testosterone enanthate<\/a>, through wide-bore needles. Either you get over being phobic very quickly or you crack, was how I looked at it. The day a quadricep spasm broke the needle off in my thigh was the acid test of needle-phobia \u2013 I got up from the toilet seat, limped to my toolbox in the living room, got the needle-nose pliers, limped back, and pulled out the broken needle. And then I fixed a new injection and shot up, since the first one hadn\u2019t been completed.<\/p>\r\nThat fall, however, the physical weirdness was far from overwhelming. I loved teaching; grad school was just enough of a challenge; the SCA was fun. I was making new friends, and overall was pretty happy about life, right up to the point where one of those friends decided that I was her own personal private piece of virgin meat. Since this story will end up being long enough without gory details, I\u2019ll summarize. \u201cKelly\u201d and \u201cArthur\u201d were a married couple in the SCA, part of my new circle of friends. One night \u201cKelly\u201d asked if I wanted to go get some ice cream after the meeting, and over ice cream asked if I wanted to be her lover. Stunned, I fell back on my only polite way out \u2013 the truth. I told her of my rather unique situation, explained about the shots, figuring that this would serve as a polite but not ego-damaging \u201cno\u201d. Instead, it merely dunked me in metaphorical A-1 sauce. I started getting a lot of attention from Kelly, which I was too na\u00efve to interpret properly. The fact that she came into my (unlocked) apartment when I was in the shower \u2013 and didn\u2019t leave \u2013 should have tipped me off. Eventually I was held down on my own couch and forced. I was twenty two. I had never done more than hold hands.<\/p>\r\n
After that I didn\u2019t worry about politeness anymore when I said \u201cno\u201d. I was utterly confused by what had occurred, but not so confused that I had any desire for it to happen again. She was married; I had said no; therefore It Was Wrong. What was less easy to sort out was the fact that it had felt physically pleasurable. This whole physical craving \/ physical pleasure aspect to things made everything more complicated. I continued to fend Kelly off over the next several months while I got on with the rest of my life; eventually she got the hint. I continued to make friends in the department, around town, in the fencing club, and so on. And I started to notice small bits of personality change here and there.<\/p>\r\n
It\u2019s odd trying to chart personality shifts from the inside when you\u2019ve just changed social groups. Your friends, the people that normally serve as your \u201creality-check,\u201d are all brand-new, just meeting you for the first time, so they aren\u2019t in a position to warn you. The only way you can usually do it is in retrospect. Even so, I began to notice things here and there. I\u2019d become more quick-tempered, more prone to jump in with both feet and argue with someone, especially academically. I\u2019d stopped crying, something I used to do very easily when angered, frustrated, or depressed. Now, I couldn\u2019t<\/em> cry, even when I wanted to; I had to find other ways of letting things out, and eventually settled on whomping trees with an aluminum baseball bat in order to release anger and frustration. At one point I rather cold-bloodedly seduced the girlfriend of one of my colleagues \u2013 pretty much just to see if I could. That was a year after the shots started. In just over a year I\u2019d gone from a person who was described by his college friends as \u201csolid,\u201d \u201cdependable,\u201d \u201cchivalrous,\u201d and \u201cthe most honest person on campus\u201d to someone with severe mood swings and a pretty damn stained moral code. All of which, I was repeatedly told by friends and medical professionals, was \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/p>\r\nHere I will hit the fast-forward button a bit, skipping over mononucleosis, the loss of my assistantship, the two-year relationship that eventually broke up, and a long downward mental and financial spiral. We pick up again at a traffic light where Our Hero, biking to work, is cut off by a cursing 280-lb. man in a half-ton plumbing supply pickup. The driver of this truck has some rather firm opinions about public roadways, bikes, and the combination of the two. He speaks profane fluently, and roundly curses out all bikes and those skinny geeks who ride them. The light changes to green, and the truck peels out, smoking his tires. Our Hero sees red, and peels out after the truck, just plain smoking. Pedaling his twelve-speed at 35 mph; he catches up to the truck and proceeds to ream the driver out, from right alongside his window, in traffic, questioning the driver\u2019s intelligence, manners, parentage, and fighting ability \u2013 especially fighting ability. Fortunately the plumber does not feel like fighting; each person arrives at their respective place of work without further incident.<\/p>\r\n
I got to work, opened the store for the day, sat down with my morning bagel\u2026 and immediately got the shakes as realization hit. I had, moments ago, wanted nothing in the world but to drag that man out of his truck and beat the holy shit out of him. I\u2019d wanted it so badly I could still visualize it. That morning was when I knew I had a major problem going on, that my personality had been radically affected by the testosterone shots. I reflected on the little things I\u2019d been noticing over the past few years, including a fear that my intelligence and creativity had dropped measurably. I made an appointment with the endocrinologist as soon as I got home that night. When I went in to speak with him, I explained the changes I\u2019d noticed, up to and including my new violent streak that I had (until that morning) been rechanneling into beating up trees. He shrugged, and indicated that he was an endocrinologist, not a psychologist. Not his department; not his problem. I pleaded with him, trying to make clear the extent of my worry. He advised me to look in the phone book under \u201cpsychologists\u201d \u2013 this at a time when I was making part-time minimum wage. He again repeated his injunction to simply \u201cvary the dosage and find out what works,\u201d which I\u2019d done. He continued to treat the situation as if it were a pure plumbing issue, and I was somehow suggesting that he be concerned with the magazines in the bathroom or something. Faced with no help from the doctor providing the medication, no money, no insurance, no anything, I did the only thing I could think of \u2013 I stopped taking the shots.<\/p>\r\n
My best guess is that it took about three months for most of the testosterone to work itself out of my system, and another 6-12 for it to be as gone as it would get. I didn\u2019t tell anyone that I\u2019d stopped, but within just a few weeks my female friends were remarking that I was \u201ceasier to be around these days.\u201d Of course I asked why; none of them could ever point to anything specific. One of my good buds, Lisa, said I felt \u201cless threatening\u201d \u2013 not, she was quick to add, that I\u2019d ever done anything or said anything threatening before\u2026 it was just \u201can aura or something.\u201d I was still out of school, but felt my creativity and IQ come back up; I dropped the upper-body muscle, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, I still continued to have to shave, though less frequently. I was able to cry again; the fits of red rage disappeared. I won\u2019t say \u201cand he lived happily ever after,\u201d because it just isn\u2019t so. Being off the stuff is a mixed blessing in all sorts of ways.<\/p>\r\n
Having a \u201cnormal\u201d upper-body for my size was really nice while it lasted. I turned into quite the jock in grad school \u2013 biked ten miles a day or more, taught fencing, did some heavy-weapons fighting with the SCA \u2013 but now I\u2019m back to my pipe-cleaner-armed self. Can\u2019t retain the muscle mass one bit. This caused some trouble when my repeated knee injuries finally needed surgery \u2013 I worked my tail off in physical therapy, but couldn\u2019t build the leg muscles back up above a certain point, no matter how hard I tried. I wear twin knee braces now if I need to do any real walking, and on bad days I use a stick. I have to wonder if that\u2019d be the case if I\u2019d still been on the testosterone.<\/p>\r\n
Gradually my sexual ability faded. Not the drive, just the ability. It\u2019s a source of mild but continuing frustration, not to mention a bit of a barrier in having any continuing relationships. And speaking of relationships\u2026<\/p>\r\n
In college, my platonic relationships were all het, since the only models I had to go on were what I read \u2013 and medieval literature isn\u2019t brimming with same-sex love affairs. When I was on the shots (effectively, going through puberty but a bit late), I basically kept going with what I was familiar with and surrounded by, which was all straight. Once off the shots again, and single, I slowly started realizing that yes, in fact, I was attracted to guys as well. It was a while before I\u2019d admit it, but I finally did<\/a>. That was at age 28 \u2013 six years after the initial shots. I\u2019ve only just started addressing it face-on this past year, though \u2013 getting involved in the community, coming out to one or two more friends every month, learning a little bit more all the time. Am I bi because of my XXXY chromosomes? Beats me. Did the testosterone push me in a straight direction, and I only realized my orientation after it was out of my system? Good question. Unfortunately, I can\u2019t answer it. There are arguments, counter-arguments and evidence all over many sides of both those questions. What I do know is, here I stand, and this is who I am at this point in time. The questions I need to deal with are some of the same questions that anyone in the FTM community faces.<\/p>\r\nI just learned from Jed this year about the dangers of osteoporosis when you don\u2019t have normal hormonal levels. I haven\u2019t been back to an endocrinologist yet, but that alone makes me wonder if maybe I should. I still like to camp, hike, and do all sorts of other outdoors stuff, knees or no knees. But I don\u2019t relish the though of finding out that, yes, osteoporosis is<\/em> in fact a problem when I\u2019m halfway down inside the Grand Canyon and my wrist breaks. My rational side says to go find a new endocrinologist and get some facts. But my emotional side\u2026<\/p>\r\nI got burned and burned badly by the unethical prick I saw the first time. Like the personality changes, it\u2019s only in retrospect that I see how bad it was. At no point was the hormone therapy presented as an option<\/em>; it was simply \u201cOh, you\u2019re not normal. We can fix that.\u201d No analysis of alternatives; no weighing of \u201cIf we do X, this will happen; if we don\u2019t do X, these other things will happen.\u201d I was treated like a malfunctioning toaster. This makes me more than a little reluctant to risk more trauma by putting myself in the hands of another guy who may well be just as bad. I\u2019m a graduate student; I can\u2019t afford to shop around to six different offices, searching for just the right person. But, as any reader of this journal knows, it is vital to find a doctor who will respect the patient as a person, who will actually listen to concerns, and who doesn\u2019t feel like forcing every patient into the \u201cnormal\u201d mold right off the bat.<\/p>\r\nThat issue of \u201cnormalcy\u201d is the big swirling cloudy final question. I\u2019ve never had any illusions that I was normal. In high school, I used to make jokes about my half-elven blood, since everyone else was aging and changing while I stayed my thin, impish self. When I found out about my less-than-normal chromosome structure, I got an explanation for some of my difference \u2013 but it was treated as something \u201cfixable\u201d. It wasn\u2019t until just this past January that I found out that there are entire organizations, support groups, communities that celebrate these sorts of differences, encourage the exploration of identities that don\u2019t fit neatly into the pigeonholes society provides. Am I a little bitter? Sure I am \u2013 I never had any real opportunity to take conscious charge of my position as a crosser of boundaries, someone who lives in-between. It\u2019s been a few years now since I quit the testosterone, and I still have a cellar-level bass voice, still have to shave every other day. My body isn\u2019t changing back; on the outside, I\u2019m undeniably male. But how do I identify? I\u2019m attracted to men and women (mostly men of late); I\u2019m neither a classic Dave-Barry-style \u201cguy\u201d nor a femme [Jed, some help with the terms in this part would be a big help\u2026 --Alex] I\u2019m not especially fond of tractor-pulls or<\/em> Streisand. I listen to Springsteen one day, Cats<\/cite> the next. I feel<\/em> in the middle somewhere. It\u2019s natural for me; I\u2019ve always been a bridge, a go-between, understanding both sides of any given coin but living somewhere in the milled edge.<\/p>\r\nStaying there could be one heck of a trick, though.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":19949,"menu_order":20,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-18115","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18115"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20713,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18115\/revisions\/20713"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}