Lets get right to the core of it.

In YOUR experience, was your nonbinary dysphoria progressive, or did it either stay the same or drop.

Time to debunk a rough question with forum experience.

Love to all here.

Mine- too soon to tell.

Quote from: Satinjoy on September 08, 2014, 12:33:00 PM
Lets get right to the core of it.

In YOUR experience, was your nonbinary dysphoria progressive, or did it either stay the same or drop.

Time to debunk a rough question with forum experience.

Love to all here.

Mine- too soon to tell.

It was not progressive. It came on all of a sudden with the realization that I could live the way I wanted. Suddenly my life as it was looked unbearably bleak in comparison with possibility.

first i had binary dysphoria. like, serious binary dysphoria.
the choice was presented as only one. either or. but that was the scariest thought i'd ever had.
what if i were to be stuck in one, and only one gender, for the rest of my entire life?
almost had a panic attack at that.

well, realizing that, i started having non-binary dysphoria.
first i thought, this person i think i am could never possibly be accepted in society.
came to susan's, found out i was wrong.

kay, so i can exist. is what i learned. euphoria at that.
but dysphoria soon set in again. for how do i be me?
the man i long to be found his place on this vast internet.
he has his friends, and a couple enemies. quirks and cute and horrible sides.
the girl of course has had her time and almost never speaks.
and the person who was me, all of this and some, found their space in here.

yeah, it worked. kind of.
but dysphoria wouldn't let go of its grasp, and rather tightened it slowly over time.
it hurts to find out that i can't just transition.
not because of society or family or anything. simply because of a government playing nanny knows what's best for you.
yeah, there is no place for me in the system.
but i got by, barely, by slowly letting go of all i need not be, letting myself take more and more of the space that a character had held.

even so, as time went by and i became more of me, i only found more to feel miserable about.
finding myself meant finding flaws.
the bodily flaws can't be changed, unless i win a lottery.
flaws in personality can be changed, but first i'll have to find them. and admit them.
it hurt. it worked with dysphoria to throw me into a space so dark there was no light left to see.

well, this all happened over several years. dysphoria grew bad enough that suicidal thoughts haunted me not just every day.
but every hour, and some times even every waking moment.
i felt dysphoric about everything.

but by some miracle, i found myself.
i learned that i am me.
no matter how i look.
no matter how i dress.
no matter if my body has the right shape. (it's just the shape, it's still a wonderful body.)
no matter if anyone else can see me. (though it helped that i had a few friends who saw me. truly saw me.)

nothing much in my life has changed.
no transition. no job change. no more or less acceptance from parents. nothing has changed in my life.
but something changed within me.
i still want to transition, but i no longer feel like i'll go crazy without it.
i worry about how people will take it, but i don't fear their reactions.
and i forget myself a little more often. saying odd things once in a while.
but all that i do and say is genuine, and the people who care will respond by showing more of themselves too.

dysphoria is still there, but no longer as a raging monster.
it's more like a mosquito that's managed to get inside the bedroom.
suddenly that buzz near my ear, and just as suddenly gone.
harmless, but a tiny bit annoying. an annoyance that i hope to get rid of.

i still can't know if it will get worse again. i've only truly been living for a few months.
we'll see what the future brings.

I would say that mine is going more and more toward the female side. I would say any kind of dysphoria can progress or digress depending on a lot of things. Mine does seem to be getting a lot stronger than it ever was and way more frequent.

And no hormones yet for you darling, I know, been there, been where you are

You may walk that path in the forest my dear, do not be afraid to if it makes you feel more comfortable, testosterone made my dysphoria so much worse

Time will tell, we are unique....

..nails out...

Quote from: Satinjoy on September 09, 2014, 11:00:15 AM
And no hormones yet for you darling, I know, been there, been where you are

You may walk that path in the forest my dear, do not be afraid to if it makes you feel more comfortable, testosterone made my dysphoria so much worse

Time will tell, we are unique....

..nails out...

Not yet SJ. I think I am slowly pointing toward that way. Never really thought I needed them before. I mean gynecomastia, small hands, really small wrists, smallish feet. I would think maybe 65% male and only 35% male. Now it is abut 90 female and only 10 male. What really scares me is the realization that I may have wasted all the years. That is the biggest fear I have is what I may regret.

As a matter of fact SJ, the dyphoria that I think I may be experiencing is my actually anger at myself mixed with the dysphoria. If that makes any sense.

All the sense in the world dear.  And far be it from me advocating anything except therapy.

That anger is destructive.  We are where we are.  We morph as we morph, change as our truth comes to light, live in new understandings and emotions and being.

Unconditional acceptance of who we are in all of our gender components is crucial.

Embracing ourselves in truth is of the utmost importance.

Living free is the dream we share.

But all that we experience is of blessings, never wasted, it helps others, it teaches lessons, it makes us diamonds.

Blessings and love my dear

Satinjoy.  Wow is she strong today. 

It makes a lot of sense. I have never felt the anger or afraid of any regret before. I was who I was and am who I am. But the stronger the female feeling is becoming, the more I experience I don't even know if I could call it true anger or not but I am experiencing it more and more. It's almost like a sad anger. I have always been and felt really secure, and now I am questioning that security that I felt before. Just another way of fooling ourselves maybe?

For me, some level of dypshoria always existed but I was always able to keep it in check with my usual coping mechanisms.  I certainly didn't need to transition, let alone wear women's clothing.  At age 43, when the dysphoria monster started to really rear it's ugly head, I started to ID as non-binary, androgyne, bigender, whatever.  I had recently lost a lot of weight and put on a lot of muscle, and when you put andropause into the mix, it got really ugly.  I mean, it really snowballed to the point where I had to shave off the beard, shave my body, wear women's clothes (for the first time) and makeup, take finasteride and stop acting like a fake-ass dudebro.  I started to drink like crazy, wanted to die and spent most days crying.  The noises in my head began to get very loud and impossible to ignore- "SEX CHANGE!", "YOU'RE A WOMAN", "DO IT NOW!" over and over again. 

I found a therapist.  She told me that my estrogen receptors were now starving.  Less body fat, more muscle, testoterone level rollercoaster (I had abnormal testes to begin with), less aromatase to convert the excess T into E that was keeping me afloat, blah blah blah.  She told me that her typical first time MTF client was 38-45 and had recently lost a lot of weight.  And according to her, dysphoria is a progressive thing.  Depending on how much your brain failed to masculinize in utero (there are degrees), that will determine how bad the dysphoria will eventually get.  Some people need to transition at 5, some at 55.

When I started a therapeutic dose of estrogen, things got a lot better right away.  The noise in my head went from an "11" down to "2" in just 2 hours.  The more I took, and the less T in my system (all gone now), the happier I felt.  In fact, I didn't know what happy really was until HRT.  Also, from what I've heard, given time, estrogen will make your brain even more female.  I no longer feel remotely male, and it's such a relief.  My dudeliness was an uncomfortable act that I could not wait to shed.  I naturally act pretty girly, and I got bullied almost every day in school from the ages of 4-14 for it. In junior high school, my name was "little f****t sissy boy" and I had to adopt a tough guy persona to overcome that.  I'm just glad I finally found myself and that the years of suffering are behind me.

it's just another way of fooling ourselves.
i did struggle with regrets and what ifs. for quite some time.
in the end, i just had to admit to myself that no matter what, whether i'm a man or a woman or something else entirely, i am still the person who made all of my choices.

i did what seemed best, decisions based on the knowledge i had back then.
was i wrong? maybe. but if i didn't know, how could i have made a different decision?
don't judge your past self based on knowledge that you have only acquired later.
didn't your past self do the best they could to make the right decisions for you?

a person only knows what they know, only understands what they can understand at that moment.
my past self was stupid, foolish, made some decisions that can't be deemed good in hindsight, but were good at the time they were made.
and the ones that weren't good at the time they were made, are decisions that i have to forgive myself for, and learn from.
why did i do it? and what signs did i see, but interpreted wrong, or ignored? could i even have made a different decisions based on my knowledge at the time?

think about it. the anger, the regret. go through it together with a friend or a therapist.
someone who can help you find your faults without judging, so you can learn from them rather than hate yourself or your past.
the past is there to learn from, the future is where we shine.
living for the past is pointless, living for a better future is where happiness lies.

Quote from: Jill F on September 09, 2014, 12:49:05 PMI mean, it really snowballed to the point where I had to shave off the beard, shave my body, wear women's clothes (for the first time) and makeup, take finasteride and stop acting like a fake-ass dudebro.  I started to drink like crazy, wanted to die and spent most days crying.  The noises in my head began to get very loud and impossible to ignore- "SEX CHANGE!", "YOU'RE A WOMAN", "DO IT NOW!" over and over again.

I felt like that for quite awhile and I came very close to transitioning, but it's not right for me. I had it all planned out that I was going to move to some city far away where I didn't know anyone, find a job and a gender therapist, and not come back home until I transitioned to the point I could legally be a woman. I decided instead to all of that except the find a gender therapist part.

Becoming non-binary seems to be the answer for my dysphoria. The idea of everything I'd have to go through to completely become a woman makes me far more unhappy than the idea of living the rest of my life as a man.

The hard part for me is though even though I am non-binary, there's some part of me that doesn't believe in non-binary. If I can get past that, I feel that I can just be me all the time. Yeah, there will always be some people that have a problem with how I present and my mannerisms and such, I can live with that as long as I'm not one of them.

Quote from: Jill F on September 09, 2014, 12:49:05 PM
For me, some level of dypshoria always existed but I was always able to keep it in check with my usual coping mechanisms.  I certainly didn't need to transition, let alone wear women's clothing.  At age 43, when the dysphoria monster started to really rear it's ugly head, I started to ID as non-binary, androgyne, bigender, whatever.  I had recently lost a lot of weight and put on a lot of muscle, and when you put andropause into the mix, it got really ugly.  I mean, it really snowballed to the point where I had to shave off the beard, shave my body, wear women's clothes (for the first time) and makeup, take finasteride and stop acting like a fake-ass dudebro.  I started to drink like crazy, wanted to die and spent most days crying.  The noises in my head began to get very loud and impossible to ignore- "SEX CHANGE!", "YOU'RE A WOMAN", "DO IT NOW!" over and over again. 

I found a therapist.  She told me that my estrogen receptors were now starving.  Less body fat, more muscle, testoterone level rollercoaster (I had abnormal testes to begin with), less aromatase to convert the excess T into E that was keeping me afloat, blah blah blah.  She told me that her typical first time MTF client was 38-45 and had recently lost a lot of weight.  And according to her, dysphoria is a progressive thing.  Depending on how much your brain failed to masculinize in utero (there are degrees), that will determine how bad the dysphoria will eventually get.  Some people need to transition at 5, some at 55.

When I started a therapeutic dose of estrogen, things got a lot better right away.  The noise in my head went from an "11" down to "2" in just 2 hours.  The more I took, and the less T in my system (all gone now), the happier I felt.  In fact, I didn't know what happy really was until HRT.  Also, from what I've heard, given time, estrogen will make your brain even more female.  I no longer feel remotely male, and it's such a relief.  My dudeliness was an uncomfortable act that I could not wait to shed.  I naturally act pretty girly, and I got bullied almost every day in school from the ages of 4-14 for it. In junior high school, my name was "little f****t sissy boy" and I had to adopt a tough guy persona to overcome that.  I'm just glad I finally found myself and that the years of suffering are behind me.

And Jill you are another DES exposed transperson.  What I see here is classic.

But my higher level brain stuff has not changed.  Satinjoy instead was freed, and the whole of me is out.  SJ and Satinjoy, the same, but not.

Anyway, parallel stories my dear.

Time will tell for me.

TW: Brief mention of rape

I believe non-binary dysphoria is progressive to a point. It may cause distress but it can also lead to a deeper understanding of one's self and having unlimited possibilities of expressions. Freedom can be liberating but at the same time, it can also be incredibly isolating - that is what I think and I understand this is not a universal thought. I believe the crucial key to taming non-binary dysphoria is finding a healthy balance. Once that balance of diverse identities/expressions and acceptance of thyself is achieved, the happiness will radiate from within outwards and the dysphoria should hopefully begin to lessen.

In my instance, going from binary dysphoria to non-binary dysphoria was interesting to say the least. In my wildest dreams, I would've never imagined taming non-binary dysphoria would be as tiring and enlightening as it is.

Before and when I identified as FtM, I had intense body dysphoria about being female-bodied. I squashed down my female self and my feminine traits, thinking they were something to be suppressed as I embraced my male identity while transitioning. After a few years, I began to realize I couldn't warm up to the male identity as much as I would've liked. It felt like I was so close to my true identity yet so far away. It was then I realized that I identified as neither gender and am most comfortable presenting in an androgynous manner.

Since identifying as non-binary and accepting my male (Jason), female (Jay) and genderless self (Jacey), Jay who had been forcibly suppressed for several years has finally found her voice. She is not happy with how the body looks. Jay would like to get the vagina "fixed up", she thinks the labia minora that is large enough to accommodate two small testicles should be trimmed back to resemble a neat appearance. She would like to have a breast reduction, rather than top surgery, to a B-cup - that way, if one wishes to look masculine, it would be easier to bind the B-cup opposed to the breasts the body has now. In saying that, she is willing to compromise these options as long as we get VFS done. Jay is VERY vocal in desiring Voice Feminization Surgery, she cries over the deep masculine voice the body has. It makes her feel alienated and disconnected from it.

Jason is also equally louder, if not more. He argues with Jay, he would rather have top surgery, hysterectomy, metoidioplasty and recently, he is thinking seriously about phalloplasty. He is willing to compromise, to leave the ovaries in and go off T (as long as periods are gone. Thankfully, none of us are interested in giving birth.) but he strongly wishes to pursue the binary transition to male. Jason feels like he is being held back from being his true self, that Jay and Jacey are spitting on his identity as a male. He is angry and filled with rage. According to him, the female body has to be eradicated completely but part of him knows the rape is one of the driving factors behind that anger. He feels betrayed because we had been grappling with dysphoria regarding the female body for many years and feels like the Jay's recent suggestion of breast reduction is undermining those years of struggling with dysphoria.

Despite their differences, Jay and Jason have one thing in common. They wish to experience love - both romance and sex. Even if it's just once. This is hindered by the physical body being so different from their perceptions of what their bodies should look like. They are both attracted to females sexually and romantically. That being said, they both experience erotic fantasies of having sex with men. I, the genderless self, believe I am attracted to females romantically but not sexually towards male, female or otherwise. Unlike my binary counterparts, I am indifferent to sex. Intimate acts such as kissing, cuddling, holding hands and the occasional heavy petting are things I am comfortable doing. When it crosses the line into penetration, everything switches off - this has happened before the rape so it is, I believe, completely irrelevant to that incident. I consider the indifference and lack of sexual attraction to others to be my sexual orientation of being asexual.

It will take a lot of introspection for the three of us to come to a mutual understanding on what kind of surgeries the physical body will receive. I am grateful that there will be many years until bottom surgery will even become an option and until then, we can discuss and explore feelings together, travelling the path as a non-binary individual.

Good heavens my dear – you who are so loved of the forest here –

Rape.  I feel ill...

I appreciate the total transparency, kittychild, it floors me.

My core loves the intimacy of my love, of my woman, the ciswoman I married.  But I am non functional sexually.  It does not matter though, we are not young, we have almost 30 years of sharing our hearts, we think thoughts and the other speaks it... we dream .  The intimacy we have, physically, is beyond price.

She loves the almost-male, and embraced the blended binary spirit and presentation that is me now.... I hide Satinjoy from her for her own comfort.  But not in fear... in love.  For her and for Satinjoy too.  I must protect them both.

So you are triune too....

It all does make sense to me.

Now as to my own story....

The physical dysphoria still is there but is offset by the hormones and the full body transition they created.  It remains strong, but only in the sense that I must have my body as it is today, and it continues to improve shifting slowly to the female side.  I have almost B's now, and I don't even have to hide them, they just are not obvious at all with a one size up shirt and an unlined bra.

The social dysphoria does not even exist for me in public.  I like how I look.  Its almost stealth birth gender, but there are so many clues and I don't hide any of them.  Nails, the boobs if I lean back, my upper face....my new figure....

In private, Satinjoy chafes at her boundaries, but she is out more, and I am not uncomfortable at all.  When I am alone, she is out and in full control.  With others, the fluidity kicks in completely.  With you she comes out.  With others, especially the maleborn, SJ will be out to chat, unless they are in female mode, and Satinjoy will then be out to chat with the girls, or those who are emotionally not threatening to her in any way, those who do not trigger the protection instincts.  Whether emotional or physical.

Threatened I become SJ, the action figure and protector, in a place of comfort and trust, and whenever I draw on the  compassion, Satinjoy floods out in all her power and love.  A wellspring that had been suppressed for 55 years and was freed in here.  In the forest I think.

Is it progressive for me?  I have absolutely no idea, but my shrink strongly feels that I can authentically maintain being non binary, and he wont sign off on surgery, he strongly feels I will regret it if I have it.  I am ok with that.  He believes I can keep this up forever, as do my closest friends here on the forum.

So I know I am gifted to have a diamond tightrope to walk, one that is maintainable and is smoother every day.

Love to all here.  Kittychild getting hurt has evoked SJ.  I would dearly like to rip whoever that was apart and stuff them up their own as—es.

Nails out....mad as hell.  Trying somehow to make a difference.

I experienced some dysphoria which came and went in varying degrees during my MtF phase, I probably was a little nuts when I de-transitioned at mid-point, but there were a lot of triggers in the mix, some even unrelated to gender. Once my brain came back to center where my thoughts weren't entirely female or entirely male at all times, then came the realization that non-binary was a perfect fit for me and my lifestyle as well as for those around me whose love I valued far beyond that of my own previously selfish and very delusional desires. Now dysphoria is nothing more than a word as I have settled in comfortably just being me. I know some who read this will hate it, their problem though, not mine because I'm happy not having to fit in anyone else's mold to please them or to add or detract in some way to their own validation.

talking about multiplicity...
when i mentioned breaking into little pieces, i meant it interestingly literally.

i started out thinking there was both the male and female. the female was so strongly against ftm transition that i never even got to pursuing it no matter how much the male insisted on it. at least one good decision, though one that also caused pain.
a little later, after finding these forums and discovering the very real possibility of being both, and even finding acceptance for it, i started asking myself questions.
got answers from five different voices. not really what i expected.
but i did take the time to have a good discussion, listening to all the voices, and we came to an agreement that all could live with.

people started gathering into what seemed more like three different sides. they started harmonizing more, but the impossibility of transitioning without going all out ftm was frustrating.
and i also had too much trouble to deal with that had accumulated pretty much since quite early childhood. sexual predators in my youth didn't make things any better either.
finally finding the way to deal with things resulted in me becoming more of a person, generally happier, but...
happiness can be a little fragile. or should i say my new self was very fragile.

some heartbreak, an unintentional betrayal, a fight with a friend, made me shatter. almost completely.
what should have been a person was suddenly only half a person and a whole lot of sootball and a very broken heart.
switching between different modes in the blink of an eye between different conversations happen a little too easily.
i'm not too sure what really happened, other than a defense mechanism.

then the sootball was suddenly gone, and i was more like the person i am right now.
something like a half person.
i might be a little more after having found some peace. had a good summer, learned how great life really is.
but i do have this odd mode that i can't really tell what gender is.
all i know is that i lose a whole lot of empathy, and get totally out of touch with any stereotypical feminine qualities.

i'm not even sure there's a point in posting this.
other than maybe for telling that i've found a balance that i can live with.
i truly believe i can live like this for the rest of my life, if i don't get any opportunity to transition.

it's not like i have no body dysphoria at all. but instead of consuming me, it's more like an annoyance.
somewhat like a mosquito that's managed to get into my bedroom and flies past my ear just as i'm about to fall asleep.