I stopped taking testosterone on day 235, May 19th 2019 - 6 days ago, and after just under 8 months of low-dose testosterone. I had 1 pump of Tostran gel per day, which the medication leaflet says is 10mg of testosterone.
WHY DID I START TAKING LOW-DOSE TESTOSTERONE?
I’m nonbinary, and my goal was always to be androgynous. I started taking testosterone to deepen my voice, mainly, but the idea of a more masculine fat distribution on my body was appealing because I also have dysphoria about my hips and slim shoulders. “Passing” as nonbinary isn’t really a thing because most people don’t know that there are more than two genders, so the best I could really hope to achieve realistically was to confuse as many people about my gender as possible. 😈
Less feminine body fat distribution
Hairline changes (but if it happens a little that’s okay)
A couple of years ago I had one session of voice therapy (NHS), which was fun and very interesting, but it taught me a couple of things. One was that finding my lower pitches and getting that low resonance by finding my chest voice was definitely helpful and relieved my voice dysphoria. The other was that there was no way I was going to be able to keep up with multiple voice exercises per day to keep it that way. I pretty much decided that day that testosterone was the most sensible option, and even though it was scary I would just have to find a way to deal with the negative effects.
My voice dysphoria was sort of disconnected from my idea of my gender. All I really knew was that my voice needed to be a lower pitch and more resonant. I felt that dysphoria especially when I was talking excitedly or when I was singing. But I also knew that I didn’t want people to mistake me for a man either, and since it’s a very long slow process and quite unpredictable I knew that I would need to be careful to keep track of things to make sure I didn’t start giving myself a new kind of gender dysphoria in the masculine direction!
It was another year or two before the stars aligned and I actually managed to get the can of Tostran into my hands (NHS).
As I mentioned above, I was on a low dose, one pump of Tostran per day. One can lasted about 107 days. The endocrine nurse said I could reduce the dose to half if I squirted the gel onto my leg/stomach as usual and then wiped half the gel-dribble off with tissue and threw it in the bin before I rubbed it in, but I never did that. The two-month blood test put my levels at 9.7 nmol or something like that. (Female range is 3 or below, and male range is 10 or above, so I was very nearly almost at the male range.)
The first month I got that scratchy throat feeling, which I now know happens when my voice is deepening, and I noticed my voice getting a little lower. Also I was SO GREASY OH MY GOD, I had to shower twice as much, I had to get some high-powered anti-perspirant deodorant. It didn’t make me spotty, it was just disgusting! But it felt okay because I could tell it was affecting my voice. I also noticed that I smelled different, and that my bedroom acquired that delightful(??) teenage boy smell! Ew. This kicked in properly in under a week, and trailed off around month two, though I still needed to take more showers and wear hardcore deodorant and I was still more greasy for the entire time I was on T.
On day 26 I noticed that my... [flails around wildly for non-dysphoric word] pudendum had gotten a little bigger, and I regret not getting “before T” photos. The growth was fast and a lot more noticeable than I had expected, and it was extremely emotionally intense, because I hadn’t realised but I’d been sort of suppressing and dissociating from genital dysphoria for my whole life. I knew I had genital dysphoria, but not how much or how it was affecting me. I was completely unprepared, and it was overwhelming. (I am very lucky that I was able to access fortnightly gender-specialist talking therapy at Charing Cross GIC during this time.) A few weeks later I started looking into genital surgery options. I think my genitals haven’t changed much in the last 2 months, so I guess it took about 5-6 months to get to where they are now.
Here’s the graph the Voice Pitch Analyzer app [iOS/Android] makes:
And here’s the graph I made myself using data from the app:
In the second graph, the thing I notice right away is that my highest pitch now is lower than my lowest pitch pre-T.
My first month was rapid pitch drop, and then there were a couple of months of wibbling around on a plateau, and then after that things kicked off again, I had a few scattered days of scratchy throat and things started meandering downward. A common pattern was two to four weeks of wild fluctuation and no drop, followed by a sudden drop over a day or two. Sometimes my brain took a while to adjust to a drop in pitch, and I would tire myself out speaking with a higher pitch than my vocal chords really wanted to do.
In the last couple of months I got a lot worse at making the voice recordings, which in hindsight might be because I was less enamoured with being on testosterone, and it was maybe a sign that my testosterone advantages were sort of wrapping up and it was nearly time to stop.
No one who sees me regularly said unprompted that they could hear a difference in my voice. When I asked people if my voice sounded different, they said “ehhh, maybe kinda, yeah?” I learned that testosterone doesn’t make your voice sound different! It makes it feel different, to yourself and to other people. My therapist, who I see (approximately) fortnightly, said she couldn’t tell the difference at all, and when I played her my day 1 voice recording to compare it to my current voice (6 months or so) she was like 😮.
Strangers are still mostly gendering me female, as far as I can tell, but my appearance and my voice means that strangers gender me male a little more often than pre-T. I also get “sir, I mean ma’am, gosh I’m so sorry...” more often. It makes me uncomfortable to make people uncomfortable, so I just usually say “it’s okay, I’m nonbinary so I’m kind of both??”, which rarely makes them less flustered or less confused. I had some cards made years ago that have the nonbinary flag on one side and the definition of nonbinary on the other, which I should just start handing out whenever this happens!
My testosterone dose was too low to stop my menstrual cycle, but it did seem to mellow out the highs and lows. My PMS and menstrual symptoms are generally a nightmare even though I have no uterus to bleed from, so that was a nice relief. It was very strange to experience PMS and boy puberty simultaneously.
I kept records of my specific dysphoria feelings from about 3.5 months, thanks to prompting from my gender-specialist therapist at Charing Cross GIC in London:
The ideal outcome, which I was looking out for, was all of the lines meandering towards that horizontal line in the middle. That would mean the feminine dysphoria was reducing and the masculine dysphoria was reducing.
I am pretty lucky, in that most of the changes I wanted from testosterone are permanent and the changes I didn’t want are temporary or reversible. I made some lines on the graph more bold because those were the ones that I wanted to keep an eye on. Here are my thoughts on this graph:
Facial hair was impossible to score because it gave me both masculine and feminine dysphoria. Feminine because those dark fine hairs on my upper lip are most often seen on cis women, and masculine because they were caused by testosterone and male puberty.
When my pudendum started growing it also gave mixed signals. It was good because it was getting bigger, but as it grew it highlighted that there was a lot going on down there that made me feel feminine dysphoria (mainly labia around my pudendum, and sometimes that it was still relatively small).
I am not a very hairy person. I thought I wouldn’t like having more body hair, and for a few months when I scored my dysphoria I focused on specific patches of new hair and thought about whether I was dysphoric and thought that I wasn’t. After a few months I realised I was being too short-sighted. Yes, I can totally deal with these new fine hairs on my thighs. Yes, this darker and thicker hair on my shins is okay. Sure, these hairs around my belly button are no big thing. But when I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, and saw the hair as a pattern, my whole brain recoiled. Yes, I am definitely dysphoric about masculine patterns of body hair on myself. :S
There was a trend of all types of dysphoria getting less over time - until month 7, when they all started getting worse except voice. It took a while to be sure it was a trend, but looking back on it, that was definitely a thing!
The ideal outcome would be all of those lines converging on the middle horizontal axis, and it hasn’t happened. There are no flawless solutions for nonbinary people at the moment. As things stand and with what’s available to me right now, I will probably always have gender dysphoria. But I’m pretty glad that I’ve done what I can and I will keep doing what I can, because it is all helping.
Unrelated to any gender stuff, I have put on weight and gone up a size or two in trousers and one size in t-shirts. It could just be that I’m in my 30s and my metabolism is slowing, which is what I assumed it was at first, but the weight has come on in quite a short space of time, so that made me think about what I’ve been eating and why. I noticed that I was craving carbs and sugar, eating it, and then feeling unsatisfied afterwards. The type of hunger I’ve been feeling lately feels the same as the type of hunger I had when I had Implanon, a three-year birth control implant. When I had that removed my appetite went back to normal. So this putting on weight feels a lot like a hormonal thing. I have mixed feelings about it! I strongly dislike my clothes feeling wrong and having to buy new clothes, but also bits of me are pleasingly wibbly and it’s fun to be able to rest my cup of tea on my stomach when I slouch. :D
Also unrelated to gender stuff, even on a low dose many of my EDS symptoms were noticeably reduced: fatigue, loose joints, joint pain, IBS, dysautonomia. (Joint pain and fatigue were still present, but not as bad after exertion.) I also noticed that the really vivid dreams and very emotional days that come with PMS mostly disappeared, which I was sad about.
People gendering me in different ways has increased lately. Like, a few weeks ago me and @watchkeyphone were trundling about town, and one charity/religion street-hawker person asked if we were sisters, and then a hundred yards later their colleague called us “lads” or something.
A week or so ago, I realised that my voice was sounding and feeling resonant in my chest pretty much all the time and that felt pretty nice, but I was still scoring my voice as sounding feminine, and I wondered if that might be because the changes are so gradual that I just changed my idea of what feminine sounds like. I noticed that I was more comfortable recording my voice to put online for various reasons.
I don’t live in a culture where people go around saying “excuse me sir” or “hello madam”, we don’t routinely gender each other in a formal way. But also, either I don’t have enough casual contact with strangers to notice gendered familiar words like “mate” or “love”, or strangers just avoid using those kinds of words with me because I’m hella queer-looking. So I basically realised that I have no idea how strangers see me or hear my voice at all.
So, in approximately this order:
I put a recording of my voice on the internet and asked strangers to gender my voice. Most of them said androgynous, leaning a little masculine. One person said I sounded like Q, a computer-generated intentionally genderless voice!
I went to a queer social group, and when it came up in conversation naturally I complained about how hard it is to know when to stop testosterone because I can’t tell how my body and voice are gendered by other people, and a lot of people I see regularly still see me the same way as they saw me pre-T. A couple of people said, “actually, in the past couple of months I have really noticed the effects...” So that was reassuring!
I decided to notice how my pitch works in different situations compared to pre-T. After the queer social group we went down to the river and some people swam, and when they got into the water and it was very cold, some of us cheered supportively - and I tried to woo like the “woo girls”, and my voice just came out at a dude pitch instead...! I apparently can’t be high-pitched at high volumes any more.
I watched a video about gender and voice by someone I’ve met in person. When I met them I noticed that their voice was pretty androgynous, and I enjoyed it and thought about how nice it must be to have a voice that can’t be easily gendered by strangers. When I watched this video last week, in which their voice was exactly the same, I noticed that they sounded like me. That was the moment that I realised my voice was done!
I spoke to my PA about it. I played my pre-T voice to her and her face was A Picture, she could not even. She then said that she has quite a feminine voice, and she suggested we each make a recording of our voices reading a paragraph of the book on the table, and then compare to her partner’s voice in a recording. My voice sounded more like her male partner’s voice than like hers.
I can now speak with a comically low deep resonant voice if I want to, and I can also speak with a high cutesy voice in order to address my cat, provided I am warmed up a bit.
On the day that I posted the voice file online, when strangers started saying I sounded masculine, I was honestly pretty surprised. In my head strangers in person were still mostly gendering me female, but when I really thought about it people hadn’t actually been gendering me much at all. I think I had been assuming strangers were hearing a woman’s voice because the change had been so gradual that I hadn’t had a moment where I could “update” my own gendering of my voice. I didn’t wake up one day and go “wow I sound like a dude” or whatever, so there was just nothing to update.
So, as soon as there was an indication that I might sound like a man soon, my gut said “NOPE” and I worried a little bit about going too far in the masc direction. If I keep taking T then I will sound more masculine and I might regret it, but if I stop and find that my voice dysphoria could be relieved with a little more testosterone I can start again in a few months, right? So I decided to not take it that day unless I learned/felt something that indicated I should put the gel on, and... I didn’t.
The first couple of days were pretty uneventful. Around day 4 I started to feel really run-down and chronic joint pain from EDS was flaring up, so I cancelled near-future plans. Yesterday was like the worst of my (uterusless) periods, I was in a lot of abdominal and lower back pain and then last night I slept for 11 hours... And today, also typical of my uterusless periods, it feels like a storm has blown over and I feel like a new human.
So what I’ve concluded is, coming off T triggered a very, very bad period.
Also, the past couple of days I have once again been SO GREASY, and I got spots yesterday, which is unusual in itself, but these are striking because they are WEIRDLY HUGE?? One of them is on my jaw and has caused a very noticeable swelling, so I’ve named it Balthazar.
(From “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” S03E12: Nine Days.)
It’s only been a week, so I’m assuming more weirdness is coming, but it’s all going to be ovary-hormone-related silliness so I’m pretty much used to it and I’m not too worried.
I am sad that I will probably slip back towards feminine body fat distribution. I will probably lose some of the weight that testosterone brought with it, but the remaining weight will probably end up on my hips again. I am really not looking forward to dissociating my hips again but I don’t know what I can do about it except have liposuction every few years?! (I will not do that.)
I am also sad that the bad bits of my menstrual cycle will go back to Full Force, and that my EDS symptoms will worsen again.
I am very much looking forward to my body hair getting finer and lighter, and maybe my upper lip hair will fade a bit too. If not I will probably have to get it painfully removed.
I want a metoidioplasty. Unlike many trans guys, I want no testicular prostheses, no vaginectomy, no phalloplasty, no new urethra. The clinicians at Charing Cross are aware that I want to have a metoidioplasty, because I included it in a letter when I wrote to the endo about a blood test, to make sure my surgery needs are documented in my medical records from the earliest date possible. I did that because they have minimum-time requirements for a bunch of diagnoses and referrals (like, two appointments before hormone treatment recommendation), which you can sometimes get around by providing reasonable counter-arguments. One of their requirements for referring for genital surgery is being on testosterone for at least a year where clinically indicated, so since testosterone has done its job now that means I’m not clinically indicated for testosterone any more, and I’m hoping that being on T for only 8 months shouldn’t be an issue. I also found a blog by a trans guy who had a simple metoidioplasty like the one I want, and his blog posts are really helpful and informative and have good quality non-porn photos (so rare omg), and his junk and my junk are extremely similar in size and appearance. (Here are his before and after pics.) So, fingers crossed the docs will consider that I have been on T for long enough and my pudendum is developed enough that surgery is an option.
I’ve written to the endocrinologist to say that I’ve stopped putting on the Tostran gel, and to ask if I still need to have those blood tests I’m meant to be having. I’m due to see him on 1st July anyway, a little over a month from now, and no doubt I will have saved up a list of questions for him!
