Immediate placebo and physical changes from HRT
My doctor told me I would likely have immediate placebo effects from making the decision to do HRT. And boy was he right.
Within hours of leaving the clinic my mind starting to go quiet. The noise, the distraction of thinking about it vanished.
And in the void, a quiet ringing happiness.
Holy shit, I’m gonna feminize my brain.
The doc and shrink agree that 100 mg of progesterone combined with .5 estradiol x 2 and 50 mg spiro will allow me to emotionally and cognitively find relief. The physical impacts are low, no one is really sure how much feminization will occur with progesterone alone, for after the first three months my plan is to go off the estradiol for the next three-month cycle (or month or whatever is decided by my doctor). Progesterone peer-reviewed data is limited, for now, and non-binary transitions are less documented, for now. Especially trans-fem non-binary transitions.
Interesting immediate physical response:
On day one of HRT I had to go to Walmart to pick up some stuff. I had my youngest child with me. The store was packed. Chin-diapers everywhere. Very few people practicing social distancing. I started to feel myself get hot. Irritated. Frustrated.
Now, dear reader, this AMAB non-binary/transfem person often has many moments when my blood pressure goes red and I can feel my body springing into a physical explosion. These kind of moments have come plenty these last two years and I am intimately familiar with the physical sensation of my blood beginning to boil.
Recovery has given me spiritual tools to deal with this that work and that I use.
What I felt in the store was that when my blood pressure spiked, it was diminished greatly by the spiro. My body didn’t stress out, as much, like it is prone to do. I found it much easier to return to homeostasis afterward as well.
Why this decision and not the full binary transition?
Part of me really likes the idea of going all the way to the other binary. I love wearing women’s clothes. I love expressing myself in a feminine way. It does not mesh with my work and I have a hard time seeing how that would play out. I’m an educator in a conservative Trump county in a Blue state in the mid-Atlantic. The community would be split on me living as Cassandra and teaching as Cassandra. It’s not something I am emotionally capable of handling, like ever. My parents are a whole other kettle of fish, not to mention my partner’s family. In my own family, I am the outlier in terms of socio-political beliefs. When I expressed gender non-conformity as a child I was quickly rebuked and corrected — suicidal ideations in high school over this stuff, dear reader, and then learning to cope by trying to fetishize it or drink/drug to numb it/or let it out (a Jekyll Hyde kind of reality that was not at all fun, let me tell you, dear reader).
My physicality is above average, I guess, at 6'2 211 lbs. I exercise & write daily, garden and read and enjoy time with my family. My heart goes pitter-patter at being a cute boho chick with a hippie girl vibe, but that’s never going to happen without a million dollars worth of cosmetic surgery. I’m not passable, but I can be very androgynous/punk rock and appeal to both my eye and inner eye, and my partner’s aesthetics. I am very happy when I present more androgynously.
I have been out in public dressed as Cassandra once. And only once — when I went to the LGBT clinic for an HRT consultation. I am not even sure if I can handle the social transition to Cassandra at my age.
Being an addicted personality/trans individual has taught me that I do not have a healthy emotional reactive response. I am learning. I am so much better than I was ten years ago. At this time living/presenting as a woman seems way too overwhelming.
My wife is cishet and has overcome huge phobic and inherited biases within herself as we have learned to deal with my transness. Both of us are 1970s babies so it’s not like either of us had any cultural ideas about trans people. As a kid, trans people were either a joke or a sexual fetish w/r/t to film, media, tv, etc.
Me living as Cassandra full time in our house would break us up and I don’t want to be broken up. I like her. I love her. We have an awesome family. Where we live, our lifestyle is mostly being homebodies so it's not like there is any practical use for building a chic wardrobe in Wal-mart country. Not that I can’t get/won’t get cute. I plan to, but age-appropriate/budget-appropriate cute. Thankfully, I got a lot of the wear sexy clothing when dressing as a woman out of the way already. Not that many transwomen can’t make it work. They can trust me. But not this transfem.
My profile pic is from Face App, btw. An app that has saved my emotional bacon more than a few times, let me tell you.
-Cass
