Hormones

AGE sixteen: I am so nervous I can barely stand it, and am trying to not bounce around in the bus seat like a crazed two year old, but I’m only having moderate success in being still.

The day is here… a day I’ve anxiously awaited for five weeks… or maybe for all my life. I’ve got the necessary $150 cash in my pocket, money I earned busting my ass doing yard work for anyone who would pay me. I’ve got the doctor’s name, address, and phone number memorized (so thoroughly that it will end up taking me years to erase them from my brain).

I’m on my way to finally talk to a real live sex change doctor, the only one I could find anywhere in Missouri. Finally I get to the right bus stop. I can feel my whole damned body tremble as I walk from the stop to the doctor’s office two blocks away. I’ve got this memorized, too, because I’ve actually taken several “test runs” from my friend’s house in the suburbs to the office building I now enter.

My hands are shaking so I’ve got them shoved deep into my jeans pockets. I hope like hell I look more grown up than that reflection of what may as well be a scared fourteen year old boy staring back at me as I wait for the elevator. The elevator car stops, the doors open… and I stand there frozen so long the doors close again. Embarrassed and hoping there are no witnesses to my hesitation, I punch the button again and this time when the doors open I make myself enter the car and press the button for the fourth floor.

Nervously, I run my hand through my hair, and then hastily try to smooth it into neatness before the elevator stops. I exit the car and there immediately before me is a frosted glass door with the doctor’s name on it. I have a brief moment of wondering why “Sex Change Doctor” isn’t stenciled there, too, but I don’t let myself ponder that too long… I may run out of courage at any second.

So I take a deep breath to brace myself, reach for the door handle, and — surprised, I think, that there are no sirens, buzzers, bell, or alarms announcing the arrival of one more gender traitor — I step into the office. A receptionist raises her head from whatever arcane tasks she must be doing and I can see her eyes narrow just a tiny bit when she realizes I’m alone.

The first words spoken between us are from her: “Where are your parents, young man?” Oh, man, I do not know if I can do this, I think to myself, but I manage to get the words out fairly audibly.

“I’m here alone.”

She gives me a little disapproving sniff and glances back to her desk.

“Marc Ryan?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I mumble, praying to every Power that Is that she’s not going to turn me over to the police or a psychiatrist or, worst of all, my parents for daring to use an alias. She obviously doesn’t really believe my name is Marc Ryan but she apparently decides to play along with me for the moment.

“Sit down there” — she points at very uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs lining a wall covered with really ugly supposed-to-be-art prints — “and I’ll let the doctor know you’re here.”

I do as instructed, trying surreptitiously to watch everything she’s doing, just in case she decides to call for someone to take the delusional child out of her office. She doesn’t seem to be calling anyone except the doctor, as promised. She keeps glancing at me for what must be an hour (though in reality is probably only three or four minutes) before an unmarked door near her desk opens and a white-coated man steps into the room.

Smiling at me in what doesn’t feel like a very sincere welcome, he introduces himself to me (and again that little voice in the back of my head is wondering *why* he doesn’t say “the Sex Change Doctor” after his name) and waves me into what is presumably his office, ignoring the hand I’d extended in order to give him a nice, hearty, “guy” handshake.

Sure enough, the room is his office, as the myriad plaques and certificates on his wall attest. He motions me to a deep armchair and as I sit I am extremely conscious that if I sit all the way into the chair my feet will not quite touch the floor, so I sit on the front edge of the seat, still self-conscious but not feeling like a toddler. And we talk.

In the end, I don’t necessarily feel like a toddler, but I definitely feel like a child. He won’t give me any medical assistance, no hormones, no surgeries, no referrals, no *fucking* anything… He also won’t give me back my money. It’s his consultation fee, he tells me.

“Come back when you’re eighteen,” he says. And then he adds as some kind of consolation prize,

“There’s this place, this gym, in the city where you can get some testosterone if you want to try it out, but I can’t tell you anything about dosages or side effects. You’re a minor so it would be against the law for me to tell you that.”

Furious, humiliated, scared, I leave the fancy ass doctor and the fancy ass office and the fancy ass elevator and the fancy ass building and eventually make my way back to the bus stop and back to my friend’s house. There I try to pretend it’s all just a bad dream. I pull the pillow over my head and cry myself to sleep.
——————————————————————————–

TWENTY-four years later, and I still remember the fucking details. Must’ve been one hell of a bad dream.

I sometimes wonder how differently my life would have proceeded had that doc been more unscrupulous than he was. Granted, he ripped me off of my $150, but he didn’t just write me a script for testosterone either. Then again, he did tell me where I could get black-market T, but he’d taken all my money so I couldn’t afford it on that trip into the city and then never decided to go back in search of the magical elixir that would change my life perfectly and forever.

That’s how I thought of it when I was a naive sixteen-year-old kid. “Masculinity in a syringe.” I hadn’t been able to find a hell of a lot of information about sex changes in the first place; I lived in a small rural Missouri town an hour from the near city of 10,000 or more, and the public library collection was only so extensive. I’d been able to read enough — very covertly, of course — to know that there were at least two transsexuals in the world, Renee Richards and Christine Jorgenson.

It seemed logical to me that if they could make boys be girls then they could make girls be boys. All I had to do was find a sex change doctor, explain that I wanted to be male, and then he’d take care of everything else.

That one trip into the city cured me of that illusion very quickly. The two-year wait until I was old enough to legally pursue sex reassignment surgery was the time I needed to really consider why I was considering SRS in the first place. It wasn’t for me that I was thinking about surgery; it was for my girlfriend who, in a twistedly homophobic way, said she could only love me in the future if I was a “real” guy.

She wanted to have the house in the suburbs and the white picket fence and 2.5 kids (where the hell does that half kid come from anyway?) and a husband who could fuck her and make her pregnant and do the guy things that “real” guys do. Had I actually gone through the long-term process of transitioning, I still wouldn’t have been what she wanted, and I wouldn’t have been what I wanted.

That’s not saying that I never wanted to be a boy or a man. When I was six my best buddy stopped playing with me because I was “just a girl.” I cried bitter tears and prayed to God to “fix” me, which in my six-year-old head meant “make me into a boy.”

When I was eight, my mom told me that I could make a wish come true if I could kiss my elbow. I spent an entire afternoon trying to break my upper arm and bend my elbow to my lips so I could kiss it and be magically transformed into a real live penis-enhanced boy.

During my adolescence and young adulthood I dated a number of straight women for whom I was an anomaly, an experiment, masculine enough outside to not make them feel too queer, but female bodied so they could be closeted “queer for a day” tourists; every one of them left me for “real” guys.

I could not serve on submarines or on any other combat ships in the Navy because I was penis-deficient and only the penis-privileged got to play with the cool toys. And now… yeah, when I watch my lover caress her biomale partner’s cock, watch him harden and swell, see her take his cock into her mouth, watch the play of sensations as they wash over both their bodies, watch him shudder as she sucks him higher and hotter, and then watch them both tense and then soar when he cums inside her… yeah, there are still times when I ache to be.. ‘whole’ is not the right word, but it’ll suffice for this moment, I guess. There are times when I wish that my own cock was more than it is, when I wish my body and my cock would announce my arousal to my partner, when I wish I knew the sensation of having a lover give me a blowjob on my very own flesh and blood cock.

There have even been times in the long past when, maybe for all of a nanosecond, I’ve yearned to be able to make a lover pregnant.

The longing for a cock is not something that gnaws at me day and night. In fact, there are plenty of times when I’m very aware that, as a butch, I have a distinct advantage over biomales… no need for recovery time. I can cum intensely a half dozen times or more and still be hard. No need for Viagra either. And no need to worry about contraception because no matter how butch I am, I will never be *that* butch.

But that’s not the only reason I choose to stay T-free. In the intervening years since I made that wasted and expensive trip to the “sex change doctor” I’ve learned much about identity and being gender queer and my body and lust and sexual queerness.

I had the good fortune to have a stonebutch mentor who helped me find pride in myself *as* my stonebutch self, who taught me through his own life that there are options and opportunities for masculine-presenting, female-bodied people and there are women in the world who love and desire masculine females.

I have a family that has always allowed me the freedom to move through the world as I choose and that has taken my masculinity in stride; even my niece who’s learning Spanish sometimes refers to me as “Tio Beth” (‘tio’ means uncle, which she says makes more sense to her in Spanish).

I have a lover who loves my soft skin. I have a baby face despite being forty-one; that’s a pro and a con. I have a deep enough voice that I am frequently “sir’d” on the phone.

I pass as male about half the time without trying. My lover *gets* it… she understands about butchcock and she gets the masculinity in me and she very carefully reaches deep inside my soul where the vulnerability, the softness — the feminine — hides and for a few moments free it without discounting my stonebutchness.

I do not know my genetic background (I was adopted at birth) so I have no way of knowing what kinds of health conditions to which I may already be predisposed, without worrying about the potential side effects of taking hormones.

I like my jeans snug and I like the way my “day-pack” (ie, soft so I can actually bend in the middle to sit) gives me just the right bulge, and I like the way it feels when my lover grazes her hand across my fly.

I learned to shave when I was a kid standing on the toilet seat lid with my little kid’s plastic razor, mimicking each of my dad’s motions as he shaved and making faces at him when he would dab at shaving cream I’d missed; I can shave now without a blade and still enjoy the ritual of it without the “pricklies.”

I’m used to this physical package into which I was born and within which I have lived for four decades. It has not always been an easy truce, me with my body, but we’re grown fairly accustomed to each other.

If I did decide to take T, it would be a quantum leap for me from where I stand now. Granted, it would be nice to not bleed every month, especially since my body is insistent on reminding me that I am biologically female by bleeding heavily and giving me debilitating cramps sometimes. But all the T in the world wouldn’t mean I could stop having to get Pap smears at least once a year, and when I’m really unlucky, once a quarter.

That could only be accomplished through surgery and while I have no deep attachment to the “girl parts” inside my body, I’m in no hurry to go under a knife to have them removed either.

If I did decide to take T, my libido would probably rev even higher, but I’m not all that sure that would be a good idea. After all, I *am* in school and trying to study!

If I did decide to take T, things would change drastically outside of my body too. See, to me, being sexually queer basically affects just me and my lover(s). I can still ostensibly have a family through adoption or artificial insemination (for my *partner*, not for me). I can still get married and even, in Vermont at least, civilly united. The things that parents often grieve when they learn their kid is gay, lesbian, or bisexual aren’t such absolute losses anymore. Transitioning through genders, though, is a whole ‘nother matter.

My parents would lose a daughter, my siblings would lose a sister, my nieces and nephews would lose an aunt, my grandparents would lose a granddaughter, my uncles and aunts would lose a niece… all those relationships would change. More profoundly, my relationship with my SELF would change. Given how long it’s taken me to get to this place in my life where I’m used to my body and my identity as stonebutch fits like a perfect pair of boots broken in just right and ready to help me take on the world, I’m in no hurry to change things.

I honestly cannot tell you what it would be like inside my head if I were just now sixteen and had all the options for transition available to me that folks have today. I do know it would be a hell of a lot more tempting to take my $150 to a doc who maybe had a good reputation for giving a damn about her/his patients.

I do know I’d probably be able to tell you every single website in the world that addresses SRS issues. I do know I’d be tempted to believe that just maybe there really is a magic elixir, “masculinity in asyringe,” instead of the masculinity in my soul that my stonebutch mentor so long ago and my lover now recognize and respect and encourage me to live.

There are times when I hear a voice in my head that is unusual for me, a voice advocating caution and moving ahead slowly, that questions the wisdom of female-bodied people transitioning at a young age. There have been no longitudinal studies to assess just what testosterone does to a female-bodied person over time. There are no definitive answers to questions about what potential health risks may exist. There are no certainties about how it will all turn out. And in some cases, there are folks who’ve begun transitioning female-to-male who have stopped in midstream or who have decided to become pregnant and bear children, and there’s not a heck of a lot the medical establishment knows about those sorts of situations either.

That annoying mental voice isn’t the dominant one in my head, though. The main voice advocates respect for and support of people who do decide to transition, which is absolutely and completely what I believe I can totally get why a person would opt to transition.

I know the “misogynistic attempt to access male privilege” argument, which I personally think is a crock… the very very best we can do as people born in female bodies manifesting masculinity is “rent” male privilege.

But even that notion I question because fundamental to the concept of privilege is the concept of unconsciousness: it’s only really privilege when you don’t know you’ve got it, or when you *do* know you’ve got it and choose to invoke it, oblivious to the implications of it. If you are passing in this world — as a man, a temporarily able bodied person, a white person, a wealthy person, an educated person — then yeah, you may be able to access a certain kind of privilege, but the penalty for being busted very well may be death.

I understand the penis envy argument. Problem is, I don’t (generally) have penis envy. In fact, one aspect of penis envy that I have had the pleasure (please note heavy sarcasm here) of witnessing was male sailors debating just whose dick was longest.

To be worried about whose dick is bigger than mine for the rest of my life would really get old quickly. And in 1998 when I got bashed for using the women’s bathroom on campus, the two bashers made quite a deal out of the fact that I was packing — “What do you think you are? A man???” and “Hey, she thinks she’s got a dick!” Even with a bloody nose and a ringing head I desperately wanted to jab back at *them* for being jealous of my dick, which comes in several sizes (no pun intended) and stays hard all night. Who’s jealous of whom?

And one more thing about penis envy… the guys I know who’ve transitioned aren’t doing it for the sake of a penis. They’re doing it for the sake of their sanity, for the sake of congruity between their bodies and their souls, for the sake of fitting into the world in a way that makes sense to them. All the T in the world isn’t going to grow them a huge penis that John Holmes would envy. All the T in the world is not going to make the immune from the sentences that may be enacted against them if they ever get found out for having once been or still being female-bodied.

I don’t buy the “traitor to the feminist cause” argument either. Having once been female-bodied (and possibly still being so) but moving through the world in a masculine persona does not inherently make a person a traitor to feminists or to women.There are plenty of men in this world, bio- and trans-, who are staunchly feminist in their politics, philosophies, and practices. There are also plenty of women, biological and otherwise, in this world who are actively misogynistic in their lives. Becoming a male chauvinist pig is not a mandatory prerequisite for transitioning female-to-male.

There are actually only two arguments against transitioning that I can think of that I support. The first is the reason I initially sought SRS: to please someone else. That, to me, is a fundamentally stupid thing to do, said in a totally nonjudgmental way, of course. People come and go in our lives, lovers, family, friends. Even the one person who swears to be with you all the days of your life can’t foretell the future.

In the end the one person who will be inextricably stuck with your new body is you. If you’re not transitioning for yourself, then I would wholeheartedly advise getting some good counsel from someone other than a lover, friend, or family member, and maybe even getting yourself a new lover or friend, because if someone can’t accept you as who you are now, what sense does it make to think they’ll change their mind several years and several hundred thousand dollars down the road? (This thing about transitioning for someone else also includes trying to make others think you are enough… man enough, tough enough, simply enough.)

The other argument against transitioning that comes to mind for me is qualified, not absolutely anti-transitioning, but urging caution. In other words, not trying to do it on your own. I could’ve gotten my hands on black market T a long time ago. I could still get access to T through other than sanctioned medical channels, simply by checking out the world wide web. I could use herbal medicines like yohimbe to kick my testosterone level right on up there. And I would not have a clue just what kind of damage I could be doing to myself.

As much as we justifiably rail against medical practitioners who style themselves as gatekeepers to transitioning, deciding who gets to enter and who can’t, there is a really good use for doctors… they can help keep you from killing yourself. Okay, enough of this lecture crap. I’ve now hit my own limit and that takes some doing.

Bottom line is this: for some people transitioning is a life-and-soul-saving necessity. For some it is absolutely imperative. For others it’s a risk worth taking. For me, it isn’t right.

I know there are folks who identify as butch who have had top surgery and take T. For a while, I questioned what the hell that meant. To me, butch does not include body mods. But then again, I pack and I’ve bound my chest too. So who died and made me soul judge of who’s really butch?

I know there are folks who identify as transmen who are not using any hormones or anticipating any surgeries. I know people who are doing masculinity through being punk queers. There are as many ways to do masculinity as there are people doing masculinity.

Nobody really gets to be the gatekeeper in the end, because authenticity doesn’t come from anyone else.

Authenticity comes from deep down inside ourselves.

B. Harrison Prado. (2002). Hormones. Torque, 2(2), 15-25.

page updated 27 December 2010