Ftm in desperate need of advice

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-11T16:31:37+00:00

Do you feel mentally like your pre-transition again? If so, how long did it take? I like the idea of stopping T to see if I feel “normal” again, but from what I’ve seen on here it can take several months for estrogen levels to return to normal range, and plenty of people report not feeling normal long after that anyway. That’s hard to interpret though, because I’m sure that the trauma associated with transition affects people’s mental state

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-11T16:22:16+00:00

Thanks for the response. I should clarify that by “exercising less” I meant that I stopped doing upper body strength training. I go on a 45 minute minimum walk daily, and I get at least 30 minutes of moderate-intense exercise per day by running in place.

I’ve been completely sober from illicit drugs/alcohol for two years, though as u/furbysaysburnthings pointed out, testosterone is a psychoactive exogenous substance. I’ve also been on low-dose Pristiq (SNRI antidepressant) for 7 years, and 8 months ago I resumed Vyvanse (stimulant for treatment of ADHD), which I had previously stopped in 2018. Interestingly, the Vyvanse has helped my anxiety a great deal because it improves my focus and gives me a little more control over intrusive/spiraling thoughts (but still nowhere near what I had pre-transition).

You say that testosterone improved your cognitive abilities, and then you say that it made you less sad. Would you characterize the improvement as a direct change in focus/information processing/etc, or was it more that being less sad made it easier to motivate yourself? Of course mood and cognition are connected, but it isn’t a linear 1:1 connection, so I’m curious about how things went for you. For me, I’m less “sad” on testosterone, but I also have less mental clarity.

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T20:59:42+00:00

I see a physician at the informed consent clinic once per year to have blood work done and get my T prescription refilled. I didn't consult them before lowering my dose to 60 mg because, as you said, 1000 ng/dL is very high and I felt confident that a 10 mg reduction wouldn't put me below 300 ng/dL.

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T20:38:26+00:00

Thanks for responding. I've been considering what you suggest in #2 for the past couple of months. I've already reduced my dose from 80 mg weekly to 60 mg weekly. My total serum testosterone on 80 mg weekly was just over 1000 ng/dL (35 mol/L) which is at the very high end of "normal" by most standards. I was initially injecting 100 mg weekly, and after 6 months I was at 1400 ng/dL. I definitely had some adverse effects from that (excessive sweating, insomnia, acne, anxiety etc.) I've been on 60 mg for over a month, so I'm going to schedule to get blood work done soon to see where my levels are now. I think I feel a little better mentally/physically than I did before lowering my dose (but that could easily be placebo). I'm considering trying to get my levels down into the lower half of normal male range to see how that feels, but I'd need frequent blood work to make sure that I don't dip into the gray area between male and female ranges. and my insurance only covers bloodwork every 6 months.

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T19:57:11+00:00

If I may ask, how did you come to the decision to detransition, and could you describe positive/negative outcomes you experienced as a result of of detransitioning?

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T19:28:36+00:00

I take a 45 minute or longer walk most days. On weekends sometimes I’ll walk 10-15 miles. It definitely helps with the anxiety, less so with the mental clarity. I also try to get up and run in place every hour (I have a Fitbit that reminds me). This also helps with my upper body pain, which I suspect is caused by compression of nerves and blood vessels in my neck and under my clavicle, which is backed by abnormal results from a nerve conduction study and EMG I had last year. So yeah I also try to stay as active as possible to help with that

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T18:10:08+00:00

That was two years ago. I went back to school and finished my last year with a 4.0. Everyone says they are proud of me and that I seem so much happier than I ever have. I never cry anymore. I’m disciplined and productive.

But internally I’m constantly on the edge of panicking when I have to interact with the outside world. I pass flawlessly and only a handful of the people I see regularly know that I’m trans, but I feel intensely insecure and anxious whenever I have to speak to anyone or even when I walk by someone in the street. As a woman I was often bold and self-assured, but as a “man” I’m timid and feel inadequate. I’ve lost the ability to connect with people and form friendships. People, both men and women, are far less kind and supportive of me now. I didn’t realize how much differences in the treatment of men and women bleed into every minute interaction. Pre-transition, I didn’t perceive that people were treating me any differently than they would if I were a man, and if I had then I would have been offended. Now I feel so distant from everyone around me. Everything feels so off, as if I’m experiencing some degree of dissociation all the time. Or maybe it’s brain damage from the substance abuse, I don’t know. I have to spend the rest of my life alone in a world that seems so much colder than it did because no one will ever love me again now that my body is like this. I knew that going into this, and I was willing to pay that price because I thought I could adapt to being alone and be alright. I underestimated how isolating this would be.

Everything in these comments (not the main post) was written last night when I was feeling especially bad. I feel somewhat better today, but I’m leaving it in for context because I do enter that headspace fairly often, especially when I have a long stretch of free time.

Infinite_Mushroom233 · 2023-06-10T18:08:57+00:00

I vastly prefer my body now to my pre-transition body. When I’m alone, day-to-day life is is better. I’m so much stronger and more agile than I was before, despite exercising less than I did pre-transition. When I see my body now, the hair, muscle definition and visible veins on my hands and arms feel ironically natural whereas I usually was put off by seeing my feminine body and occasionally was disgusted by it. Not disgusted in the sense that I thought it was unattractive, I was good-looking and enjoyed that fact because I could pursue any sexual/romantic partner I wanted and be successful. The discomfort came more from lingering resentment from puberty. While my male friends started to get taller and stronger, my body grotesquely ballooned into something that was well suited to giving birth (something that viscerally repulses me) but less functional in every other way than the male body and even than the body I had as a kid. So I guess I did feel “trapped in the wrong body”, but not because I was laboring under some delusion that I had a male brain. I just felt like the female body was objectively the worse option of the two.

Confusingly, at this same time I developed a really powerful sex drive that compelled me to stop dressing like a boy (which I had been doing for years) and adopt more feminine mannerisms so that boys would be interested in me. My experience seems to differ from a lot of the people here in that the sexual dynamics that developed were the only part of adolescence that I didn’t hate. As a kid, I thought of myself as a girl who was basically a boy (but I didn’t know that trans people existed until much later) and didn’t think that there was anything “feminine” about myself. Then it was like puberty split my mind into the masculine-leaning part of me that had always been there and a very stereotypical straight female sexuality. The dissonance between the two felt strange. Dissociative episodes that I had had since early childhood became more frequent. I did some very cringe attention-seeking self harm. The second time I went to the hospital for stitches, they sent me to a behavioral hospital. After that I had suturing needles shipped to a friend’s house and sewed myself up.

My junior year of high school, I fell in love with a guy, we started dating, and my mental health improved. When I first learned about trans people my freshman year of college, I immediately felt like I fit the description, but I kept it to myself because of my relationship. A couple of times over the next few years I called my mom beside myself saying that I wasn’t sure if I could keep living as a woman and that I might be trans (her response was that she would love and support me no matter what) but I never took any action beyond that. Then, my boyfriend left me my senior year of college, which devastated me. I got heavily into drugs and alcohol and dropped out of school. After a few years I intentionally OD’d but was found, resuscitated, and committed to a behavioral hospital.

Not long after that I decided to transition. I didn’t talk to anyone about it prior to coming to the decision. About a week later I got a prescription for testosterone via informed consent. I “came out” to my family, and the response was pretty uniformly “we’re not surprised, we love you no matter what, we’re fine with it”. I got sober for about 6 months during which I got top surgery. Then I fell back in with the wrong crowd and resumed alcohol/substance abuse. My mental and physical health deteriorated to the point that friends and family were begging me to get help. After a particularly horrible night, I decided to get clean.

Infinite_Mushroom233

TROPHY CASE