Why is it "birth control" for me but transitioning for he?

They love relying on the fact that sex is real!

This comment was left on a video. I have gotten it several times elsewhere. It is a reference to the fact that my medical transition began and ended with mechanical compression of my breasts and the hormone progesterone, taken with the intention of reducing dysphoria by modifying or eliminating menstruation.

The reason I define mechanical compression via “binding” as a medical intervention is because it carries medical risks. Don’t believe me? Google “what is a bed sore.” If they can happen on their own, they can be induced if the same conditions are created. Sores can be created in between folds of skin that are continuously pushed together, such as the folds created by breast tissue or a binder. Surface infections from lack of sterile bandaging are predictable - and these are bandages that are being applied, intended to restrict normal movement. Sometimes normal movement during activities of daily living can create problems, and therefore needs to be restricted to prevent complication, e.g., a sling. Those restrictions must be monitored. Only some people are allowed to recommend some restrictions for a therapeutic purpose.

If your child’s psychotherapist is prescribing binding to relieve psychological distress, yet this person cannot explain what causes bedsores, or is new to the phrase “pressure necrosis,” the gender therapist does not understand that they are prescribing a medical intervention that carries serious medical risks. The Mastectochist YouCreeper who is sending your child giveaway binders has even less medical training. Here’s some other terms to google: Necrotic yeast infection. Kyphosis (if prolonged pressure via bracing can fix it, it can cause it in a healthy, growing child). Brachial plexus neuropathy. The list goes on.

Consider that their goal is to cripple systematically. If it is not their goal, they seem ignorant that it is a possibility. It is my hope that most are more ignorant than evil.

The use of medical intervention to stop menstruation to alleviate dysphoria is a very common transmedicalist intervention and recommendation. It is widely recognized and agreed by the trans lobby and their enablers, that menstruation induces gender dysphoria in transmasculine people, and therefore transition care may include addressing menstruation. The theory is that non-trans men do not need to menstruate, so it will not harm transmasculine identifying women to not menstruate.

When I was first joining the Church of Trans, I went through a period of being indoctrinated via peers, books, and the extremely nascent social media of Facebook and Youtube. One of the most fundamental precepts to transgender ideology is that you are trans regardless of where you are in your transition. The logic is simple: People, often due to occupational discrimination against trans people, i.e., trans people being passed over for job opportunities due to transness, perhaps cannot afford to transition. Societal transphobia forces trans people to pay for their own cosmetic surgeries - how unjust! Sometimes hormones interfere with medication or exacerbate an underlying medical condition unrelated to being trans. These circumstances do not make a trans person less trans, any more than a hormone disorder makes a cis person less cis.

Some people just do not feel they need to undergo every option available in order to avoid the 41% sandtrap of Gender Golf. Not every transmasculine woman wants a phalloplasty. Every trans person also goes through a period between when they have just come out and their first medical intervention, but they were still trans all along. It is none of your business what is in someone else’s pants or what their medical history is, they will say. You’re not trying to sleep with them, are you? It is an egregious faux pas in the Church of Trans to invalidate someone’s transness with reference to what they have or have not done.

Something about you has marked you as trans, or you would not identify with a gender other than the one that culturally matches the sex you were assigned at birth. There is no threshhold of medical interventions a trans person needs to surpass in order to be valid as the gender they identify with. Therefore, a person cannot become more trans via obtaining these surgeries, nor are they less trans for not being able to afford them. As one of the Phalloplasty Philes contestants stated in a Tiktok, the phalloplasty will not make her more of a man, because a cis man losing his penis would not become less of a man.

That is, until you graduate to ex-trans. Then it is critically important to know: what is in your pants? How far did you go? Do you count? What’s your gender blood quantum?

Core to the allure of the ideology is that there is a capitalism-driven elevation of choice and personal autonomy. Undergoing ritualistic amputations is a test of faith that is not about moving people along a spectrum of less to more transness, but about enacting control over the body in an attempt to tame the mind. In pursuit of that end, I exerted control over a part of my female biology that I felt was a main source of my dysphoria: menstruation. I biologically interfered with this process in an attempt to modify my biology and appearance to be more in line with my identity of dudebro gender. The reduction in estrogen cycling did serve to redistribute my body fat and make me appear less feminine, but not to the extent testosterone may have. Now, my journey [whip sound] is being invalidated, because of what sex I was when I took hormones. Hold up: When did sex become real again?

I believed at the time that my transmasculinity had some sort of biological basis (Our Lady of Perpetual Hormone Replacement Therapy) and therefore I needed to be on something other than the standard female cycling of estrogen and progesterone in order to feel normal. This was in the days before nonbinary identities were mined using bitcoin technology, freeing us from the false dichotomy of the two sex-genders, but also creating the nonbinary polychotomy (which is the source of the Great Round-Up to Monochots). I elected for continuous progesterone therapy.

It did not seem prudent at the time to jump into cosmetic amputation when there were less invasive treatments I had not tried. I still had unpierced ears in those days. However, I had accepted the fundamental lie that my sense of alienation and bodily discomfort was a physical condition simply because the locus of obsession was my physical body. I further believed the falsehood that I needed to treat this psychological problem medically to avoid suicide. I weighed my options. I like to sing, and had other reasons for believing testosterone would harm my body and therefore my mental health, more than enacting that degree of control would help my mental health. This perhaps should have been a clue that I was not interested in self-harming, and therefore was likely not at risk of suicide simply due to feeling a bit tomboyish. Taking testosterone does not make a trans man more trans and not taking testosterone does not make a trans man less trans, or so the claim goes. My choice was valid in the past, and it is now being used to invalidate me due to my status as a vocal apostate.

After pursuing my planned course of trans treatment, I discovered that “transitioning” “worked” to change my feelings - by reducing my innate pain level and creating a new source of pain that was within my control, as well as via the placebo effect. I thought it would help, therefore, it helped. A few years after my OB/GYN dismissed my claim that the progesterone helped my knee pain, that estrogen birth control had worsened, I came across a paper stating that hormonal contraception can act to stabilize the joint. The alternate theory is/was hip angle.

In reality, pain makes you unhappy, and I had merely noticed the pain had a cyclical connection to menstruation. The connection between my pain and my sense of gender dysphoria was never considered, in part because I thought I had the answer (“I’m just trans”) and in part because women’s pain is thought to be our lot in life, not a problem, and not worthy of further contemplation. I also considered elective double mastectomy, which was all the rage at UC Berkeley gender cohort at the time. I can only imagine the man-scape today. I was encouraged by peers to connect my mental health symptoms to the fact that I continued to have these “useless” appendages causing me dysphoria, via causing me physical pain. I was once even guilt tripped - it was so hard for everyone else to cope with my symptoms when there was an easy solution.

I happen to be buxom, and so part of my contemplation involved a recognition that quite a lot of tissue from these “chesticles” (yes, we really called them this) would be removed in this procedure. I had learned from prior medical procedures that my skin takes far longer to heal than doctors predict, and that I do not like the look of scars. I realized how large the scars may end up being, and that the scar tissue under the skin may not be visible but may still cause problems. I was able to rationally and with the help of a real therapist, evaluate that I was likely to regret the loss of sensation which was highly probable to occur.

Around this time, a woman I had dated decided to start taking testosterone, the drug I was still weighing for myself. Being 23, I thought, I will see how she reacts to it. Far from simply changing her cosmetically, the psychoactive drug use had an immediate effect on her mood - elevating it - and behavior. She had a tendency to shiver most of the time, in apparent coldness as well as nervousness, and this drug made that stop after a few weeks. It was unclear whether that was because it built muscle which allowed her shivering to be more effective, or because she was shivering for psychosomatic reasons and the testosterone reduced her psychological anxiety. Either way, she was different after that. Her anxiety turned to aggression. In a lot of ways, she was able to come out of her shell, but she deserved to come out as her whole self. Not this simulacrum.

She was also different after the concussion she sustained when she was hit by a car. I never considered until writing this essay that this had been a suicide attempt, and she was adamant that she just had not been paying attention when she suddenly stepped into the street and was hit by a car going fast enough that her body inflicted “major damage” to the windshield per (if I recall her statements in the hospital correctly) the police report. The concussion was significant enough that she did not remember being hit, but did remember being put in the ambulance, but not the ride to the hospital. This means she likely has a loss of memory of between one minute and one hour, with some of it retrograde and some anterograde. She likely had a Grade I, but possibly a Grade II concussion, as she remembered her hospital stay.
Grade I: no loss of consciousness; amnesia is absent or present for less than 30 minutes.

Grade II: loss of consciousness for less than five minutes or amnesia for between 30 minutes and 24 hours.

Grade III: loss of consciousness for more than five minutes or amnesia for more than 24 hours.

This sort of grading is used when attempting to piece together how significant the brain injury that landed the person in your office actually was, as close to objectively as possible. Despite no broken bones or soft tissue injuries requiring traction or immobilization, she was kept overnight for observation, as brain injuries can be followed by a “lucid interval” - where they seem fine so their brain’s injured judgment area decides to go home, lie down, and wait to die, instead of seek medical attention - that precedes sudden change of status leading to death. If a portion of the skull cap is removed before the brain swelling causes the brainstem to herniate out the foramen magnum, the large hole in the base of the skull, a fatal brain injury becomes surviveable. Otherwise, the swelling of the brain will herniate through the base of the skull, paralyizing the diaphragm and halting the breathing reflex.

After this event, although her speech was normal, she changed. Her thinking became very linear. Talking to her felt like trying to dust with a broom handle. All she cared about was transitioning. I watched her efforts towards erasing herself so this new man could take her place. I could not get anyone else to acknowledge the change. She slowly surrounded herself with other devotees of the shrine of self-harm.

At one point, some time in 2012, I went with her to a talk at the Pacific Center. This was after I had applied to graduate school, and if my memory serves, after I had learned I was accepted and therefore was starting to see myself as a speech-language pathologist-to-be. The talk centered on the effects of testosterone on the female-to-male voice, which it termed “trans guy voice.” The talk was fascinating, but what came after was bizarre. After the talk was a “two minutes hate” about speech pathologists trying to pathologize the normal, natural, healthy, chemically, surgically and cosmetically damaged “trans voice.” How dare we notice vocal pathology without asking the trans community if they saw it as a problem. What do we know?

Exact quote:

Person A: “They’re always trying to pathologize us. We don’t all want to sound like cis people!”

Person B: “What do you expect? They’re pathologists. Of course they pathologize.”

I resolved to be one of the good ones. I still considered myself trans, still expected to heavily focus on trans voice training, and had never considered that perhaps these interventions were causing observable harm that these drug users did not want to face. I now know what problems those pathologists were hearing when they first observed the characteristic, stereotypical, hear-it-a-mile-away trans-masculine (masculinized female) or trans-feminine (feminized male) voice - before people became too afraid to say the emperor has a frog in his throat. The tissue itself significantly changes, and not just in terms of overall size.

The combination of the concussion and the anabolic steroid use for cosmetic purposes turned her from someone who was paralytically thoughtful into someone obsessed with crossing every boundary, conquering, and transforming her body to further fit into a subculture and validate a delusion. Especially after the first instance of ostentatious self-harm causing pain (binding) and the cosmetic amputation of healthy and irreplaceable breasts, she became a “born again” “man.” I believe in retrospect that she had immense rage and betrayal that no one in her life, not her family, not her friends, not her romantic partners (including me), said wait - don’t do this. This is actually a bad idea. The world needs all of you.

She correctly perceived that we were all curious about what would happen, and we put that over what was best for her as a young woman, because her paramours and friends were young fools and her family was far away and perhaps fearful of rejection. She misattributed her unhappiness as a woman and a lesbian, believing it was ultimately due not to a misogynistic and homophobic society, not due to her own angst as a woman coming into adulthood. She blamed a transphobic society that expected females to continue to be female and denied them the interventions they needed to carve out a body that matched their soul.

The binding caused her a great deal of pain, which she frequently mentioned. She did not stop binding. She had a history of anorexia nervosa and had a persistently low body fat and muscle composition despite her recovery. The testosterone further reduced her body fat while increasing her muscle. She enjoyed the redistribution of body fat that the hormones created. As a member of Our Lady of the Perpetual Hormone Replacement Therapy and fan of Julia Serano/Whipping Girl, she believed that taking this drug made her physically male in some way, to the extent that she became livid when she encountered an HIV prevention medication, research clinical trial that welcomed homosexual men and “heterosexual” trans “women,” but excluded “gay” trans “men” like her.

She was in a relationship with another “gay” trans “man” - by this time, we had modified the bond of our end of the polycule love tessaract - and she made it very clear to me that she and she fully enjoyed the double ended whatnow that allowed them to scissor uglies. That was the moment I began to wonder if breaking her heart had created some animosity between us. Oh, the days before necrotic skin tubes became a civil right!

Even though she was had a very low risk of STD transmission from this relationship between two females, she wanted to gum up the data on the effectiveness on a drug that was being tested in the group with the highest risk/rate of STD transmission. She did not care that this would make the drug look more effective than it was. And because she believed that testosterone was the critical factor in biological maleness, she saw no reason beyond bigotry and hate that she would be excluded from this drug trial. She refused to see reason or consider the harms that mixing sexes in drug research creates. At the end of the day, for her, the Gender Bamiyan Buddhas were heretical. They had to go.

That is the difficulty with religious fanatics caught up in an ecstatic social awakening: they are certain that Gender Jesus is on their side and Gender Jesus would not have made them trans in a world where he did not want them to force their way into every imaginable single-sex space, regardless of the consequences. They are in the right, so any negative outcomes that will be born by people who are most vulnerable to HIV infection - actual gay men - are just part of the divine plan, and therefore not worth understanding and not within our scope as humans to attempt to avert.

This is a way of attacking medical research that benefits marginalized and oppressed groups, homosexual men and women of all sexual orientations, without looking like you are attacking medical research that benefits such groups. It is also about attacking sex education without saying you are against sex education, and instead just going after the licenses of educators who tell the truth about which people can get which other people pregnant.

So what does it really mean here, to say that it is “just birth control?” I am taking the exact hormone that trans “women” take in order to transition. Prior to going progesterone-only, I was taking multiple transition-care standard medications used by trans women around the world to transition. I have identified in the past that I am an assigned female at birth trans woman. Female is a myth, I was assigned female nevertheless, and I identify with the gender of transgender woman.

If female does not exist as a biological circumstance to which no male belongs, why is it transitioning for some trans identifying people to take these hormones, but “just birth control” if I do it?

Is it because….

Could it be that perhaps….

These people know who the women really are? They know that men are not part of this category.

Women are women.