On pleasure, part 1

this one was inevitable

Warning for suicide, transphobia

Some transsexuals say that they notice an emotional lift almost immediately after starting HRT, long before changes to the secondary sex characteristics are even noticeable. This was not my experience.

When I began taking testosterone a year-and-a-half ago, I did feel an initial ebb in my baseline depression, but that quickly passed. In retrospect, I liken my temporary shift in mood to that surge of adrenaline you get as you’re leaving the doctor’s office after a dreaded visit, or the high of finally stepping down from the podium when you have a deep and humiliating fear of public speaking, as I unfortunately do. In the spring of 2019, I was actually doing the thing that I had been trying to talk myself out of for ten interminable years, and regardless of whether it was the right decision, I was overwhelmed with relief because at least I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

It wasn’t until second puberty really kicked into gear this past January that I started to feel good. The things that I had been afraid of were coming to pass in and on my body and I was shocked, if you can believe it, to find them to be not only not horrifying but pleasurable. Where I was once almost hairless, follicles of white and fawn were sweeping up my thighs and toward my navel, feathering my forearms and knuckles and knees, like a time-lapse video of springtime shrouding a meadow. The ways that I weep and cum have evolved like Pokémon—similar enough to be recognizable, but different enough to merit, perhaps, new names. All my clothes feel new again, except for the shirts that no longer fit me.

Though there were aspects to these changes that were challenging, and even sad, I didn’t feel the pain of pointless suffering, which meant I could experience the sweetness along with the bitterness. For a few weeks in April, for example, my throat started to feel tight yet charged. As your voice deepens, there is a window of time where you can no longer hit the high notes, but the low ones haven’t shown up yet. I pictured my voice box like a brown paper package that had been shrunk down to two sizes too small. My access, such as it was, to Kate Bush, Christina Amphlett, and Donna Summer was gone forever. I miss it. There was even a day where I felt sad enough to cry over it. But I don’t regret that it had to happen, and I am starting to learn that growth is not a zero sum game.

It feels right, what’s happening to me, and long overdue. Over the past ten months, my sympathy for teenage cis boys, whose hair and horniness and hunger descend on the pre-androgenized body like a typewriter on paper—hard and fast, sometimes all at once and sometimes in tiny, concentrated stabs—has grown a thousandfold, for even as distressing as my first puberty was, it did not feel as dramatic as this one, though admittedly that could be because I don’t have to psychically leave my body to tolerate it. I feel a kinship with those boys and their zits and confusion and desires, reminding myself that when I am at a loss for what to do with my irritability, excitement, horniness (did I mention that?), sore throat, urge to move—to drive fast and punch walls, which as a grownup I can do with fewer consequences than teens can—that it’s because I am still getting used to a vitality I hadn’t felt since I was a little girl who wanted to be a little boy.

I have this memory from my freshman year of high school, clear as a bell in a quiet room, of seeing my reflection in the glass wall outside the girls’ lockers. I was in my very short cross-country uniform, so I could see my thighs, which I normally hid from myself and everyone else. They were becoming womanly, like everyone said they would, and I knew that they were not supposed to be like that, and it was unbearable, though of course I bore it. The knowledge that I was going the wrong way, known before I knew that trans people could do things to their bodies to correct them, or that people like that even existed, was one of the only bits of information my soupy, sedated mind could retain, pooled at the base of my brain like black ice, a sad and ominous awareness that someday something would have to be done about all this. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that something as anything other than drifting away in a cozy, well-insulated garage.

With my second puberty, the things I have spent my life fearing—having trained myself, as most queer people do, to hate and fear what I want—were finally happening to me. Even as I gave myself my weekly dose of testosterone cypionate, I was certain that my new form would be bad and hateful, that I would become more and more ugly with unnatural and unwelcome changes on my already unnatural and unwelcome body. It was hard for me to imagine looking uglier than I already did, but I knew it would happen. I had no point of reference for a puberty that wasn’t catastrophic, which should make clear, I hope, just how last-ditch HRT was for me.

Like other transsexuals, perhaps, I had to become one to truly understand how much I hated us. It took me a decade be graced with hormones, but I still believed, even if I was conscious enough of what that belief betrayed not to say it aloud, that I didn’t actually want what it would do to me. I’m going on HRT for the fat redistribution, I told myself. I’m not thrilled about the voice change or gaining (and losing) hair or the clit growth or the many real terrors of living as a transsexual among these cis demons, but what do I have to lose? I’ve already mutilated my body from years of self-harm and SM and surgery and substances and sickness, and anyway, I told myself, I’m already ugly and past 30. Who cares what I look like now? Who cares if this is the wrong choice?

The things I told myself about myself were the kind of things that I would never say to another trans person, especially another person on testosterone, and would recognize as virulently, violently transphobic were they coming from a cis person (which of course they do, all the time). But as HRT has continued to change me, I’ve begun to think like this less and less. T can’t take all the credit, because I’ve done a lot of work, over the past decade, to make my mind ready for this time. Still, where I was before, pleasure was almost impossible. I was hardly capable of it.

For the first time since my first puberty, I do not actively want to die. Limited though it may be by climate change, fascism, and family concerns that constrain how and where I live my life, I have begun to think about my future as mine, with curiosity and sometimes even anticipation. The great pleasure of medical transition has been an integration of pleasure itself into my life. I’ve even discovered pleasures I didn’t know I wasn’t having. Back in May, I reported that I wasn’t a music person, speculating that a lack of enthusiasm for sound was some kind of inborn quality. But over the past few months, I realized that I’ve been listening to music more than I have since I can remember—new music, especially. In a way that feels outrageous and indulgent, I feel myself growing goosebumps over voices and sensations, but don’t have to wear out a song or an album beyond boredom because listening to something I haven’t memorized yet just sounds like work.

I am aware that these heretofore unknown pleasures may seem more pleasurable than they really are in contrast to an old, benumbed world. This means that I needed the displeasure to appreciate such pleasure that I have, that it gains color, texture, and harmony in comparison with the other way. One requires the other. But is the pleasure worth the pain?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.