I'm a bit new here. So I identify as bigender (woman/nonbinary), and am FAB. I live with what feels like both a female or male/nonbinary brain sex, which alternate control over my existence in an unpredictable fashion. Because these brain sex flips are sporadic, I can have periods of months during which I feel completely like a cis female, and only go a few days or a week out of those months where I feel unquestionably male/nonbinary.
I'm however beginning to get worried that I am living with a more severe form of sex dysphoria, and that it might be manifesting as a partial cause of a chronic illness I live with. Whether it is due to a hormonal imbalance or a misalignment between brain and body I don't know. That said though, I am wondering whether certain sets of somatic or neurologic symptoms could actually be explained by dysphoria and not some other disease.
I'll give a brief history of my dysphoria first and what symptoms I had. It was early 2014 when I realized something was amiss between my physical sex and my neurologic sex, and my first experiences with dysphoria were not pretty.
First it was being suddenly hit with severe depression that would literally bring me to my knees, but it would dissapate after a few hours. Soon after, I had severe episodes of dissociation, burning sensations if I touched certain (female) parts of my body, and nausea, headache, dizziness, and flu like symptoms in general. These went on continuously for about 10 days in early March 2014, and kept reappearing episodically thereafter for the rest of 2014. At the time I believed all of these symptoms were related to dysphoria, even though they were also consistent with migraine.
Fast forward to the present. In late 2015 I began to develop a central nervous system chronic illness which has led to overall decay for my health, as well as disabilities. I'm losing my hearing, and have to battle migraine symptoms on a daily basis. My autonomic nervous system is a wreck, I can't do anything that puts my body in a compromised or stressful position, and I am having other forms of sensory disturbance and psychiatric symptoms that I never had prior to 2016. Many people have said I have something similar to fibromyalgia and POTS, even though I don't meet all the criteria for either disease; I also know that part of my health problems can be explained by my klonopin prescription (bad, bad, bad), and mild autism. But beyond these speculations my illness remains a complete mystery to medical experts.
Now, the thing that gets me nervous is that I have been able to tie a handfull of these symptoms to my intermittent dysphoria as a bigender person. As of this year in April, some of these familiar symptoms from early 2014 and clear changes in my brain sex and gender identity started to come back, independant of my ongoing illness.
Yesterday I had another major migraine, but interestingly some of the symptoms of my migraine dissapeared as soon as I packed (nausea, ear fullness, some head pain). Doing this activity over the past few months has also relieved a lot of muscle tension from the neck down (and I am very tense), and has also sometimes cut down the amount of pressure I feel in my head when walking or standing for too long. In general, this activity also lessens my ongoing depression and sensory processing issues to some degree.
And this is just one example of how doing things to manipulate how my brain sees my body has helped me. Binding, though I can no longer do it, also has led to some relief for some of the physcial symptoms mentioned above.
So, what do people think on this? Is it common to get severe neurologic or somatic symptoms as a result of body dysphoria, and should I be taking this possibility very seriously (i.e., see a gender therapist ASAP).
Thank you so much for your help and input!
