06-06-2013, 02:00 AM
This post is far too long, so I apologize in advance if I bore you. But I wanted to get it down as a kind of personal credo, and as a thank you to the contributors to this forum. If some or all of you disagree with my maunderings - by all means say so.
I recently came across an article on research which purported to distinguish between ‘early onset’ and ‘late onset’ gender dysphoria on the basis of index to ring finger ratio. I don’t believe that distinguishing between groups of people on the basis of digit ratio can be good science, not least because of the wide range of quite different characteristics it purports to indicate, and because of the variation of average values of the ratio found in different countries. But it did make me wonder about the validity of any early/late onset differentiation. There does not seem to be a commonly adopted definition of early and late onset, but for present purposes I will take it to mean before or after say 40.
It is my impression that the people here because of gender issues do fall into two main groups, one mainly in their twenties and the other in their forties and upward. The first, early group seems more likely to be interested in or to become interested in transition, while those in the second, late group wish to feminize their bodies to a greater or lesser degree but do not in general contemplate transition as a practical proposition nor even in many cases even desire it. But is there a real distinction between the groups?
We are dealing here with a symptom, dysphoria (which I would define as being a state of troubled mind) believed to occur because of incompatibility of an innate condition of our brains with the individual environments in which we have to function,. We use the word brain because it is the brain that is conditioned physically during foetal development, but from our own personal perspective ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is a much better term since it is our very essence as a person that is involved. This conditioning has displaced our brains, or whatever term you prefer, some greater or lesser way along the gender spectrum (which I definitely believe exists) from the male towards the female end.. Those at or near the female end are likely to encounter more or less severe dysphoria quite early in their lives depending on environmental, social and personal history factors, but I suspect that nearly all of us encounter dysphoria once the onset of puberty floods our bodies and brains with male hormones, even though we may have no clear idea of the cause of the symptom.
This male hormonal regime may cause us to assert our masculinity, but how successfully and for how long this can repress our female side seems to depend on the extent of the displacement along the spectrum and, again, on environmental, social and personal history factors. For present members of the late group, transition was largely not a practical possibility nor even part of our awareness while we were of an age to have belonged to the early group, even if for those who knew what we may now believe to be the true reason for our problem. In one way the present members of the early group have a more difficult situation than we did because for them transition may be a real possibility. I find it hard to comprehend the courage and dedication it must take to pursue that course. Many of us on the other hand could and still may see little alternative to living male under the testosterone regime while taking such palliative measures as we can, e.g. discrete cross-dressing or other attempts to simulate the female experience. It seems that as we get older and testosterone levels drop, the desire to respond to the feminine component of our gender becomes more assertive and the ability the testosterone regime may have had to mask the dysphoria symptom weakens.
For my own part, I believe that I have belonged to both groups at different stages of my life, and that this applies to most of us apparently ‘late’ onset cases. I first experienced the dysphoria symptom in the very early stages of puberty, and changed by all accounts from a cheerful extrovert small boy to an introverted, pathologically shy and withdrawn teenager with a bad body image, a speech impediment and no self confidence, although no one knew why. My school work did not initially suffer - that came later. At 16 I developed a strictly platonic crush on a younger boy and convinced myself that I must be homosexual. Although later encounters allowed me to play a female role, there was a lot of guilt involved, no emotional contact on my part, and I ran a mile from any attempt by another male to go beyond encounters. I was attracted to girls but far too shy to make any approaches, and tended to hold at arm’s length those few that did try to be friendly. I did make various attempts to get a grip on myself, and there were some brief periods when I felt I was really living (or may be escaping) but they always seemed to end in some disaster or other After (just!) surviving university, I started my first job and found that women there were easier to talk to than men, at least in a non-sexual context. I made a real friend of and subsequently fell in love with the woman who is now my wife. When she eventually induced me to take her out, we met on that first date a man who before I knew what was happening had moved into her apartment and shortly married her. Miraculously, our friendship survived, even through she was trying very hard to make her marriage succeed and in due course to look after her children despite a feckless and abusive husband. While I was becoming quite good at my job, I wasn’t succeeding too well with my personal life nor in managing my dysphoria, so I applied for and obtained a job in Canada where my qualifications were in demand and I felt that I could start with a clean sheet. At that stage I experimented briefly with cross-dressing but the results were so ludicrous that it did nothing for me, and other attempts to find ways to feel like a woman were just as inadequate..
At this point I received a letter from my friend in England saying that she was going to leave her husband, and which of several courses should she take to safeguard the kids? I said none of them, join me, and thus started a new and wonderfully exhilarating period of my life, despite the horrendous difficulties and hazards in legalising the immigration of my new family to Canada, and thereafter coping with my new responsibilities. Dysphoria was pushed into the background for some twenty years until stresses at work , health problems and probably declining testosterone levels let it re-emerge. My erectile function dropped towards zero and our physical relationship became more and more frustrating for both of us as both Viagra and Cialis ceased to work. Eventually we found that if I gave up being distracted by attempting conventional male function and concentrated on her needs, things went much better for both of us than they had for some years.
I started looking again into various possibilities for palliating the dysphoria and learned of the possibility of NBE. I acquired Flat to Fem and followed its instructions for six months or so without any result that I could persuade either of us was real. Then in yet another attempt to control my blood pressure I was put on spironolactone, on which I remained for 18 months through confusion following the untimely death of my doctor. Another attempt at NBE during this spiro period seemed to produce real results, and I discovered this board and PM..
Finally my blood pressure problems got sorted out and I was able to drop most of the sexually unfriendly medications. An enforced holiday of several months from NBE while gallbladder problems were dealt with gave me the opportunity to attempt restoration of male function, but it became clear that nothing useful was going to be achieved after so long on spiro. I now believe that the spiro at least had the benefit of finally freeing me from the testosterone regime, while the PM has not only relieved the dysphoria but makes me feel that I am still some sort of sexual being. It has also given me an inner peace that I have never felt before. I may be thinking of the prime of our marriage rather than my childhood, but I think that Wordsworth’s famous lines from his ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (and much of the rest of that poem) say it far better than I ever could:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind”
To plagiarise the taglines of some of the prominent contributors to this forum, I now know I am what I am, I’m currently a happy camper, I may be a heretic, although I appreciate the imagery, I don’t think I am quite a butterfly emerged from a chrysalis; and I think that the major contributors have done a great job with the FAQ. To you, and to all the many others here who have helped me - thank you.
I recently came across an article on research which purported to distinguish between ‘early onset’ and ‘late onset’ gender dysphoria on the basis of index to ring finger ratio. I don’t believe that distinguishing between groups of people on the basis of digit ratio can be good science, not least because of the wide range of quite different characteristics it purports to indicate, and because of the variation of average values of the ratio found in different countries. But it did make me wonder about the validity of any early/late onset differentiation. There does not seem to be a commonly adopted definition of early and late onset, but for present purposes I will take it to mean before or after say 40.
It is my impression that the people here because of gender issues do fall into two main groups, one mainly in their twenties and the other in their forties and upward. The first, early group seems more likely to be interested in or to become interested in transition, while those in the second, late group wish to feminize their bodies to a greater or lesser degree but do not in general contemplate transition as a practical proposition nor even in many cases even desire it. But is there a real distinction between the groups?
We are dealing here with a symptom, dysphoria (which I would define as being a state of troubled mind) believed to occur because of incompatibility of an innate condition of our brains with the individual environments in which we have to function,. We use the word brain because it is the brain that is conditioned physically during foetal development, but from our own personal perspective ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is a much better term since it is our very essence as a person that is involved. This conditioning has displaced our brains, or whatever term you prefer, some greater or lesser way along the gender spectrum (which I definitely believe exists) from the male towards the female end.. Those at or near the female end are likely to encounter more or less severe dysphoria quite early in their lives depending on environmental, social and personal history factors, but I suspect that nearly all of us encounter dysphoria once the onset of puberty floods our bodies and brains with male hormones, even though we may have no clear idea of the cause of the symptom.
This male hormonal regime may cause us to assert our masculinity, but how successfully and for how long this can repress our female side seems to depend on the extent of the displacement along the spectrum and, again, on environmental, social and personal history factors. For present members of the late group, transition was largely not a practical possibility nor even part of our awareness while we were of an age to have belonged to the early group, even if for those who knew what we may now believe to be the true reason for our problem. In one way the present members of the early group have a more difficult situation than we did because for them transition may be a real possibility. I find it hard to comprehend the courage and dedication it must take to pursue that course. Many of us on the other hand could and still may see little alternative to living male under the testosterone regime while taking such palliative measures as we can, e.g. discrete cross-dressing or other attempts to simulate the female experience. It seems that as we get older and testosterone levels drop, the desire to respond to the feminine component of our gender becomes more assertive and the ability the testosterone regime may have had to mask the dysphoria symptom weakens.
For my own part, I believe that I have belonged to both groups at different stages of my life, and that this applies to most of us apparently ‘late’ onset cases. I first experienced the dysphoria symptom in the very early stages of puberty, and changed by all accounts from a cheerful extrovert small boy to an introverted, pathologically shy and withdrawn teenager with a bad body image, a speech impediment and no self confidence, although no one knew why. My school work did not initially suffer - that came later. At 16 I developed a strictly platonic crush on a younger boy and convinced myself that I must be homosexual. Although later encounters allowed me to play a female role, there was a lot of guilt involved, no emotional contact on my part, and I ran a mile from any attempt by another male to go beyond encounters. I was attracted to girls but far too shy to make any approaches, and tended to hold at arm’s length those few that did try to be friendly. I did make various attempts to get a grip on myself, and there were some brief periods when I felt I was really living (or may be escaping) but they always seemed to end in some disaster or other After (just!) surviving university, I started my first job and found that women there were easier to talk to than men, at least in a non-sexual context. I made a real friend of and subsequently fell in love with the woman who is now my wife. When she eventually induced me to take her out, we met on that first date a man who before I knew what was happening had moved into her apartment and shortly married her. Miraculously, our friendship survived, even through she was trying very hard to make her marriage succeed and in due course to look after her children despite a feckless and abusive husband. While I was becoming quite good at my job, I wasn’t succeeding too well with my personal life nor in managing my dysphoria, so I applied for and obtained a job in Canada where my qualifications were in demand and I felt that I could start with a clean sheet. At that stage I experimented briefly with cross-dressing but the results were so ludicrous that it did nothing for me, and other attempts to find ways to feel like a woman were just as inadequate..
At this point I received a letter from my friend in England saying that she was going to leave her husband, and which of several courses should she take to safeguard the kids? I said none of them, join me, and thus started a new and wonderfully exhilarating period of my life, despite the horrendous difficulties and hazards in legalising the immigration of my new family to Canada, and thereafter coping with my new responsibilities. Dysphoria was pushed into the background for some twenty years until stresses at work , health problems and probably declining testosterone levels let it re-emerge. My erectile function dropped towards zero and our physical relationship became more and more frustrating for both of us as both Viagra and Cialis ceased to work. Eventually we found that if I gave up being distracted by attempting conventional male function and concentrated on her needs, things went much better for both of us than they had for some years.
I started looking again into various possibilities for palliating the dysphoria and learned of the possibility of NBE. I acquired Flat to Fem and followed its instructions for six months or so without any result that I could persuade either of us was real. Then in yet another attempt to control my blood pressure I was put on spironolactone, on which I remained for 18 months through confusion following the untimely death of my doctor. Another attempt at NBE during this spiro period seemed to produce real results, and I discovered this board and PM..
Finally my blood pressure problems got sorted out and I was able to drop most of the sexually unfriendly medications. An enforced holiday of several months from NBE while gallbladder problems were dealt with gave me the opportunity to attempt restoration of male function, but it became clear that nothing useful was going to be achieved after so long on spiro. I now believe that the spiro at least had the benefit of finally freeing me from the testosterone regime, while the PM has not only relieved the dysphoria but makes me feel that I am still some sort of sexual being. It has also given me an inner peace that I have never felt before. I may be thinking of the prime of our marriage rather than my childhood, but I think that Wordsworth’s famous lines from his ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (and much of the rest of that poem) say it far better than I ever could:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind”
To plagiarise the taglines of some of the prominent contributors to this forum, I now know I am what I am, I’m currently a happy camper, I may be a heretic, although I appreciate the imagery, I don’t think I am quite a butterfly emerged from a chrysalis; and I think that the major contributors have done a great job with the FAQ. To you, and to all the many others here who have helped me - thank you.
