estrogen – Beeshive

How it started, how it’s progressing.

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

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.

Family Violence Report Download

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

My ovaries………

Well, seeing as how I don’t have ovaries I have to get my estrogen the good ol’ fashioned way like nature intended.

Through a transdermal patch.

A trans on a trans………. I think I just made a joke?

I’ve noticed some changes so far.

But I’m still a few weeks away from the changes really becoming pronounced.

And this ain’t cheap. Those 8 packages are just over $30.00 each for 8 patches. That works out to $3.75 per patch.

The prescription calls for 4 patches per week, so those patches will last for 3.25 months. So in one year I’ll be looking at using 208 patches. This works out to about $800 per year. And that’s if I stay with the four 50 microgram patches per week. As I progress along my dosage will be increased. It could go up from 100 micrograms (two 50 microgram patches) up to a maximum of 400 micrograms (four 100 microgram patches). So yeah, this will get pretty expensive.

And no, this isn’t covered by provincial medical and it’s not covered by my Pacific Blue Cross insurance yet.

So, if you hear alt-right nutcases whinging on about “state subsidized trannies” or government paying to force transexuals on the rest of society there isn’t any such thing. There are special cases where the government will subsidize the cost of the medications, but this generally isn’t the case, at least not for me.

So, what am I?

Male, Female, or non-binary?

I definitely am not male. I’ve never really identified as male.

And NO, this so called “gender confusion” has nothing to do with the babysitter, McRae, or Totzke. I have honestly never identified with being a male. But the environment that I grew up in would never have allowed for the expression of an identity that did not match the junk between my legs.

Yes, there will be those who will scream that the civilian world was not much different than life in a military family living on a military base. And sure, the civilian world back in the ’70s and ’80s wouldn’t have been a cake walk for a trans kid, but……… in the civilian world there was no official order demanding that you rat out your co-worker or your neighbour. In the military community there was CFAO 19-20. And yes, CFAO 19-20 didn’t apply to military dependents directly, but it set the attitude of the members of the Canadian Forces that people who didn’t conform to sexual norms were mentally defective and a liability.

But, what will I identify as?

Me, I’m going to go with the letter “X”.

There are far too many areas in North America where identifying as a trans female isn’t legal, and travel wise there are some areas as well that don’t accept genders different from what you were born as. However, almost every jurisdiction will accept “X”.

And as I said, I’m not going for bottom surgery. I’ll get parts removed, but that’s it. I’m not getting things created. So in the end I’ll look like a Ken doll, but a Ken doll with breasts. And not as muscular or masculine……..

Washrooms? Thankfully most places have unisex / single washrooms. I haven’t ever encountered problems going to the men’s room in the lower mainland, or Iceland, or Washington state or Oregon. I suppose there is the possibility that this might change once my breasts start to become larger and more visible. Women’s room? Probably not. That’s far too much of a hornet’s nest for me to go poking just to take a piss. Even though I will eventually become a sitter and unable to use urinals, going into the women’s room will undoubtedly trigger some people, and I ain’t going there.

I think that’s enough for now.

Tomorrow will be a different day.

100 micrograms

Went to see my nurse practitioner today.

My blood work looked fine, so I’ve graduated from 50 microgram patches to 100 microgram patches.

And we’ll do the same thing in a month’s time. I’ll got for another blood test. And if my liver isn’t showing any signs of not liking the estrogen, then I can graduate to 150 micrograms. And so on and so on.

The goal is to get my testosterone down to around 1.9 nmol/L while getting my estradiol levels up to around 500 pmol/L without going over 700 pmol/L.

Should be an interesting ride for the next few months.

Soft………

Well, one thing that I’ve noticed over the past few weeks is how soft my skin is now.

Since I started taking estrogen a few weeks ago my skin has become noticeably softer and smoother.

And yes, this was to be expected, but I didn’t think that it would have been this noticeable.

My breasts are noticeable, but not that noticeable. I’ve seen guys with bigger Molson boobs than what I currently have.

They’re just barely large enough to show through my tops, but they are large enough to snag the shoulder strap of my laptop case.

I don’t think I’ll have to resort to the Judy Blume exercises…….

But hot damn my nipples are super sensitive.

My body fat feels different too. It’s a lot more squishy and jiggly.

Mood?

My mood is different. Can’t quite explain it, but it’s different.

I’ve got an appointment with my doc next week.

See how well my kidneys and liver are taking to the new hormones.

This will be the first of my never ending blood tests and we’ll see how much estrogen was in my bloodstream on the final day of the four day period for my patch.

We’ll decide if I stay with the same patches or if I go up in strength.

And we’ll eventually decide if I go on androgen blockers.

Then I’ll know for sure what the mood difference is between androgen and estrogen.

Sometimes when I go to apply a new patch, the exposed portion of the patch will fold over and touch itself. Because of the adhesive I can’t get that half apart. I wasn’t sure what to do with the 1/2s that were good. Well, I can actually cut off the stuck together part of two different patches and then use the good parts as one patch and cover them with Tegaderm. Just like new!

Fears……

What fears have you overcome and how?

WordPress sometimes prompts me to write about a certain topic. It’s geared towards “family” type events.

There are very few that actually seem to apply to me.

Today’s prompt was somewhat interesting.

I think the biggest fear that I had in my life was my father.

I overcame that fear somewhat in 2006 during a series of phone calls that I had with him.

Then there was his death in January of 2017.

That was a major relief.

My brother thinks that I’m over exaggerating my fear of Richard, but as Dr. Gabor Maté observed, “no two children have the same parents”.

The most significant fear that I had of Richard was his temper. Richard had very poor impulse control and very poor control of his anger. He also couldn’t take into account the difference in physical strength between himself and the person he was lashing out at.

My fear of Richard only grew more intense when I became involved with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke.

Richard is dead and gone. And the world is probably better off for this. But his effects still haunt me and have left their traces upon me.

My grandmother was another person that I feared as a kid.

Her anger and her impulse control were worse than Richard’s, but at least she lacked the physical strength of Richard.

Alcohol. I’ve always feared being an alcoholic.

Both my father and my grandmother were intense alcoholics. Both were happy drunks for the most part. Conversely both were intensely angry people when they were sobering up.

I’ve had so little alcohol in my life I can almost remember every exact time.

The last time that I had a drink was back in July of 2011.

Before that it was January of 2010

Before that it was August of 2006

Before that it was September of 2005

Before that it was May of 1994

Before that it was sometime in the winter of 1990 in Gagetown, New Brunswick.

Before that it was sometime around 1986.

I can’t remember all of the “sips” that my father or my grandmother would give me when they were drunk.

I do remember the beer that grandma made me drink in the summer of 1984.

Most of these were just casual get-togethers when I was changing jobs and moving up the so called ladder.

But becoming an alcoholic has always been one of my fears.

Growing up on military bases I was exposed to a significant amount of alcoholism. It was as if being an alcoholic was a requirement to join the Canadian Forces back in the ’50s through the ’90s.

Being a “homosexual” and subsequently growing up to be like the babysitter was always a major fear of mine. Both Captain Totzke and my father would keep telling me that if I didn’t stop kissing, hugging, and being interested in other boys that I would grow up to be just like the babysitter and the priest from Namao.

Imagine the type of fear that would instil into a 9 to 11 year old.

Being told that you’d be going to a psychiatric hospital or jail for “allowing” the babysitter to do what he had done.

A little hint

Okay, so I had a little bit of a learning curve with my estrogen patches.

Yes, they’re supposed to stick you your skin. But I found for the first couple of days my patches kept falling off.

And not really wanting to miss out on any of my meds, I had to think of something to do to keep these from coming off.

If I could put them on my upper arms like a nicotine patch, that would have worked, but the estrogen patches have to go on either my butt or my lower belly for the best effect.

So I turned to Tegaderm.

I put the patch on, then I put a Tegaderm dressing over top of the patch. And the patches don’t fall off. which is nice.

I don’t want to miss out on any of the meds.

Coming up this Friday I have my first blood test to make sure that my body is handling the estrogen properly.

Hopefully my body is.

Mentally I like the difference in mood.

It’s almost like androgens are a toxin.

Happy Pride Month?

As I’ve said, I’ve never really taken part in pride, and I really don’t identify with it.

I guess part of it has to do with the environment that I grew up in.

Military communities were isolated. And by isolated I mean that the Canadian Armed Forces had control over the types of people that were allowed to live in the military communities on base.

By way of filtering recruits, the Canadian Armed Forces could control the political leanings of those living on the bases. And it should be of no surprise that these military communities were very conservative and right leaning.

The thing is, when you’re living within these communities, especially if your exposure to the outside world is very limited, you come to see the political leanings of these communities as being “normal”.

Yes, Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 did no apply to children living on base, it only applied to members of the Canadian Armed Forces. But as has been indicated through various studies, members of the Canadian Armed Forces often had a problems with separating their military careers from their home lives.

As the civilian social worker that dealt with my family noted during various home visits to our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, Mr. Gill orders his children with simple commands and answers their questions with yes or no replies and the children don’t question these decisions.

Being in the Canadian Armed Forces, Richard was nothing more than a cog in a machine that demanded his servile obedience. His was not a position to question. His was a position to do as he was told. And like many men who are stripped of the authority in their lives, he made up for this lack of authority by exerting his authority on those he could.

When it came to me and my issues from Canadian Forces Base Namao he was not going to question the authority of Captain Terry Totzke. If Captain Totzke said that I was a homosexual, that I was exhibiting signs of homosexuality, who was master corporal Gill to question this?

When I’ve talked to other base brats about how things were on base I get this Pollyannish rose coloured view of what things were like on base. This usually comes from former brats that didn’t have “issues” and therefore weren’t exposed to the underbelly of life in the “company town”.

I have encountered a few former brats that don’t participate in any of the social media groups for base brats. They want nothing to do with acknowledging their past. And I have an inkling that the brats who don’t want anything to do with remembering their pasts as base brats vastly outnumber the number of brats that celebrate their past as base brats.

The number of broken and dysfunctional families that lived on the bases was probably a high percentage, especially when you look at how the recruiting process would naturally filter out more liberal minded recruits. The military communities were rife with homophobia, racism, misogyny, victim blaming, victim shaming.

Another matter that played into the sterility of the military community was the fact that military housing could only be rented to members of the Canadian Armed Forces, and that these members had the ability to decide who could live in these houses and who couldn’t. If a service member wanted his spouse out of “his” PMQ, she was booted off the base by the military police. Same thing for his kids. As long as provincial law allowed for it, the serving member could give his kid the boot. The age that a child can live on their own varies from province to province. In Ontario a 16 year old can move out on their own.

I’m not sure what the rules are any more, but in my day living on the bases, 18 was the absolute oldest a base brat could be. Once you hit 19 you were expected to get off the base. There were exceptions to this rule, care givers could live in military housing so long as it was to look after military dependents, persons with disabilities could live on base past their 19th birthday, and students obtaining a higher education could continue to live on base until their 24th birthday.

As you can imaging, there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Everything was sterile. Everything was the military mindset.

Queer kids just learnt to stay in the closet.

Queer kids learnt that they were defective and a national security threat.

Kids on base learnt that there were no victims, that it always took two to tango.

Kids on base learnt that compassion was a liability.

Living on base there were no “others” like us.

Living on base we only had exposure to adults that passed the requirements of the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting agents.

Our view of the world was shaped by the monochromatic views of the world espoused by these serving soldiers that passed the conformity tests.

You know all of those soldier that have been implicated in hazing rituals over the years? Yeah we grew up amongst those people.

I lived on the base that was the home of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. We grew up amongst the mindset and the racism that lead to the death of Shidane Arone in Somalia.

All those sexual assaults that occurred in the Canadian Armed Forces? Those were committed by men of the Canadian Forces, many of whom were our fathers.

The misogyny and homophobia that were rampant in the Canadian Armed Forces back in the day? The men espousing these views were often our fathers.

I grew up in a community that allowed everyone up the chain of command to escape responsibility for the murder of Shidane Arone and allowed a lowly private, private Kyle Brown, to be made the scape goat for the whole sordid affair.

I grew up in a community that allowed sexually abused children to be blamed for the abuse they suffered at the hand of members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

I grew up in a community where the chain of command could determine who was a victim and who wasn’t a victim.

I grew up in a community that had the legal power to investigate itself and its members for sexual assaults against children.

I grew up in a community in which officers with no legal training and no legal background could summarily dismiss service offence charges that had been brought against their subordinates.

I grew up in a community in which a 3-year-time-bar applied to all service offences, including service offences of a purely civilian nature.

I grew up in a community which claimed criminal code offences related to children as service offences to be dealt with solely through the military justice system.

I grew up in a community served by such a compromised justice system that it was dismantled and restructured due to horrific miscarriages of justice.

So no, in the end I have nothing to be proud of.

16 days

Okay, so it’s day sixteen of estrogen.

I’m currently on patch #3, tomorrow will be patch #4

Things seem to be mentally more clearer.

Not better, just clearer.

Make sense?

Didn’t think so.

A co-worker asked me if I was still contemplating M.A.i.D..

I don’t see anything changing at this moment.

In fact the BC Human Rights Tribunal directed my complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

2027 is still awhile away.

In a way it’s my desire for M.A.i.D. that has given me the freedom to transition.

As I’ve said before, I really wanted to transition since the ’90s. But the fragility of employment along with the absolute lack of family support meant that transitioning was always going to be a far off desire.

When I could no longer control my desire to transition and I changed my name I made the fatal mistake of going after my babysitter from Canadian Forces Base Namao.

That put me 14 years even further behind.

So it’s either transition now or never.

And I chose now.

Body changes so far?

I’ve noticed that some fat seems to be moving around.

My desired muscle loss hasn’t happened yet, but it will.

My long sought after breasts haven’t started growing yet. They are puffy though and their texture is starting to change. So I know that something’s brewing.

I’m off for the month of June, but I’m hoping that when I go back to work in July that I’m sporting a noticeable pair of bumps.

Surgery to help things along?

Nope.

I’ll be happy with whatever estrogen has in store for me.

I have no intentions for any type of surgery except for removing things.

Estrogen Log: Day 10.

Okay, so I’m on day 10 of being on estrogen.

I’m currently on patch #3, patch #4 will be on Wednesday.

Not too much noticeable in the way of changes, but there are some changes.

My facial hair isn’t growing as fast.

My nipples have started to change shape, and now it feels like there’s an empty void behind them.

And my testicles are smaller.

Other than that I’m still waiting on the muscle loss.

I did go for physio last week and the one thing we noticed is that my muscles aren’t as stiff and tense as they usually are.

I don’t expect the really noticeable changes to start occurring much before June.

June is my vacation month, so I am expecting to go back to work looking a little different than I did before my vacation.

That should be very entertaining……..

A co-worker of mine whom is aware of my blog and my desire for M.A.i.D. has asked me if finally being able to transition will put an end to my desire for M.A.i.D.. I told them that we’d have to wait and see. We’ll have to see what awaits in 2027.

Anyways…… ’nuff for now.

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.