The Significance of Questioning

The topic of people questioning themselves anew after starting HRT came up as a side discussion in another thread. I thought I would start a new thread to focus on the topic.

People have been questioning the questioners! Fair enough. Some actually are not transsexual, should never have started HRT, and will ultimately stop and take another path. Frankly, the path tends to be self-correcting anyway and I'm not overly concerned for people's long-term well-being. Many transsexuals wind up in this questioning phase, though. At a minimum, all will have WTF moments. The phenomenon is widely misunderstood and little-discussed in depth.

It starts with normalcy. The sense of normalcy on hormones is incredible. It's hard for me to stress that enough. I've compared it to waking up after decades. I've compared to a return to my sense of self in childhood. These aren't just poetic or literary metaphors and aren't exaggerations. These are things I feel very strongly.

But with such normalcy often comes a renewal of questioning. You will see frequent references to people who are post-HRT start and pre-op, their WTF moments and their confusion and angst. I had quite a time working through it.

It reduces to this: You come to a certain point of self-realization and desperation where you realize you must start hormones. You think you have reached clarity at that point, but in fact your thinking is still rooted in its old patterns, if not crisis-driven besides. One cannot experience renewal before it happens! The post-HRT calm introduces a normal and proper state of mind. The problem is that you have no experience in processing your thinking and feelings in this state. Am I cured? Is it enough? Am I even trans? Was I wrong? I must be crazy! "Oh F***"!

If you give yourself enough time, there is a shift. While not living who you are creates incredible trauma, experiencing a true sense of your self though living in a normal state are turns out to be quite subtle. When it happens, you start feeling the dismay of the core problem (congruence), a deep, inward pull toward transition starts, and your vision shifts away from the pain and fear toward the future.

What is required to get to this point is to shut up, live for a while, and listen to what your heart and body are telling you. The emotions I have when I do are almost indescribable. I have discovered – to my surprise – love and happiness in and for myself. An aching, longing to be whole. Optimism bordering on euphoria… this coming from someone who has spent life immersed in sarcasm and cynicism. The urge to touch and connect – coming from someone profoundly dissociated and socially averse. The sense of being an unfillable vessel, coming from a lifetime of being in the desert and never even knowing I was thirsty. Every bit of it proceeds from recognizing and releasing my female identity, formerly hidden away and protected in my innermost core, the smallest and most delicate thing imaginable, but now suffusing itself into every aspect of my being.

Far from indicating that one is not transsexual, this renewed confusion is a powerful indicator that they have reached a point of calm where things can really start to happen in a positive way. This is the significance of the questioning.

I was genderless and now I am fully gendered. It is an amazing thing to experience. It starts with a still small voice whispering in a new and unfamiliar state.

WOW! Thanks Lea. this puts many thoughts into perspective. I had some thoughts of maybe I could just get by with a small intake of hrt and not have to fully transition. I still may not but it is something for me to think about and helps me to understand what can happen.

Again Thanks!

Lea, wonderful post. The first thread mentioned has some excellent thoughts. This post really focuses down on the fact that wherever one is in their journey, they must make decisions. I know that where I was 9 months ago, I was not making rational decisions because of my mental state. Now, i am, as Lea points out, at a point of calm. I can now make decisions from a point of knowing I have recognized my female identity. Whether I have acted fully on that can be discussed, but those changes will be made from a point with rational thought/questioning about what I am, and where I need to go. There will always be questions regardless, but now I feel I can listen and more calmly respond and take action.

Barbara

I would not say that I have (yet?) been dwelling on the matter of congruence. It has gone a bit differently for me.

I had some health scares earlier this year. Along the way, the question came to mind, "What would I do if they told me I only had a year (or 5) to live?" And without needing to "think it over", the emotion-laden answer came to mind: I would change my name, get implants, and go full time. That I would, to phrase it one way, "live for me" if I knew I only had a relatively short time left. The thought didn't go away; it just got "parked" for a while, to come to mind again due to other life circumstances. And it sat with me for a while. While I was doing my yearly self re-assessment (birthday came around), I remembered something my gender therapist had told me long ago: that the important question is "How do you want to live?" And at that point I realized that it was Okay if I did not feel completely female at this point, that the way I want to live is as female.

I used to agonize about how to go through the job hunt process when I am ready to return to work, about how stressful it would be for me to pretend to be "male" -- but I did have some mental image of "getting through", "making do", "putting up with it". But after I realized that I can go ahead and live and leave the "am I female enough to 'deserve' to do this?" questions behind, I no longer have mental images of life two years from now without having changed my name and changing public gender.

I still Question, I still don't want to break up my relationship -- but at least now I know what I want to do "if I were being selfish". To at least try.

With regards to "the urge to touch and connect": I have not been socially adverse; I just haven't fit in, and have been unwilling to pretend to. I have few real friends. And yet I am prepared to lose the few I do have. I have spent so much of my life doing things for other people, that I feel a need to do this profound thing for myself. Perhaps I will make new friends along the way, but I need to do it even at the risk I will not.

When people go to a swimming pool it is interesting to watch how they go about it.

Some arrive and set up next to the water and lie in the sun and that is about it. They enjoy showing off their tanned body. They complain if someone splashes water on them.

Others come in and run as fast as they can and jump right in and splash anyone nearby. Usually yelling and screaming the whole time.

Still others walk by dipping their toe in first to test the water, then slowly walk down the steps to the shallow end and eventually start swimming laps.

So...........which one describes you?

There is no normal and that is the problem. At least if there is I do not recognize it. Questioning is kind of like the third swimmer. Some of these dip the toe in and find it too cold and decide to set up on the chase lounge taking the sun and some stand around yelling at the ones making all the noise and splashing about.

Oh I almost forgot. There are also the ones who sit in the chair high up in the air watching all the swimmers and blow the whistle when someone gets out of hand.

Ellen you have not yet reached that point of feeling normal . My doctor told me when I started hormones I would feel normal in about 3 months. I asked my therapist about that and I raised the same question as you. What is normal and how would I know. His answer was I will know it when I experience it. It actually took about 6 months. I woke up one day as I was going about my day it hit me I feel normal. It is hard to describe and put into words, but the feeling to me was strong enough I was able to recognize it.

I do not have many wtf moments anymore. The positive events transition has provided me with to date confirms to me Ibam doing what is right for my personal growth. It has not been all strawberries and cream but the positives have outweighed the negatives. All the energy I expended over the years, hiding, denying, suppressing , can now be released band channeled to a different firm if energy I have used to renew myself. And it is refreshing.

I very much relate to the sense of normalcy and peace that you mention Lea. And your reference to childhood is right on the mark for me. I distinctly remember a summer morning when I was around 7 years old, waking up after a great night's sleep and looking forward to heading out onto the giant prairie across from our home for a sunny day of playing in the tall grass with my close friend. I felt so good, so very happy to be alive, and I get a powerful deja-vu of that morning from time to time now! Out of the blue, any time of day. I kiss the earth in gratitude.

My latest round of questioning has been regarding my emergent sexuality. At my age it's not a very pressing issue, but now that my gender angst has been eliminated and things seem to be on track (next goal, FFS in 85 days, 10 hours and 43 minutes, but who's counting), I've observed myself questioning what indeed are the nature of my sexual preferences. I was pretty much a failure at the sex thing in my past, and didn't get on well with anyone sexually, male or female, really. Lots of pain and uncertainty associated with those memories. But with my fresh new attitude anything seems possible! I don't dread the questioning this time, just kind of twirling a fresh daisy between my fingers and considering the possibilities of a new, sexual me, as a loving and compassionate, mature woman.

A major part of the message is that gender is more abstruse than credited. Ask yourself WHY cisgendered people don't think about their gender. The conventional answer is that its because its a given. A better answer is that it's impossible to isolate and exceedingly difficult to attribute. Omnipresent yet ineffable.

MtFs contend with a noise problem overlay. If experiencing gender directly is akin to listening to the most delicate music box, then testosterone forces you to try to do it standing at stage front attending a rock concert. What happens when the concert ends? You are deaf, my friend. Better wait a while to listen to that music box ... and hope you haven't completely lost your hearing besides.

For those really concerned about having that experience of "knowing" you used the most important words to connect words to the feeling.

One is the recognition that you have been living "genderless" because chemically your body as your endocrine system has been affecting the brain as your mind forcing you to be what you are not which causes trauma to the mind and becomes particularly severe once puberty starts.

I experienced it as being pushed from behind into something I knew I was not or having a type of electrical current flowing through me that is not natural to me.

My identity as my brain was split off from my body as sex so that my heart and soul are female but living in a vessel that could not express this so you have the experience of being locked inside of yourself because of your body while being poisoned by it as anxiety.

Gender is a creation of sex and I knew I was different because I did not carry the animal energy of the sexual male and my thinking feeling person was nothing like any male I ever encountered.

This energy is what sex comes out of but it is so much more. It is about territoriality which is utterly absent in me. It is about that unique way males compete with other males for dominance so they can hold onto their maleness and enlarge it.

It is that world view males have of ownership and kingdom building.

All that is in males that drives their behavior by this singular energy is not an experience known to me and I have no interest in knowing it because I see it has foreign to me so foreign to who I know myself to be.

Before I understood gender identity as a biological process I wondered if I was an effeminate male but there is nothing about me that is effeminate and certainly nothing that is passive or submissive but yet also not dominant.

I have never been a male caricature of the feminine yet I have a profoundly feminine energy in the intuitive, emotionally aware relationship I have with life that is often missing in woman who have lost the ability to be woman as what their minds are capable of experiencing when they stop rejecting themselves by adopting the masculine values of the culture they reside in.

I am what a woman can be when she is not trying to act like a man as the consequence of living in a world dominated by men yet I have no interest in the creations of society used as symbols to signify that I'm female.

I am female but I have no interest in communicating this to anyone but simply want the freedom to be what comes naturally to me.

HRT opens the door to being natural by giving the mind an opportunity to escape what has been preventing this and the changes to the body simply become an expression of ones natural energy that takes pleasure in the smooth skin and soft curves that complement the natural energy of ones soul.

I still prefer hiking boots over any other type of shoe and do not like the color pink and I will never wear a flowery dress. I am not emotionally dramatic but reserved and hate chit chat and gossip.

All of the sexist views of what is a woman or man I stand outside of, in that I will not adopt anything to prove I'm one or the other because this once again traps me into society (others) defining what is a woman or man.

I believe to be the person I know myself to be as a woman I must never concern myself with proving it to others.

To be whole you must step away from the mirror as using others to mirror back to you the woman you have created for them that is not you.

You must become an island unto yourself while living in a sea of people. You must find yourself without using people to do it with.

The more you depend on others mirroring back to you that you are a woman the more you depend on them for defining what a woman is and the less likely you are to discover who you are naturally as that unique individual who also happens to be a woman.

If you try to force yourself to be a woman as defined by others you will lose your individuality so lose being an individual woman so you will never discover yourself as a woman because they are inseparable.

Every transsexual must find their own unique voice as a woman.

If you are a woman there is no need to prove it but only the need to live it as the expression of who you naturally are.

When you follow this path that was always there it naturally takes you to your destination as your natural destiny.

Being a woman is a state of being that the behavior comes out of.

It is not behavior that takes you into this state of being because this would be a false creation to project a false persona in an attempt to create reality out of fantasy.

:notworthy:

Kelly, you are really inspiring. I totally agree in this, but... but this in some sense is the "death" of all the "passing" worries. If I am a woman, I don't care if I don't pass in the world as a woman, I have simply to express my natural self which is a woman.

Does the world see me as a woman? No, this is not the correct way to put the question. The correct way is: "do I accept myself as a woman even if living as the woman I am could mean that the world does not understand?".

It seems to me that I am returning to the meaning of being TS. To the core of the message: I am a woman but I am not presenting myself as a typical woman, you (the world) can reflect to me another judgment but I do not care.

This may seem too much preposterous, something valid only on stage... perhaps we can distinguish between not caring what the world says from challenging the world, using deliberately a style, a way of looking which is in contrast to normal, acceptable behaviors, clothing, of the target gender.

Loved you post Lea (and the lovely comments of all the others). I feel so fortunate to have my sense of normalcy come upon me within two weeks of starting HRT. (I am only into my 5th week).I liken it to a sense of "coming home". Years ago I took Prosac for depression. It worked. When people asked me what it did, I told them it made me feel normal. But the price of that normalcy was living in a fog. In order to at least feel something I gave up the drug.

The estrogen I take now gives me normalcy but with a 1000 times the ability to feel and sense and enjoy life. I love feeling like a woman. It's who I am. There was a time when to feel this way I had to CD. I still love my dresses, but when I cannot wear them, I do not feel any less a woman. That's so wonderful.

Questions? Everyday. In my case being 66 helps. Finding happiness each day is so much more important now. My little patches and pills brings me happiness, and that's good enough for me. But for younger people the decisions are much more difficult...I understand that.

I'll probably never confirm to society's "standard" for a woman (which is a standard that many women cannot live up to),and while I'll always dream of being beautiful and glamorous, its ok that I'm not. I don't have to look that way to be a woman. I am a woman and that alone makes me very happy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bas1985

The correct way is: "do I accept myself as a woman even if living as the woman I am could mean that the world does not understand?".

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I tried to live as a man for many years and the world didn't understand so whats the difference? At least I will feel better about it.


Back to Lea's OP. I think that the buildup of fear and anxiety before going on HRT is so overwhelming that once you start things begin to settle down and now you have time to actually look deeper with less distractions and see or realize things you may have missed or been too busy to think about before.

My experience when something like this:

First, a period of euphoria, lasting perhaps a couple of months. This is due to two things – the psychological effects of starting, estrogen affecting you little in such a short time, and the faster effects of the anti-androgens, which take down the pressure from the testosterone.

Second, a rapid buildup and return of dysphoria. The inner monologue returned. Congruence issues and focus sharpened. This time was very upsetting for about a month or so. It was accompanied by a brief renewal of depression.

Third, a period of calm that extends to this day. Growing happiness over the same period. Continued improvement in terms of lifelong psychological issues going away, particularly dissociation.

And then for me, this renewal of questioning. In some respects that's a misnomer. This is not quite like questioning that goes on during discovery and crisis. Rather, it is a new type of discovery. Maybe a better way to put it is that it is wondering at yourself, looking inside to finally find what you are and integrate that, too. It feels like a deeper level of integration than the personality and behavioral types of integration of the months before. And, of course, as you flicker from time-to-time in and out of your older viewpoint of life, you trigger those WTF moments …

This last period started perhaps a month ago. (I'm just over one year on hormones). Several things happened. I decided to transition. I lost my self-consciousness. I have become more assertive of about who I am at home, but without it being tainted by defensiveness.

As the self-examination went deeper, the nature of the questions has change. The thing is, the more you integrate, the more you start to lose the separate or unique sense of your gender, just as it is with cisgendered people. Losing the special sense of gender that you worked so hard to find, surface, and claim again sometimes feels like a loss. But now it's more like something I can't put my finger on. Something familiar and still with me, but half-remembered. It's probably no coincidence that my dreams about early family life have been so frequent lately. All of this has happened even as female gender has suffused through my personality and behavior, as I wrote before. Ubiquitous – but no longer so easy to isolate.

So in the and, I suppose I'm talking about the experience of integration. Reading about it, talking about it with your therapist, hearing about it from others, etc. is one thing. Experiencing it is another. As it happens, your sense of self actually changes. I still feel like me. More like me than ever, in fact. But I'm having more and more trouble remembering what it felt like to be me before. If you're introspective – and I am – this leads to a deeper and deeper kind of questioning.

The WTF moments are startle moments. Again, I think arise out of flashes of your older, non-integrated persona. If so, they herald the integration itself. By all reports, they never disappear completely. But they do lessen in frequency. I expect them to come and go with major transition stages as old fears and views briefly emerge. I can only pray that they don't come on so strongly that they overwhelm and derail me.