I don't think you'll find it in your local library but F*cking Trans Women by Mira Bellweather was (at least for me) an enlightening resource when I was exploring myself after two years of estrogen. It is albeit a lot less clinical and more gritty than many of the resources you provide in your articles. Last time I checked, a quick Google search and you can find a PDF of her work.
Agreed on how great Fucking Trans Women is! As a note for readers: please get it at http://fuckingtranswomen.org/, and pay the $10 for it, even though it can be found pirated for free easily. Mira has since passed, and FTW was her main financial be quest to support her family in her absence, so please respect her wishes and support her family where you can!
Hi Zoe. I’ve just read part of your latest, I’ve a lot going on right now, but I’m moved to comment on something you wrote early on.
“It’s not that I’m ashamed or anything; I just like to have a little privacy for things like that. They feel special, sacred, tender to me, things I don’t really want to share with the world at large.”
Yes, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I have a handful of really special memories from over the years. Some of them are erotic, but that’s the minority. And the erotic parts aren’t the point. They’re all deeply personal, very touching, very special... and sacred. Intimate. By sharing them with others I would spoil that sacredness and render it profane. I appreciate that you feel the same way.
Thanks, great as usual. Head's up, I'm going to talk about more body stuff, maybe someone will find it gross... When you were talking about testicle shrinkage "...I’ve never seen a report that says there’s any pain or trouble with it...". I'd like to mention something I've experienced and I know a limited number of other trans-femme people have also experienced this which is blood in the ejaculate (not that there's much). This amounts to a few drops of clear fluid with a dark brown tint (old blood) and occasionally a hint of pink from newer blood. It can be really disturbing when it's not expected, there's no pain with it. For me this started about 9 months into HRT. I was suitably concerned and talked to my Dr. who ordered an ultrasound of my prostate, bladder and kidneys to rule out any obvious tumours etc. Those came back fine. A urine test came back fine with no detectable blood, so not even microscopic amounts. We both did some research and came up with anecdotal evidence that this is not unheard of in transgender women. I don't know if it's related to the testicles or the prostate atrophying or something else but so far that's what we're chalking it up to. I'm currently at 11 months on my HRT journey and it comes and goes (I'm 55 if anyone is curious). Anyway, just wanted to add this for other peoples information.
I'd found an 8 year old post on Reddit where a couple of others chimed in with similar complaints but obviously not super common. My Dr. didn't specify exactly what her source was but I got the sense it was from talking to other doctors.
There are some oddball edge case situations, maybe like yours and maybe different, that we run into regularly in transition, and that's to be expected. Gambler's Fallacy and all that, right?
But for anyone else reading: this is EXACTLY what you should do when something unexpected happens in transition! Talk to your care team, run a few tests to be safe, and then in all likelihood move on with your life.
As always, excellent work! I had not heard of those particular books before, but I'll definitely add them to my (interminable) reading list. As a psychologist, I'm especially intrigued by your caveats for _Trans Sex_. :P
I have always appreciated and respected your boundaries around sharing (literally) intimate personal details. I find myself in rather the opposite position - if someone genuinely wants to learn (and is not just being salacious - and you /know/ the difference) it doesn't really bother me. I will say, no one gave 2 figs about my sex life as an apparently middle-aged cisgender heterosexual male, so it's a bit of an adjustment, but I've rolled with it. I've found that my natural predilection to be an educator (albeit not professionally as my wife is) has made me well-suited to be a "transbassador" (yes, I just made that up; what of it? :P ) and the role gives me a sense of purpose and additional fulfillment beyond, you know, just getting to /actually be myself/ (and know who and what that /is/, finally).
Have you encountered any communities / research groups / anecdotal collectives looking at more detailed exchange of information about changing sexual experience over (and after) transition? I think I would enjoy engaging in such a conversation (probably anonymously, because yeah :P ) with others in a similar life path. One of the things I appreciate most about your work is your focus on normalizing the vast diversity of individual experience - but there's also a certain comfort (and intellectual satisfaction) in knowing how one's new "normal" fits along various spectra of experience. :)
Unfortunately, I've shied away from those groups when I've caught wind of the, just because that kinda thing isn't my jam. I'm definitely the wrong person to ask if you want to get connected with that stuff.
This is only a single data point, and I know others with different experiences, but I can confirm that for some trans women (specifically me), having and erection or an orgasm is not problem on HRT, even with basically zero testosterone. It *feels* radically different, but the basic mechanics still work the same way.
My sexuality also changed during my transition. Before I transitioned, I was exclusively attracted to women (using a broad definition). After I transitioned, I was still exclusively attracted to women. The difference was in how I felt about my attractions and non-attractions.
Before transition, the idea of having sex with a man was horrifying. Part of that was internalized homophobia, but I've been working on overcoming that for a very long time and have (mostly) succeeded. The big thing for me was that I found male sexuality to be really distressing. Not because there's anything wrong with male sexuality in the abstract, but because the way I experienced my own sexuality in a male-shaped body was so dysphoric. It felt good (it was still sex, after all), but it also felt terrible. After transition, that's all gone. I'm still not attracted to men, but it's no longer horrifying.
My attraction to women has mostly just settled into the right shape. Attraction to women always felt alien to me while I had testosterone in my system, like I had some sort of external force pushing buttons in my brain. That's gone now, and the attraction that I still have feels natural, like it's coming from inside me and not from the monster in my head.
It's been interesting, to put it mildly. After 18 months on HRT, I'm starting to get flickers of my libido coming back on line, but it's much like making love to an alien - nothing quite works the way one expects.
I'm still poly, I still prefer women, but I have noticed some shifting that things aren't quite set in stone. More like silly putty. One of my long-distance partners told me a few months ago that a woman's sexuality is more fluid, and the more I become who I am, the more I may find things shifting and changing. (through one can argue this may be society verse nature)
And when I came to the conclusion a couple months ago about wanting bottom surgery, I found taking the idea that I may someday want penetration, was part of my decision matrix.
Mind you, a *slight* complication to my sapphic leaning self is my LDR boyfriend - but that's a relationship that predates either his transition OR mine, so it's....a bit complicated at times. (and considering both his nesting partner and started our transitions after him, the jokes about his superpower is turning people trans are rather obvious.)
Since I am the owner and operator of an XXY body to start with, my pre-transition sexuality wasn't exactly bog-standard to start with. (things like orgasm and ejaculation NOT being connected, being incredibly touch-sensitive, etc). The differences now as things become to start coming back is how and where those feelings are. Even the locations of where I feel a climax are different, more difficult to get to, they feel deeper and more full body. And there are sensations and and physical reactions that when I tell my wife how and where they feel, she'll look at me and go "are you sure you don't have a g-spot?"
It's been quite the ride learning how to operate a body that is more and more matching who I always wanted to see in the mirror.
My son has come out as non-binary. He wears feminine clothing and insists he is still a son/husband/father. He and his wife continue as life partners parenting their 12 and 8 year old kids.
So, first of all: being a son or father or husband is a social role, not some sort of scriven-from-the-skies inherent truth of being, and a lot of trans folks stick with some or all of them in transition because they like *the role*, just not the gender that usually goes with it. Gender and gender roles are two different things--liking to hunt doesn't make someone a man, and liking to cook doesn't make them a woman, does it?
Second, figuring yourself out is a process, and it takes time. Could be that they're holding on to some things for now that they'll change in the future. Remember how teenagers need basically a decade to figure out who they are? When you're transitioning or embracing any other LGBT identity, you have to do all that work over again, and it just plain takes time. That's normal and healthy and a good thing.
Third, nonbinary isn't a third gender, as sort of an option that's neither man nor woman. It's sort of a big "other" category for gender that catches all the different genders other than man or woman. For some people, that means "nope, I'm not either of those two." For others, it means "I'm both, at the same time!" It sounds like your son might be in that category; I know people who are on estrogen, who've grown curves from it, and who LOVE their beards because those curves plus that beard let them express this combination of who they are inside more accurately.
But I guess one big thing I want you to take away from this is this: you don't have to understand. In reality, you probably *can't* understand, because you're cisgender, *and that's okay*. You can't know what it's like to be trans any more than I can know what it's like to be cis. The best thing is to trust your child to know themselves best, to trust you did a good job raising him, and that he's a smart cookie who's beloved by his family. When he tells you the truth of who he is, and if that changes over time as he learns his truth more deeply? Just believe him. That's really all there is to it. You don't need to understand, jut trust he does.
That sounds lovely, if understandably confusing from the outside. You're in a good place: read more of Zoe's works, she has essays specifically about "basics" as well as "my child is trans".
It's not harmful to anybody, kids are way less worried about gender stuff than adults are, and having supportive family is so important. And things have changed so much in the past 15 years even - there is nothing forbidden about staying with your family during/after transition anymore. (It used to be required to leave them...)
I am a trans woman (mostly binary, not non-binary) with a wife and kids about the same age, so I relate to this a lot. I was wearing my correct gendered clothing, including things like purple skirts, months before I came out to my kids and explained what it meant that I was trans, and they didn't bat an eyelash. Kids love and accept their parents, and how we look doesn't change this. But even after coming out to them, and after I was passing as a cis woman in many contexts, despite being just a binary woman I still preferred being called Daddy - it's a name associated with a lot of precious memories and the first masculine title I ever felt attached to. (So I was daddy but also a wife and daughter) This isn't even that uncommon with cis lesbians for one to be daddy in some contexts. Gender is complicated and beautiful.
The most important things you can do for your son is love him deeply, make sure he knows that (and that it doesn't feel like "I love you even though you're trans/non-binary" because that hurts), and respect what he tells you about himself. You don't have to understand what someone tells you about themself to know that it is true and valid, and that they know themselves better than you can. (And if you're cis, you probably cannot understand what it's like to be trans or non-binary, and that's ok as long as you accept it)
Don't stop loving him, don't love "in spite of", and don't avoid talking to or about him: use his stated name and pronouns (whether or not they've checked), just correct and move on when you mess up. We can tell if you're avoiding referring to us, or referring to us only in a group ("you two", etc) to avoid using our name and pronouns, and it hurts so deeply. (Can you tell what has hurt me recently?) Gender and families and love are so complicated and can be so beautiful. Celebrate the complex beauty, don't let it scare you.
I don't think you'll find it in your local library but F*cking Trans Women by Mira Bellweather was (at least for me) an enlightening resource when I was exploring myself after two years of estrogen. It is albeit a lot less clinical and more gritty than many of the resources you provide in your articles. Last time I checked, a quick Google search and you can find a PDF of her work.
Agreed on how great Fucking Trans Women is! As a note for readers: please get it at http://fuckingtranswomen.org/, and pay the $10 for it, even though it can be found pirated for free easily. Mira has since passed, and FTW was her main financial be quest to support her family in her absence, so please respect her wishes and support her family where you can!
Hi Zoe. I’ve just read part of your latest, I’ve a lot going on right now, but I’m moved to comment on something you wrote early on.
“It’s not that I’m ashamed or anything; I just like to have a little privacy for things like that. They feel special, sacred, tender to me, things I don’t really want to share with the world at large.”
Yes, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I have a handful of really special memories from over the years. Some of them are erotic, but that’s the minority. And the erotic parts aren’t the point. They’re all deeply personal, very touching, very special... and sacred. Intimate. By sharing them with others I would spoil that sacredness and render it profane. I appreciate that you feel the same way.
Thanks, great as usual. Head's up, I'm going to talk about more body stuff, maybe someone will find it gross... When you were talking about testicle shrinkage "...I’ve never seen a report that says there’s any pain or trouble with it...". I'd like to mention something I've experienced and I know a limited number of other trans-femme people have also experienced this which is blood in the ejaculate (not that there's much). This amounts to a few drops of clear fluid with a dark brown tint (old blood) and occasionally a hint of pink from newer blood. It can be really disturbing when it's not expected, there's no pain with it. For me this started about 9 months into HRT. I was suitably concerned and talked to my Dr. who ordered an ultrasound of my prostate, bladder and kidneys to rule out any obvious tumours etc. Those came back fine. A urine test came back fine with no detectable blood, so not even microscopic amounts. We both did some research and came up with anecdotal evidence that this is not unheard of in transgender women. I don't know if it's related to the testicles or the prostate atrophying or something else but so far that's what we're chalking it up to. I'm currently at 11 months on my HRT journey and it comes and goes (I'm 55 if anyone is curious). Anyway, just wanted to add this for other peoples information.
I'd found an 8 year old post on Reddit where a couple of others chimed in with similar complaints but obviously not super common. My Dr. didn't specify exactly what her source was but I got the sense it was from talking to other doctors.
I hope this wasn't too much!
Leah
Thank you for sharing!
There are some oddball edge case situations, maybe like yours and maybe different, that we run into regularly in transition, and that's to be expected. Gambler's Fallacy and all that, right?
But for anyone else reading: this is EXACTLY what you should do when something unexpected happens in transition! Talk to your care team, run a few tests to be safe, and then in all likelihood move on with your life.
As always, excellent work! I had not heard of those particular books before, but I'll definitely add them to my (interminable) reading list. As a psychologist, I'm especially intrigued by your caveats for _Trans Sex_. :P
I have always appreciated and respected your boundaries around sharing (literally) intimate personal details. I find myself in rather the opposite position - if someone genuinely wants to learn (and is not just being salacious - and you /know/ the difference) it doesn't really bother me. I will say, no one gave 2 figs about my sex life as an apparently middle-aged cisgender heterosexual male, so it's a bit of an adjustment, but I've rolled with it. I've found that my natural predilection to be an educator (albeit not professionally as my wife is) has made me well-suited to be a "transbassador" (yes, I just made that up; what of it? :P ) and the role gives me a sense of purpose and additional fulfillment beyond, you know, just getting to /actually be myself/ (and know who and what that /is/, finally).
Have you encountered any communities / research groups / anecdotal collectives looking at more detailed exchange of information about changing sexual experience over (and after) transition? I think I would enjoy engaging in such a conversation (probably anonymously, because yeah :P ) with others in a similar life path. One of the things I appreciate most about your work is your focus on normalizing the vast diversity of individual experience - but there's also a certain comfort (and intellectual satisfaction) in knowing how one's new "normal" fits along various spectra of experience. :)
Unfortunately, I've shied away from those groups when I've caught wind of the, just because that kinda thing isn't my jam. I'm definitely the wrong person to ask if you want to get connected with that stuff.
No worries; thanks for the prompt reply!
This is only a single data point, and I know others with different experiences, but I can confirm that for some trans women (specifically me), having and erection or an orgasm is not problem on HRT, even with basically zero testosterone. It *feels* radically different, but the basic mechanics still work the same way.
My sexuality also changed during my transition. Before I transitioned, I was exclusively attracted to women (using a broad definition). After I transitioned, I was still exclusively attracted to women. The difference was in how I felt about my attractions and non-attractions.
Before transition, the idea of having sex with a man was horrifying. Part of that was internalized homophobia, but I've been working on overcoming that for a very long time and have (mostly) succeeded. The big thing for me was that I found male sexuality to be really distressing. Not because there's anything wrong with male sexuality in the abstract, but because the way I experienced my own sexuality in a male-shaped body was so dysphoric. It felt good (it was still sex, after all), but it also felt terrible. After transition, that's all gone. I'm still not attracted to men, but it's no longer horrifying.
My attraction to women has mostly just settled into the right shape. Attraction to women always felt alien to me while I had testosterone in my system, like I had some sort of external force pushing buttons in my brain. That's gone now, and the attraction that I still have feels natural, like it's coming from inside me and not from the monster in my head.
It's been interesting, to put it mildly. After 18 months on HRT, I'm starting to get flickers of my libido coming back on line, but it's much like making love to an alien - nothing quite works the way one expects.
I'm still poly, I still prefer women, but I have noticed some shifting that things aren't quite set in stone. More like silly putty. One of my long-distance partners told me a few months ago that a woman's sexuality is more fluid, and the more I become who I am, the more I may find things shifting and changing. (through one can argue this may be society verse nature)
And when I came to the conclusion a couple months ago about wanting bottom surgery, I found taking the idea that I may someday want penetration, was part of my decision matrix.
Mind you, a *slight* complication to my sapphic leaning self is my LDR boyfriend - but that's a relationship that predates either his transition OR mine, so it's....a bit complicated at times. (and considering both his nesting partner and started our transitions after him, the jokes about his superpower is turning people trans are rather obvious.)
Since I am the owner and operator of an XXY body to start with, my pre-transition sexuality wasn't exactly bog-standard to start with. (things like orgasm and ejaculation NOT being connected, being incredibly touch-sensitive, etc). The differences now as things become to start coming back is how and where those feelings are. Even the locations of where I feel a climax are different, more difficult to get to, they feel deeper and more full body. And there are sensations and and physical reactions that when I tell my wife how and where they feel, she'll look at me and go "are you sure you don't have a g-spot?"
It's been quite the ride learning how to operate a body that is more and more matching who I always wanted to see in the mirror.
Another great read, Doc! Especially interesting since I’m now noticing the effects of estrogen on my own (a)sexuality after 3 months of HRT.
Also cannot recommend the book “Trans Sex” enough. I found some of the exercises in the book very helpful in my own transition journey. 🧚♀️
My son has come out as non-binary. He wears feminine clothing and insists he is still a son/husband/father. He and his wife continue as life partners parenting their 12 and 8 year old kids.
Help⁉️i am 71 and very confused.
Hi there!
So, first of all: being a son or father or husband is a social role, not some sort of scriven-from-the-skies inherent truth of being, and a lot of trans folks stick with some or all of them in transition because they like *the role*, just not the gender that usually goes with it. Gender and gender roles are two different things--liking to hunt doesn't make someone a man, and liking to cook doesn't make them a woman, does it?
Second, figuring yourself out is a process, and it takes time. Could be that they're holding on to some things for now that they'll change in the future. Remember how teenagers need basically a decade to figure out who they are? When you're transitioning or embracing any other LGBT identity, you have to do all that work over again, and it just plain takes time. That's normal and healthy and a good thing.
Third, nonbinary isn't a third gender, as sort of an option that's neither man nor woman. It's sort of a big "other" category for gender that catches all the different genders other than man or woman. For some people, that means "nope, I'm not either of those two." For others, it means "I'm both, at the same time!" It sounds like your son might be in that category; I know people who are on estrogen, who've grown curves from it, and who LOVE their beards because those curves plus that beard let them express this combination of who they are inside more accurately.
But I guess one big thing I want you to take away from this is this: you don't have to understand. In reality, you probably *can't* understand, because you're cisgender, *and that's okay*. You can't know what it's like to be trans any more than I can know what it's like to be cis. The best thing is to trust your child to know themselves best, to trust you did a good job raising him, and that he's a smart cookie who's beloved by his family. When he tells you the truth of who he is, and if that changes over time as he learns his truth more deeply? Just believe him. That's really all there is to it. You don't need to understand, jut trust he does.
That sounds lovely, if understandably confusing from the outside. You're in a good place: read more of Zoe's works, she has essays specifically about "basics" as well as "my child is trans".
It's not harmful to anybody, kids are way less worried about gender stuff than adults are, and having supportive family is so important. And things have changed so much in the past 15 years even - there is nothing forbidden about staying with your family during/after transition anymore. (It used to be required to leave them...)
I am a trans woman (mostly binary, not non-binary) with a wife and kids about the same age, so I relate to this a lot. I was wearing my correct gendered clothing, including things like purple skirts, months before I came out to my kids and explained what it meant that I was trans, and they didn't bat an eyelash. Kids love and accept their parents, and how we look doesn't change this. But even after coming out to them, and after I was passing as a cis woman in many contexts, despite being just a binary woman I still preferred being called Daddy - it's a name associated with a lot of precious memories and the first masculine title I ever felt attached to. (So I was daddy but also a wife and daughter) This isn't even that uncommon with cis lesbians for one to be daddy in some contexts. Gender is complicated and beautiful.
The most important things you can do for your son is love him deeply, make sure he knows that (and that it doesn't feel like "I love you even though you're trans/non-binary" because that hurts), and respect what he tells you about himself. You don't have to understand what someone tells you about themself to know that it is true and valid, and that they know themselves better than you can. (And if you're cis, you probably cannot understand what it's like to be trans or non-binary, and that's ok as long as you accept it)
Don't stop loving him, don't love "in spite of", and don't avoid talking to or about him: use his stated name and pronouns (whether or not they've checked), just correct and move on when you mess up. We can tell if you're avoiding referring to us, or referring to us only in a group ("you two", etc) to avoid using our name and pronouns, and it hurts so deeply. (Can you tell what has hurt me recently?) Gender and families and love are so complicated and can be so beautiful. Celebrate the complex beauty, don't let it scare you.