Transadness

There is no shortage of dialogue about transgender regret. Not sure it is always coming from real transgender persons though.

But I want to talk about transgender sadness.

Because it isn't regret. I'd do it all over again, maybe more efficiently in hindsight.

But the sadness is real.

I'm sitting here fussing over a lot of great role game designs from the past. Going back to the start in the 70s. And all those moments, with teen buddies. All the gaming, all the pizzas, and the funny-shaped dice.
And it all came crashing to a halt when I showed up.

So I have no one to role game with.
And no, I don't want to do it over a computer.
I want to be in the same room, eating pizzas and laughing at the terrible critical fails, and cheering at the impossible successes.

But I lost it all when I became me.

I'm going to role game solo if I must, but it's like watching a great movie alone.
Books are meant to be solo. Movies don't need to be.
A video game can be played solo. But role games were meant to be played with a group of friends.

So no matter how long I have been transgender, and no matter how adjusted, the thing is, some things will always make you sad.

I can't understand Transgender regret this has been improving my life my mental health my social ability being a man was killing me being a woman changes everything my happiness has never been this high 

That said it's not some magic cure I'll still get mad upset still argue the added mental fatigue from being transgendered is slowly improving to point where I can just be as sad as everyone else lol

It can be bittersweet in a way learning who your real friends and family are after living life authentically.

Easier said than done for sure, but I suggest doing a bit of social networking, Lesley. Find a group of LGBTQ folk who like to RP. Honestly, it'd likely be more fun than how things used to be.

Tran

I have an advantage in this type of situation. I cannot abide people. I have absolutely no friends offline, and the online ones are easy enough to escape from with the single click of an X.

I tried D&D. It was awful. In part, because I cannot visualise, but, mostly having to be around the people playing.

Yeah, I did bands. They often knew when to shut up and play. I might do another music gig someday. Probably not tho. Trans and rock and rollers don't seem to get along here.

That's unfortunate Kaibeth.

Wow, so much to relate to here - and so much I have trouble relating to as well.

For me so far the journey has been one of opening up not closing down.  I've always (since I was a wee young one) known there was something really strange about me and that it was related to gender - long before I actually understood what that even meant.  What I mean is, all my memories are tinged with this ineffable feeling of regret that I wasn't simply born female, like both my younger sisters...

It made me feel strange in social situations but I learned to suppress it somehow because growing up in the 50's and 60's there was no alternative.  And I was well liked, I was the smartest kid in the class but I was also the class clown, from my earliest recollections onward.  I was never shunned but sometimes I was laughed at for my ineptness and lack of conformation to the social mores of the day.  In other words I could hide it, but it took a psychic toll nevertheless.

And in the story I've told here often enough (including the old board of course) after I discovered that there WAS such a thing as transitioning, and when I got old enough to contemplate it and plan for it once I was independent of my parents (don't ask!) I was stricken with testicular cancer (OMG the irony!) and my life and plans pretty much fell apart for quite a while.  And then I just kept putting it off, trying to bottle it up, but we all know how well that doesn't work.

So I kept on hiding because I had no real idea how to let the truth out, and that of course cost as well.  But it was a price I paid, because I always felt that some day I would act on those feelings.

Well that day finally came and after 6 months on basic estrogen HT today I had a long anticipated virtual visit with my endocrinologist at the OHSU Transgender Health Program (about an hour by car in Portland, so yeah Zoom!) and tomorrow I'm starting 100 mg Spironolactone daily as well as upping the Estradiol to 6mg daily.  As he said, "enough baby steps."

This is to find out am I really OK without T (well I sure expect to be) before I elect to have my one remaining testicle irrevocably removed (though I am more than ready).  As my regular GP said when I broached that topic again, "just try the antiandrogens first since it's only temporary."    I will stick it out until I get new blood work to see how it's working.

My reaction to estrogen has been ecstatic.  I'm just...plain...happy.  I wouldn't give it up for anything now.  

My SO has been supportive for years after I first came out, but faced with the actuality had some hesitation - but she's slowly coming around after realizing that these changes don't mean we can't have [insert your euphemism of choice], just that it will be of a different sort.  And the mental/sexual changes are intriguing to me, while hugging a month or so ago instead of getting the beginnings of a "is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" I felt this...tingling...in my crotch that was something of an OMG moment.  I won't go on about that.    

So this is all realizing a dream for me, basically, but my regular life goes on as well and few if any of my friends will care in the slightest about my sexual identity.  My fundamentalist nephew and his wife, I'm not so sure about them...  I'd hate to lose contact with their adorable year and a half old Covid baby but even if it comes to that I won't let my life choices be determined by other people's reactions.  I just can't live that way anymore.

My creativity has taken huge steps, my color sense has improved, my musical skill likewise - I just hear better and in more depth, I feel the emotion in the music more vividly.  Movies make me cry more easily, same with songs, same with the natural world.  I'm more in tune with everything - it's like I'm tripping 24/7 if that helps explain it.

My only concern going forward was - since I had serious breast development during puberty and their response now to estrogen started within a month and has been literally fulsome - with summer coming on, was I gonna want to hide them or flaunt them?  Eventually over the last month or so I realized it's just me and since I stopped trying to hide anything years ago when I first came out, I'm just gonna wear what I want, when I want, and be proud.

Still need to start laser and eventually electrolysis for whatever grey beard remains (yeah I know the arguments about it all but the pandemic made me more than reluctant to get close to people who are spending time with people I don't know). I'm doing and planning other cosmetic stuff but it all feels normal now.

What is new is that I discovered I've been borderline anemic for a long time now, likely the result of radiation for the cancer back in my twenties.  I found this out thanks to the blood tests done for the HT by the endo and I followed it up with my GP who tested for iron stores, confirmed it, and put me on serious iron supplementation.  The difference has been night and day, I feel good again and my CV endurance is coming back in spades.

I guess what I'm getting at is that being trans, and knowing it all your life, and finally doing something effective about is, for me at least, a liberation of the most fundamental sort.  I don't care (too awfully much) if I make an attractive woman (though I've always been a really cute guy if I can quote cisgender women I've known), and I've no expectation of changing my sexual desires (estrogen hasn't changed a thing there, I'm expecting the spiro won't either), but I'm so much happier with myself that it's almost a different world.  A better one to be sure.

I got that through psychedelic usage as well where I could reimagine myself.  It always came up, and it was always this far away goal.  Well no more, it's here now.

I know people advise, rightly, it's not the transition it's what happens next.  But being this free, now, already, encourages me immensely.  One thing my GP took care to mention when I had "the conversation" last year was that "people can be mean".  But I've had that all my life already at times and you know, I really don't give a fuck.  When you express your true self people really don't mess with you.  It's when you're uncertain that they try to get their jollies at your expense.

I think a lot of the current generation of people on the rainbow spectrum realize this instinctively now and aren't afraid to express who they really are.  It makes me glad.  I wish things were like that when I was a kid, but they weren't, and repression was rampant.

I haven't checked in here for a while so this is my update and contribution.

Love to all, and thanks for indulging this far too long reply!

Lisa (aka Marci - can I change my username somehow? )

45

Thanks for your comments, and I do feel for you.  Life gets complicated that way.

After the cancer I didn't have any real idea how long I might live (and here I am 66 and pretty healthy considering) so I didn't want to have kids for obvious reasons - a mixed blessing in some ways but in others a source of the only actual regret I have (besides getting cancer in the first place which was more an act of God - my oncologist's take on it, not mine).  It really fucked me up, but it also put me better in touch with innate mortality, which is not something easy to do in your early 20s when you're basically still feeling immortal.  I mean, after that it's all a bonus, because of the alternative...  

I tried over the years to suppress the gender dysphoria and that only works for awhile because it's not something you have any real control over.  I could - and did - live with it but it was always there, along with this feeling of "someday I have to do something real about this" so that's where I am and so far it's going even better than I'd hoped.

I didn't want to die (eventually, or course, and ideally a long time from now!) with the regret that I never stepped up to the bat, so to speak.  But I really had to come with things to become determined enough to actually set the wheels in motion, and what the hell, that took me a long time.

Not much novel revelation there of course.  

I've never really been an unhappy person in spite of it, and never been other than an optimist.

Except - and this is important - when I was actually experiencing suicidal ideation within the last 5 or 6 years centered around the internal, and external, dichotomy that manifests as gender dysphoria in the first place.  I'd had that before a number but this time it got me concerned, it felt more serious, more palpable, much more scary.  I'm bipolar (mild) as well and the depressive phases were going deeper and darker, so I could see I really had to do more than just being out as trans, if anybody ever wondered...

When I finally made the appt with my GP about several things, and discussed transitioning medically it felt natural and right and I was only nervous to start with.  He was very understanding, listened to all my history, assured me he was OK with the process, and had done it a couple times before already.  

But he said he wouldn't prescribe hormones (understandable considering how specialized that is) and my current endocrinologist's office couldn't help - they referred that sort of thing to the clinic at OHSU.  So it was off to PDX, and about 6 months later (after one cancellation during our heat dome experience last summer) my meeting with the new endocrinologist at OHSU went even further towards normalizing it for me.  This was just a thing that happens to some people and, it was just how I was made, and it could be treated.  He wrote the prescription, I did the blood tests there that day, and it was all systems go.

If I'd had serious opposition from my SO and/or (nonexistent) kids I might feel differently but I've been out for years and it's really OK with her.  Obviously more than a bit weird though, which I can appreciate coming from somebody who's never had any such problem, and apparently most people don't. The things that will eventually change are not things that matter in the current stage of our relationship, which is solid and very long term.  I wouldn't want to lose that and clearly I won't, but if it was otherwise I'd have to wonder who it was I've been living with all these years.  Plus our current awesome cat loves us both equally and who would ever mess with something like that?  

The freedom to finally just be myself in this way is priceless, I guess that's what I'm getting at here.  I had to work for it and that was very hard at times and it shouldn't be that way, but thank god the world is slowly changing towards acceptance.  

I do wonder though if you might benefit from HT if you haven't tried it.  Even low doses work some serious magic, I found that out starting with 2mg Estradiol daily.  It's not just physical, it's mental as well, and it really relieves the distress.  Maybe it could be something you could do without upsetting the apple cart so to speak.  

My libido, which has always gone to 11 since forever has hardly changed so far - even as the dosage has been titrated upwards.  And though the experience has changed (become much more whole body then before) all the parts still work at this stage, though I expect with the spiro (first one down the hatch today) that that will change.  I won't miss it I think because the tingly sensation that comes in waves is so much better...     

Sorry if that's too personal but me dysphoria always made it so that even when I was having great sex presenting as male I was always wishing I was actually my female partner instead - but I just hid that away.

Anyway, I could go on pretty much indefinitely but I'll leave it here and wish you the best.

Lisa

It's all

Oh it's not a placebo at all.

There are ways to get around the medical system but if you value your health it's likely not a good idea. That's why I went through the system even though it took a long time. So worthwhile though.