So much as I KNOW my brain is far more male than it is female, much as I know i'll never really fit in with "the girls", it's so so much easier in our culture and society to just be a boyish girl. To be gender non conforming and that's honestly something i've always done.
It eases any real sense of dysphoria I might otherwise have, least the obvious forms, because as a modern AFAB we don't really have such a narrowly defined box as AMAB indifividuals may have.

I wonder if it's worth "coming out" and moving forward with making my outside more comfortable when I don't have distressing disphoria (more a numb disconnect, which I think I could just live with. I mean i've lived with it this long)
I worry my husband won't actually be as okay with it as he wants to be. I worry i'll lose him. I worry i'll cause undue strain to my relationship with my own and his family and I worry my children will be deeply distressed, confused and worse, teased about it.

I want to protect the people I care about, and the best way to do that is to CONFORM.

And here's the thing, I could probably be okay with that if not for one thing.
The fact that i'm increasingly convinced my feminising hormones are actually posioning me.

I have never had a good relationship with Estrogen and Progesterone, they've always made me very sick.

They feel like foreign toxins in my system.

Of course there's no guarentee T wouldn't be just as "toxic", but I have this massive NEED to try you know?
because if it worked, if it was finally the answer to why i've been so ill, so miserable, so wrong feeling both physically and mentally my whole life wouldn't that just be amazing?

Realistically I know it wont' magically make my life somehow better or easier, it won't remove every problem I have, nothing will, but I keep obsessing over whether my constant hormonal issues are in fact because they're the wrong damn hormones.

I'm probably grasping at straws.

And of course then there's the doubt that the reason I really feel out of touch with my body is purely because of the hormonal issues that have made me miserable and resentful toward it since I hit puberty.

I mean i've always resented my body for doing this to me. I didn't ask to be a woman, it was just forced upon me and I fought against it but ultimately it was a battle I lost. Since then i've had nothing but misery from my body. Heavy periods, ovarian cysts that hurt randomly, hormone linked headaches, cramps, hot flushes and so on.

And as a result I feel like I don't maybe want this "ENOUGH", i'm not dysphoric ENOUGH and all the hurt, all the pain, all the stress it'll put on those around me is selfish and shortsighted and unfair.

but I can't quite make peace with the idea of just giving up and going back to how I was.

I don't know what to do.

I know how you feel, and it is a pretty horrible place to be stuck in.  At the very least, I always have video games and the Internet where I can escape to, hopefully that will hold me over for a while. 

It sounds like you've had more female chemistry and biology in you than any man should have to take!

Does your family understand that you are feeling poisoned?

Have you investigated the possibility that you are allergic to estrogen and progesterone? I was surprised to learn that people can be allergic to the sex hormones.

My husband gets it, but honestly I am too chicken to actually bring it up to my mother. She has a tendency to make me feel stupid and talk me out of things,and i'm pretty sure she won't understand.
While I don't think she'll cut me out of her life or anything that extreme, I think she'll take it... hard. She's very conservative and not great at the whole empathy thing.

And wait, you actually CAN be allergic to hormones? I thought I was being over dramatic.

The doctors told me I wasn't allowed estrogen because it makes my blood pressure spike dangerously on even the tiniest dose and they sort of panicked. And Progesterone is just gross and makes me either bleed and bleed and bleed or feel nauseated. Estrogen seems to be the major problem though. From my recollection my hormone levels are actually VERY low anyway, I don't produce much of anything. Just the ratios are all borked. My theory has always been that even the micro dose of synthetic hormones they give you for hrt are "too much" for my body to  handle.

There was discussion about having a Mirina coil put in but i've put it off because it involves an internal (something I find very very painful and my doctor didn't want to put me through. She actually wanted me to go to the hospital and have it done under the influence of gas and air but the hospital refused) and i've been worried it will just make things worse and then involve a SECOND internal to get the damn thing out again. My doctor agreed it was pretty unneccisary torture right there.

I have a nurse appointment at the end of the month for my smear (eugh) and to have another thyroid test (it's never my thyroid but my doctors are obsessed with checking it even though it always comes back fine) so i'll ask if I can have a look at my last full hormone profile which was done less than a year ago. I'm curious what my levels are as honestly, they're massively inconsistant and in constant flux.

I mean no wonder my body is broken, I have an utterly inconsistant supply of different hormones. It doesn't know what its doing!
Honestly since puberty at ten my body has been utterly confused about what it's supposed to be doing.
It doesn't know how to actually DO anything properly. I barely ovulate and when I do i do so really late, I get sporadic and unpredictable cycles that can either be horribly heavy or barely even there at all. I can go 3 or 4 months without one and then spot for like 2 days and that's it or bleed like a stuck pig for weeks. It's so annoying.
I have kids and I couldn't do labour either, my body had no clue what it was meant to be doing and I stalled for 24 hours and had to have medical intervention to not die.
My body is all "wait what? How do I do woman?"
man, it's just as confused as my brain is!
Neither brain nor body really know how to do "girl"

Sadly there's no guarentee is knows how to do "boy" any better. My body is pretty damn dumb. I mean sure i've been basting in excess testosterone most of my life, and all that's really done is give me a beer belly and excess body hair, but there's no guarentee testosterone won't cause symptoms like estrogen does in me. Blood pressure is a concern, as is the whole losing my hair (I'm honestly pretty sure it's already thinning at the temples and my sister has female pattern baldness, all my mother's brothers are balding. I'm doomed!) but I can't shake that desire to TRY.

But then I wonder if i'm wanting to do so for all the wrong reasons.

That maybe i've latched onto this idea that my body and biochemistry is at odds with my chromosomes (those have actually been tested, i'm not sure WHY they tested them but they did.) and seeing it as some miracle cure.

thing is, if I was cisgender surely the idea of flooding my system with T would be horribly unappealing regardless of how sick I was? Wouldn't it?

And if it was just "it might fix my health problems, please fix my health problems so I only have to focus on my messed up emotional problems!" then why have I for the past 30 odd years described myself as a "boy brain in a girl body"?

ARGHHH

But i'm just so worried about my family. My kids especially. I feel like I have to protect them, and that means sacrificing myself. I wonder if maybe I should just wait, hold off on anything major till they're older but then I wonder if doing it while they're young is better or if there is EVER a good time and just.. eugh.
I need to keep my family safe and together, they're my responsibility, and if I go down this path it's incredibly selfish and potentially quite damaging for my family.
I'll always be their mum of course regardless, but I just don't know if I can inflict the stress and confusion of me becoming more physically masculine on them.

I keep thinking that maybe I should just settle with cross dressing and cutting my hair short but still responding to "she/her". She/her doesn't cause me distress, i'm not really in massive anguish being in this body, i'd just sooner NOT have to deal with it and its nonsense. I don't hate my body so much as I just don't much like it and would rather it would just sod off.
I COULD live as a boyish girl... I think.

But i'd forever wonder if testosterone could have fixed a lot of problems. (it probably can't, but i'll always wonder)

Quote from: F_P_M on April 08, 2019, 03:39:29 AM
But i'd forever wonder if testosterone could have fixed a lot of problems. (it probably can't, but i'll always wonder)

         OMG F_P_M the way you describe it I'm so glad I'm trans and not a cis woman maybe you need a brain transplant? Know a great neurosurgeon who fixed many of my wife's prior hormonal problems he likened your endocrine system(s) to an "Italian Parlement" without a Mussilini, a dictator to keep everybody else in-line and "straight" otherwise chaos reigns! Really don't think experimenting with "T" is the way to go, there's too many downsides if things still don't work out, perhaps you have too much already . . and hair thinning is definitely NOT A GOOD SIGN! 

Quote. . . been basting in excess testosterone most of my life

Take the opposite tack and try a very mild "T blocker" and see if your regular "E" system gets happy, finally kicks in? As a MtF "very masculine female" is probably how I would best describe myself as well

         Surely there must be a way to get your body "balanced" out? I can very much relate to "family concerns" but feel that should be the least of your worries you need to get "right", whatever form that may take!

thing is, I don't LIKE e, it's  horrible stuff.
It gives me migraine headaches.

Man if I could have my brain stuck into a functional male body that'd be awesome but alas, not possible.

I've seen soooo many endos over the years, they all just shrug because it's a confusing mess. It's pcos, no it's hypogonadism, oh no we don't know WHAT this is...
*sigh* something is horribly wrong with the way my body functions for sure.

Which hasn't helped my feelings of disconnect to my biological sex at all i'm sure.

I mean don't get me wrong, I dont' "want to be a man" JUST to get away from the health problems, but I wonder if they're a big factor in why it's hitting me so hard NOW. That i'm just exhausted by trying to function in a body that hates me and never felt right anyway.
Maybe if it worked I could tolerate it better. I could live just as a tomboyish girl who was in no way traditionally feminine. But the addition of my body actively trying to make me physically miserable as well it's just.. eugh.
It makes that resentment harder.
And I for sure resent being biologically female. It sucks.

I have a lot of FREE testosterone apparently. The hormone that's supposed to like.. bind it up and make it unavailable doesn't really do its job (the slacker) so even though from memory my t levels aren't that high, the percentage that's free and biochemically available for use is far higher than it should be.
But to be perfectly honest, the masculinising effects of that have never really bothered me that much. I have a lot of body hair, I grow chin hair and a faint moustache, I have a beer belly. The only time this has ever really concerned me has been other people's reactions to it. Society claims women shouldn't have beards or stomach hair, so I conformed for a lot of my life for fear of being teased or criticised. I always resented having to do it. I mean why SHOULD I have to endure pain just to look how other people think I should look? My chin hairs actually BLEED if I tweaze them, they're that deep.
Ultimately I realised I was only doing it because I felt I SHOULD rather than because I wanted to.
the excess body hair has NEVER bothered me personally or made me feel less me. I actually resent my breasts far more (they get in the way, I mean why do people bother with these things? they're such a nuscience omg)

I have to admit, when i was told I had too much free testosterone I wasn't at all upset. I quite like it. That's maybe wierd but i've never really felt that "female" so being told I had too much free t was like "ahah."

And to be frank, the side effects and peminant effects of t? Don't really worry me. In fact I kinda find them.. appealing? (except the baldness but nobody wants to be bald, nobody)

I have to imagine that a cisgender woman wouldn't find the idea of growing a full beard and getting downstairs growth to be massively exciting would they?

For the past 20 years they've been trying to get my body to cooperate using feminising hormones. They've always just made things worse. I've toyed with the idea of getting a hysterectomy or at the very least getting the ovaries removed becuase they're horrible cystic lumps anyway but the fear of having to forever be on HRT (estrogen and progesterone) when both make me already so sick scared me off it. The idea of having to put more of that stuff into my system makes my skin crawl.
Just yeugh.

I hate how they make me feel, even when i'm not getting horrible side effects they just make me feel out of control and wrong. It's unsettling.

Hello FPM

I am sorry you have all these problems but I am glad you are actively pursuing with doctors and nurses.

My advice is that simultaneously you should consider 2 separate paths:

1. Find out as much as you can on reactions to hormones by researching and by discussion with your doctor and if necessary ask to see an Endo who should of course be experienced in anything hormone related.

2. Arrange therapy preferably with a gender therapist to discuss the possibility/probability of being transgender taking into account both your physical feelings which you are then separately attending to, your emotional feelings and the potential effect of being transgender on your family and how to address them.

I should point out that if you are indeed trans but believe you can "live with it", you may only suppress temporarily and the Gender Dysphoria always returns and usually at a higher rate each time.

I truly wish you resolution with these issues and ultimately happiness.

Hugs

Pamela 

Hello again

I have just read your latest post and note you have already seen many Endos and I truly hope you find the right Specialist this time. And the right therapist aswell.

Hugs

Pamela

thanks. Yeah i've had a lifetime of bloody endos.

Ultimately just about everything wrong with me always comes back as "idiopathic" to the point where I twitch when I hear the word.

With husband's advice I did go out and buy myself some more masculine clothing and i tell you what, I haven't felt this comfortable in clothing in a LONG time.
Like. wow... I can actually look at myself in a mirror!
It's been a long time since i've been able to stand the idea of looking at myself or taking photos of myself and now I find i've sort of... rekindled that and it's really weird.

It's also funny because these are the clothes I wore when I was a teenager (some are quite literally the exact same garments i've had for like 15+ years) and into early adulthood. Only reason I started to wear skirts and stuff was because finding women's trousers that fit my strangely shaped body was proving extremely stressful and aggrivating and even the ones that fit were horribly uncomfortable to actually wear or looked "wrong" on me (frumpy, or tight in all the wrong places or just eugh I dunno, not ME)
and then I got into a funk of depression and exhaustion and life and just threw on anything that was clean whether I actually liked it or not and my mother kept giving me clothes she was getting rid of and I am super cheap so I was just like "yeah sure" so i'd wear those even though they didn't suit me and I hated them because they were clean and it was "good enough."
Which isn't a good way to live.

I haven't felt excitement about clothes in a long time and now the idea of being able to wear stuff I always liked but didn't think I COULD wear (because you know, men's section) is so exciting.

Also, why did nobody tell me men's trousers were so comfortable!?? Why the heck did I live all this time forcing myself into tight fitting women's pants that dug into my belly and rode up by butt!?? Damnit world, why didn't anyone tell me I was ALLOWED to wear men's clothes and that they were amazingly comfy!?

It's like you aren't even wearing pants! lol.

I still like skirts, they are really comfortable and cool but I feel like i'm just coming out of being on autopilot for so many years and it's surreal.

I've been living in this sort of fog.

I got new antidepressants which have helped but taking them brought about this realisation that i've been living my life unhappy and wrong all this time.
Hmmm.

I'm hoping my GP will refer me to a gender therapist or something, but the wait times are horribly long. It could be a year before I get to speak to someone.

Quote from: F_P_M on April 07, 2019, 01:02:51 PM(more a numb disconnect, which I think I could just live with. I mean i've lived with it this long)

I know that numb disconnect well.  I lived with it for 60 years before I realized that I could do something about it.  My life has gone from being numb to being joyful.  Imagine: I never knew what joy was until I transitioned!

I'm not saying that you need to transition or even that you should.  But I think you owe it to yourself to investigate it further.

Are you seeing a gender therapist?  If not, I would highly recommend it.  A therapist is good for more than just getting a referral to an endo (which you already have already).  They are best at helping you work out the "should I or shouldn't I?" questions.

Gosh i'd love that. But i'm not sure I dare to hope.

Today was.. .awkward.

My mother is still unaware that i'm questioning my gender identity and being my mother well.. she's actually honestly extremely misandrist.
She always rolls her eyes and goes "pah, men" whenever her husband or mine does something she disagrees with or finds annoying and i'm like "uh.. I don't think it's their gender that makes them act like morons actually" (In step dad's case it's because he's a grumpy old jerk and in husband's it's because he's a seriously introverted autistic who finds social interaction extremely difficult and exhausting at the best of times!)

I dunno, she tends to generalise and has quite a narrow view of what male behaviour MUST be and I always feel a bit uncomfortable but today was just especially awkward.
It's a bit like having a really homophobic aunt who rants at the dinner table while you're in the closet going "mmmm can I leave now?"

I love my mother, but I think she's going to take this very very badly. Today just kinda highlighted HOW poorly this is likely to go.
She's always been so delighted at only having daughters, i'm not certain how she'll really react to finding out her youngest daughter is in fact her son.
I'm scared it'll completely change our relationship, i'll go from her confidant (and honestly in a lot of cases bloody parent) to someone she rolls her eyes at and complains about loudly whenever I do anything she doesn't understand or like.

She was talking about how "oh men's brains are just LIKE THAT" and I was like "uh...."
awkwaaaard.

I know exactly how you feel, albeit from the other side of the fence. I suppressed it and conformed for 16 years just to make sure my son didn't have to deal with this until he was an adult. The last four years were unbearable. But I survived, and finally came out to my son a few weeks before he went off to college.

As far as the wrong hormones, I totally agree. For me, testosterone was toxic. Made me hate myself at times. Disgusting thoughts and feelings that just weren't who I was inside.

It all depends on how willing you are to suppress your desires and sacrifice your own emotional well being for those around you. For me, my child always came first. Maternal instinct I guess, though I didn't carry or give birth to him.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

And there's my dilemma, that need to protect my family vs my own needs. *sigh* And I generally tend to put other people ahead of myself, always have.

Last night I was feeling particularly miserable. My body was all "oh yeah, ovulation, that's a thing I should do!" and because my ovaries are like 90% cyst that means an hour or two sitting unable to move, taking shallow breaths because anything else is too painful and cursing my stupid body for being so useless.
My chest was also SO sore I couldn't even brush against it without wincing.

My body is terrible at this whole "woman" thing. It genuinely seems to have no idea what it's doing. Never has, never will.

I've described it before as being like a car running on the wrong fuel. That's how it feels.

I said to husband, even without the dysphoria i'd for years wanted to have these stupid ovaries removed but the idea of being on female hrt for the rest of time horrified and scared me. I was actually given the low micro dose estrogen they use for exactly that a while back and my blood pressure spiked after just ONE pill. The doctor panicked and told me I was never ever to take any more ever. And that was the tiniest dose they do!
The thing that's always stopped me having my ovaries just taken out is the fear of how much sicker hrt would make me. I produce very very tiny amounts of feminising hormones apparently, next to no fsh, next to no lh, very low estrogen and progesterone but my body is used to such low doses so it kinda.. almost.. functions on them. You give me synthetic hormones and it's too much for my extremely sensitive system and overwhelmed it.
Estrogen could quite literally kill me by giving me a stroke.
Which is pretty scary.

Of course there's no guarentee testosterone wouldn't do the same thing. It may be that i'm just not designed to tolerate hormones in general because my system is so broken. Which sucks.

I feel unwell right now because I have progesterone and estrogen surging through my system and they'll continue to fight one another and not actually know what they'll doing for a good month or so until I finally get a bleed, some brief relief and it all starts again.
I'm on cd 36 today. Normal women ovulate around cd14 but I never do. cd35 is actually pretty normal for me. It means in most cases the eggs aren't viable. The fact I managed to have 3 kids despite that is frankly miraculous. By all medical science I should NOT have been able to have kids. My middle kid was a cd30 egg! That shouldn't have been possible.

But just because I ovulate on cd35 (if I have a cycle at all, half the time I don't) doesn't mean i'll get a period in 2 weeks. Nope. What will happen is i'll get headaches on and off as my progesterone falls, forgets it's supposed to be dropping and starts to rise again and my estrogen does the opposite. They will yoyo for weeks and weeks till one eventually wins and i'll finally have a period but till then i'll be SICK as anything and in agonising pain. My chest hurts, my stomach hurts, my head hurts, I feel nauseated and foggy and just generally unwell.

and it's only getting worse.

Even without the dysphoria this is pretty intollerable. I have for the past 5 years or so really honestly wished for early menopause or something just so I can be DONE with it, but of course then there's the hrt problem.

Much as i'd love to whip the whole lot out it makes me nervous because I know there's a real chance no hormones will work for me and the idea of osteoporosis is just not fun. But also because my aunt, who had similar issues to me with her body had a full hysterectomy and was left with endless trouble including her bladder leaking into her blood stream!??? AIEEE!

That sort of  terrified me.

thing is, a lot of women have hormonal problems but they don't go "if I was a man this would all be better". Do they? They don't tend to fantasise about taking testosterone. I'm pretty sure the majority of them would be really uncomfortable with the idea of taking T to fix their problems because they wouldn't "want to be masculine" but for me? The idea is super appealing. Not just because of the idea it might maybe possible fix a lot of my issues but because I never bloody asked to be a woman in the first place!

And it's sort of this cruel irony that I never asked to be a girl but was given the most terribly defective female body anyway. (it has no idea what it's doing like.. at all. I mean heck, it even got confused about which duct system it was supposed to form so I have a remnant of the wolfian ducts too! WHY? why body? WHY? and thinking about it, this might be why they checked my chromosomes... hmm.)

and that defective body does NOT help the dysphoria.

I wonder if maybe if it worked okay, if I didn't get all these horrible symptoms and the constant sickness that maybe i'd be able to just cope with being a masculine presenting girl. I wonder if it's making my disconnect with by biological sex all that much worse.

But the last ditch effort the doctor suggested was a mirina coil which involves an internal and she herself was reluctant to do it because I sort of scream during internals....
they're horribly and unpleasantly painful and made worse by my anxiety relating to them.

if the mirina coil didn't help and in fact made things worse they'd have to go back in there and retrieve it and just eugh.. the idea of two traumatising internals is too much.

I personally wanted to try the implant but the doctor had been given a batch she didn't trust (it was causing problems for a lot of regular women) so said it was a bad idea.
Having a thing stuck into my arm seemed way less horrible than a full internal.

I do have a very very nice doctor who does really understand how unpleasant I find the whole thing, but her hands are pretty tied by NHS protocol. she wanted the hospital to do the coil insertion with me under gas and air or some other form of sedation but the hospital refused because it's "not protocol" and my doctor was angry at them. But that's how it goes on the NHS.

I have to wonder how surprised she'll be if I go in and ask for a referral to the gender clinic.

The drug I found personally the absolute worst? Clomid. Oh my god clomid is horrible! (it's a fertility drug for those not in the know) Clomid tricks your body into producing more estrogen which in turn makes you produce fsh to mature some nice little eggies. And you know what that did to me? It made me INSANE. I at one point actually punched my husband, in public, several times, because he took me to a regata I didn't want to go to. Okay I was also cripplingly depressed at the time but the drugs did NOT make things any better. I felt out of control, disconnected, a passenger in my own crazy train. My emotions were all over the place. I spent days hiding in a bedroom crying, screaming, wanting to punch things. Clomid makes most people a bit crazy but I HATED the feeling so much. I had no control, I have no doubt had I remained on it I would have actually really hurt someone. Which is a frightening thought. I mean there were points I wanted, so much, to actually severely injure my other half over stupid irrelivant things. Even pregnancy didn't make me that psycho! It took SO MUCH strength to not rip his throat out with my teeth (Genuinely, I wanted to! I was like a freaking animal!)
The rage was just... wow... intense. I've never felt such intense uncontrolled anger. i was one step off flipping a dang car!
Poor guy had to deal with a lot. That he didn't run for the hills says a lot about his character.

Hormones man... just eugh... I mean more power to you ladies who willingly pump estrogen into your bodies. Makes me want to curl up and whimper. *shudder*

But I suppose that's the thing isn't it. My brain is geared up for one set of hormones, my body for another and they're in constant conflict.
I'm a petrol engine pumped full of diesal, no wonder nothing works right.

But eugh...

Surgery freaks me out. I worry it'll go wrong and i'll make things worse. Honestly the fear of making things worse has me frozen and unable to move forward. I just keep thinking "well sure, things are bad now, but they could be way worse. And if you do something more permanant and it makes stuff worse, you can't go back"

If I knew it'd all go perfect and fine i'd have had a bloody hysterectomy years ago.

F_P_M,  Have you gotten the same respond from different drs?  I would talked with several independents dr about having a full hysto, from what you have said here your life couldn't get much worst for all the pain you are going through now. 

Believe me i've seen SO many doctors over the years.

And in the UK they won't do a hysto unless they really really really feel it's for the best. Sporadic pain isn't enough of a reason and the dangers associated make me scared anyway. There's a risk of incontinence and lemme tell you, i'd sooner die than have incontinance. It's one thing I just couldn't live with. There's also the risk of flat out dying on the table, organ prolapse, all sorts. None of which are pleasant. I feel like i'd be tempting fate.

the problems my aunt had have pretty much terrified me about the idea.

interestingly, my aunt and my grandmother both had hystos. One was suffering effectively cyclical hemhorages and the other her uterus actually shrivelled up and atrophied (how? just... how?)
Yeek.
So "lady troubles" seem to run in my family. *sigh* typical.


But yeah, I just.. eugh... the thought of making things worse paralyses me. It's all a bit of a gamble and if that gamble doesn't pay off, then what?

F_P_M, I know there can be problems with all surgeries, you have to decide when surgery is the best option for you.  Problems with female organs along with their hormones can make life very difficult for one. Only you can decide what is best for you.

Yep.

It's going to be a long process of figuring out the right thing. Because if I end up on T i'll need to go through the surgery anyway, it makes cysts worse among other issues. They usually like to get it all out after a while on t.

Believe me i've been researching like a mad person. Trying to get every angle, every possible route

In an ideal world of course I could just wave a wand and feel happy and comfortable in this body, looking as it does and it would work properly.
but this isn't an ideal world and there is no easy "cure" for my health problems let alone my brain's disconnect with my body.