March 2019 – Amena's Trans experience

updates a year and 2 months into transition

updates

Hello blog land. I’m sorry I’ve not posted in a while. My transition has been going well but has hit some weird hitches along the way. Last October my stomach issues got a lot worse, and I managed to lose 30lb in 3 months. This was a good and a bad thing. It was good because I could always use to lose some weight but was not great because I lost the weight in an unhealthy way. In January my doctor and I made the decision to switch me from spironolactone to monthly Lupron injection’s. This has seemed to help the stomach issues but didn’t help with the chronic pain I’ve experienced for a long time. Unfortunately, the fibromyalgia pain has made it very hard to go out and do stuff. This is unfortunate because I was excited to go through college and hopefully get a job after obtaining my associate degree. My doctor and I are trying some medications to help with the fibromyalgia pain but haven’t found anything that has worked as of yet. In happier news I got to meet the surgeon that is going to do my bottom surgery on March 12th. He is a very kind man and I look forward to working with him more. The surgeon gave me a long list of things to do including a year of laser hair removal, and a consultation with the urologist that will be joining the gender confirmation surgeon during the operation. In other transition news I’ve been able to go out and pass without trying. This is nice because it used to take a lot of work to pass. Now I can throw on some sweats and a shirt and go outside without the fear of being misgendered. I’m sorry for the long delay in posts but am hoping to make these more of a thing. I’m finding that writing is a good coping mechanism for my fibromyalgia pain and hope that I can turn my dribbles I write in my journal into good blog posts. If anything, I might talk about my fibromyalgia journey, and hopefully will give my dear readers a look into life with fibromyalgia.

When I started taking the first doses of hormones I became very emotional. Not because of the new hormones being introduced into my body, but because I was beginning the path to living my authentic life. These emotions had their ups and downs. The ups out weighed the downs, but when I felt down it wasn’t because I wasn’t making the right choice. It was because I had to deal with little things like people using the wrong gender, the wrong name, and the wrong pronouns. I think the worst experiences came when I had to deal with social services such as social security and the county office. They unfortunately don’t have a place in their systems to mark preferred pronouns and preferred names so no matter how many people I explained it to it didn’t get fixed. This needs to change so that gender nonconforming people don’t feel uncomfortable when accessing these vital services that can mean the difference between homelessness and being in a safe place.

During the first month of hormones I remember saying to my friends and family that it felt like a cloud had started to lift from my brain. I used the word cloud to describe it because before hormones I had to deal with extreme depression and anxiety caused by my gender dysphoria. When I went out after being on hormones for a month I started confidently correcting people on gender pronouns, and started to insure that friends and family called me by my proper name and used the correct pronouns.