Worst of Both Worlds

I'm scheduled to give myself a shot today, but I'm afraid of what it will do to me. I've got my period, and as a not-intended-to-procreate female, I get horniest just before and after my period, when there's absolutely no chance I'll get pregnant. (Which would be a nifty trick of nature if menstruating didn't suck so bad.) Before I started taking testosterone, I would find myself lolling about thinking about sex all day at these times, and usually wind up masturbating at some point. But now, the testosterone is amplifying the effects of whatever lady hormone it is that causes me to be so non-utilitarianly randy (I'm just playing dumb: I know it's progesterone, whatever that is). Now, I'm an internet porn bandit and I actually woke up the other morning with my pants down, as if I'd clawed them off myself in the middle of the night.

(Aside: Would somebody please put out for me? I'm not that bad. I'm actually kinda hot.)

Point being, I'm not sure I can handle the perfect storm generated by the confluence of my female and male randiness. If I could grow two heads and two nether regions, it could work out, but barring that I'm going to wait several days to give myself the shot.

I'm also going to increase my dose from 50 ccs to 100 ccs, since after 5 shots all I've got to show is a constellation of little zits on one side of my face. (The laryngitis persists, and since it began on Easter, I'm thinking that I may simply be reborn with a lower voice.)

Before You Go Getting Any Ideas...

Somehow I need to say that my story isn’t that I’ve always been a man, born in the wrong—clearly wrong—body, and that I’ve hated my “breasts” (such as they are) since the moment they first appeared. I don’t want to live my life as a straight man. I’m ambivalent about facial hair—except sideburns, with which I’m obsessed. And I don’t want to go bald. I’m not sure a dicklet—i.e., large clit—will be any better than what I’ve got now, unless it makes it insanely easy to come while I molest some sweet young thing.

I do want people to stop making all kinds of assumptions about my likes and dislikes, my history and how I want to be treated based on the fact that they associate “biological female” with all kinds of other things that don't follow logically. (To take one particularly annoying example, my housemate really felt like it should be him who changed the lightbulb in the high-ceilinged hallway, even though I swear to god, he looked like he’d never done it before.) (Or the guy who called me baby at the gym.) I do want to stop having waitresses refer to my gorgeous femme date and I as "ladies." And I wanted to experience for myself what biological attributes of masculinity might come in a bottle.

Find Your Voice (It’s Multiple Choice!)

I came down with laryngitis on Sunday night. It’s the final farewell of a cold I thought I’d outsmarted. Being more than a little bit verbal, I don’t find laryngitis much fun. But this time, I find myself wondering if my old voice will ever fully come back.

I’m ambivalent. I don’t love my voice, but I don’t hate it and I’ve had it for a long time. I’m psyched to have a lower voice—I think this will be the coup de grace that finally defeats people’s impulse to call me ma’am. It’s just a question of how it will happen. Will I sound like a teenage boy (which I figure could be kinda fun because I could bat away questions by saying "My voice must be changing," which is sort of Dada)? Or will I just feel it fill with more and more reverb (which is mostly exciting, but a little bit uncomfortable because I find myself sometimes having a visceral man-hating reaction because some guy’s voice is so loud and penetrating)? Or will I get laryngitis—which caused my (cool) coworkers to observe that my voice is "awesome," and my boss to make an uncharacteristically bizarrely sexualizing/feminizing remark that it’s "husky" (italics indicating the tone of insinuation, tampered by his lack of skills and practice at being inappropriate)—and recover with a whole new voice?

All this to say, I should be recording myself everyday...but it feels entirely too self-absorbed. And how awkward is it to talk into a tape recorder when you’re alone in your room?

Doctor, Make Me a Man!

I got my first three shots at the doctor’s office. First I’d tried the patch, which resulted a few weeks into it in 11 perfectly round, itchy, blazingly red welts on my ass. Before the allergic meltdown, I felt very private about telling anyone I was taking testosterone. But the reaction made the story feel somehow more mine, and less like Lexington pulp fiction.

The fourth shot I gave myself, after being coached sufficiently by the nurse. I came home from work, wound up on X Tube, jacked off, then realized I should give myself the shot before my utterly un-gendersmart straightboy housemate got home. So I did, and it went perfectly—no fuckups, no blood, no pain (the trial run at the nurse’s hadn’t been quite so textbook).

And I felt a wave of kindness toward myself wash over me, and I thought: Somebody has to do it. (For all the feelings among the rest of the dyke community—including, not so long ago me—that trannyboys are the ultimate manifestation of the dyke who thinks s/he’s awesome and takes up a lot of space to prove it, it doesn’t feel particularly privileged to be sticking a needle in your ass all alone to become a bit of a Frankenstein.) Then I watched Law & Order, and all felt right in my private little world.

Breaking News on Women's Sexuality: Men Don't Understand It, or Care

Your bloggerbot comes out of semi-retirement to express his dismay at this latest finding, cited in a New York Times article that pretends to break the latest scientific discoveries on sexuality and gender:

Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women's brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children.

It's not completely the Times' fault, but you'd think they'd at least observe that science is seriously skewed toward studying men's sexuality. But the article accomplishes the reverse, claiming to shed light on sexuality for both sexes when it mentions only men. After quoting a thinly researched observations about how sexual orientation seems more fixed in men than in women, the article concludes, "Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth." The "at least for men" drips with condescension and dismissal of female sexuality—making the articles supposedly reported conclusions that women don't have a sexual orientation that much more suspicious.

Yes, I'm serious about the claim that women don't have sexual orientation. The article quotes J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University: "I'm not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men." That's right, they pick men because men are objectively the best candidates! Bailey goes on to claim that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Here we are in an article by a man, that quotes only male scientists and deals only with studies focused on men, and—shocker!—it concludes that women's sexuality is a mystery that nobody really gives a fuck about anyway. The one thing we do know about them is that they're passive.

That's right: all male scientists, male writer, all studies about men. Yet the article has the balls to introduce its rundown of research on homosexuality as follows:

Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire," the article gives examples only of studies on male homosexuality.

The article concludes with no evidence whatsoever that male and female sexuality are utterly different. It also seems hell-bent on arguing that male and female brains are completely different. Yet this is the best they can do:

Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain's outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Or this:

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right.

This one is my favorite. Listen to how many weasel words it uses to conclude that straight men are turned on by women and gay men are turned on by men:

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Do I need a smart conclusion after that? Because I just feel done.

TransBack

I've never heard of a transguy deciding to go back to being female, but I bet, given the popularity of transitioning among those in their early 20s, it will become more popular. But maybe, just maybe this is first-ever account of (and by) a person who came to regret the decision to become a man. (There are a lot of verbs in there, but I think that's appropriate, if clunky.) Which makes blogs feel a little worthwhile again. (In my opinion, they make more sense as vehicles for voices otherwise unheard than anything else.)

Do you know of more such man-interrupted stories? What do FTMs who have fully transitioned think of them?

Gates on Gays in the Military: I'm Too Busy for this Crap

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that homosexuality, like adultery, is immoral and the Army shouldn't allow any immoral behavior. I have a few questions left about that. First of all, immoral according to what standard in a secular state? The Bible? Even the Bible takes adultery to be the bigger issue: It made the top 10; biblical pronouncements on homosexuality are tucked away in odd places and not especially clear. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" is pretty clear. And yet, there's no word from the DoD that a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on adultery is forthcoming.

None of these obvious questions has been asked. The media has, however, tackled likely '08 Democratic candidates Obama and Clinton and asked for their opinion on the morality of homosexuality. They hedged. (Clinton had asked for the gay vote just days before at an under-the-radar speech at the Human Rights Campaign.)

Finally, someone has gotten around to asking the Secretary of Defense what he thinks. Robert Gates veritably brimmed with substance and insight when he said, "I think we should just move on at this point." Asked whether he thought Pace should apologize, Gates said no. Gates went on to say that he was too busy to evaluate whether "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—which less than half the nation supports and which costs a strapped military 4,000 soldiers a year—is an effective policy.