I know that I have a female mind, but I feel like I am being suprest by male hormons or something. like how I would think as a woman is blocked by being a man phisicly. some feelings are there, but I feel starved femaninily. does this make sense to anyone? my relation to women in generual was trying to absorb something from them. I did not have that femene feel of my own so I liked being are them to barrow theirs. lol. I have herd in the past that male hormos block parts of the mind that are used by women, is this true or not? if so, does estrogen help? If so in what way do it help? Does Spiro block the testatrone from your brain also?
I don't know if it is true, but for me my fem self was very deeply buried. I had never had the oppuntity to explore this side of me properly. It took some time to find me in there and bring me out.
So I think most of it is just to do with freedom to be yourself. Currently you don't have that freedom I'm guessing. That is freedom to express yourself fully, freedom to discover the girl you are inside, to work through your 'teengaged' years as a girl to find your place in the world.
Without a doubt homones affect your mind. But I think results vary. Like I am sure I am more emotional now, more talkative, more expressive, and sexualy attracted in different ways. But I am not sure how much of that is hormones or just freedom to express myself.
Quote from: Nicky on July 29, 2010, 10:07:08 PM
Without a doubt homones affect your mind. But I think results vary. Like I am sure I am more emotional now, more talkative, more expressive, and sexualy attracted in different ways. But I am not sure how much of that is hormones or just freedom to express myself.
Yes, hormone replacement therapy changes things quite a bit. That's very true. For me, they provide a low-level high. Everything is just better but generally subtly so.
Most of us here were very repressed for years. I was for decades. Most people here will agree that your gender dysphoria will never go away if you are truly trans. Your feelings are not that unusual for people like us.
Wishing you well.
"Currently you don't have that freedom I'm guessing. That is freedom to express yourself fully, freedom to discover the girl you are inside, to work through your 'teengaged' years as a girl to find your place in the world."
the only time that I have is when no one is around, I do let myself go sometime until someome says something that hurst my feeling then I man up for awhile.
I subscribe to the theory that once a TS makes the decision to transition and starts on hormones they will have a second puberty which will make them seem to be oddly juvenile and in many ways resemble teenagers.
the effect was first noticed and reported on back in 1984 before the research that showed TS brains are different.
it is generally accepted that hormones alter people and it seems logical that a MtF would not have had a typical male puberty with its emphasis on booze, tobacco and sex but once on estrogen a MtF brain will be kicked into puberty and make for a couple of years of sillyness that seems just like a teenage girl's.
Lots of people do not like this theory.
Are you trying to say that you have male traits but for some reason feel like a woman and being around women helps you in a sense? You feel like a woman inside but you definitely have male traits. You feel if you transitioned you would be read rather easily because of your maleness, so you like to be around women because it sort of eases the pain. You want to suck the femaleness out of them so you could pass better or something. I am kind of like this myself. I like seeing my own traits in women because that gives me hope that I can transition and blend in. I also tend to hang around women that I feel resemble me physically in a way.
Tell me if I am wrong.
I've thought this as well and I think it's true that from so many years of male hormones our bodies adapt so much to them, yet a part of the dysphoria is not feeling comfortable with that, and feeling like there is a part of you being repressed, a part of you that has been buried deep inside and held shut by testosterone.
I can relate to that.
I've seen TSs before that come across as being very gay acting more than feminine and it makes me wonder if they are trying to connect with their true selves but they have it jaded by their residual male qualities? Or they're trying too hard too soon? Will that ability to come across as a gay guy eventually fade away with HRT? I've said to my mum a few times I'd rather be slightly more on the male side than go down that gay-like path. It's just not me.
I think for some they just adjust really quickly and others it can take time to feel comfortable and to find their true self and to bring it to the surface at the right pace. Is it seven years that the body completely reproduces itself? So seven years of hormones and you should be more or less rid of a lot of those old male qualities and ways of thinking etc but each year I'm sure it's more and more noticeably gone.
Each year of HRT things will slowly fall more into place.. and for me at least I know I will continue to feel more and more like "me". twelve months in and strangers and people I know suggest things are going well. ^_____^
But it is in a way a leap of faith, no matter how much research you do.. it can be hard to say what exactly will happen. Personally if the conviction is strong and the feeling of who you feel you are is so overwhelming that it is the only option then it's enough (that's how I see/saw it) everything will fall into place. :P
Quote from: lauren3332 on July 31, 2010, 02:52:53 AM
Are you trying to say that you have male traits but for some reason feel like a woman and being around women helps you in a sense? You feel like a woman inside but you definitely have male traits. You feel if you transitioned you would be read rather easily because of your maleness, so you like to be around women because it sort of eases the pain. You want to suck the femaleness out of them so you could pass better or something. I am kind of like this myself. I like seeing my own traits in women because that gives me hope that I can transition and blend in. I also tend to hang around women that I feel resemble me physically in a way.
Tell me if I am wrong.
yes to all, I think that it could also be a roll madule thing as well.
Quote from: laineyjain on July 31, 2010, 11:13:51 PM
yes to all, I think that it could also be a roll madule thing as well.
the problem TS have is that until we get out of the closet and are a year or two down the hormones path we don't realise how much we can change.
The before and after thread shows the dramatic physical chanegs that can happen but mainly I see those happy smiling people are women not guys or gays...I doubt if guys could smile so naturally for the camera.
Thats the difference between true TS and all the other wannabes.
To find an appropriate role model you need to look for women 10-15 years younger than yourself and see how they are living and socialising as if you really are a woman trapped in a man's body the estrogen will let that woman come out but she will be a lot younger than you are.
Quote from: lilacwoman on August 01, 2010, 12:37:06 AM
I doubt if guys could smile so naturally for the camera.
Thats the difference between true TS and all the other wannabes.
Smiling for the camera?? ???
Kinda wondering about the whole smiling for the camera thing too? Some people are just not comfortable with having their picture taken, no matter how comfortable they are with who they are. How one smiles for the camera is no indication of whether or not they are a "true" TS or not. I have some trouble smiling for the camera only because I have one miss aligned tooth that I don't like seeing in pictures, that does not mean I am not really a TS. Away from the camera I smile more than I ever have in my life and people tell me I look happier that I ever have, that, for me, is a sign that I am living my truth, not the camera.
lols if anyone is going to keep you on your toes with what words you choose and to be careful with how they could be twisted and misinterpreted it's a transsexual, sorry a mtf transsexual! But hey that's just my own personal observation/opinion. Not trying to state it as a fact ;)
*covered all bases?* check, double checked ...phewww. But still in the dangerzone? ^______0
>_____< *prays my little heart out*.
*more loling*.
Quote from: katgirl74 on August 01, 2010, 10:32:20 PM
Kinda wondering about the whole smiling for the camera thing too? Some people are just not .
even sat on a blue fly no-one will take you for a guy.
Interesting topic.
I apologize for not responding with a more personalized message, but rather than paraphrase an author I'm going to offer up a quote of hers because it says pretty much everything I can think of at the moment... and probably says it better than I would at this time of night.
"...contrary to popular belief, hormones do not simply act like unilateral on/off switches controlling female/feminine or male/masculine development. All people have both androgens (which include testosterone) and estrogens in their systems, although the balance is tipped more toward the former in men and the latter in women. Not only are there different types of androgens and estrogens, but these hormones require different steroid receptors to function, are metabolized by numerous enzymes that can shift the balance by converting one hormone to another, and function by regulating the levels of scores of "downstream genes," which are more directly responsible for producing specific hormonal effects. Because of all these variables, there's an extensive amount of natural variation built into the way individual people experience and process specific hormones." -- [Julia Serano]
"While biological gender differences are very real, most of the connotations, values, and assumptions we associate with female and male biology are not." -- [Julia Serano]
"While biological gender differences are very real, most of the connotations, values, and assumptions we associate with female and male biology are not." -- [Julia Serano]
[/quote]
the assumptions work well enough in most societies as to be real and tangible.
so we supress are selves and do not carry out how we feel in real life just because of social roles of others pressing on us pushing us to live stereotypical male lives until we can't take anymore? I know not all fall into this scenario, but it seem that many do.
"the assumptions work well enough in most societies as to be real and tangible."
[/quote]
"so we supress are selves and do not carry out how we feel in real life just because of social roles of others pressing on us pushing us to live stereotypical male lives until we can't take anymore? I know not all fall into this scenario, but it seem that many do."
[/quote]
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Social constructs are all too real, as is transphobia, cissexism, and trans-mysogyny.
Hmm, I do not mean to sound cynical in my reply, so I will try explain. While there is much to be said about 'socialization' there are quite a few other issues as well. Cognitive dissonance describes the mental tension and stress that occur in a person's mind when they find themselves holding contradictory thoughts or views simultaneously. Gender dissonance, which can be terribly painful, I think is very real to most trans people. But it is often dismissed by others because it is 'invisible' and they themselves are unable to relate to it. But they often understand being stuck in a bad relationship or a crappy job and how those can make a persons life miserable and lead to a depression that is so overwhelming that it seeps into every aspect of that persons life.
If that much despair can be caused by a full time job, imagine how painful it could be if one was forced to live in a gender that felt wrong every hour of every day, unceasingly?
Cissexuals have a subconscious sex too. But as cissexuals they feel 'right' in the sex they were born into, they have 'gender concordance' and therefore have have no need or desire to locate and examine their subconscious sex in order to differentiate it from their physical sex.
My first memories of being trans was when I was four years old. Now, I wasn't able to articulate back then that I should have been born female. But I was consciously aware of the fact that I was physically male, that other people treated me like a boy and that there was something profoundly different between me and any boys I knew. For several years I struggled with my subconscious sex and I was very confused about many feelings and experiences. Everyone seemed to think that I was a boy but it didn't make any sense to me.
At my earliest ages I did not suppress myself and I believe I expressed myself the only way I knew how. The way I understood it was not in terms of gender but in terms of my physical sex. I could only imagine how to express femininity and female gender roles but I did not yet understand them, much less desire to understand them. My subconscious sex was not the result of socialization or social constructs. I was not only encouraged to think of myself as a boy and to act male or masculine, but I was ridiculed when I deviated from doing so. Ridiculed, corrected, scolded, degraded, publicly humiliated, even mentally and physically abused... I was told there must be something wrong with me.
"Ya think?!?!"
At that time, my gender dissonance was not the most pressing or painful thing in my life... all of the crap that I received because of it was the most pressing and painful to me at the time. If I was going to cope I had to internally deal with the difference between my subconscious sex and my conscious sex. And though my subconscious sex was all my own, my gender identity was shaped by my thoughts, my experiences and through socialization.
And as years passed by I tried everything that I could to make myself successful, to become an upstanding citizen, to be someone my family could be proud of, to be respected, to be honored, to... I don't know. Everything I tried didn't work, I always ended up miserable. Eventually I hit a mental low, a dangerous low. And at first I thought it was because several of my family members had recently died, one after the other in a small string of bad luck. But no, the low was because "I" was dying. Pretending to be male was killing me. Within days, I decided the only way I could go on was to stop living a lie.
Perhaps this wasn't the best way to make my point, if I had one to start with... I'm just saying, for me, it was a lot more than just social roles or pressure from others that kept me from transitioning or coming out as trans for as long as it did. Though it all seems much more simple to me now, it was hella confusing along the way and my own ignorance was my strongest hindrance.
Quote from: laineyjain on July 29, 2010, 09:57:55 PM
I know that I have a female mind, but I feel like I am being suprest by male hormons or something. like how I would think as a woman is blocked by being a man phisicly. some feelings are there, but I feel starved femaninily. does this make sense to anyone? my relation to women in generual was trying to absorb something from them. I did not have that femene feel of my own so I liked being are them to barrow theirs. lol. I have herd in the past that male hormos block parts of the mind that are used by women, is this true or not? if so, does estrogen help? If so in what way do it help? Does Spiro block the testatrone from your brain also?
Well there are structures in the brain that react with male and female hormones. If your brain is female and your body is male their is a discontinuity, signals while being interpreted are not fully being processed correctly. For example, when something happens in the outside world when i was living as a man, my first impulse would be to just react, however conditioning and training as man says that if i reacted that way, it would be inappropriate for a man, so i adjusted. I had various health conditions as well as i was growing and felt my body wasnt working 100% right, like your in the matrix and nothing is real, yet its right their in front of you.
Once Spiro and Hormones hits is a whole new ball game so to speak. ^_^. The changes you experience are subtle at first that you just dont notice them until it happens. You will know when you cry, yeah, as a guy its easy to hold back tears, Testosterone makes it so easy you can tough threw it, but as a girl after 1.5 yrs of HRT, heh, You couldnt stop those tears if you tried your damned hardest. Among the most interesting and refreshing things is that you can now think.. Yeah, with testosterone your mind is filled with Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex, if something happened to stimulate that thought you would carry it all day or until you did something about it. Then Estrogen comes along and its just... gone, your mind feels less cluttered, more free to think about lots of different things, at once even, it seems really easy to do now, difficult before. Also if something stimulates you it lasts a bit, then you think about shoes and poof all gone. It seems i just have more control of my emotions, but the intensity and sensitivity of them are much higher.
Its hard to explain you just feel like you have an air of femininity about you, and you know this simply because you didnt in the past. It feels different but comfortable.
Quote from: perlita85 on August 03, 2010, 06:47:47 PM
I always know that I was a female, but I alwyas preferd woman. I guess that made me a lesbian. However, since I have been in estro. i have begun having feelings (desires) for males.
Soon you will be one of us... one of us...
thats how it started for me.
Going WAY in time, to my teens, and looking at things from 30+ years down the road, I see some things more clearly.
From puberty onward, testosterone was like a 'bad drug' that really screwed up my ability to deal with life and my emotions. (This was before 'blockers'.) Oestrogen was like a tranquillizer - it didn't help me deal with things but it made the instability better. It wasn't until after SRS, with T reduced to almost nothing, that things really came together. Life was easy and enjoyable and I finally became a real person, much more of a person than I had ever dreamed possible. My body and mine were simply not running on the right fuel before.
Quote from: Northern Jane on August 04, 2010, 06:35:30 PM
Going WAY in time, to my teens, and looking at things from 30+ years down the road, I see some things more clearly.
From puberty onward, testosterone was like a 'bad drug' that really screwed up my ability to deal with life and my emotions. (This was before 'blockers'.) Oestrogen was like a tranquillizer - it didn't help me deal with things but it made the instability better. It wasn't until after SRS, with T reduced to almost nothing, that things really came together. Life was easy and enjoyable and I finally became a real person, much more of a person than I had ever dreamed possible. My body and mine were simply not running on the right fuel before.
Hormones had the exact same effects on me only in reverse. Isn't that crazy? That E did the same thing to you that T is doing for me! Almost like the brain really does have a preference for a certain fuel. :laugh:
Post Merge: August 04, 2010, 08:21:07 PM
Quote from: lilacwoman on August 01, 2010, 12:37:06 AM
To find an appropriate role model you need to look for women 10-15 years younger than yourself and see how they are living and socialising as if you really are a woman trapped in a man's body the estrogen will let that woman come out but she will be a lot younger than you are.
Interesting. What do you mean she will be younger?
I completely understand the notion of a second adolescence and effectively being a considerably younger woman than you were a man... I've been on HRT for 5 years and sometimes feel like I think like a much younger person. People that are close to me have noticed, too...
I, too, feel that T had a profoundly negative effect on my state of mind from my "first" adolescence to when I started HRT. Like Izumi mentioned, stopping T was like lifting a veil that had been over me for 37 years... I was amazed at the clarity of thought... it's hard to articulate but everything just seemed "right."
When I first realized what I was, I had never even heard the word, "transsexual." I thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I decided, back then, to be the best guy I could be. I lived my life through a mask... my male identity, and tried to be what everyone else expected me to be. Looking back, the more I tried to push "the girl" away and "man-up," the worse my ability to cope with reality became. Trying to deny my gender identity, over time, almost drove me to suicide. I think, before transition, that we're largely unaware of how much damage we do to ourselves by denying our own existence. "I should have done this YEARS ago," is a phrase I've heard lots of Transsexuals use.
Quote from: lilacwoman on August 01, 2010, 12:37:06 AM
the problem TS have is that until we get out of the closet and are a year or two down the hormones path we don't realise how much we can change.
The before and after thread shows the dramatic physical chanegs that can happen but mainly I see those happy smiling people are women not guys or gays...I doubt if guys could smile so naturally for the camera.
Thats the difference between true TS and all the other wannabes.
To find an appropriate role model you need to look for women 10-15 years younger than yourself and see how they are living and socialising as if you really are a woman trapped in a man's body the estrogen will let that woman come out but she will be a lot younger than you are.
If I could elaborate on what Lilacwoman stated,...
The bottom line is that women, when given the chance to live their lives as women, will be obviously happy with their gender role, regardless of how they look in a picture. There are some that consider themselves part of the transgendered community that still consider themselves men but like the lifestyle, the attention and /or the feeling they get while "en femme." Someone who isn't truly transsexual would not be happy to live full time, take hormones, have GRS, etc.. I think that the outsiders' culture links the T too closely to the GLB and makes some young transsexuals wonder, at first, if they're gay.... I know I did when I realized I was attracted to boys and it seriously confused me.
It was when puberty hit that I really started having problems with depression and anxiety. Female hormones do strange things to both my body and my brain. One example...back in May, the doctor put me on Provera (progesterone pills) for a few days due to issues with the, err, reproductive organs. Stupidly, I agreed to go on it.
I was supposed to take them for 10 days but only managed to make it to day 8 before having to quit. I had an allergic reaction to the pills, dropped into a horrible suicidal depression that took me weeks to come out of, and right after stopping the pills had cramps so bad that a couple of days I couldn't move for hours (I never have cramps). And it didn't resolve the problem; in fact, made it worse.
I noticed after I started taking supplements that upped my T levels I was less depressed and less anxious and it helped lessen the problem I was having with the reproductive organs. Even if for no other reason, I think I should transition just so my body has the right hormone to run on (and less of the wrong ones).
Quote from: JessicaR on August 04, 2010, 09:45:59 PM..... makes some young transsexuals wonder, at first, if they're gay.... I know I did when I realized I was attracted to boys and it seriously confused me.
That was a SERIOUS issue back in the 1960's! By age 8 (1957) I knew my physical sex was wrong, by puberty I knew I was attracted to boys but I also knew I wasn't Gay - try explaining THAT to people back then! ::) I was pronounced Gay by an old quack of a shrink at 15 and it wasn't until 2 years later that I finally saw a doctor who knew what transsexual was (thanks to Dr. Benjamin's book).
"Among the most interesting and refreshing things is that you can now think.. Yeah, with testosterone your mind is filled with Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex, if something happened to stimulate that thought you would carry it all day or until you did something about it. Then Estrogen comes along and its just... gone, your mind feels less cluttered, more free to think about lots of different things, at once even, it seems really easy to do now, difficult before."
This sounds very appealing to me - I can't wait to begin HRT :) It seems ever since I hit my teens my head has been overly cluttered and it's hard enough to focus without having your thoughts wander in a sexual manner. Say if I wanted to doodle just randomly , whatever I would scrawl would end up feeling like a sexual organ no matter how screwed it looked up on paper. However I don't think I'll ever, ever find guys attractive though. Not in the slightist.
Certain men I find attractive, actually a lot of them. Women, I find attractive too, but more in an aesthetic sense. I think women, their faces, their bodies, are just more innately beautiful than men are. However when I get aroused or fantasize about sex, its always with a man. In school I was always crazy about and had crushes on boys.
Yet, just like everybody said, I know and have always known I wasn't gay. In fact, most gay men just don't interest me. I guess that might be I know they won't see me as the woman/girl I've always wished I was on the outside instead of just inside. I don't know.
Quote from: Llewelyn However I don't think I'll ever, ever find guys attractive though. Not in the slightist.
/quote]
Write that sentence out and hide it away for ten years while estrogen works its magic and then show it to your husband :D