So this testosterone thing is real. 4 months in and the changes are weird. I can’t think of a better word. Sometimes they’re subtle like a high note I can no longer hit in the shower, sometimes they’re more obvious like body acne, and sometimes they’re downright triggering. Everything that is happening was expected at some point. I knew my smell would change, I knew my downstairs would change, I knew I’d have different emotions and that I’d gain weight. What I didn’t expect was the rate of these changes. Nothing could have prepared me for the feelings I feel, the way I relate to my sexuality, how I carry my body now. Testosterone is just fucking weird. I used to hate pressure wave toys, now I love them. I used to love hard glass and silicone, now I can’t really tolerate rough penetration. I expected to be a horny teenager wanting to hump everything that moves, but now it’s a yearning for touch, comfort, and warmth. I definitely masturbate a LOT more frequently, typically 2-3 times a day. My redistribution of muscle mass is taking its toll on my lower back and WHERE the HELL did the carb cravings come from?
Just popping up on your feed to say bottom growth is absolutely a thing and I appreciate pressure wave stim/ sucky things so much more now.
— Avery (@ThePalimpsex) July 4, 2019
Testosterone has flattened my affect. I still can’t cry. My ups and downs are more frequent, but less drastic. So much of my desire to write comes from manic episodes, moments of brilliance and inspiration I now fear I’ve lost. I’ve felt the urge to blog almost every day and yet I can’t craft something coherent. I never used to care about that; I’d just pound it out, edit it for grammar, and hit “Publish” with the intention of raw and unfiltered content. I see all these awesome things bloggers are doing. Going to conferences, hosting workshops, publishing amazing books, reviewing new and innovative products. It’s beautiful and makes me proud to be a part of this community but I’m also teetering into a hole of doubt. One of my fellow board members at Masakhane imparted a wonderful Theodore Roosevelt quote during our last picnic together: Comparison is the thief of joy. I think about how I navigate this world and how comparison can be intoxicating and extremely damaging to my sense of well-being. I’ve always had a certain respect for competition, my Aries tendencies reveling in the energy competition can create. To extricate comparison from competition is so deeply rooted in my own neurodivergences and traumas, I’m not even sure where to begin. I also see this narrative amplified through the macrocosms of corporations, particularly those who claim to advocate for gender and sexual minorities. Authentic collaboration is entangled in capitalism, and that’s a reality I am sinking into more and more with age.
https://twitter.com/ThePalimpsex/status/1132281350436921344
So clearly, my brain/body connection has been very, VERY fucky lately. I’ve seen a quote circulate Instagram lately from Jamie J. Leclair about how “Intellectualizing your trauma is not the same as working through or processing it.” For me, it rings true. Intellectualizing is my defense mechanism. And so here we are, wading through it again. I need to be more vulnerable. I need to fuck up. Cameron Glover said in a Disability After Dark podcast with Andrew Gurza that sometimes it’s more about getting the content out there. For me, I think I need to stop thinking in binaries. It’s not the opposite of intellectualizing that will light a fire under my ass, it’s just thinking creatively. I put together my ConCane last week. It’s something Cameron and I came up with at the NSEC conference where I used a cane to help with my sciatic flares. I found a hollow acrylic cane with a clear Lucite handle on Etsy. For the NSEC conference I filled it with the sheds from my recently deceased snake, Princess Buttercup. I kept every one of her sheds preserved in Ziploc bags throughout her life, knowing I’d create something beautiful out of them one day. Buttercup passed away in March in the peak of her pubertal years. She was only 5 and became eggbound due to her spinal lesions. She was so severely kinked and arthritic that passing eggs was too painful for her. We tried warm baths, anti–inflammatory injections, massage, but nothing worked. Her death shook me in ways I hadn’t connected during the stress of the moment. Here is this creature, my kin, suffering with similar disabilities and chronic pain, destroyed by her capacity to reproduce. I’m still getting my fucking period on testosterone. It is wreaking havoc on my back. Hot baths, epidural injections, uterine massage…I miss you Buttercup.
I had written a lengthy post about the ConCane last Friday during a 9 hour workshift where I was the only one in office. I thought I had saved the post via Dropbox but it turns out I had only saved about half of it. It’s not the first time I’ve lost a post and surely isn’t the last, but it broke me and I’ve spent the last week grieving, emotionally drained. There was so much more I had written. There was an outpour of gratitude to the companies, artists, and retailers in the field that donated minis/teenies for my cane. There was a synthesis of how this cane has come to represent my identity in the nebulous frameworks of mind, body, and soul. I am a collector. I collect stones, toys, figurines, books, ticket stubs, patches, all from different moments in my life that help me remember who I am and why I’m here. Layered on to WHAT I collect is HOW I collect these treasured identity-markers: a rotating wooden zodiac altar for my stones, a lit cabinet for my toys, a DIY converted DVD case for my figurines, my father’s bookcase from his years at Princeton for my books, a triple goddess triptych made out of my tickets (after taking this picture of them I am now realizing I hung the waxing and waning backwards yikes), my “battle vest” for my patches and buttons…the methods are performative as vehicles of self-expression, decades of evolution with threads of consistency validating my embodied existence. As someone who frequently dissociates, these are quite often literal touchstones to keep me grounded. It resonates through my cane, a device used to brace my existence on all planes, a rod to channel my understandings of sexuality and disability, a display for the symbols of support within my community, a means of saying “thank you” every time I take a step.
I am rewriting the remains of this blog post on another Friday 9 hour workshift, one where I was supposed to be at the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference. I’ll be there tomorrow, but I’m experiencing a dose of FOMO for missing the first two days, though I’m doing my bit here. I’m fielding phone calls, some from patients who are at the conference this very moment. I’m organizing care for my community in the ways I can. I’m adapting to a limitation, where being “stuck at work” during a major event related to my identity is still an opportunity to subvert, reach out, and process. I am so excited to see familiar faces tomorrow, to connect with new communities, to learn new perspectives, and best of all, to show off my new ConCane(TM).
Want to see how I did it? I livestreamed the process on Instagram. Saved it to Youtube. Added CC’s. Enjoy!
Special thanks to:
Funkit
Uberrime
Lust Arts
Pleasure Forge
Phoenix Flame Forge
Strange Bedfellas
Monster Maxim
Hole Punch
SarahJGoodnight