I have two stories to tell you.
The first we enter as I'm laying on my living room floor. I have just finished working out with my at-home weights, the same routine that I’ve had for months. My body burns not from exercise but from frustration. Tears are leaking from my eyes. A day or two prior I have taken my first dose of testosterone. It has not made me, magically, strong and powerful.
In retrospect, and even at the time, this was ridiculous. But all things are both themselves and also a symbol. And to me testosterone is a symbol of freedom. Freedom from a misfitting identity, from misogyny, from my weakness. And in that moment I was disappointed, devastated to find that this symbol had not liberated me, violently, powerfully, all these qualities we ascribe to this masculine hormone.
For my second story, join me as I step out of the bathroom in a fury. This fury is righteous and clear headed. The most clear headed I've been in months. For months I've been watching joy slip through my fingers like water. I've been staring down the road of life, forcing myself to trudge along, afraid that if I stop even for a moment I will never resume. I've been playing to myself a monologue that repeats “I just want, I just want, I just want," never moving forward, because the next two words I cannot say to myself are "to die.”
The moment you join me in this story is the moment the fog has lifted, as suddenly and powerfully as a day of sun after months of storm. In a few days time I will struggle to convey to my therapist how night and day the change is. I am myself again, not a sad lost stranger trapped in my own skin. And in my return, I am furious. Because my period has just started. And between the suddenness and the blood, I realize that these months (years) of suffering have been caused by a hormone. My body is poisoning me. Estrogen is trying to kill me.
Now this, too, both in retrospect and in the moment, is ridiculous (also a gross oversimplification of the ovarian hormone cycle), but consider again that all things are both themselves and a symbol. And while to me estrogen is a symbol of all the things testosterone might liberate me from, to others it is soft, nurturing estrogen. Gentle, kind, harmless estrogen. It rounds, it smooths, it kills.
I tell these stories not to demonize or glorify estrogen or testosterone. As you can see, it leads to ridiculousness, and this ridiculousness in turn results in unnecessary strife. Unmet expectations, unwarranted fear. Resentment, self-hate. And isn’t it funny, how we ascribe to these chemicals the same qualities we assign to women or men? Powerful, irreversible testosterone. Subtle, gentle estrogen. Neither of these things are true, which is why I’ve shared these stories with you.
The truth of the matter is that all hormones are arrangements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that interact with our bodies in somewhat predictable but ultimately individually variable ways. To me, low-dose T has been a slow, measured series of subtle changes, accompanied by the knowledge that while, yes, my body hair will never be quite as light as it was, it has been well worth the opportunity to poke and prod and who I might be. But I had to overcome this image of sudden, violent, irreversible transformation to get here.
In truth, hormones have no inherent qualities, just like we (also arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) have no inherent qualities either. And if we are to break down these rigid ideas of what makes a woman or man, necessarily hormones are included too.