another book

[Absaroka]

I'm reading another new book on trans sexuality, this one called The Testosterone Files by Max Wolf Valerio. It's a fun read although at times somewhat sylized in it's writing. He's a writer by profession and someone who's experience and perspective are a bit different than mine. For example I was never a lesbian punker. And then there are some interesting cultural things. He was a tomboy but that was not considered unusual by anyone. He was raised Native American and says that a great many Native American girls fit the tomboy description in their youth-it's considered normal.

A great deal of what he has to say is very interesting. He is FTM. At one point he describes how after he began testosterone treatments many of his feelings about sex changed. In short he felt the way a lot of teenage boys felt. Although as a woman he was a lesbian as someone becoming male he felt attracted to women in a somewhat different manner. He sometimes felt it was difficult to explain this to his lesbian friends. Or there are smaller but equally meaningful things, like the fact that after he began taking testosterone things seemed to start to look more 3 dimensional when he looked at them. Apparently it affected something about how his brain processed visual cues.

I find reading things by transmen to be fascinating. So much of being male is something that is hard to express or explain because it has always been there. Other men understand without anything being said, women don't understand it any more than I can understand what it's like to be pregnant. Since many of my close friends have been women this sometimes leaves me at a loss as to how to explain myself. And so the prespective of a transman is something that I find very valuable.

I have to admit I find it amusing when I read how much he hated having to wear dresses when he was a girl.

Absaroka

[Ann Stef]

a tv program showed the transitition of a M2F was going thru. At one point when she was at her maximum estrogen level due to injections, she cried on the way home from an event, without any particular reason. The next day, the dr. said that with female emotions, a woman can cry at any time due to some emotional feeling inside.