Bex Talks Sex Starting the Conversation
Nearly one year ago, on May 30th, 2017, I took my first shot of Testosterone, it was the beginning of my medical transition, though not the beginning of my complicated relationship with my gender. To celebrate my one year on HRT I’m going to be sharing a different post each week of May detailing the ways my identities, body, mental health, and sexuality have evolved over the past year, with the help of the testosterone and independent of it.
Testosterone changes a lot of things, last week was an exploration of how my social transition, masculinity, and identities were sculpted over the past year. That… is a really hard thing to quantify, this week is a little more in line with the One Year On Testostrone updates you’re used to, we’re talking about what happened to my body when I started taking T. Get ready for the TMI folks, we’re talking new hair, new smells, and everything else that comes with being a teenage boy.
Dosage
I inject .3 cc of Testosterone weekly into the subcutaneous fat of my belly, this is a moderate dose from my understanding.1 While sometimes I am impatient with the rate at which my body is changing, I think it would be scary to watch it change any faster, and it definitely would have been early on, so I haven’t bothered to adjust my dose at all since I started. I do weekly injections because my brain already gives me enough mood fluctuations, and a two week cycle can be known for exacerbating that. I don’t say this to be prescriptive, and I considered not including it at all, because it’s important that your dosage is something you decide between you and your doctor, but I decided to include it to offer context for the rate at which my body changed.
How Consistent Do I Need To Be?
According to my doctor, the time that I do my shot doesn’t really matter, and I could even fluctuate a day or so early or late. According to my body, on the other hand, I am expected to do my shot first thing Tuesday morning or my body reacts like a toddler being told that they can’t have ice cream for breakfast. The one time I did a dose of .2cc instead of .3cc (because I ran out) I had the worst migraine of my life. I’m gonna go ahead and not do that again.
Bottom Left: 6 Months on T
Right: One Year on T
Fat Redistribution
One of the things testosterone does when injected into an estrogen-dominant body is to redistribute the fat into a more masculine silhouette. On me this change is most visible on my face, my face has become broader and my jaw more defined. At the six month mark I didn’t love the way the T changed my face, like many teenage boys, I felt like I was going through an ugly duckling phase. I’d stare at myself in the mirror and not recognize the person staring back, I wondered when my face got so round, and how it could look so different and at the same time entirely the same.
Now, I couldn’t tell you if that was because it was strange to see my face change, if my face really did go through an awkward middle transition, or if it was a little of both. What I can tell you is that I love the way I look now. I get gendered correctly something like 40% of the time and there are days when I’ll just stare in the mirror and marvel at my own face. I take more selfies, I smile more, and I’ve finally figured out my new angles.
As for the rest of my body? I don’t feel like I’ve had as much luck. I have hips and curves and that hasn’t changed. I had hopes that the testosterone would shift the fat from my hips up higher around my belly but instead all it seems to have done is given me more of a belly. What has helped me the most is recognizing that hips aren’t exclusive to AFAB2 folks, cis men can also gain weight around their hips and develop the same kinds of love handles that I do.
Body Hair
I am very Italian, and yet shockingly, I am not a very hairy person. Pre-T I let my body hair do whatever it wanted which was… not all that much. The hair around my bits stayed cropped close around my vulva, my leg hair was so faint that if you saw me from a distance you’d think I shaved daily. My armpits were proudly unshaven for years, and yet there was nothing more than a small bundle of curls in the middle. I often joked that all it would take was one shot of Testosterone to kick my Italian gene into gear, that I would wake up one morning as a lumberjack, with a beard down to my nipples and an axe in my hand. The reality is much less exciting. The reality is spending a year staring at your body and wondering “Was that hair here before?”
A few months in I noticed a dusting of peach fuzz across my upper lip and my chest. A few months after that I noticed my leg hair had grown, and my pubic hair was spreading. I had hair around my asshole for the first time in my life. I shaved it. I do not recommend shaving it.
Now, my pubic hair covers my entire pubic region with thick curls, it doesn’t extend to my legs yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does soon. My leg hair has thickened and darkened, it now circles around to the back of my leg, though it is patchy and still doesn’t extend above my knee. I’ve noticed a small showing of hair at the bottom of my belly, the beginnings of a happy trail that I’m very excited about.
On my face I have a bit of a mustache. Okay, well, it’s a modest mustache. Okay, well, I have some hair on my lip that sometimes just looks like my upper lip is dirty and is probably less hair than you’d see on your average 7th grader BUT I’M PROUD OF IT, OKAY? I also have a bit of peach fuzz on my cheeks and maybe one day I’ll be able to rock a beard.
Acne
First time around with puberty I lucked out! No acne! Testosterone was… less kind.
Now, I’m a person with absolutely no skincare routine whatsoever. I use whatever body wash is on sale and hold my face under the shower water for a bit to clean it off, and, well, testosterone had other ideas. I broke out across my chest, chin, and back mostly, with large patches of red bumps and zits. My doctor recommended some antibiotics that they thought would help clear it up, but they made me sick3 so I never really took them after that.
I did go to Lush though, where I picked up Grease Lightning (with the assistance of a very patient and affirming salesperson who explained everything to me) and a combination of that and time seems to have cut my acne down by about 50%.
Voice
Oh hey, I have a podcast where you can track this change weekly! Basically, it got deeper. A lot deeper.
Occasionally it cracks, but mostly when I’m trying to make sounds that I didn’t realize are out of my range now. For example, I still forget that I can no longer “Woo!” at shows now, I try and literally no sound comes out, I have to settle for a more manly “Yeahhhhh!” On the phone, I only get gendered correctly about 20% of the time, and in an ideal world I’d like my voice to get a little deeper. I haven’t given up hope, my voice is the one thing that consistently and regularly changes.
Lots of people have asked about my singing voice… I couldn’t sing then, and I can’t sing now, so you’ve got the wrong guy for that question.
Bits
This is the change that happened the fastest and, next to my voice, is the most obvious. I went from having a nearly imperceptible clit to one so large that you can actually pull back the hood and see the shape of the head and shaft. It’s pretty amazing actually – the clitoris and the penis are made of the same tissue in very similar shapes, the only difference being that most of the clit’s anatomy is internal, except when you add Testosterone into the equation. As my clit has grown it’s looked more and more like a penis, pulling back the hood exposes a tiny head and shaft, around 1.5″-2″ depending on arousal. I’ll talk more about what that did to my sex life in an upcoming post exclusively on that.
Click here to see before and after pictures of my bits. NSFW obviously.
Other Changes
- I noticed an increase in appetite at the beginning of my transition but that has tapered off. I also have some real bad disordered eating habits so like, maybe don’t listen to me on this one.
- I noticed my stomach is no longer as resilient as it was, when in the past I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted, now too much meat or sugar and my stomach will be mad at me for hours.
- My body odor changed which was SURREAL, especially because I love masculine body odors (even the gross sweaty ones) and now my body makes those smells and it is supremely distracting. Plus, you kind of get used to your own body odor, you smell it all day every day for your entire life, so you only really notice it if it gets bad. I on the other hand, smell very different from how I did for the last 25 years and boy do I notice it. So now, until I get used to it, I’ll be walking around with 2 sticks of deodorant in my bag, and showering twice a day out of fear that I smell.
To read more about Bex’s transition, keep an eye out for weekly pupdates all May on his social transition, how his mental health changed, and how his sexuality changed!