Namao or my involvement with Terry.

These feelings and these desires have been with me for as long as I can remember.

I really hope that things go as smooth as I want them to.

If I don’t have any bad reactions to the androgen blockers and the estrogen I’ll be very happy.

I can’t help but wonder what my brain and what my emotions will be like with the removal of androgen from by blood stream.

What will it feel like to have estrogen flowing through not only my body, but my brain as well.

Will my way of thinking change?

Will my view of the world change?

If everything works out fine I’m really hoping that I can go for bottom surgery. As I’ve said before, I just want to get everything removed down there.

I don’t want anything added to or created.

No penis

No testicles

No scrotum

All gone

Nothing but a smooth scar closing everything up down there.

A small hole to pee from.

But nothing else.

The male curse will be gone.

Banquished

Never to haunt me or traumatize me anymore.

Hopefully the male craziness and insanity are washed away from my brain.

Why now?

That’s a good question.

If I had to pinpoint one thing, that would be the teachings of Terry.

Terry of course was Captain Terry Totzke, my military social worker from when I was a kid.

Terry and of course my own father had such a toxic effect on my development.

You gotta admit that blaming a child for their own sexual abuse is fucked in the head, and blaming that child for the sexual abuse of their sibling was even more fucked in the head.

Sure, there were more than likely other kids growing up in the same period of time that I was who had a different gender identity than what their physical body presented.

But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they didn’t have a toxic philosophy being rammed down their throats and beat into their heads by a military social worker.

Prior to working at the hospital I don’t honestly believe that there was a single employer that I worked for in which transitioning would have been acceptable.

And with absolutely no support from home I couldn’t just go shopping around for a job in which I’d feel safe transitioning.

When I started at the hospital, it still took time to ascertain if this would be a safe place. And for the most part it was. Well, save for the outside management company that was running my department.

I had a series of phone calls with my father in August of 2006. These phone calls were the last time I’d ever speak to Richard. After the initial phone call that I made to him in the wee hours of August 7th, 2006 he’d place almost daily phone calls to me. This ended towards the middle of October when I told him of my plans to go after the babysitter.

I honestly can’t remember if I ever breeched the topic of gender reassignment. I don’t think I did. But if I had been talking about the babysitter and Terry, Terry calling me a homosexual for allowing myself to have been abused by the babysitter would have come up.

In 2007 I made the decision to start proceeding down the road towards transition. I started to pick out my new name.

I tried so many different combinations. And there were more exotic names, but they just didn’t work. So Bobbie Garnet Bees was born.

There was the paperwork, the finger printing, the records checks. I got notified in March of 2008 that the RCMP had cleared my background check and that I was cleared to change my name. The rest of the paperwork started flowing in. And in May of 2008 my birth name officially became dead.

I took a change in employment in 2009 due to a previous employer contacting me and connecting me with the new owners of a business that I had worked at.

This didn’t work out, but it did set me up for going to the Supreme Court of BC for an employment matter that we settled out of court.

This settlement convinced me that it was finally time to go after the babysitter for what he had done.

This one decision derailed my desire to transition by 13 years. I can’t decide if this was a wise move or if I had made a very stupid move.

I had absolutely no involvement with the Canadian Armed Forces from the time I was 16 and moved out of the PMQ on CFB Downsview. I had not paid attention to the news stories about the defective military justice system or the rampant sexual assault problem plaguing the military. I was completely blindsided to discover just how big a problem the Captain Father Angus McRae matter had been on CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980, and I was even more devastated to discover the extents to which the Canadian Armed Forces were willing to go to keep the connection between Captain McRae and his teenaged accomplice, the babysitter, hidden and buried in the past.

Who would have ever thought that the Government of Canada would have willingly given the military their own justice system with which the military could use to hide problems and make issues disappear.

Now is the time for my transition.

The government has delayed my ability to obtain medical assistance in dying.

The class action is proceeding. I honestly have no idea of what amount of compensation the Government of Canada is willing to put forth. It’s definitely not going to be anything spectacular, but it will at least be something of an acknowledgement.

I will be able to start to draw from my pension in a few years. Drawing from my pension and taking part time employment will allow me some flexibility to explore different paths.

But, I can’t help but feeling like an idiot for not doing what Richard suggested and just leaving the babysitter matter alone in the past and not gone and stuck my nose into this “shit” as he put it.

Instead of wasting 13 years of my life, I could have transitioned back around 2011 instead of setting myself up to be destroyed by the Canadian Armed Forces for the second time in my life.

I guess I’ll just have to play it day by day going forward.

Is M.A.i.D. behind me?

As I responded to Zuzu, no, I haven’t given up on obtaining Medical Assistance in Dying.

Transitioning is something that I want to get off my plate.

It’s like a dying child using “Make-A-Wish”.

Transitioning, or more appropriately, nullifying my male gender is something that I had wanted to do all of my life.

I have never identified as a male.

I didn’t ask to be a male.

So, at least I’m going to take some big steps.

Start off with the androgen blockers and the estrogen replacement.

I will lose a lot of my muscle bulk, which is good. Mentally my body has always felt much smaller that what I physically am.

Next step would be orchiectomy and then the penectomy.

And that’s it.

The genitalia that I’ve always considered to be foreign is gone.

The body that I have never identified with is gone.

The body that I will have will have the breasts that I always felt were missing. They won’t be much to look at, but at least they’ll be breasts.

The hips that I have always felt should have been wider with the iliac crests for me to rest my hands on will never be there. Male puberty was a long time ago, and some things can’t be undone.

No labia majora, no labia minora, no clit, no vagina, no cervix, no uterus, no ovaries.

A female?

No.

A male?

Thankfully no.

As I discussed in a previous blog post, I never thought that I was giving off signs as to my gender issues, but nonetheless others have picked up on it. These were usually men who were certain that I was gay due to some effeminate traits or signals that I wasn’t aware that I was giving off.

Unfortunately I will now have another faction of people to deal with.

There will be women out there that will despise me.

You’ve never had a period!

You’ve never experienced growing up knowing that you could be raped at any moment.

You’ve never had a pap smear.

Yep, sure.

I’ll never get to become pregnant and have children.

The raped part?

Sure, technically in Canada rape was not a crime that could be committed against boys. But I did spend 1978 to 1980 getting penetrated by my babysitter. I would go on to be sexually abused by men, some of whom were in positions of authority.

If anything I am only following the whims of my genes and my DNA.

I am firm believer in the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate.

Yes, the male brain and the female brain are identical in build. Autopsies, MRIs, fMRIs, CT scans, EEGs have shown that for the most part male and female brains function the same. But what these scans and tests can’t yet detect is the wiring of the brain.

The human brain has to have some instinctual information hardwired into it otherwise every human born would have to learn the basics at birth.

Breathing?

Instinctual

Swallowing?

Instinctual

Latching on to your mother’s nipple?

Instinctual.

Women don’t have to learn from other women how to engage in sexual intercourse just as men don’t have to learn from other men how to engage in sexual intercourse.

“So how was Henry last night? Did you have sex with him?”
“Oh, sure I did, if you can call it that”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he kept rubbing his flaccid penis against my ear”
“What?”
“Yeah, he said that no one had shown him how to get an erection and he didn’t know how to make his penis hard”
“But why your ear? Don’t you know where his penis is supposed to go you silly girl?”
“My mother never showed me, so I thought that it was supposed to be my belly button, be he told me not to be silly.”

Sexual behaviours are basic instincts. Every human is born with instinctual level knowledge as to how their genitals work.

All humans begin their first few weeks not as a blank slate, but as a fetus that appears to be female from the outside.

This is why most clinics will not tell the parents the gender of their child, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that until about 12 weeks its almost impossible to do with anywhere near 100% certainty.

Prior to 6 to 8 weeks all fetuses have labia and all fetuses have vaginas, and all fetuses have a clitoris.

Over the next few weeks things will begin to change.

All fetuses have a pair of gonads in their lower abdomen.

If the fetus has XX chromosomes the gonads will descend into the pelvis where they will become ovaries.

If the fetus has XY chromosomes the gonads will develop into testes and they’ll descend to down to where the scrotum will eventually be.

The timing of the development of the gonads is critical as the gonads will drive major changes in the fetus.

If the gonads become testicles, they’ll start to secrete androgens, one of which is testosterone. The labia majora will close and fuse together, this is why males have that ridge in their scrotum. The labia minora will become the penile raphe. The clitoris will become the glans of the male penis.

If the fetus is XX, the gonads will become ovaries which will secrete estrogen and other hormones associated with female development. The genital features that are in place already will continue on with their development. The uterus will form as will the fallopian tubes.

There is a very interesting condition that occurs when a fetus has XY chromosomes but has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS. This whole topic is well beyond me, but basically due to a genetic coding issue the androgen receptors on the cells in their body are unable to bind with androgen molecules.

These people are born with genitalia that looks female. And nothing is suspected until their teenage years when they fail to develop secondary sexual characteristics and they fail to start to menstruate.

A blood test or a tissue test will show that instead of being XX, their cells are all XY. They have no uterus and they have undeveloped testicles in their abdomen.

Other gender variations arise from XO, XXY, XXX, XYY. Even “normal” XY and XX can have a multitude of variations due to variations of genes on other chromosomes.

The idea that there are only two genders if fucking laughable.

The above paragraphs deal with gender. The next few paragraphs will deal with gender identity.

I am of the firm belief that gender identity is hardwired into the brain along the same time the gonads form into either testicles or ovaries. Your brain has to be wired to be able to use the various parts of your body. To say that the human brain is formed as just a billion random neurons with no purpose is laughable. Every human brain, barring genetic defects, has the same sections that preform the same functions.

There has been quite a bit of research done into the development of the human brain so far as it relates to gender and orientation.

Much like the genitals of a fetus require androgens to interrupt the development of female genitals the human brain as it turns out is destined to be “female” unless it is masculinized by exposure to androgens.

Can an XY male that doesn’t suffer from AIS identify as a female?

Why not?

If the human brain is supposed to become masculinized with the exposure to androgens, is it not possible that timing issues or hormone levels or even hormones from the mother’s bloodstream have affected the fetus’s brain?

Is there a brain test or a brain scan that will detect this masculinization to see if it occurred at the right level to fully modify all of the original female wiring.

Nope.

You get people like me who feel like the junk they have is not what should be there.

You get people like me who don’t fit the masculine roles that we’re supposed to fit.

But back to the topic of M.A.i.D..

I want medical assistance in dying because I am tired.

I am burnt out

Will transitioning change my desire for M.A.i.D..

No.

But at least I will for once be able to be comfortable in my body.

2 weeks to go

Two weeks from now, at around this time I’ll have anti-androgens and estrogen coursing through my blood stream.

I received the results of my blood test earlier this week. Nothing out of the ordinary. My cholesterol is a little high, but nothing to worry about.

My testosterone levels are on the low side. Probably a side effect of my anti-depressants. But again, nothing to worry about.

I really don’t know how things are going to play out at work.

I have a pretty secure position, but still.

For the most part I don’t think that I’ll have any problem.

I know my life in the great outdoors is gonna get a little more complicated.

But complicated is what I seem to do the best.

To not be male is my primary goal.

As I’ve said, I’ve never identified as male.

But nonetheless male is what I have been.

Was never really masculine enough.

And people have always accused me of not being straight.

Captain Terry Totzke was the first person in my life to accuse me of being a homosexual.

For years after the abuse I had always wondered if Totzke was right. Maybe I got abused because I was gay or because I acted too much like a girl.

School wasn’t too bad, until grade 7 when everyone’s hormones started switching into overdrive, then I was a target for the real boys who didn’t want a faggot in their midsts. I could never figure out what it was. Was it the way I walked? Was it the way I talked? Was it the fact I never acted like horndog around girls and that I never showed any interest in girls?

When I worked for Ed, Bruce, and Dirk at Classic Billiards, Ed was always quick with the gay humour. I got sent to do a service call at the Hotel Isabella by myself with Ed asking me if I got any “action” when I came back to the shop. Ed even sent me off to see a rather interesting promoter in the city. Ed kept asking me if he made any advances to me and if I did anything with him.

In my teen years I would periodically find myself being groped by random men. I never could figure out why I was being groped and no one else was. Like I’d be riding the subway and some dude would make a bee line for me on an empty car, sit down beside me, make some small talk, and then his hand would be massaging my crotch. One time I was downtown at Funland Arcade, I was playing pinball, and the guy wasn’t even being coy about it, he just came up from behind, stuck his hand between my legs, and he wasn’t even coy about it. And as he’s doing that he asks me if I want to go back to his place as he finds me really cute.

I got mugged back in 1995 down at Burrard and West Georgia in downtown Vancouver. The first thing that the investigating officer wanted to know is was this actually a fight between me and my boyfriend or perhaps I tried to pick up a straight guy in a bar.

I had a manger in the early ’00s who would frequently refer to me as “Freddie” as in Freddie Mercury. He would often urge me to use protection when I had sex as he didn’t want me to catch AIDs.

While I was working for this same manager, one of the contractors that did construction projects for the company used to wait until no one was around, then he’d call me a faggot, or a fucking queer. I’d go talk to the manager and he’d laugh it off and tell me that I had to grow a thicker skin if I wanted to survive in the world.

When I first started working at the hospital my department was managed by an outside management firm. I had two mangers that worked for this outside contractor. One of these managers refused to acknowledge me. The other manager, who was the first manager’s manager said that I was far too flamboyant and that if I toned it down maybe the other manager would begin to tolerate me.

But through all of this, never once did I feel “gay”.

I just never really was attracted to women.

And actually, I was never really attracted to men either.

Since I was a kid I was certain that I was going to have nice breasts. Not big ones, nothing like Dolly Parton or Jane Mansfield. Just nice ones.

All the other stuff I wasn’t too concerned about because I really wasn’t aware of the other stuff yet.

Around age 5 on CFB Shearwater, me and three of my female friends were playing in the garage attached to one of their PMQs. I can’t honestly remember how it came to this, but the three of them were tying to help me push my penis back inside because the consensus was that I must have peed too hard one time and that’s why everything popped out and why I didn’t look like them.

But the differences down below never really caused me any issues until later.

In the years that I lived on CFB Griesbach in the aftermath of CFB Namao I really despised what I had between my legs. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it.

Even though I had been sexually abused for 1-1/2 years, I’m certain that the disdain that I felt towards my junk wasn’t because of the abuse.

About that time I had started going through the early parts of puberty.

And I really didn’t like what was going on.

The feelings of phantom breasts were becoming more intense. It’s like I felt like these should be developing, but they never did.

And at the same time it felt like my hips were supposed to be widening, but they never did. It’s an odd sensation that still persists to this day.

I used to cry myself to sleep every night hoping that I’d wake up as a girl the next day, but childhood hopes can’t overcome physical realities.

It was just after we moved to CFB Downsview in Toronto that my nipples started to secrete a milky white liquid. Finally! I thought that I was finally going to get my breasts. Nope.

Apparently some boys experience this leakage and it’s quite normal.

Transitioning isn’t something that I just decided to do on a whim.

I legally changed my name back in 2008 as a first step in the process.

Bobbie was supposed to eventually become Bobbi.

I even wrote my father a detailed letter explaining what I wanted to do and why I was doing it. He never wrote back or called after that.

And it’s not like he didn’t know what was coming down the pike. In August of 2006 we had an in depth conversation about the events on CFB Namao in which he blamed his mother for hiring the babysitter and that I just had to understand that none of it was his fault.

I told him that I wanted to go after the babysitter and Richard cautioned me against doing that as I might not like the way the shits smells.

After we had that initial telephone call he called me on a daily basis for almost 2 months, but then the calls just suddenly stopped.

I think maybe I had mentioned the verboten topic in casual passing in one phone call.

When I got my name change in 2008 I was so geared up towards taking the necessary steps, but then in 2009 I got an offer of employment that would steer me off course.

The new job disappeared due to a dispute between two factions of shareholders that owned the company. One faction wanted to keep the business operating, the other faction just wanted to sell the property and get the money and get out of there.

I ended up taking some of the shareholders to the Supreme Court of BC. Took a few months of legal back and forth but we ended up settling out of court.

Armed with this, I decided to take on the babysitter.

That was a fucking mistake.

I could have transitioned years ago, but instead I got ensnared in the shit my father warned me about. For 13 years I got derailed on my gender adventure by a military hellbent on keeping their dirty laundry out of sight of the public.

They lied, and they lied, even though they knew the truth.

They called me a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military.

The Minister of National Defence accused me of being a scammer looking for a quick buck.

So, here I am waiting for two weeks.

Two weeks for me to get my first dose of anti-androgen meds and my first dose of estrogen.

I won’t truly be a woman, and I’m fine with that.

Just so long as I can no longer be considered a male, I’m happy with that.

If this works and there are no adverse effects, then I do plan to have all traces of my male genitalia removed. No penis, no testicles, no scrotum. Just nothing.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like if humans were born genderless and then had to choose a gender on the 16th birthday, what gender would I have chosen.

The sad thing about being a human being is having to endure other human beings that “know more”.

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” blah, blah, blah.

There’s only two genders……. blah, blah, blah.

Boys are supposed to have sex with girls, not with other boys (Totzke said this)…… blah, blah, blah.

You can’t have a penis and testicles and long for your phantom breasts and phantom hips….. blah, blah, blah.

I’m not a brainologist, or a genderologist, or a sexual attractionologist, I’m just a XY that’s never felt like an XY or identified as an XY.

Growing up Queer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

There’s nothing that starts up arguments better in the base brat groups on F-book than discussions about what it was like to grow up queer on a military base.

The strongest counter argument that most former base brats can come up with is that it wasn’t easy to be queer in the civilian world so why do I concentrate on the military world.

I didn’t grow up in the civilian world, I grew up in the military world.

I lived on military bases from the month I was born until just after my 16th birthday.

By the time I was 8 years old I knew the following terms:

Homo
Faggot
Queer
Cocksucker
Pansy

I was taught that women were inferior to men and that girls were inferior to boys.

It would be an understatement to say that the military was a very misogynistic and homophobic environment.

The Canadian Armed Forces had a very strict policy against homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” right up until 1994 when they were ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to ditch the homophobia.

This policy was CFAO 19-20.

And as I’ve said before, yes, the policy didn’t apply to military dependents. But each and every member of the Canadian Forces would have received basic information on this policy as they were expected to rat out fellow members if they suspected those fellow members of being gay, lesbian, or exhibiting any other sexual “abnormality”.

I think this is one of the reasons that Captain Terry Totzke was so hellbent on making me understand that I was a homosexual because I had sex with the babysitter. In Totzke’s mind I must have been a homosexual as there would be no other reason why I’d let a boy twice my age put his penis into my rectum on various occasions. Totzke’s training in the military must have fucked up his common sense beyond all belief.

And as study after study has indicated, military personnel were very prone to bringing their training into the homes on base.

This is one of the reasons why domestic abuse was always a problem in the military community. In the military you do not under any circumstance question or disobey the orders of your superiors. In the military home the male spouse would often view themselves as the commander of the house and everyone in the house was his subordinate bound to obey his each and every command. And there would be hell to pay if commands were not obeyed.

All I can say is that I am very thankful that Richard never caught me crossdressing in my early years on Shearwater or Griesbach. Actually, I’m very thankful that no one else caught me crossdressing.

I cannot imagine, even in today’s world, growing up trans on base, or even just gender non-conforming. Being gender non-conforming on base is dangerous.

For the longest time I had always assumed that my desire to not be male had something to do with the abuse from 1978 until 1980.

No, the abuse was not the source of my desire to not be male.

Yes, in the aftermath of the abuse I really wanted to be a girl. But I had always assumed again that that was due to the abuse as well as the teaching of Captain Totzke and nothing more.

I had always written off my desires to have my own breasts and my own hips like the girls at school was just me being fucked up due to the abuse.

All the abuse from CFB Namao did was set me up for further abuse on CFB Downsview.

It was the military’s attitude towards gender non-conforming people, and the military’s opinion that gender non-conformity was a mental illness that caused me to bury my desires.

Yes, I realize that switching hormones isn’t going to be easy, but at least today’s civilian world is far more accepting than the homophobic and misogynistic environment that I grew up in.

Yes, I do expect to encounter boneheads who think that what I am doing goes against “god’s will”.

Tough.

Yes, I do expect to encounter women that will accuse me of wearing “their” gender as a costume.

Tough.

For the most part my gender identity and my sexual orientation were formed in utero. The brain is literally hard wired for sex. If the human brain, or any other animal brain for that matter wasn’t hard wired for gender identity and sexual orientation, reproduction would have never worked.

Sex is a basic instinct.

There is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.

But how the brains are wired very much depends on what hormones the fetus is exposed to in utero as well as the levels of those hormones, and the timing of the exposure.

Genes and chromosomes also play heavily into gender identity and sexual orientation.

Humans start developing as females even if they have XY chromosomes. However, once the fetus’s gonads develop into either testicles or ovaries and start secreting either androgen or estrogen the the fetus will either keep developing as a female or the development as a female will halt and the fetus will start developing as a male.

Persons that are born intersex prove that gender is not a simple binary male / female choice. We’ll never know the true prevalence of intersex persons throughout the entirety of human existence, but it would be safe to say that ever since mammals started determining sex via the presence of a second X or Y chromosome that intersex persons have been with us.

One type of intersex are persons with XY chromosomes that are born presenting as female. XY is supposed to be male, right? Well unlike what the bible thumpers would love for you to believe, due to Androgen Insensitivity intersex persons are often born with testicles in their abdomen, a vagina, but no uterus, all external genitalia presenting as female. These people are usually not detected to be intersex until they become teens and fail to go through puberty.

Their testicles are in their abdomen because due to the androgen insensitivity they failed to descend towards the scrotum. Basically the gonads stayed where they would have been had they developed into ovaries.

They have a vagina and external female genitals as both male and female fetuses have these until the gonads become testicles and the female tissues are repurposed for their male counterpart.

Males have mammary glands and nipples because they form before the gonads develop into ovaries or testicles.

How and when the brain starts adapting its wiring is anyone’s guess. Researchers know what the various areas of the brain do, but the exact wiring patterns that form and how they determine the characteristics of the fetus are still quite a few years away from truly being understood.

Trans people and queer people and gender non-conforming people have existed all throughout human history no matter how hard the Abrahamic religions have tried to erase them. To say that human beings are either genetically male or female, identify as male or female, and are only attracted to the opposite sex is quite laughable.

3 weeks to go

Well, it’s three weeks until my appointment with my nurse practitioner.

This of course is when I get my prescription for testosterone / androgen blockers and estrogen.

Is my goal to be a woman?

Nope.

I just have really never identified as anything. And I’ve never felt at home in my masculine body. In fact there are a lot of things that I hate and despise about with being a male.

If I had to say that I identified as anything, it would be non-binary. Something in the middle. A little bit of both. But not much of either.

I’ve always identified women as being smarter and superior to men.

I hate my genitals. I really do. I’ve hated this junk for as long as I can remember.

At first I’ll be on the testosterone / androgen blockers, but eventually I will undergo orchiectomy.

If I can get a penectomy, that would be nice, but it’s not a deal breaker.

Definitely not going for vaginoplasty.

I got fucked enough when I was a kid. If I never see another penis for so long as I live I’ll consider that to be “mission accomplished”.

Having nothing down there would make me happy.

I’ve wanted breasts for as long as I can remember, so much so that when I was about 11 or 12 and finally understood that I wasn’t going to develop breasts, I was devastated.

What will I develop?

Probably nothing more than an ‘A’ cup. Which is more than enough for me. If I had started this back in my teens or 20s I probably would have grown a bit more, but this will be fine.

I probably won’t show much at first, but around 6 months I should be sprouting. By about 14 months I’ll get as much as I’ll ever develop.

I’ll get softer skin, my facial hair will somewhat thin out. Other body hair will probably remain unchanged

I’ll lose muscle mass. My body fat will redistribute.

I’ve never felt at home in this body, and that was even before the events that occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

My lack of breasts weren’t the only thing that I’ve felt was wrong since I was a kid. My hips don’t feel right. It’s like my hips should be much wider than what they are. The disconnect between my body size and what I feel my body size should be has haunted me all of my adult life. It’s hard to explain, but when I look in the mirror and see my body, my body feels as if it belongs to someone else. So when I say that I’m looking forward to losing muscle mass, I mean it.

Do I blame this gender / body dysphoria on the sexual assaults and subsequent counselling from CFB Namao? No. If anything the abuse and the subsequent counselling just conspired to delay me in taking action.

These issues are literally issues that I was born with.

Anyways, enough for now.