Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. I realize it was founded upon taking advantage of Native Americans when colonists first settled here, which is awful, but I do try to take this time of year to appreciate the good things I have in my life. Having a holiday centered around being grateful helps center me personally. Not everything is going great, but if I can just hold onto some sort of positive sentiment about where things are headed it helps me tremendously to hold onto that sense of forward momentum. I wish the same upon anyone reading this. A forward propulsion toward some good future things.

Catch up

 If you want details, I guess you should watch the vlog on youtube I made, but basically, a 'run down' to help catch up on my world would be that my spouse and I, after we married, had to deal with her wanting to be poly, which I knew she was an asexual, but she wanted a live in best friend and me to not swear off intercourse for the rest of our lives. This also was harder to hear cuz her health was going super bad, like, terrible. 

I finally accepted the poly thing and we ended up having a crush on a friend who also had a crush on us. I stepped back from the LGBT+ support community I was helping run and focused on the relationship and my spouse's health. After significant amounts of testing and specialists, we were told my wife would need a very specific specialist, and that it would not be covered in WA state. Our gf was in NY, so we go rid of everything that we owned that wouldn't fit in the car, and drove 3k miles, without even having a place landed to live yet.

This meant we ended up in a tiny room in a slumlord house and it was pretty awful living there. The landlord didn't always pay the bills for things like electric or internet and so we had to deal with that, plus she expected us to care for her dog, we were not really allowed to use the kitchen, and the bathroom had to be used at certain times of day and not others. So on. miserable living situation, and the rent was HIGH. 

On top of this our girlfriend left. We moved there for my spouse her specialist, and to be close to her, and she told us 2 days after we arrived she was leaving.

So that was devastating, and we were miserable, and my wife was super unwell. But I kept pushing and found her one of the best specialists in the state and found us a studio apartment with much cheaper rent and much more functionality than the slum room, and broke up with our gf.

She was very upset by that and so she put in a ton of work and managed to convince me to get back together and be long distance again and that was very hard, but she was trying. My spouse started to gradually do better with the specialist and I started therapy to deal with my life and how much I needed to function better and stop rescuing people all the time.

I thought I was just going to do childhood trauma and ptsd stuff and such, but no, we also had to deal with why I was so miserable and wouldn't look at myself in the mirror or think about myself at all and had rescuer personality issues (white knight syndrome). And while part of it was absolutely how I grew up and the abuse and all that, part of it was so much more and I had been running from it my whole life.

Basically, a doctor had talked to me a little about possibilities due to my abnormalities in my body and especially my hormones years before we even moved to NY. I freaked out, unable to hear what he was saying and just quietly became nongender, but still anyone could call me she or whatever they wanted because I couldn't handle being a burden. 

But I was completely tortured by this and hated it so much. In reality, I had been lamenting I wasn't born a boy since I was a teen and some doctor was telling me I might actually be a boy and I had always wanted that so I felt even more guilty about it, even though none of this was in my control, and I even wanted it, I also felt so terrible about wanting it and tremendous shame. So I hid for years, but I finally had to address it now in NY because of the therapy being held back from me avoiding the issue, and also, more doctors were seeing my compounding health issues from avoiding this. 

I was a boy. I was born intersex, and was actually male. I was not a girl, and had been forced to be a girl, actively punished for every time I acted like myself (boyish) when I was growing up, and it was a huge process to get to where I could accept so much about all of that.

My girlfriend was super supportive and helpful along the way during the process, and that also meant a lot, to have someone on my side and not act like me existing was a massive crime somehow. Eventually, I listened to the doctors, after getting a second, and then third opinion, now that it had been years later, and hearing the same advice. 

I needed to transition, for my physical and mental health, and also, for me, and for my emotional and personal growth. Doctors, therapist, and me, we all knew it, and I was the last one to get on board, but once I did, I was still worried that maybe they were all wrong and it wouldn't work.

And at first, it didn't. I was placed on a very low dose of gel for testosterone, and that dose did nothing. My T levels were the same as they had been before, or if higher, very close to where they had been before. 

So a new doctor gave me a more regular dose, and was less cautious than the previous one. The other doctor had started me with such a low dose, worried about my body producing the levels of the hormone on my own, and that it might affect that. But the new doctor could see how much I was distressed, and just went for it, but said it had to be closely monitored for a year, to make sure that the supplemental dose didn't diminish my own natural production.

Most women have Testosterone ranges of around 8 to 20 ish. Women with PCOS can have higher amounts, like to 60, but that is considered pretty high for a woman. My whole life, the lowest I ever had was 60. Most of my T ranges were in the 100s and 200s. A man's healthy range would be 300 to 1000. If a man walked into a doctor's office and had below 250/200 ish, the doctor would give the man hormone therapy to help the man, because the symptoms of low Testosterone for men are awful, including depression, suicidal ideation, weight gain, ph imbalances, immune system issues, and more.

I had all the symptoms of a man with low T. I had been diagnosed with chronic depression since I was 6. The doctors told me that once I started therapy it would dissipate. I didn't believe that could actually happen, but I thought, if it could just get less bad...

I remember the day I woke up and it was just gone, and it has been almost a year since then, and I still haven't had depression issues. No more suicidal thoughts. No more constant wishing I hadn't been born. I went to bed miserable. I woke up fine. Overnight. I couldn't believe it, and had to do a lot more therapy to learn how to live without depression shaping all of my habits, but yeah, lifechanging is an understatement.

I went ahead and also had some physical changes, but not many. I already could grow a beard and had body hair all over. I already had masculine behaviors and a little deeper voice than a lot of girls, though it did deepen on the hormone therapy. I already was very male internally, but my body hair did get darker and my patchy sides of my beard did fill in more. I got the acne and the changes to body smells (sweat for instance). But some of the usual changes didn't happen for me that happen for most trans ftm. No bottom growth. No body recomp. 

Unfortunately I have always been a little deformed down below, so it sadly seems to have interfered with the usual growing that should have occurred. I don't know about the body shape thing. Fat is supposed to redistribute, but it really didn't, but I have also never been super female looking. I have grieved and still get dysphoria about it, but I also can't control those things.

Our girlfriend finished her degree with a job and with honors. We were proud of helping her get there and of her doing so much work. We all moved back to WA this past summer and we live together and are making it work so far. My spouse is significantly more high functioning and her health still is having some issues, but not like before, not even close. I am supposedly 8 months or less from top surgery, and have gotten the official go ahead to not worry about if the testosterone therapy is interfering with my body's ability to produce T on its own. I am taking a dose that should give most ftm around 400 to 500 T levels, and mine is basically 900. So my body seems to actually be making even more Testosterone than it was before and that makes the doctors really happy, because you can have too much T and it convert back into female hormones, and my body is not doing that at all. :)

My health and mental health are dramatically improved, and almost all the health problems and mental health problems the doctors predicted resolving were correct and did happen. And even some improvements in my health that they didn't predict, got better. Being born intersex and having to deal with the consequences of other peoples' choices when I was little has been a hard thing to deal with and get through the grief of, but I am doing a lot better now, even though the majority of everyone I have ever known has disowned me and called me evil. I realized that they had all treated me in pretty terrible ways my whole life, and ostracized me the whole time anyway. Being disowned has actually, once past the horrible pain of it, been healthier for me and taken a lot of pressure and stress to be perfect away.

I still have a long way to go, and things aren't perfect or anything by a lot. Again, my youtube vlog has so much more detail if anyone is curious, and if anyone else is trans or intersex, there is help out there, and not everyone is fighting against you. If you don't know what intersex means, it means a baby born with sex organs from both sexes, male and female. The accepted belief about intersex babies when I was born was that genital mutilation on the baby was the best course of action, to force the child into a more 'normal' looking form and that the kid would be nurtured into being the chosen sex by the doctor.

It is now understood that this causes horrible hormone issues for the kid as they grow up, that they know their gender, no matter how much you try to force them or nurture them to think otherwise, and that they end up with very damaged psyches, major mental health issues, and if the hormone issues are bad enough, physical health issues as well. It is becoming less and less accepted to cut babies in this way and damage them like that. It ruins the life of the child as it grows up, and it is only done to make it more socially convenient, not for the child's actual benefit. Feel free to google intersex children and learn about it yourself. 

Anyhoo, I will continue to make the vlog, and maybe even post here from time to time. Hopefully life will keep improving and people will get educated more and medicine will keep advancing and we can all have better lives. 

Been So Long

 Sorry I haven't posted in so long. My spouse's health got really bad, and we actually had to get rid of everything that wouldn't fit in our car and move across the country 3k miles. We lived in New York for 3 years before we could go home so she could see a specialist. I also finally dealt with being Intersex and accepted the lose of most of my family by coming out as a boy, which, I always was masculine and male leaning, but yeah, it was hard to deal with all of that turmoil and took a lot of therapy. I have a vlog about my transition and coming to terms with everything that I have been recording for more than a year now on my youtube channel.

I am hoping to finally get back to posting at least occasionally, and am sad to say I am still not in a place to publish more books. We are still poverty ridden, but at least we are in a more stable position and living in a much happier place than we did before, and also better than when we lived in New York in a studio. Money is super tight, but when isn't it when you are poor? haha

My spouse's health is not all great or anything, but she is doing better than she was, and that is a major help, and I am personally much happier overall than we were before. Hopefully the positive momentum keeps going :)

I started a new blog called Watching to just mostly post pics of nature and stuff in, but I am hoping to post in there decently often. I really love taking walks and viewing the trees and water and animals. 

Thanks for reading :)