Was at the doctor this morning for my monthly check-up.
My blood work is progressing along nicely.
He doesn’t think that the collapse that I had last month had anything to do with me being on anti-depressants or taking estrogen for my hormone therapy.
I’ve had a long running history of syncope. BP was 112 over 73. Not bad.
And my liver seems okay with the estrogen.
My testosterone results were online at the time of my appointment and they were around 1.1. I’d like to get those down as low as possible, but we’ll have to wait and see whether I can do this chemically or if I can do this surgically.
So, I’ve graduated up to three patches twice a week. That’s 150 microgram of estradiol per day. Whooo-Hoooo!
My most recent blood test revealed that I am at 479 pmol/l which is the same as a woman in her early 20s
I’m aiming to go for an estradiol level of 800 pmol/l which is about 210 pg/ml. This is equivalent to a woman in her late 20s.
Puberty to maturity in less than 6 months.
And then there’s going to be the eventual tapering off.
My body is old. Usually human bodies only undergo one sexual development and maturity per lifetime. Putting my body through a second sexual development and maturity is gonna be tough on it.
Is it worth it?
I think so.
I get a taste of what could have been.
I realize that there was absolutely no way that I could have transitioned early in life, especially not as a kid living on Canadian Armed Forces bases.
And even in my adult life, there would have been very few chances I could have had to have transitioned previously.
In a way, no matter how much psychological trauma I had to endure being involved with the Canadian Armed Forces “justice” system from 2011 until 2020, I wouldn’t have ever been able to contemplate transitioning until I came to realize just how damaged and fucked up the Canadian Armed Forces are and how as an organization they’re willing to destroy the lives of those they deem to be inconsequential so long as the CAF can persevere its public image.
Once I realized just how ethically damaged and psychologically challenged members of the Canadian Armed Forces such as Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, Captain Terry Totzke, and Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill were I began to realize that all of the hose shit that Captain Totzke and Mcpl Gill had shovelled into my head from age 9 to age 16 was nothing more that the military’s standard bullshit that was deployed to keep secrets.
As I said previously, when my brother called me in 2019 to let me know that Richard had died in 2017, I felt an honest sense of relief knowing that the silly fucker was dead and gone.
And that was when I started putting some serious thought into transitioning.
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 2024
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.
July 2024
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.
August 2024
The August tests show that my estrogen levels can stand to go a little higher. Hopefully the “results are pending” for my testosterone levels indicate that my testosterone levels are so low that they’re running the samples again to make sure that they’re not misreading the results.
It’s going to take a few months for the changes to really start to set in.
I’m going to reside somewhere in between the worlds of male and female. Never wanted to be male, but won’t be 100% female either.
What kept me from transitioning earlier in life?
I would have to say wholeheartedly the environment that I spent my childhood within.
This was Canadian Armed Forces policy from 1973 until 1994.
Yes, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence will both wholeheartedly point out that I was not a member of the Canadian Forces. But my father, master corporal Richard Gill was. My social worker, Captain Terry Totzke was.
A report that was commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces in 1996 and released in 2001 entitled “Canadian Forces Response to Spousal Abuse in Military Families” had a few interesting things to say that might explain how catastrophic CFAO 19-20 was toward me.
I have never been able to find a corresponding report on violence against children in military communities.
Military social workers were seen by many to be “company employees”. And that they were. They were officers within the chain of command. They had rank over members such as my father, plus they also had to answer to their own superiors.
Military social workers were often lacked the credentials required to be a civilian social worker, and often simply remustered from other branches of the military. This was the same for military police back in the day. You didn’t join the Canadian Forces specifically to be a military police officer or a member of the Canadian Forces Special Investigation Unit. You could simply transfer from another completely and totally unrelated branch of the military if you decided that you wanted to be a member of the military police.
So…….. here we have Captain Totzke, instructed by his training in the Canadian Forces that ANY sexual abnormality was an undesirable mental illness that needed to be eliminated from the Canadian Forces at any cost, and here we have me, fresh off of CFB Namao and fresh from the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal in which the military police, the CFSIU, and the base commander Colonel Daniel Edward Munro knew not only about Captain Father Angus McRae having committed “acts of homosexuality” with children on the base. But the military also knew full well about the actions of the babysitter.
No doubt the military rationalized that we were all homosexuals.
If Captain Totzke didn’t really have any type of credentials for social work, this might explain why his actions were completely baffling to my civilian social workers. Might also explain why he thought that it was completely appropriate to threaten me with arrest by the military police if I ever kissed or touched another boy on base.
As far as the military was concerned, there was no difference between us kids down at the lower age spectrum, and the 14 year old babysitter, and the 50 something chaplain. We were all guilty of committing the criminal code offence of Gross Indecency , which was the crime of two males having sex.
So yeah, it would be safe to say that the Canadian Armed Forces, CFAO 19-20, captain Terry Totzke, master corporal Richard Wayne Gill, and pretty well the entire military hierarchy enforced by the National Defence Act slammed me into the closet, and slammed the door shut.
I’m almost 100% certain that the abuse at the hands of the babysitter and McRae on CFB Namao had no effect on my gender identity nor my orientation.
I’m of the belief, and science backs this up, that gender and gender identity rely on more than just XX or XY chromosomes. There’s the timing and levels of hormones released in the foetus, there’s the mother’s exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, and there’s just good ol’ variations presented by the expression of the genes.
The human foetus, just like the foetus of most mammals, is predisposed to become female.
This is why you can’t generally scan for the gender of a foetus before 10 to 11 weeks as all foetuses will appear to be female.
If the foetus has XX chromosomes its gonads will develop into ovaries, which will then start secreting minute amounts of estrogen which will allow the foetus to keep developing towards female.
If the foetus has XY chromosomes its gonads will develop into testicles, which will then start secreting minute amounts of androgens. This will halt the development of female external and internal reproductive organs, and start forming masculine reproductive organs. The brain of the foetus will undergo masculinization.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are both “hard coded” in utero.
If the brain didn’t have orientation or identity hardwired into it, human reproduction would have been almost absolutely impossible.
Nobody goes to school to learn how to have sex.
The brain is hardwired for this.
Only ignorant institutions or ignorant people would think that gender identity or sexual orientation are something that someone chooses on a whim
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?
ovaries inna box
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.
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.
Well, I realized that the results of my latest blood test were posted on my health account for me to view.
At first I was a little concerned as when I logged in the system said that there was a test that was outside of normal limits.
Not sure what was wrong, I clicked on the link to see my lab results.
The Alanine Aminotransferase at 16 indicates that my liver seems to be doing fine.
The estradiol at 179 pmol/L indicates that I have elevated levels of estrogen in my blood stream, but not yet near the upper limits for men. For trans females the ideal range for estradiol in my blood stream will be 367–734 pmol/L so I can stand to go up some more.
But the reading that I am the happiest about, and it is the reading that got flagged by the system, is my testosterone levels. At 4.95 nmol/l I’m below the range acceptable for males which is 6.30 nmol/l at the lower limit. The target for this seems to be 3.4 nmol/L to 1.04 nmol/L.
So, I’ll have to see which way things go on my visit to my doctor next week.
Hopefully I can get my estradiol dosage upped a little.
And it would be nice to look at the possibility of androgen blockers.
Beeshive 