[Requesting engagement from trans-feminine people on HRT]
I don’t yet know when I will begin hormone replacement therapy, but the anticipation leaves me prone to developing expectations I worry are unrealistic.
Not sure how best to explain. My emotions, and sometimes my expression of those emotions, will feel masculine when heightened. Feeling intensely happy or angry about something even unrelated to my identity, those feelings give me dysphoria because of how masculine they seem. It’s not that being happy or angry is inherently masculine, of course. The dysphoria comes from the emotion’s manifestation seeming masculine.
I don’t know if this makes sense, but has anyone experienced something similar and/or seen changes to these sorts of things?
Yeah, I think it’s hard to say exactly where and how this changed for me, but it definitely did. I was always a very feminine person, and this would manifest itself around certain places and people. Like pre transition, I had a few friends, specifically that I felt safe acting feminine around, and I would. But the rest of the time, and in general, my emotional responses to things and my feelings did feel very masculine to me. In a way that felt invalidating and made me feel kinda gross with myself.
I would describe myself as very girly now. Like my emotional reactions to things do not feel masculine in any way to me anymore, and i feel like i respond to things in a way society generally assigns femininity to. I also feel girly, and feel that after years living as a woman in all aspects of my life I feel my perspective has changed a lot and my understanding of myself too. It definitely started after starting HRT, when I felt like I could be the “feminine me” all the time.
I also went to therapy a lot and was told by several therapists that if I don’t like something about myself, I can choose to change it. So that definitely played a role in it, too, consciously changing how I emotionally respond to things. I took gut reactions, language I would use, and how I processed and expressed my emotions and consciously changed them. I changed how I speak, my intonation, my cadence, and my pronunciation and changed them consciously to the way that I felt less dysphoric about. My voice does not pass yet, I’m considering surgery, but how I speak is unmistakably feminine. My friends and people who know me well are always very bewildered when I get misgendered, because aside from my voice and a couple physical factors it’s hard to see me as anything but a woman.
I can’t say for sure to what extent the actual chemical changes in my brain impacted that. It’s probably non-zero, but not as much as feeling safe to be myself and consciously changing parts of my personality and responses I didn’t like and wanted to leave behind. I became the woman I am today. She is the person I always wanted to be, and I worked very hard to be who I am.