Being On Testosterone Again

(I want to start this post with a disclaimer: My experiences should not be interpreted to mean anything grand, overarching, or essentially true about the experiences of people with any amount of estrogen, testosterone, both, or neither.)

So, two weeks before your surgery, you stop taking your anti-testosterone pills (generally spironolactone).

Now, I've been on these things for over two years. I was 17 and 9 months when I started them. For 3 months I joked about how I felt like an ameobous genderless blob, then on my 18th birthday, I started taking estrogen. It was a really intense experience, undergoing a pretty radical hormonal shift like that. Especially at first I was really really emotional, I would joke about how I needed to rewatch any show I'd ever watched because I was reacting to them differently. This is to say nothing about the physical effects. Eventually my emotions settled the fuck down (even as I increased my dosage gradually), I think it was just the shock of this (comparatively) new hormone that sent my brain in overdrive.

I'm currently in this interesting position of effectively being on testosterone again for the first time in two years, and let me tell you, I'd really, really forgotten what it was like. As I put it to some friends of mine, my train of thought upon seeing anyone lately has gone like this: "You have a body? *I* have a body! We should have sex."

Granted now, this isn't far from my normal pattern of behavior. I've always been a very sexual person. But having testosterone in my system again (or at the very least, thinking I have testosterone in my system again) has amplified that. And it's calming down, for sure, I think the initial rush of "omg I have testosterone in me again!" has begun to subside.

I used to kind of giggle at transmasculine people's reactions to taking T for the first time, but this has been a really needed reminder of just how real hormones are. I'd forgotten just how important this step was to me back in the day, and how essential to my happiness being on estrogen has been. My dosages will be decreasing drastically for both estrogen and spiro after surgery, but I'm never going to complain about these pills again.