Preliminary notes to TG counselling

These are notes I made for the counselling assessment interviews. I have been gender dysphoric since I was about seven, when I tucked in response to seeing a female friend naked. I wanted to be like her. This was followed by intense curiosity about what it was like to be female accompanied by the desire to be female. This might be thought of as autogynephilia. The reason I don't think it is is that I was in the process of developing various paraphilias at the time and they were notably unlike the desire to be female. I have often found that my natural inclinations to doing particular things, e.g. choice of academic subjects, career and of course clothing, feel normal to me but are perceived by others as markedly feminine, or just turn out to be dominated by women, e.g. herbalism is 90 female. This is without foreknowledge. !hen I became aware that "#$ e%isted, I wanted it. &owever, since I was about eleven at the time, I didn't take it further. 'n entering puberty, like many other boys I started to develop breasts and saw this as a very positive thing, although of course they stopped developing after a while. (et's not over dramatise. )y mother gave me a radical feminist book on transgender issues which was strongly against and I internalised that. I came not only to hate being male but to hate myself for wanting to be female. I used this self*hatred to keep me alive by telling myself that suicide would be a release from the suffering of continuing to be male and that as a man who wanted to be a woman, I deserved to suffer rather than die by living my life out as a man. )ore healthy approaches included trying to see myself as a whole person and trying to be happy with being male. +lthough I was overjoyed at having children, it was hard to deal with the fact that someone else had born and breastfed them and not only did that feel like a hole inside me, an unsatisfiable longing, but also there was a lot of envy. I had counselling for that but it didn't help because although I openly acknowledged the fact of my "I, to all, I was still trying really hard to find positives in me being male and didn't want to give the alternative any house room. The situation has finally come to a head this year. I don't know why this has happened and there seems to be an element of it which is outside my will. The observable facts are as follows- I decided to make a hoa% .ouTube video about being pregnant, which was of course partly wish*fulfilment. This was an idea which came to me in the middle of the night the day before. This video proved to be very popular and I set up another channel devoted to the progress of my pregnancy. I then started taking herbs to mimic the symptoms of pregnancy, which among other things made me nauseous. I put up with the nausea for about a month before I started vomiting and decided to replace the emetic herb with a different one. +t the time, I thought I was taking oestrogenic herbs all along and was simply replacing one such herb by another. !hat was in fact happening was that I was replacing a non*oestrogenic herb with an oestrogenic one, but crucially, at the time I was unaware of this. +lmost as soon as I started taking the oestrogenic herb, a number of mental health problems I had had disappeared, including recalcitrant depression, an%iety, irritability, obsessiveness and what were probably +$, tendencies. +lso, since then I have lost both the phobia and the paraphilias. /hysically my skin has improved and I have lost weight 0I was previously overweight and have lost two stone1. I have more energy, sleep better, have more perspective on things, am more motivated, worry less, am more fle%ible and so forth. +ll of this happened without awareness that I was taking something oestrogenic. 2ecause this eliminates the placebo effect, I feel this is compelling evidence that gender dysphoria has a physiological cause. Second go at the notes just in case this doesn't include what I said in the first: 3ust be honest. 4or a really long time now I have wished that I'd been born female. $o far as I can

tell I had this from about the age of seven. It has never gone away and I now think it's like se%ual orientation * unlikely to change although on occasion it can, not under voluntary control. 5nder normal circumstances I probably would've looked into the possibility of gender reassignment by the age of about twenty. The reason I didn't was that when I was nineteen, my mother gave me a copy of 3anice #aymond's 'The Transse%ual 6mpire', which persuaded me not to, as it portrayed gender reassignment from male to female as tantamount to rape and as a way of policing gender boundaries. I still think she has a point but at the time I was completely convinced and very depressed by the idea that this very strong longing was completely unsatisfiable and in fact something I shouldn't be feeling. I proceeded to take on board completely the ideas of T6#4s and it made me hate myself for wanting to be a woman. I used this hate to keep myself alive- I decided I was so disgusting for wanting to be female that death would be a release that I didn't deserve, and that a fitting punishment would be to live out my life as a man. I have had three se%ual relationships and made a point of telling each of my girlfriends that I wanted to be female right at the start. 'ne of the relationships was brief and abortive but in the other two we have tried to work together to achieve positivity about my assigned gender. I also thought this was important because of my work as a herbalist * being at one with my body would be a good thing for a holistic therapist to achieve. It didn't work. +gainst my better judgement, I married and had children. This was the best thing that ever happened to me. &owever, it also led to me having counselling because it was very hard to deal with the fact that someone else had borne and nursed my own children. I tried to breastfeed one of them myself but abandoned it because I decided it was more important that our child could be reliably fed. I also carried the children close to myself in a way to relieve the yearning that I had to have carried them in my abdomen. The counselling didn't help, mainly because I had internalised the anti*trans attitude promoted by radical feminism. Therefore I gave up. There have been difficulties in my marriage around my envy that my wife has a female body, menstruated etc., though she is now post*menopausal, and generally with my desire to be female and my wife 0and e%'s1 opposition to me doing things like shaving my legs. I have dealt with the problem by trying to distract myself and keeping myself busy. I attributed the research of which I was vaguely aware to junk science designed to support an anti*feminist agenda. This approach continued for many years. This spring, something remarkable happened. I decided to make a hoa% pregnancy video on .ouTube, mainly of course as a form of wish*fulfilment. It proved to be very popular and I decided to start a channel using this as the theme. In order to do it more effectively, I also decided to take herbs to mimic the symptoms of pregnancy such as morning sickness. This worked but after a while I could no longer persist with the nausea, so I replaced one of the herbs with 0etc, usual story1. The situation now is that oh forget it. That's all I wrote at the time + bit more- I'm very keen on the idea that this is some kind of shamanistic process or spiritual journey and see it as a bit like taking on the role of an animal spirit, regardless of which 7side8 someone starts from. It's not just a case of realising you have a problem with your hormones and correcting it like diabetes or a thyroid problem, although I also wonder if there's something there too. I think there's an element of instinctive craving in there as well. 'n some level one becomes aware that there is something wrong or missing and that triggers a strong urge to do something about it, like the desire to eat non*food substances when someone has a mineral deficiency, or, of course, the ability to intuit what herbs one needs, or what herbs someone else needs, in a more instinctive way than just coming to a conclusion based on rational, conscious thought. There are in fact people who are 7otherkin8- they believe themselves to be members of another

species trapped in the body of a human, for instance wolves or bears. I think the way society and culture have gone, it's very difficult for things like this to find a place in it, rather like the way people now considered mad would've been thought of as having a special link with the spirits or the goddesses and gods in the past. Instead of that, psychiatrists and the like try to cram this thing into a psychiatric disorder. To some e%tent, you have to play their game and there are ways this can be understood which correspond to that. )onothematic delusion- In fact, the concept of delusion is not well defined but for the sake of argument I'm just going to say that a delusion is a strongly*held belief which persists in spite of enormous evidence to the contrary and ignore the possibility that that might describe a perfectly normal belief. +n e%ample of a monothematic delusion is 9apgras : an otherwise healthy person with brain damage is convinced that the people they're emotionally closest to have been replaced by impostors. 'ne of these is somatoparaphrenia, the belief that part of one's body doesn't belong to one. This last is sometimes e%pressed in terms of the idea that one cannot be 7right8 unless one has had a limb amputated. )y first reaction to that idea is that it's very unhealthy to want to have a healthy limb removed, and I think this gives me some vague insight into the way people who are at peace with being a particular assigned gender see gender dysphoric people. These problems are more like neurological, brain injury type problems than psychiatric ones, but they blend into psychiatry. The wisdom of madness, by the way, is something I'm very keen on. )y friend )ichele was clearly very easy to look at as mentally ill because she thought her boyfriend was trying to take over the world, to kill her and also that she was being pursued by the secret police, and there were other things like she thought there were secret messages in the T; coverage of (ady ,i's funeral aimed at her and that the content of her wardrobe was entirely white. &owever, she was also aware of truths which she couldn't have known, so far as I could tell, by normal means. It's hard to know how far to go with this because it can 7let the madness in8 and sweep me away, but clearly there are sometimes situations when 7mad8 people can see things clearly when the 7sane8 can't. )ight "I, be an e%ample of this<