I am reading this doctors posts again... Since I stumbled on one of them while looking on another subreddit. He's autistic btw which effects how he communicates info I think (like the parts that could be seen as insulting etc.)
This is a bit surreal... I think he posts hypothetical stuff a lot based on his observations which is you know interesting but not brilliant much like most personality tests.
Okay, so just as an example, I often have joked about the FTM Helga to Tinkerbell scale. Now, that is part of the theory as the Tinkerbell's being type 1 and the Helga's being type 2.
For years I called it the Helga to Tinkerbell scale As I really didn't have a better way of explaining why I had two different groups of transgender men.
Before transitioning, they basically almost always fell into one of two categories (but obviously there are straight and bisexual outliers)
A tiny, pixie, ADHD lesbian who says that they want to transition. They often have hypermobile joints, autism spectrum disorder, and a multitude of other health issues. They look like a literal elf.
A Helga, a big, thick, stocky, earthy woman with large breasts. They look like they would be a female dwarf in World of Warcraft. (Exaggeration, but that's the category that you would sort them in given the choice)
Type 1 starts on testosterone and typically within 6 months, develops an attraction to men, sometimes, this becomes the dominant or only attraction. They go from being a lesbian to a gay man.
Type 2 starts on testosterone and they just basically become a hornier person. They go from being a lesbian to a straight man.
The accuracy of this phenomenon is greater than 90%. In fact I guarantee you people reading this will be able to identify their friends that fall into these categories.
For many years I reported this, this phenomenon that I saw, but I had no mechanism to explain the why. [...] syndrome now elucidates the mechanism and offers an actual treatment.
I mean, we all kind of subconsciously know this right? How many pre-HRT FTMs do you see that look like fucking Barbie? Almost zero. The overwhelming majority of them fall into two categories. What I call "pixie" type transgender men, who are about 4'10 to 5'3 and never really weigh more than 125 lb. They show up with short cropped hair and sort of have the look of an effeminate teenage boy. They often look younger than their stated age. They are usually attracted more to women with some degree of bisexual leaning, and after starting HRT, they generally become gay trans men. I often state that they were gay before and they are gay after. They rarely have abnormal androgens.
The other subset tends to be the stocky masc trans man. They come in like "Helga", a very muscular or thick bodied and masculine-looking person right at baseline. They often have a hairy upper lip or some degree of hirsutism and acne. They look like they have been on testosterone for a while already. They are usually attracted exclusively to women and previously identified as masculine presenting lesbians. They transition and tend to stay attracted only to women.
Not everybody falls in these two categories, but I'd say that this catches about 80% of my patients.
It is very interesting to me that if somebody is masculinized before starting HRT, their sexuality tends to stay the same. But if they look feminine and not masculinize before HRT, they flip in their gender of attraction.
Except pansexuals, they just get more pansexual.
I don't like that he often just lumps everyone into straight or gay. I think a lot of trans guys are bisexual/pansexual etc according to surveys (one I looked at was 30% combined bi + pan and then 24% used the label [BEEP] which isn't specific,) and also I've come across someone in an article who talked about how he initially thought he became exclusively into men but then just realised he was still bisexual later. He just became more into men basically after starting testosterone.
There's also a bunch of trans guys who date other trans guys, and people who aren't on testosterone and I don't think they're monosexual either. One I can think of specifically id's as bisexual.
Tbh though anecdotes like these I just found are useless for this reason:
I've met a lot of bi trans guys but not a single mono-gay one IRL as far as I know
(I'm also bi)
I am a stealth straight man and tbh I don?t really feel "at home" in a lot of trans spaces [...]
What I will say is that
every trans man I've met IRL has been straight, I've never met a gay trans guy yet but maybe that's just the circles I travel in.
^ by straight he means attracted to women btw.
I know an insane amount of pan trans guys, myself included
...Anyway.
The tiny, pixie-like lesbian that says that they want to take testosterone almost always inverts and becomes a gay transgender man.
The ones that are built like a linebacker when they show up, identify as a lesbian, but then decide to transition, they almost always remain attracted to women and have never experienced any change in their orientation through the process.
Exactly why that is? I'm still trying to understand it. But it's a pattern that I cannot ignore. It's glaringly obvious.
I had a patient explode at me once, as I was warning them about the possible change in their sexual orientation. They were a Tinkerbell, and basically, I told them, hey, I know you have a girlfriend and you're a lesbian, but this may change your sexual orientation because I've seen it happen many times.
The patient was super offended and basically flipped out at me and nearly ended the appointment. They basically said if I brought it up again, they were done. Told me that it was absolutely revolting that I would suggest that they might become into men.
I dropped it, and said okay, no problem. I could not believe how hostile they were about it. Super offended.
I was supposed to see them 3 months later for follow up, but they showed up 6 weeks later. Chief complaint was "private"
I walk into the room, and the patient is there, and says that they need to go on prep.
Ask why, and they say rather bluntly, "Because I fucked six dudes in the past 6 weeks and I don't want to have to hear from you how you were right. So just give me what I need so that I can stay safe".
And I did. And that was pretty much the conversation. I didn't shame them about it, but just looking at their face and body, I knew that it was highly likely that this would happen simply by starting testosterone. I'd seen it happen hundreds of times before.
I see so many people, I do so many transitions that the pattern, it becomes more and more evident. I start to see the same subtypes of transgender people. And how they respond to certain drugs and how it affects their sexuality and various aspects of their behavior and so on.
I hope that gives at least a peak into some of it, but it's a lot more complicated than I've described here. This is an oversimplification.
But, since I like being sexually fluid it's something I've definitely considered among other things in choosing not to go on hrt. I'm already mostly into guys and I think it would just be very boring.
I also kind of wonder if it would remove my attraction to androgyny which would bother me
way more. Because I've spent a lot of the past decade hearing that I should be attracted to masculine guys and so I basically became the Jack Donovan of androgynous guys and now it would be like losing some kind of sense like going blind or something hahaha (sad but true):
"Masculinity is a religion, and I see potential for androphiles to become its priests," Donovan wrote in Androphilia, "to devote themselves to it" in a way that men who understand their manliness through women -- in quantifying the number they've slept with or measuring "men's rights" against "women's rights" -- can't. And so androphiles like Donovan have found common ground with the gender-traditionalists and male-advocacy groups elsewhere in the messy carnival of the new right, where reactions to women range from outright hostility to benign disinterest.
Donovan has been described as gay,[4] though he does not use the label for himself and has criticized gay culture as effeminate.[8]: 173 He has described himself as an "androphile", a term he uses to describe romance and sex between masculine men.[8]: 113 In his 2006 book Androphilia: A Manifesto, he wrote, "I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire... The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics."[5]
He removed the book from print in 2017, and has said he has "transcended both that identity and that sexuality".[9]
I'm very serious about it lol. I wrote this (it's quite cringe though) when I was 16. Well I've quoted some other stuff first. Some people were yelling at this trans guy on twitter who was 19 for a fictional character he created that he also dressed as at least once and it was basically like outsider art that no one would have ever seen back in the day but that's a lot of the internet now. So then after reading some things he said, I started thinking about my teenage writing:
Yes I do, her name is Maria, she's very dear to me, I love her, I've thrown her a birthday party last week actually :D my beautiful, she's very comforting for me, I've grown very attatched to her over the last 2 years, she's been there for me. She has a lot of personal meaning.
okay so you made a little subservient trans girl to yourself for you to play your fantasies on and that should make me believe you're not out to commodify us and fit us into what you believe we should look and be like?
I'm thinking about pretty girls but when one messages me on a dating app I get so scared I refuse to open it at all💔💔
Thought after over two years maria will stop being my, in a lack of a better word, main interest. But it's just like getting worse, genuinely, is it normal to be so obsessed over something you made up? I'm so attached to her at this point
Maria funfact for today
When I created her 2 years ago, she was as an annoying cartoonishly green undead c|s man (of the same name)
I slowly started switching her identity like a year ago, first using he/she for her. Luckily her personality also started to switch at that time
He had some pictures of her as a fairy. It reminded me of Henry Darger but like a different age. Darger usually created drawings/paintings of young girls with dicks and who had fairy wings often.
I also had a green androgynous character once when I was 16 but he just stayed male as a plant elf. Well intersex I guess but that doesn't apply to plant elves (he had female reproductive anatomy but also male and was otherwise an androgynous male but personality varied a bit depending on what I was writing.) He was based on Poison Ivy among other stuff. I wrote something about this too because I noticed some things (besides how cringe this is) when reading back through some old journals.
[actually I quoted some stuff about that in some other recent posts I see from a few months ago so won't repeat that here.]
I'm bringing this up because in hindsight there was something archetypal and Pagan about a bunch of my writing I think in hindsight. So it takes on a strange quasi-spiritual quality. Like what Donovan was doing.
A lot of people do this with what they're attracted to but I guess it's probably especially common for [BEEP] people maybe. I was talking about this before though with this straight guy who has a website and writes things like this (but this is how he wants to be treated, but I guess also how his attraction manifests):
Masculinity is under assault, but so is femininity; our current order is much more of an androgynarchy than it is a matriarchy.
Girls are happy when they're allowed to be girls and are worshiped for it. Girls are sad when they're pushed to become inferior imitations of boys. It's not rocket science. Reject patriarchy, reject androgyny, embrace femininity, and women will be happier than ever.
It also serves I think to illustrate something sorely lacking even in most "optimistic" science fiction, even in most bright romantic realist science fiction: that in the spacefaring future men can be men and women can be women, that what humanity should aspire toward is a future where girls can fully express their femininity and
be adored for it by everyone around them. You don't have to become some sort of androgyne to be a good citizen of the spacefaring universe.
He's often doing things that are feminine etc. I like androgyny though so boo. (He also really likes Billie Eilish and talks about that a lot who is an androgynous pesron so I don't think he's really paying attention.)
So specific:
I can't help but suspect I might get along the best with some rich young artsy type on the beach in California who was from Europe originally, which sounds like trying to find a unicorn, but god knows there are people like that out there in significant numbers, and I am the sort of person such a character would gravitate towards.
I don't think he wants to know the kind of person who's gravitating right now LOL.
I said before I don't know where he thinks he's going to fit into that world because he's not masculine.... Everyone on twitter assumes he's a woman.
Why do you think I was summoned here?
It hasn't escaped my attention that of late I'm experiencing more and more the symptoms of what the Jungians call "anima possession", the surfacing of the feminine archetype in the unconscious mind
The only aspect of old me I'm missing is my longer hair: about two inches had to be cut off to accommodate the bleaching process, and as a result I can't see my gorgeous hair around me and feel it brushing my shoulders anymore,
which is really just awful. But luckily we had a plan for that too: hair extensions.
So I'm getting my hair extended, from about chin length (where it is now) all the way down to my chest, where it'll rest as sensually as a model for a surfboard line (or perhaps a character from "Pirates of the Caribbean" hehehe). All Jean Harlow tier platinum blonde of course. It's a bit of a bummer too that the hair really can't take both permanent waves and platinum blonding: it just isn't strong enough for both, since just one runs the risk of frying your hair. But lucky me, my natural texture is wavy anyway, and with the extra length it'll have more than enough room for the waves to cascade down in a really striking way.
I've always liked my hair; it's so wavy and shiny, yet so brunette, just like my biggest crush from history Emma, Lady Hamilton, who had the best hair ever. All my other historical-girl crushes and even my present-day crushes have that same sort of hair, the same kind I have as an adult.
I'm like pinhead.
(He's also a huge narcissist but I'm not going into that again lol.)
It seems that native-born Americans hate me, despite the fact that I'm a native-born American myself. Hmph.
'Hmph' lol. That's almost adorable.
Not sure what I was thinking with a
cutesy girly parchment map of outer-space destinations at constant acceleration, but hey, isn't this a vibe we could use a lot more of?
He put lovehearts on all the i's.
It's like he's doing it on purpose at points.
"Oh no. While doing laundry I seem to have got stuck in this dryer" 2:13:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyby_N9W0Zg
I know he's not and also basically no one responds to his tweets/posts - he's complained about that a few times. So no audience to play to really.
Also (I like her and I don't think she's toxic about it like Donovan so I'm not really comparing them on attitude just the underlying phemonenon well... Also her wife isn't a clone of her so obviously she wouldn't have the same level of animosity):
"I always think people must be able to tell. Like for a long time when I was a kid I just assumed that everyone knew I was a lesbian because I look like a lesbian. I'm a 100% feminine all of the time. Does that make sense? That's not how lesbians work though."
"Right so you're so womanly it just must extend to who you love?"
"Yeah that was my childhood thinking."
"The you that you are now is like the kind of style that I was always super attracted to throughout my teenage years in the start of my dating life and then I had an ex who was like quite more femme than me. More high femme."
"Haha Paige's face. Sorry what?" [camera person I guess]
I do need to see this person tbh cause I can't picture how.
A trans woman posted this once and it's kind of true:
femme lesbianism and masc gay dudes are the pinnacles of their gender.... butch lesbians are actually a part of the masc dude spectrum and fem gayboys are a part of the femme lesbian spectrum
straight cis men are spiritually less masculine than gay men and butch lesbians... same for cis straight women
Also stumbled on this tweet by this trans woman before:
when people misgender me i smile a little bit... i feel like a mischievous elf f@g being punished for being cute... when cis women do it to me intentionally it feels distinctly like im the quirky [BEEP] coded female and theyre the child laden miserable husband hating prisoner...
But I guess it's not a very original idea.
These days I'm just doing this lol:
My favourite thing about Tumblr is you'll have some (I'm taking a tangent briefly yeah,) you'll have some delusion thing in your head and then someone else will often share it hahaha whatever it is (I had this daydream too):
#I've said it before and I'll say it again#he looks like a d*ke that works in a library
Could you let me know which library? Outside my brain I mean. Thanks.
Someone told me I looked like him once and this is the only man I want to be compared to as a trans woman.
#geddy lee#rush#prog rock#Why do so many trans gals love him?
Do they lol? This is the first time I've heard that.
I didn't write this:
I have never understood why some people don't like his voice, and I'm not even much of a Rush fan.
A guy who sings like an androgynous elf is perfect for art rock. Just ask Yes... or Jane's Addiction. If anything, the world could use MORE androgynous elves.
He looks cute in this photo I found recently too:
I've gone so off topic. OK:
The second paragraph here seems to be related too (and LoTR returns):
**Elevated Serum Homocysteine Levels, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Hypermobile joints (often also have flat feet, pectus excavatum/carinatum), "Fibromyalgia" (I hate this diagnosis name but basically unexplained pain issues) Hashimoto's thyroiditis, IBS / Inflammatory GI issues, Queerness (gender or sexual orientation), migraine headache (mostly XX humans). Non-gender normative behavior, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (hormonal disruption, hirsutism, or passing out when standing up / "POTS", high resting heart rate, poor stress tolerance), PTSD, Bipolar/Schizo/depression (burnout type), Generalized Anxiety, Eczema, Severe acne in natal females (PCOS), Mast Cell Issues / Allergies, Myopia (negative glasses prescription), Increased Intelligence, Genetic mutations in MTHFR or MTR/R, Irritable Bladder or IC (acidic urine typically, gets up a lot at night to urinate), Spider veins (especially at the base of the neck posteriorly/upper back as well as "cherry hemangiomas". "Translucent" skin with easily visible vasculature.
In cis MPS-MPS relationships, You will often see a masculine woman paired with a feminine man. In trans relationships, it's basically the same thing, a feminine person with a masculine person. We theorize this is to offset the hormonal imbalance issues and is therefore more likely to be a successful pregnancy.
In terms of body habitus, the skinny low muscular ones tend to look like LOTR elves. They have high angular facial features and even somewhat look like a pointed ear. The lesbians that come out as transgender men that look like little pixies, they start on testosterone and suddenly become gay transgender men are this type 1 phenotype, the tall spindly 6'4 transgender woman with no muscle mass will have an absolutely enormous Adam's apple, and significantly above average length penis is the same variant but in MTF.
The stocky, thick, large breasted, big butted humans that look like they have a lot of cortisol circulating tend to look almost like dwarves from LOTR. Wider more round faces. This is a different subtype, and the lesbians that come out as FTM in this subtype remain attracted to women. Additionally they end up with better vocal development related to slowly transitioning on their own with elevated androgens throughout their life prior to starting full FTM HRT. The gay men of this subtype that have the elevated DHT end up having an early puberty, have a short, thicker penis, are short in height, Have male pattern baldness, and basically look like Burl Ives. They often have a very brassy voice that sounds similar in timbre to many transgender men who were started on testosterone too rapidly and end up ossifying their larynx before normbal vocal development can occur (which creates that brassy transgender man voice that makes them sound like a gay man). You can replicate this voice style by compressing your larynx while you speak and you'll understand what I mean.
Personality effects: Interest in fantasy worlds / gaming, "Nerd culture" (Star trek/wars/Dr who) Otakus/Anime, Ren Faire, Non-traditional relationship structures, BDSM interest. ( I think all of this personality stuff is related to these people being faintly dissociated all the time, often related to VDR/COMT/MAO mutations amplified by MTHFR defects.) Thus, the idea of "other realities" is quite easy for their brains to accept, hence the interest in these common topics.
The exception of this is the autism, which I suspect is related to perinatal estradiol levels which are effectively driven by maternal reactions to heavy folate supplementation in prenatal vitamins affecting women with MTHFR deficiencies different than other cisgender women. In short, the reason for autism is the same reason for being transgender but they are not directly genetically linked. They are both an effect caused by underlying hormonal enzyme mutations or perinatal hormonal disruption.
See my recent post on this which is my theory of why autism has become so prevalent since 1991 and the direct association between autism and increasing perinatal folic acid use as well as the complete inverse proportionality between spina bifida rates and autism rates in the entire world.
Not everyone who has the syndrome will have all aspects of it. But many people have multiple things. I myself have many of the things and I also have the same genetic mutations in MTHFR and MTR/R but no gender issues. My dad has hashimoto's and aromatase excess and both parents gave me MTHFR variants.
I have a lot of skin issues and my face is round, I'm also not flat chested but I'm short (5'2")and slim and not really curvy.
I think my boyfriend and I are a textbook MPS cis couple!
Me: 5'0 cis woman, autistic and dyspraxic, hypermobile joints (no hEDS or other genetic conditions that I know of, however I have a very narrow palate).
Hirsutism, LH:FSH ratio of 4:1 (waiting to see if my GP thinks I have PCOS or not since I have normal T, insulin, FAI and ovaries on ultrasound (DHEAS wasn't tested yet though)? NCAH or Turner Syndrome perhaps?)
Hypothyroid (negative Hashimoto's antibodies though), myopia, lazy eye/possible strabimus (all of my siblings have strabismus). Low folate, but I definitely don't eat enough food with folic acid in, so who knows the cause?
Didn't develop boobs until I started taking birth control, I was very much the "pixie" type that Dr. Powers describes.
I am straight, however my type has always been feminine men, in fact for YEARS all of my crushes would end up being gay! Pegging a man would feel SO right to me and I often get really strong urges to do so, as well as occasional feelings of wishing that I had a dick, despite being very cis.
To quote Dr. Powers, "most simplistically, I could say that testosterone makes somebody a top", and that definitely checks out for me - I am a femdom enthusiast, however once I started taking birth control, my submissive side started coming out more too. Hmmm! I am also very clearly sensitive to androgens despite normal T results, hence my hirsutism. It also took birth control for me to finally develop a feminine body at age NINETEEN despite starting my period and becoming hirsute at about 13 and developing acne before I was even 10? it makes me wonder.
My partner: 6'3 cis, bisexual man, most likely autistic, doesn't have much body or facial hair.
Here's something very interesting - his mother has had chronically low folate for YEARS and has symptoms despite supplementing? MTHFR mutation? He has had low folate himself in the past, but I believe it was due to poor dietary intake.
Eczema, asthma, allergies.
I would describe him as a "pretty boy" kind of handsome. Regarding D/s, he is also a switch.
Neither of us have tried methylfolate yet.
I do wonder if we're the classic MPS couple that [..] describes, and that r/RoleReversal is potentially a hub full of people with MPS, as well as r/GNCStraight.
Trippy.
I've not been on birth control although I didn't need it to develop breasts. They're not huge or anything but not invisible. Can mostly hide them wearing unisex t-shirts though.
The rest of that is fairly relatable to me. But I think (in fantasy) I'm kind of a switch but more into men being submissive and femdom with women maybe (that just reflects audio ... stuff. I've listened to recently though lol)
Anyway you can obviously think of examples of people that fit into this both cis and trans but there are lots of exceptions too. So like I said, it's a bit like personality tests.