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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, now that M.A.i.D. is off the table until 2027 I’m going to pick up on an issue that I wanted to deal with prior to 2011 when I sent my email to the Edmonton Police Service.
I don’t really think my complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal will have much effect on the government, at least not in the short term.
And I don’t expect to hear anything from the DND and the DOJ until at least 2030. They’re gonna want to ride this matter out for as long as possible.
In 2008 I legally changed my name.
This was done for two reasons.
The first was that I had decided that if Richard wanted nothing to do with me, then I wanted nothing to do with him.
The second was that at the time I was considering undergoing gender reassignment.
For all of my life, up to that point, I had never felt like I was a male.
I never connected with “male” things.
I loved dresses as a kid and feminine things. Once I got my first apartment in New Westminster around 1994 I started buying dresses on the sly and wearing them in my apartment.
As a kid I used to get the shit beat out of me on CFB Downsview ’cause I acted like a girl or walked like a girl or cried like a girl, etc.
The teachings of Captain Totzke were still fresh in my head that I had been sexually abused by the babysitter because I enjoyed having sex with boys.
But then in 2011 I had to go and try to get justice for what the babysitter had done, so that derailed my plans.
And maybe that was a good thing in a way.
See, I had fallen into the same trap that most of society has fallen into and that is there were only two genders. If you’re not a male, then you have to be a female, and vice-verse.
As a kid I had always wanted breasts. I was so certain that I was going to develop like the other girls, but that never happened.
I was around 12 when I realized that I wasn’t going to develop breasts. And I was fucking devastated.
I had always felt that my hips should have been larger, but they never grew out.
And on top of that I had Captain Totzke drilling into my head that I was a “homosexual”. Which wasn’t clearly explained to me what that entailed, but it was bad apparently.
So, I never really knew what I was.
Didn’t enjoy relationships with women, but I didn’t enjoy relationships with men either.
So………….
After having been kicked and beat by the Canadian Forces since 2011, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect.
And reflect I have.
I don’t identify as anything.
I’m not male.
I’m not female.
Not gay.
Not straight.
I’m nothing.
And I’m cool with that.
So, I’m going for an appointment with my physician in April.
Even though I don’t identify as a woman, doesn’t mean that I can’t have breasts.
Breasts will work nicely with my wardrobe.
And as I’ve said, I’ve always felt like I should have had breasts.
I’m pretty sure that I will enjoy having breasts.
Hips?
Nope, not at this stage of life. My pelvis has been exposed to androgens for too long.
The junk I was born with?
Never have liked it, it’s always felt like it never belonged down there.
What do I plan to do?
Well, the first thing will be to start on anti-androgens and then start on a estrogen.
Due to my age I more than likely won’t be able to oral estrogen, I’ll more than likely have to stay with dermal patches.
The nice thing about going on estrogen is it will reduce my muscle mass. My body has always felt foreign to me. The mental image that I have of my body is much smaller than what my physical body actually is. My body has always felt like it belonged to someone else.
If the anti-androgens and the estrogen have the effects that I desire, then I intend to go for orchiectomy. That is I intend to have my testicles removed. Castration basically. Absolutely no more androgen production.
And then a penectomy. That is, the complete removal of my penis.
But no, there will be no vaginoplasty. I got fucked enough as a kid, I don’t need anymore penises inside of my body. Besides, as I said, I don’t truly identify as female. It’s just I don’t identify as male.
And I want to get rid of my male junk.
How will I pee? Good that you asked.
Same way that guys who have had penectomies due to cancer urinate. My urethra will be connected to a new opening and I’ll urinate through that.
What will I look like? A Ken doll…….with a scar.
Isn’t that a bit drastic?
No.
As I’ve said, I have always despised the junk between my legs. It’s always felt like a punishment.
So, I get to get rid of it finally AND I get to have the breasts that I always wanted.
In 2008, just after I legally changed my name, I sent my father a letter explaining why I had changed my name. I was very clear with Richard this was something that I wanted to do and that he was losing a son that he didn’t want and was gaining a daughter that he wouldn’t have wanted either.
I guess this is why he told the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service in 2011 that he knew that I had changed my name, but that he didn’t know why I had changed my name.
He knew why I changed my name. I guess that having a homosexual son was bad enough, but now having a gender non-conforming son was even worse.
I had called him during the 2011 CFNIS investigation. I asked him for help with the investigation. Not once did he return any of my calls. And he plunged the proverbial knife into my back in 2011 when he gave his statement to the CFNIS in 2011 in which he denied the babysitter looked after my brother and I and in which he denied that grandma was raising my brother an I on CFB Namao.
So yeah, I guess his gender non-conforming son was an insult that he wasn’t willing to wear.
I do wish that he was still alive.
Just so that he could see me in my dresses, with my breasts…….. that would have been priceless.
But Bobbie, you have no hair!
Yep, that’s cool. There are a ton of awesome looking bald women. With tattoos to boot. In fact, the reason that I started shaving my head back in 1990 was Sinead O’Connor. She looked powerful with her 0 buzzcut.
One thing that I do wonder about, what would things have been like had I come out as gender-queer and gender non-conforming on a Canadian Armed Forces base when I was a kid back in the ’80s?
Sure, the civilian world wasn’t that too receptive yet, but the civilian world was far more accepting than a Canadian military base would have been.
Would I have survived?
Or would I have quietly disappeared either at the hands of my own father or at the hands of another member of the Canadian Forces disgusted by a person like me being “out” on the base.
If I had told my father or even Captain Terry Totzke between 1980 and 1987 that I identified as a female, I think I would have encountered a tragic conclusion.
Anyways, enough about the past, I’m looking forward to my April appointment.
Beeshive 