My One Year Anniversary of Starting Hormones

It’s March 14th, 2016 which means that I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for an entire year now.

jk i actually treated myself to my first gel nail manicure today

The idea that it’s only been one year is such a mindfuck for me. It’s hard to remember that all the changes I’ve experienced on hormones have somehow only taken a year. Imagine collapsing several years of puberty into just 365 days and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how jammed pack this year has been for my body.

These days I’ve been experiencing moments where I actually feel almost in sync with my body which is  a refreshing experience. The best way I’ve been able to explain this sensation is to refer to View-Masters, those bulky plastic glasses/goggles/viewing-thingies that combine two flat images into a three-dimensional scene. When out of focus the images are flat and fuzzy and often nausea inducing. It’s only when those images come into sync with each other that you get the proper three-dimensional experience. For years my body and my sense of self have existed in discordant relation to each other. Areas of focus may overlap and at times come together in harmony but for the most part it’s like an out-of-focus stereo display complete with the nausea swimming in my stomach. And now? Now it’s like I’m finally able to adjust the dial and bring the two images into proper harmony.

Or at least I’m getting closer to harmony, closer to bringing the two images into focus to create the three-dimensional image that doesn’t make me want to vomit everywhere.

When this process began I assumed that I would just be bringing my body into line. I thought that I had a clear image of myself that I could bring about with some artificial hormones and a like fifty thousand nip and tucks. Over the past year I’ve begun to understand that this clear image of myself came from a complete removal from reality. At some point I understood that the image I held for my body and my life would never occur and so I was cut my womanhood from earthly constraints and built a female version of myself on fantasy and desire. I lived a life inside of my head and abandoned my body to have its own “boy” identity. My complete divorce of my body and my identity was a bifurcation that could only begin to heal when I began to engage with my body.

I used to think the language comparing HRT to alchemy was a little whoo-whoo but it makes sense to me. Somehow HRT uses chemicals and compounds and various strange things with complex names to work a miracle transform the body that I abandoned into the body that I understand as my own. As my body shapes itself from dream-life into real-life I have no choice but to bring my understanding of my identity from ideal daydream into practical reality. It’s no longer enough to know that the world  should see me as a woman I now need to navigate a world that does see me as a woman (at least on the days that I get my makeup right). Starting to understand my body in the real world has pushed me one step further in understanding who I am in the real world.

This past year has been a wild one for me full of rapid changes that I struggle to keep track of. In many ways the physical changes brought by HRT are the easiest to understand and keep track of. Things like breast tissue growth and fat redistribution can be estimated and measured and neatly written up. It’s the emotional side of things, the understanding of self, that I’ve had the hardest time understanding. I still don’t entirely understand who I am but I do understand that on this one year anniversary two disparate parts of myself are coming into focus to create a stereoscopic human.

My Fucked Up Relationship with Grindr

I first joined Grindr about two years ago during the final months of my “I’m a boy!”-phase and kept it for just a few weeks before deleting it to make room on my phone for more pictures of my face. A few months later I decided that it would be hilarious to make an account for Margaret Thatcher (I have memories of gin being involved in this decision) which turned into me using Grindr as a tool to look at mildly attractive people’s torsos while waiting for the bus. Then a friend of mine, a fellow trans woman, mentioned that she was hooking up that night with a dude she met on Grindr. My reaction was probably not that different than yours, “What but you’re a woman, isn’t Grindr for men looking for men?” She shrugged and said something along the lines of, “Whatever, I still get laid.” That was all the permission I needed to turn my Margaret Thatcher account in a real account because social networking for sexual encounters that both parties understand as casual is something that I am incredibly passionate about.

Whenever I mention to someone that I use Grinder there’s always that moment where they want to know why I’m on a gay sex app for men. I’m fine with that initial sense of confusion, I experienced it myself at first, but what I don’t love is when people (usually of the cis variety) want to know if I feel weird being a trans woman on Grindr because that question is often accompanied by the unspoken question asking if I’m somehow setting my womanhood aside for a quick fuck. Obviously, or at least obviously to me, I’m not setting aside my womanhood because a) how the fuck can I take off my womanhood and b) if gay men (By the way this entire conversation of Grindr=gay completely erases the bi and pan and flexible and fluid men who use the app.) are attracted to me that’s entirely their own issue.

The heart of why I stick around on Grindr, and this is something I no longer mention to people unless I have time to listen to them talk about how pretty and attractive I am, is that Grindr is one of the only places where I’m considered attractive for casual hook-ups. Look I know I’m a very attractive young woman with legs for days and a profile carved from marble but the fact of the matter is that I’m also a trans woman which is something that often overrides my flawless beauty among Hot Singles In My Area. For the straight cis men who dominate Tinder my clit and balls make me just a little too “manly” for their NO HOMO lifestyles and let’s not even get started on the “sorry but I’m only attracted to people assigned female at birth”-transphobia that I’ve found to be disturbingly common when talking with women. When it comes to using the technology to get laid my best bet is with Grindr.

I don’t want to make it seem as though Grindr is some paradise for this lady because holy fuck it’s not. Grindr is a place where I need to put “Do not refer me to as a ‘tranny!’” in my bio because apparently that’s an acceptable word to use upon first messaging a trans woman. I get sent messages that make me want to set fire to my phone and once I had such a disappointing hookup (I didn’t even know that it was possible for a mouth to be that full of saliva.) I deleted the app for a few weeks because I was so scarred. There are also the lovely people who seem to think that if they message me every fucking hour I’ll stop ignoring them (these men have apparent never considered the fact that I’m not staring at my messages every minute of the day waiting for someone to message me). I haven’t even had that many successful physical hookups. When I write up all my negatives about Grindr my immediate reaction is to ask myself why I even have this app taking up space on my phone. The fact of the matters is that unlike Tinder my Grindr messages are more likely to be sent to me rather than sent by me. Sure most of them are perhaps a little too sexually forward for my tastes but I’m a woman who is both vain and insecure and it turns out that receiving messages from headless torsos is actually something that I enjoy immensely.

I know, I know, I’m not supposed to rely on the opinions of men to make me feel good about my body but at this point of my life it’s a nice little boost to my self-esteem. When I’m feeling a bit down about how I look it’s nice to know that in my pocket there are a stream of messages from people who are responding just to a headshot of me smirking.

It might be interesting to note that when I’m browsing Grindr I often see another trans lady or two. If I had the grant money I’d love to do proper ethnographic research on what draws us onto a site pitched at “gay, bi and questioning men” but without that research I’m reluctant to speak for my fellow ladies. What I will say is that for me there’s a security that comes from being on a hook-up app where most of the people who see my profile will accurately guess roughly what my genitals look like and won’t message me if they’re not interested in what they think is between my legs. Of course this is tied up in a much larger and more serious conversation about how we gender genitals and how this impacts intersex and trans people but right now I’m at a point in my life where if I want to have casual hook ups I need to choose between apps that offer me boys who mostly ignore me because of what they’re assuming about my genitals or an app that offers me boys who respond positively to what they think I’ve got. It’s fucked up that I live in a world where the size and shape of my genitals make me (a woman) more desirable to gay men than to straight men and gay women. (I excluded bi men from that sentence not because they’re irrelevant to my sex life but because they’re irrelevant to that particular dynamic.)

Yeah it’s fucked up as all Hell that Grindr is a safer choice for me. But as gross as Grindr can be it’s almost a nice break from my daily life where my genitals make me an anathema to both straight men and gay women. And that is one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever written.

Masturbating Away My Self-Loathing

content note: Description of how I experience body dysphoria which includes details of the self-harm desires it produces. References to how I masturbate.

My relationship with my body has always been strained at best. I don’t like looking at myself naked, my joints ache for no good reason, my skin is definitely too sensitive to shave as often as I’d like and that’s just this morning’s grievances. Early on in life I learned to distance myself from my body for my own mental health, a skill that I mastered so well that I have almost no memory of going through the physical changes that puberty brought. Although I’m grateful that I found a coping mechanism (I like to joke that my removal from my body is what allows me to walk in heels for eight hours straight: I simply can’t feel the pain! It’s the sort of joke that I find hilarious and most people find discomforting.) I can admit that it’s not the healthiest strategy in the long term.

It takes a lot for me to feel some semblance of comfort in my skin. Even when I reach that level of comfort there’s still a voice in my brain reminding me of the twenty minutes I spent getting my makeup just right or how many times I needed to change my outfit before I found one that didn’t make my “friendly” Internalized Transphobe start shouting slurs and other vile things at me. Although I try to remind myself of the parts of my body that I do like (My voice, my thick hair, my gams, my nose, my eyes, my jaw.) these moments of positive affirmations can get knocked down as soon as I see my reflection.

This is where masturbation comes in.

I didn’t start masturbating as a form of self-love. I started because sometime just before puberty began I found out that certain sensations on my genitals felt amazing. It just so happened that this new interest in touching myself coincided with the darkening of my depression and as I became more and more disconnected from the sensation of joy the orgasms that came from masturbation became an important source of momentary happiness. Now masturbation has taken a firm place in my daily struggle to not let my depression confine me to my bed. It’s like jump starting a car battery (or so I imagine, I’m really unclear on how car batteries work): when my depression sets in and my brain chemistry slides out of whack the release of my orgasm related hormones and whatnot gives my body the boost it needs to start working.

During my daily life I don’t take pleasure from my body but when it’s just me, my hand/Hitachi/pillow/whatever and my body we usually end up having some really pleasurable moments. Even in my most dysphoric of days those nerve endings in my clit still respond to the  right touches and before I know it I’m grabbing my breasts and clenching my feet and having a good time with my body. Masturbation is our moment of peace, that rare moment when instead of working against each other we’re joined together and having a fucking good time.

When I’m coming down from masturbation I can lay there in my bed and appreciate what my body just did. For once I can marvel at my body instead of loathing it. In those moments I’m in awe of its complex networks of nerves and blood vessels and hormones and whatever fucking else is going on in there. This goes beyond abstract positive aphorisms about loving my body because it gives me a concrete, physical example of pleasure in my body; it gives me a lived example of pleasure in my body. For someone who spends so much of her life trying to live outside of my body this is outrageously important for me.

My body isn’t going anywhere. While I can change certain things here and there it’s not like I can edit the features that I hate so a major part of living in my body has to come from inside, not from medical intervention (This is NOT me knocking medical intervention, there’s a whole list of surgical things I plan on getting done once I marry and then kill a wealthy old man). Obviously masturbation isn’t the silver bullet that’s going to end my dysphoria but when I spend most of my life wanting to scratch my flesh from my bones with my own two hands I’ll take whatever moment of peace and pleasure I can damn well get.

If my body and I are in a strained relationship then I guess my Hitachi is our therapist?