Storytime Sunday: The Wrong Kind of Squirter

After starting hormone therapy in February, my libido disappeared almost entirely. This tends to happen when you lose all your testosterone. For months I could still drool (literally drool) over pretty girls, but there was really no inclination to do anything. Like, I might drool thinking of sucking on some titties, but I had no desire to touch myself or feel any sexual stimulation - it was all purely conceptual.

In July, my libido started to come back and it really came back. It was like I was a teenager all over again. (Right... I sometimes forget I'm literally going through puberty.) But there was a problem: I could no longer get erections (no testosterone, remember?) and stimulation didn't feel the same even without, so I had no idea how to satisfy the itch. I knew what to do, though: I'd ask /r/asktransgender. The responses were overwhelming. I was best off getting assistance from a "helper" - a helper named the Hitachi Magic Wand:

For scale, end to end is from my elbow to the middle of my hand

I was so excited when it arrived. I ripped it out of the box and immediately got down to figuring it out. It was pretty easy. So I pulled up some eye candy from my hard drive and checked /r/dykesgonewild for anything new, and got comfortable on my bed. I laid a towel out, applied some lube, and started testing it out using one of the methods I'd been told.

It felt really good. Like, leg spasms good. But after a couple minutes it became seriously overstimulating. I wouldn't have stuck with it if that's how it started, but I felt close to orgasm, so I kept going. Just bite your lip and power through, I told myself. 

That was a mistake.

So close, so close. Just a little more. Suddenly I felt an ecstatic release. It felt like 1/2 an orgasm, and I figured it might just be dulled by the hormones. Something shot out of my penis and I thought it was cum. But it continued to keep coming. It shot into the air in a big, clear, spurting stream. Oh shit!

By the time I realized what was happening and managed to stop the flow, I had pissed all over my belly, my tits, my legs, my arm, my bed, and of course the vibrator. It soaked through the towel, through the sheets, and into the mattress. So instead of an orgasm I got my bed and half my body drenched in piss.

The best part is, I went to the bathroom right before starting to make sure that wouldn't be a problem. Less than 10 minutes from "bladder empty" to "the fucking Nile river."

Of course, the first thing I did after cleaning myself up was post the story to /r/TIFU. Some girl in comments tried to convince me I squirted, not pissed myself. Bless her heart. Lulzy commenters ran with it. Comments like, "Always wanted to be a girl, never knew you'd be a squirter." I replied, "Always wanted to be a squirter, but not that kind!"

Did I ever mention how I realized I was trans?

I know this has occasionally come up so some readers are certainly aware of at least the rough outline. But seeing that it's nowhere on the blog, I figure I should put it here for the posterity and the benefit lulz of others.

May 10^th, 2013, I had the first date of my life. It went well, to say the least. You know the joke "what does a lesbian bring to a second date? A moving truck"? Well, that pretty much happened. And all of a sudden I had a girlfriend.

I can't remember if it came up on my screensaver or if she found it on Facebook (probably the former), but a week or so later she saw a picture of me that caught her attention.

Pre-alpha Rachel prototype

I was horribly embarrassed that she saw that. "Is that you," she incredulously asked. I turned bright red. "Uh... yeah," I stammered. "It was a thing they did, up at my last college," I hastened to add, "Dragfest, everyone dressed in drag and got wasted." Yeah, that justified it.

May 24^th, two weeks after our first date: she's sitting on the couch out front and I'm in the kitchen for some reason. She calls to me. "So, uhm... those pictures of you in drag."

I freeze. "Yeah..."

"Well, you know I'm bi. And... I like having a girlfriend."

'Is she asking for this relationship to be open,' I'm wondering, 'and what does that have to do with those embarrassing pictures?' "Okay..."

"So I was wondering if you might be willing to dress up and be my girlfriend sometimes."

Time stopped. My heart pounded in my ears and my temperature shot up a few degrees. This couldn't be happening, but it was. That's it, now or never. This is my one and only chance. "Can I be your girlfriend all the time?"

My mind was so reeling I don't even remember quite what she said next. But she quickly got to asking me if I was trans. "Yeah... I'm sorry." I couldn't help but apologize.

Her response, in effect? "Well that explains a lot." I was confused by that; I asked what she meant. She told me I kissed and made love like a girl, that it explained my 'issues' with using my hardware in bed, that it explained some of my quirks and anxieties, why she was attracted to me after having written off guys and decided she was a lesbian. Less seriously, she joked about how I and our relationship were conforming to lesbian stereotypes.

She said if I wanted to be her girlfriend all the time, I could be. She loved me as her boyfriend and she'd love me as her girlfriend.

And that's how I realized I was really trans, that it wasn't just idle ideation. I had my chance to make it happen, and I took it. And for giving me that chance (and for helping me start to transition, and teaching me how to be a girl, and helping name me, and...) I am eternally grateful.

Remnants

Remnants of my twisted inner life.

I've mentioned my intrusive thoughts before - the sick, twisted thoughts that would obsessively take over my mind and wouldn't leave until I, to be blunt, masturbated to them. These left me, seemingly for good, when I started hormone therapy. But in the time from age 14 to 31, I'd accumulated quite a collection of related images. See, I wasn't the only person with such sick thoughts, and plenty of others drew or rendered representations of them. I savored and collected these representations, to the tune of 6.5 GB compressed.

I had forgotten I had kept these, in a single one-piece RAR archive. I only remembered because of the pedo priest with his 131,000 pedophilic images. Let me be clear: there is nothing pedophilic in my archive. I am not a pedophile and never have been, even in the worst throes of my sickest intrusive thoughts. Just to be clear. It just reminded me of it.

I packed these images (and stories) up in that archive, and deleted the uncompressed files, when I felt the intrusive thoughts leave me 7 months ago. But I kept the archive. Initially it was because I thought I might want to decompress it and view the images again in the future - that the intrusive thoughts would come back. But now, knowing almost certainly that they're gone for good (as long as I keep estrogen instead of testosterone in my veins), I still keep them. Why?

I feel like that lone file - CAKE.rar - is a reminder to me. A reminder of what I once was, of what my mind is like with the wrong hormones. Of what I am naturally, without medical intervention. I never intend to open or decompress it. But seeing it, sitting there, it won't let me forget. And I feel like I have to remember the consequences of not being my true self.

I probably should delete it. No, I know I should delete it. But for some reason I can't bring myself to. It feels like deleting a part of myself. A part I absolutely despise and run away from, but a part of me nonetheless.

Someone please talk me into deleting it. Because I just can't bring myself to on my own.

Expectations, Excitement, and Disappointment (pointless ramblings)

I have some bad habits. Things that aren't good for my mental health. I won't get into all of them; the relevant ones here:

• I look at /r/transtimelines
• I look at /r/transpassing
• I read other MtF girls' accounts of their progress
• I let myself get excited about every little bit of my own progress

These habits conspire to set me up for guaranteed disappointment. I've been on hormone therapy for 6 months now; my boobs are AA (yes, it's a real size, smaller than A) and show no signs of continuing to grow. The fat distribution on my face and in my body is still fairly masculine - especially in my body. 

Don't get me wrong, I've made a lot of progress. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. When my nipples started to grow, I jumped with joy; that just prepared me to despair when they stopped. Same with my boobs, which I'm now despairing over for their lack of soreness, a sure sign of growth. I was just so excited when I could say "I have boobs," it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be constant growth. Even though I know it's in fits and starts, I'm constantly afraid this is as big as they'll get. I can see changes to my face when I compare pictures, but when I look in the mirror I still see a man. My belly flab isn't going much of anywhere, least of all to my hips. Even though I've seen tables and graphs of normally expected timelines, and I see that I'm basically within normal range (though these expected values put hormone changes as happening for 4 years - I want to be ready for SRS long before that, dammit!), I despair.

My other bad habits get in the way of feeling good about that sometimes. I see timelines and read about progress where girls are looking totally female at 6 months, or have B cup breasts before this point. I look down at my AA's and I'm not a happy girl. I see timelines where 2 months of progress puts my 6 months to shame. I rationally know these are outliers, but inside they hurt.

I get frustrated. Girls talk about their endocrinologists giving them 8mg of estradiol a day; mine won't let me go higher than 4mg and I worry what I'm missing out on, how much better my progress could be. Mine started me at 50mg of spironolactone; 100mg sounds like it's a more typical starting dose. And again, I wonder what I missed out on in those first months with all that testosterone still afflicting me.

Of course, the second my boobs start hurting again, the second my nipples become tender again, I will light up in incandescent optimism. And when it stagnates, just look at a few timelines and I'm back to despair. That's how I'm feeling down after all the excitement at 6 months. And again, excited going to 200mg of the spiro, feeling my boobs get a little soreness, now down again after it goes away.

I get excited and it sets me up for disappointment. I see better-than-average timelines and it sets me up for disappointment. I hope too hard and it sets me up for disappointment. 

I should learn to expect nothing, and then be happy (not excited) with everything I get.

/angst

Half a Year

This is a milestone. Half a year since I began hormones.

This update won't be like the others. It won't be an itemized list of the minutiae of the past month. Instead, prepare for some rambling musings on the whole experience, where I started, where I'm going, and what it all means.

Beginnings

Wednesday, February 26ᵗʰ. I put on my skirt, my frilly top, my high-heeled boots, and way too much makeup. I gobbled some of my anti-anxiety medication, paced around, and finally got in my car. My appointment was right behind the physics building, where I spent all my time at UNM; I parked right next to the LIDAR array our research group is working on. I don't pray, but I certainly hoped to myself, “oh please don't step outside to work on the damn thing now” (re: my boss). My heart was pounding the whole way to the clinic; I scrupulously avoided eye contact.

I checked in, a truly cringeworthy experience. Internally I had a bitter chuckle at the irony: I was there as Rachel, to see a doctor about being Rachel, and I had to check in and interact with everyone as Ryan (because paperwork). I was so nervous waiting in the exam room for the doctor. When he got there he started asking me questions about what I expected from the hormones. No, I’m not expecting it to get rid of my facial or body hair. Yes, I know there’s only so much it can do for appearance with immutable bone structure. No, I don’t expect it to change my voice. He suggested I might want to get a laser ablation procedure done on my vocal folds to undo some of the damage wrought by testosterone during puberty. Basically, he wanted to make sure my expectations were realistic.

I was afraid I might answer something wrong and he wouldn’t give me the hormones. But 15 minutes later I walked out of there with two prescriptions – spironolactone to get rid of my testosterone, and estradiol to replace it with estrogen – and a spring in my step (yes, even in heels). I went home, switched to boy mode, and went straight to the pharmacy. That Wednesday afternoon, I took my first doses, and my first step toward physically becoming Rachel.

Retcon

Comic book fans will be familiar with the term 'retcon' in layman's terms means that the writer waves his hand and tells you 'Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that.' 

 Retroactive Continuity: rewriting past events to be consistent with the new present.

My brain is doing this to me now and it's a very strange experience. Some of my memories are being amended to be consistent with the present. The memories stay almost completely the same, except one or two things are different. The other day something reminded me of walking around the neighborhood in high school. It was a vivid memory, as my random memories tend to be.

Two things were retconned, though. First, my CRPS has been written out of existence in that memory. Gone, entirely. Like it was never there. I see this as consistency with the fact that it's been in remission for a decade. It's no longer really a part of my life, so why would it be there in a memory that had nothing to do with it?

Second, I've been rewritten as a girl. Not a trans girl in transition or anything. I was a girl and always had been. This is incredibly detailed retconning, too. I "remember" what I was wearing; I "remember" my sense of what I looked like; I "remember" my stride, completely different from how I actually walked at the time.

So now I'm remembering my life as it wasn't, subconsciously replacing the actual me with an alternate me more consistent with my present self-image. It's almost like I don't actually remember me in any of those memories - I remember my interactions with the world around me, then insert myself into it.

I'm not completely sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I hate the failure of memory and the fundamental dishonesty of my brain. What I consider fantasy is replacing reality. But is it really? The only thing that seems changed is me - the rest of the memory seems intact. And is a change of "me" to maintain better coherence with the present me really so bad? Besides, it feels really good.

Regardless of the merits of the confabulation, my brain is being pretty clear about things:

Remember when you were a boy? That was a mistake, forget about that.

Identity Crisis

Warning: Wangst ahead

tl;dr: Suddenly having trouble calling myself female instead of transfemale.

*sigh* I'm having an identity crisis. I choose to identify as just plain female, not transfemale, But now I'm not sure I can do that. I want to be just female, but wanting doesn't make it so. I was never socialized as a girl, I didn't have the experience of growing up as a girl or of living my adult life as one. The maleness of that is a part of me, however much I wish I didn't have it or wish I could jettison it.

Can I ever legitimately claim to just be female, not specifically transfemale? My therapist assures me that after 7-10 years or so (so when I'm 40, ugh) I'll reach a "post-trans" state where it doesn't even occur to me that I'm trans. I have my doubts about that; we'll see. For now, I just don't know that I can claim to actually be what I merely want to be.

This didn't quite come out of nowhere. I've been having crazy dreams this week. Some of them really drove this home for me, either because someone rejected my femininity and insisted I was male (which robbed me of my female voice and features - them saying it made them correct), or because I dreamed I was a cis woman and waking up felt like being snapped out of a happy delusion.

Still, as a transwoman, I'm a subcategory of just plain woman, not something separate and distinct. I just feel now like "female" carries too strong a connotation of cis or at least early transition. Not being either, having lived my whole life male, I feel like it's a lie, or at least misleading.

Not changing it on Facebook, though. I have to cling to the hope and desire to one day not be 'that trans girl' (which probably says more about my own insecurities than anyone's perception of me). *sigh*