Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone else experiences this. For several months I can wake up in the morning and my GID seems to have gone for the first five minutes upon waking and then it kicks in again until I go to sleep. May be I'm just odd, lol. Seriously I would like to know why this seems possible.

Stardust

How do you mean GID? Like dysphoric feelings or what? Just waking up in bed, as I see it is a fairly basic experience. I won't go so far as to say genderless, but it certainly is preoccupied with the return to consciousness, so gender and the expression thereof isn't likely to be the first thing on your mind.

Quote from: chrysalis on June 04, 2009, 01:38:44 AM
How do you mean GID? Like dysphoric feelings or what? Just waking up in bed, as I see it is a fairly basic experience. I won't go so far as to say genderless, but it certainly is preoccupied with the return to consciousness, so gender and the expression thereof isn't likely to be the first thing on your mind.

Yes I mean the dysphoric feelings. Interesting though, what you say. Yes I suppose my brain is more interested in waking up than with anything else.

Stardust

I don't know about why your feelings go away for short intervals of time, but it is common for them to disappear and then magically reappear or appear for the first time when nothing was there from before.  I remember when I thought I had finally gotten over it and then one day, it hit back hard.  Usually everytime it comes back, it hits harder and harder with each one.  I know I didn't help that much. 

Quote from: lauren3332 on June 04, 2009, 06:08:40 AM
I don't know about why your feelings go away for short intervals of time, but it is common for them to disappear and then magically reappear or appear for the first time when nothing was there from before.  I remember when I thought I had finally gotten over it and then one day, it hit back hard.  Usually everytime it comes back, it hits harder and harder with each one.  I know I didn't help that much.

The thing about GID is that it is with you every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day. It doesn't go away, during your waking hours you think about it, during sleep you dream about it, there is no escape.

Throughout my life I developed coping mechanisms over many years, wether this was my academic studies, work or hobbies that I had. IAt times I could block the feelings out, but in times of stress, sadness, or even seeing a pretty girl in a dress it would always come back to haunt me, harder , longer and more stronger as time passed.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, 7 years post op, GID progressively has gone from my life. Living a dream has become a reality and the depression, jealousy and loathing of myself is a past memory. Coping mechanisms are no longer needed, sleep is undisturbed and deep.

I always described GID as a wall in my life which I never thought I would get over, some days I could see over it, somedays it appeared to high to scale. Transition systematically took down that wall brick by brick until I was able to climb through.

Buffy

Wait a minute. Are ya'll saying its still there AFTER transition?

OMG that is so not fair. Why go through all this crap just to wake up one day and worry that it will STILL be there 24x7? I've always said I could be 100x's smarter if 99% of my brain power was not taken up dealing with GID. I want it to go away. I want to think about other things but that.

It is like Newport News running a 50% off sale and you order all kinds of stuff that is marked down and 1 thing that is not on sale, and the one and only thing they send you is the one thing not on sale because they conveniently ran out of stock on the 50% off stuff that you ordered. 

Sorry, I am upset about that......and its probably not a very good analogy but still.

I guess maybe I should have started a new thread and asked, of those that have transitioned, how would you rate your GID levels now as compared to before?

Hey, I'm with Lori.  What's up?

I've only been living as Katherine for six weeks and that's about five weeks and six days of no GID.  I certainly hope it doesn't come back.  I fully expect that after a year of Katherine and GRS, my GID will be just a dim memory.  (I'm good at forgetting things.)

Really?  GID after transition?  Am I a fool to believe this can be licked?

- Kate

"It has never been easy to be both a woman and a person ... femininity (like masculinity) is, to some extent, a performance." - Judith Thurman writing in The New Yorker

I can sort of relate to what Buffy is saying.  Some days you think you can make it and nothings seems quite so bad but other days, you just can't take it anymore.  I know all about the jealousy of seeing other women in their dresses even though my thoughts do not involve dresses at all.  It is tough when you see other people take for granted something that you crave so badly.  Even though I haven't felt dysphoric my whole life, the power these feelings have makes me feel as though it has been going on since my birth.  Sometimes I get so down about never being accepted as a woman that I just can't do ->-bleeped-<- anymore.  I noticed rather recently that a lot of the girls I talk to at school have similar personalities to myself.  I think that because I feel I can't make it as a woman, I live through them in a sense. 

Quote from: Buffy on June 04, 2009, 07:21:43 AM
The thing about GID is that it is with you every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day. It doesn't go away, during your waking hours you think about it, during sleep you dream about it, there is no escape.

Yeah I used to think I was trans before I understood that part of it, and what exactly dysphoria is like. For me it used to be, "I want to be a woman and not a man ergo I am a transsexual." but really it's more complicated than that.

I don't always have to deal with those feelings, in fact they're only with me ~40% of the time, but even then there are parts of being a guy that I like.

So without turning this into a public diary entry I want to sum this up by saying I agree with you, and I think that is an important point to bring up when distinguishing between the different orientations.

I went into this in the topic A body at rest

I don't feel any GID anymore.

Testosterone is highest in the morning and drops as the day goes on.

Many have theorized that the reason so many transition later in life is that as the T drops you can no longer bury the feelings.

Quote from: Leslie Ann on June 05, 2009, 04:55:58 PM
Testosterone is highest in the morning and drops as the day goes on.

Many have theorized that the reason so many transition later in life is that as the T drops you can no longer bury the feelings.

Curious, why then didn't the giving of T as HRT work for those in the past as a cure for TS?

Quote from: K8 on June 04, 2009, 07:56:59 AM
Hey, I'm with Lori.  What's up?

I've only been living as Katherine for six weeks and that's about five weeks and six days of no GID.  I certainly hope it doesn't come back.  I fully expect that after a year of Katherine and GRS, my GID will be just a dim memory.  (I'm good at forgetting things.)

Really?  GID after transition?  Am I a fool to believe this can be licked?

- Kate

I have the same concerns  Am I crazy for thinking this will go away after surgery?? For me transitioning so far has been almost like becoming addicted to a drug- at first a little bit goes a long way but as time progressed I found just putting on makeup and clothes didn't cut it anymore, and the dysphoria would come back stronger than ever. Got my first therapist appt.- felt awesome for a while. Finally got a letter for HRT and started the very next day- really worked wonders for me and 3 months later still does- but I still have those feelings, sometimes so strong I just want to curl up and die. Now, I look towards finishing my RLE requirement next year as that is basically the only thing standing between me and full GRS surgery to hopefully remedy this god-awful condition.   Please someone tell me it will get better after that...

oh duh.. actually Buffy and Renate did say it gets better so here's gritting my teeth and hanging in there...

I don't know.  I'm 6 1/2 weeks as Katherine and am gratefully settiling into it.  Everyone around me accepts me as Katherine and I am beginning to accept myself as Katherine.  Some days I wear makeup but mostly I don't.  I forget to put earings in some days.  I seldom wear a skirt because women just don't wear skirts very much around here.  I've had several people tell me that it's easy to accept me as Kate because they can tell I am just being myself.

As we begin this, we concentrate on the externals - clothes, makeup, hair, voice, breasts, surgery.  I'm finding that as time goes on those become less important and it is the internals - how I look at myself and how I relate to those around me - that are important.

Every day I am more comfortable as a woman.  I'm finding I think of myself less as someone in transition and gradually more as just another woman.  I'm looking forward to GRS so my pants will fit properly and as a way of dotting the i, so to speak, but I'm not sure that will make me feel as more of a woman.  The feeling comes from within.

Life is a search for knowledge of self.  Who and what are we?  As we learn to know ourselves, we become comfortable in our selves.  While re-doing the outside may help, that's not the essential part of the process.

In a philosophical mood,
Kate

well the problem with me is that the internal doesn't match the external- the definition of dysphoria? I've always felt female internally, though I supressed and hid those feelings for a number of years. I've taken to transitioning like a duck to water, and it has been very good for me. But sometimes it seems like the closer I get to matching my outsides with my insides those dysphoric feelings, when they do emerge, are stronger than ever. Maybe it's a case of "so near, yet so far". 

Chloe, still wrong-side-out girl 

Ok, externals aren't all that important, but really:

Quote from: K8 on June 06, 2009, 08:12:01 AM
I forget to put earrings in some days.

Woman! Get yourself some self-respect!

Renate (a woman with an earring fetish)

Quote from: stardust on June 03, 2009, 03:58:13 PM
Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone else experiences this. For several months I can wake up in the morning and my GID seems to have gone for the first five minutes upon waking and then it kicks in again until I go to sleep. May be I'm just odd, lol. Seriously I would like to know why this seems possible.

Stardust

sorry hon I hope we didn't get too OT here... I think what chrysalis said has merit. I've noticed a lot of things are that way- like when there has been some traumatic experience. The last time something really bad happened to me all I could do to escape the emotional pain was to sleep. On waking, the first few seconds were total bliss because it took my brain a bit of time to recall the pain. Then it all comes rushing back.

Quote from: FairyGirl on June 06, 2009, 08:25:37 AM
well the problem with me is that the internal doesn't match the external- the definition of dysphoria? I've always felt female internally, though I supressed and hid those feelings for a number of years. I've taken to transitioning like a duck to water, and it has been very good for me. But sometimes it seems like the closer I get to matching my outsides with my insides those dysphoric feelings, when they do emerge, are stronger than ever. Maybe it's a case of "so near, yet so far". 

Chloe, still wrong-side-out girl 

What I think I was trying to say very imperfectly, Chloe, is that as we re-do the outside to match our internal feelings, people start treating us as we see ourselves.  The externals are important in the beginning to make the bridge, but once made then it is a process of relaxing into who we really are.

Perhaps I'm just more weird than even I had thought, but most of my self-identity is genderless.  I asked a cis-woman friend how much of her self-identity was as a woman.  She said perhaps it wasn't number one but was certainly in the top five.  I feel that presenting myself as a woman I have the freedom to be more of who I really am, but I'm not sure that is the same as what my cis-woman friend was describing.

I had GID on and off for about 60 years.  Now it seems to have gone away.  I really hope it doesn't come back.  Perhaps if you experience it while living fulltime or after transition, it is actually something else - some other kind of dissonance?   Or perhaps I just haven't been Kate long enough for it to again rear its ugly head.

- Kate

Quote from: stardust on June 05, 2009, 06:20:55 PM
Curious, why then didn't the giving of T as HRT work for those in the past as a cure for TS?

It's only theoretical, however as I said, it only allows you to bury the feelings, it doesn't make them go away. Besides, once you acknowledge the problem it only seems to get worse, it's like Pandora's Box.

Quote from: Leslie Ann on June 06, 2009, 09:33:28 PMBesides, once you acknowledge the problem it only seems to get worse, it's like Pandora's Box.

wow that's exactly how I feel and what I was trying to explain above. I know the symptoms are definitely stronger now that I've stopped trying to supress them and actually do something about it; that is, transitioning my external to lessen this terrible incongruity with my internal. Kind of a paradox like that, or a catch-22. I am living full-time now, but I still see that Pandora's Box with obstacles that sometimes loom very large. It is then I am the most overcome with the sharp pangs of dysphoria. Much of it may be that though I am taking hormones, I'm still pre-op atm.

On the flip side of that, sometimes I think about what it means now that I am finally making progress and I get such an overwhelming sense of peace and joy and sense that all's right with the world. At those times I feel completely female, inside and out, and I just want to cry from happiness. It's sort of a roller coaster ride I guess, but I try to focus on those good feelings and make the most of those moments.

I'm glad you're doing so well Kate, your progress is inspirational. 

Chloe, not feeling quite so wrong-side-out on a Summer Saturday night.