XXY: Altered Living and Gender

I am left with a sense of loss today. Yet once again the trajectory of learning has unlocked another key to the mystery of my life. More specifically, I have reached the realization that my parents had to have known that I was not normal because they participated in treatments more than basic health care and that their certainty that the worst possible outcome is that I would be gay. You would not believe their paranoia over the possibility of their child growing up gay, or maybe you would. Very clearly not about me, it is about their fear, that my parents would subject me to what amounts to experimental procedures in order to fix something that was not broken.

What I'm saying is that the body I live for is not as God made me, but as a set of medical professionals aided by my fearful parents altered me to. I have been trying for the past decade now to get copies of all of my medical records. Some of them were easy to get, others that I know must exist because of liability limits in the USA; The holders refuse to acknowledge I was ever treated by their institution. Evidently if we sweep the very existence of what amounts to torture and illegal human experimentation out of existence then there is no need to supply that information to the patient. Originally I thought my parents agreed to these treatments because they feared I might be gay; but then wrote out a time line and realized I was wrong the fear of my being gay came after the treatments. So really, let me get this straight...after being treated for .. years .. my parents only remaining concern about my ability to live a happy and good life is that I might at some future point be gay. Why would I be gay?

Why indeed, would the last fear be their child growing up gay?

What an odd question, that after treatments, with one on going treatment that nearly killed me twice (testosterone, you would think they had learned the first time), why would my parents then hold this one great fear that I would be gay. Would it be because I was not born male? If a woman was heterosexual innately wired to love men you would not consider her to be gay, but if she was "fixed" and told to be a male, and "treated" and told she was a male. Then there might be that fear, "Oh god my baby might grow up to be gay." I would not write this article in this reference frame if I did not have a reasonable basis to do so. Which I do, and its all a medical mess. Just recently in one of those starry blue sky moments where many lines suddenly cross and a miracle occurs and the person has a realization, to know exactly what the problem is; I stumbled on the concept of lunar and menstrual cycles. Of course I know women have menstural cycles, and of course I declined to look into them because I was male; Right? For years I have kept a spreadsheet of my life and how that life goes day to day. It seemed too trivial that a host of the problems I have been dealing with stem from not understanding something so basic, why would a doctor or my parents not have told me about this? I feel betrayed. I dropped a 29 day cycle on top of that spreadsheet, and with two exceptions it matched the odd cycle of 10-12 days a month of anxiety, 4 days of despair, and 6 days of unexplainable moodiness. Without the connection to the lunar or menstrual cycle, I could predict the dawn of each of these happenstances, and could predict months in advance which day I would experience deep despair, or really high anxiety, or panic attacks. It would have to be a failed menstrual cycle. The hormone levels are supposed to rise and when they do not anxiety, panic, and despair each a worsening level of response to something my body is screaming that it needs. This happens because those hormone levels estradiol and progesterone do not rise. I have taken the time to get numerous tests and re-tests done. And every time pre-cursor hormones like Luteinizing Hormone (LH) and Follicular Stimulating Hormone (FSH) as well as the other precursor hormones are always a steady low level; A very low level.

Some would call this panhypopituitarism in a female. Others are calling it Klinefelter's Syndrome in a male with primary hypogonadism and unexplained issues relating to the pituitary/hypothalamus axis, or just Klinefelter's Syndrome with primary and secondary hypogonadism with other issues. Regardless of what the many specialists want to call it, why is it always me who has to invent a method of treatment?

When I acknowledge this certainty, and I embrace the 29 day cycle all the anxiety, depression, panic, and despair become a sudden distant memory. To believe that now for the first time in almost 30 years I can enjoy a month without complications, is almost unbelievable to me. Because of the very well documented women's menstrual cycle, I know when to add estradiol, and when to add progesterone and there is no more anxiety. To think how many years I have struggled with this, and they never told me.... not once.

Does not leave alot of trust for the medical field, nor for parents. Whose ethics, fears, and eugenicist morals are worth more to them than treating patients fairly, honestly, and with forthright cause.

About living as a woman.. I was one once. I have lived as one since. And now I blend both the female and the male. And to hell with all the people who can't deal with it.

Onnineko

XXY: A small but vocal issue...

I am left today with a fear of the unknown. For more than three years now I have participated in singing studies, and my vocal range has significantly improved throughout that time. Indeed my range continues to improve, breaks are worked through, and my natural normal speaking range has changed, yet again. I have finally after all this time been told by one vocal instructor that my tone and clarity is much improved, almost acceptable or even, normal. This voice instructor went on to say that if I continue these lessons, then I can expect my normal speaking voice to change yet again...

Yet again.

So I asked myself, what if my normal speaking voice were even higher than it is now? I would be firmly in the higher range for normal women, is this a good change? So I resolved to test the current range and loaded a vocal analyzer and recorded several sets, at various normal pitch levels and lengths including generally happy, long and boring text, a bit down, etc.. Sure enough I'm ranging in pitch from 180 to 280 hz. The spectrograph shows a bit more than the average overtones that an ordinary woman would use; I have perhaps half of the harmonics a normal male would have. In this matter, science is not helping! All this singing is enabling me to use and adjust to what males would call the falsetto voice, or head voice. When I use falsetto the excessive overtones are much reduced from my full voice, ie.. closer to a natural female. And to make matters worse.. (better?) I took several sessions with another voice teacher whom started using the term counter-tenor, almost immediately. One test this instructor likes was the natural sigh, and tricky person he is, including it in the lesson without telling me about it first; But the result, middle C, was not what I expected. Middle C is the normal speaking pitch of women, and an half an octave to an octave high for 40 year old men.

All knowledge is good, the more you know, the more you understand, the more you can make personal choices about. Only in ignorance can others make choices for you. But what do I choose about the voice? If I want to present as male, then there are a number of challenges to overcome, and not the least is the appropriate speaking pitch. Males only exceedingly rarely use a pitch higher than 150 hz, and then generally only for terror, fear, or capitulation. If I were to use such a pitch, say 200 hz, then that is already one failure in presenting male.

On the positive side of this issue I no longer have serious throat pain from attempting to speak too low for too long. It is still hard to speak low, and has become more difficult to do so without being deliberate in the doing. It is disconcerting to sit down to a vocal analyzer and comfortably, naturally, speak at what is a middle voice for a woman. Another positive (?) is that as I become more competent at singing I can better hold my part, instead of following whom ever seems to know their part well. This is good, and bad. Good because I no longer automatically (well not often anyway) pitch match with other people, especially males because they still talk too low and I can end up speaking from the throat if I am not prepared. Bad because my natural vocal range appears to be +/-3 notes of middle C. I still pitch match with women who use higher pitches, because I am not as comfortable with that singing range, B below middle C to the G above.

Supposedly according to both vocal instructors that as I work out a normal high tenor full voice, this will give me an alternative to the falsetto that I find most comfortable (and not by choice!). Remember I am trying to live and work as a male, this makes doing that very awkward.

Life is...

...psychiatrist, priest, rabbi, and a psychologist

He wanted to know if there was a good enough reason to see a psychiatrist, psychologist, rabbi or a priest. How he figured I'd be a good person to ask, I don't know. You don't carry physical marks of your time talking to a confessor. Yes, I have talked with one or two or more over the course of my life. And I am much the better for those opportunities to understand better human nature. How people think of us, matters less than most of us would assume, because we know exactly what we think of ourselves.

The difference between types of confessors is really simple, the priest or rabbi will cast their aid in a form of religion. Should someone go see one? If the phrase, "Remember the time you did a bad thing, and someone suffered because of it?" causes you a sudden feeling of remorse; Then yes, you should go see a confessor and get that bad thing off your mind. Those little bad things weigh you down, and eventually pull you into a depression generated abyss.

The first time I visited a psychiatrist it was over my personal embarrassment. I was so certain based on everything I had read, that if I could not identify as male living in a strongly masculine male world then I had to be a transsexual. I have since learned a great deal more about this, but at the time this concept was really ripping me up inside. Now at the same time, I am strongly homophobic (that too, is not the right word). However, the very thought of being touched by a male makes my skin crawl, its worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. Which led me to believe I should be a normal male... except that didn't work either.

I hope you can understand this was a very serious mentally challenging problem, not to mention highly embarrassing should my co-workers in the pro-military industrial complex ever find out.

It took me a year of talking to a psychiatrist, before I began to believe that there were good reasons to continue living. To even dream of finding joy and happiness. My world then was a dim dark grey place that wasn't too bad, didn't hurt too much, most of the time. To put it mildly my physical challenges and surroundings had left me a mental train wreck. Fortunately this was all long ago and through many talks with someone who had different insight I got alot better. :)

Today I am better balanced, my own failures pale next to the pressure I felt society was demanding of me, and those I now know are not all consuming. Psychiatrists help us to learn how to think around sticking points in the societal fabric. As do all other confessors. We can learn to be better people, we can learn to think better of ourselves, we can learn... if we but choose to do so.