DID and Trans Systems: 2 Trans 2 Furious
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ส.ค. 2020
- TW: medical talk, brief death mention.
In the most hotly anticipated sequel of the summer, Claudia answers some questions and discusses some other thoughts on being trans as a system
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Twitter: / wearealexandra
Patreon: / wearealexandra
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In our case we found out we were trans then a part of a system(to note, this would be from the perspective of the previous host). We see the body as being transfeminine nonbinary and this whole system discovery thing happened... Wow, about 10 months ago!
For me I never felt like a girl, but I only figured out I was non-binary when the dysphoria got REALLY intense in high school. It took years after that for me to figure out how deep the dissociation went, but now I see how it’s all intertwined and it’s fascinating. Now I wonder if that dysphoria I was feeling was actually all mine.
I'm so ecstatic that you made this video and I love the title!!!
After consideration, I think the root of it all (whether hrt or awareness of being multiple came first) has to do with giving yourself permission to deviate from your preconceptions.
My own journey of autobiographical assumptions has involved a lot of riding the 'pffffft, as if' train which inevitably arrives at the station of 'well, dUck' in the city of 'no fHit' around half-past 'you were already told/shown this, when will you listen?' Thankfully the exasperation is constructively coupled with kindness, patience, critical thinking, and humor.
One of the daily quotes that a teacher in high school put on the board that's stuck with me for over a decade is "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still remains." I've found it to be a pretty good litmus test thusfar.
Good points! Thanks again for the comment!
I know I didn't feel comfortable in my gender from a young age. I don't think I had the ability to really articulate what that feeling was but I had always been more comfortable when I got to present male and hang out with other boys. It wasn't until I was about 17 that I admitted to myself that I was trans and transitioning to male was the right option for me.
As with anything I like to over-analyse, and I did wonder if maybe I just had all male alters/voices and these feelings of wanting to be male were really coming from them and not me but seeing as it took me about 3 years to get on T I had plenty of time to socially transition before medically transitioning and it soon became clear that yes, I did identify as male, these feelings were my own, etc.
Almost 7 years on hormones I feel more connected to my headmates now since transitioning, as well as feeling more confident and comfortable in myself as a person.
Same with us and estrogen! Thank you for sharing that :)
Very cool topic! Our youngest is on this and started the dissolving recently with those meds. Thanks for the heads up! 💜
We first tried to voice that we were a girl at the age of 15 MONTHS old (confirmed with parents). This was in the 70's, so we had no concept of what being trans was, no internet, nothing. The most we had was a single book in the public library in the 80's, and tv/movie stereotypes. I believe that the trauma of being trans in the "dark ages", knowing full well my entire life that I was supposed to be a girl and thinking there was no escape, nothing that could be done about it, is one of the main reasons we became multiple.
We transitioned in the 90's and then were hospitalised for PTSD. Through therapy and the relief of finally being 'me', I discovered the others in our system. In fact our 2 main alters integrated shortly after because they weren't needed anymore to put on the 'act' of being male. Unfortunately, in the late 90's, being trans and multiple were considered mutually exclusive by the psychs, so our transition and our therapy was thrown into disarray and after many years of abuse, we swore never to see another psych or psych ward again.
Our system is about half male and half female, but the whole of our existence has been trans. We are female. Apart from a little discomfort with girly stuff from a couple of our male alters, there has never been any problem with our wanting to transition, except from a couple of introjects.
our body is transmaculine, we are on testosterone and looking to get top surgery. we're a weird case as in, our old host is identified by she/her pronouns, and i'm the host & a male celebrity introject. most of us dont actually consider themselves trans, and i only really do because i took over for the old host & essentially became trans by proxy. it's odd to think about and certainly not something i'd ever bring up with anyone handling our trans healthcare
[CW: system denial shenanigans, WPATH fun, and living the closet life]
At the intersection of trans and plural, the hardest part for us was excruciatingly obscerd body autonomy issues, and we thank our lucky stars it did not include friction between different sprinkles' gender experiences beyond simple misunderstanding, no real compromise required on gender expression between us. We had an arrangement where at least two protectors steered our thoughts away from any serious exploration of the possibility that we might be plural until after we successfully obtained our bit flip operation, shortly whereafter WALLS CAME DOWN. It didn't stop a lot of the terror and exhaustion from seeping (and sometimes brilliantly shining) through prior to that, so it was far from perfect and we had a heck of a gut-wrenching time getting our WPATH letters. It likely didn't help much with being covert that we had already needed almost completely stop using "I" because it felt too dysphoric so started using "we" instead, and we were rather frequently less verbal and occasionally nonverbal.
That "chicken or egg question" is interesting! It didn't occur to us to separate the two and ask which causes the other, as opposed to them being two sides of the same coin! We suspect it might be in part because for a long time we were used to thinking of gender as belonging to a human, as opposed to belonging to whomever is/are being that human at the moment, and didn't encounter terms like "genderfluid" and "polygender" until prolly late adolescence or early adulthood.
Our system's gender diversity seems limited to the edge of gender space spanning from feminine to agender: no one feels a masculine valence, nor one orthogonal to the binary, (maverique or aporagender) so we're kinda monotonic. Some sprinkles are assertively feminine, and none of the rest of us resist letting that shine into ourselves, so we are a woman. It feels just like how two sprinkles here seem to be at least partly canine introject, so we are all a puppy because no one cares to resist or wall off that influence. One of us is a positively, assertively parahuman fictive, and she makes us collectively a wannabe tentacle monster because no one resists that influence either. (It's not that all thoughts and feelings are like that, just some- apparently "identity" stuff, now we think of it. Desires, aversions and preferences, from leisure activity and tastes in food to intimacy orientation, still require negotiation and compromise like in most systems.)
Edit: Oh, yeah, timeline... December 2013: came out about gender dysphoria and started reaching out for help | Spring 2016: mental health episode triggered phase change from "I am not a man" to "we are a woman ...and barking is a thing we do, apparently" | June 2019: bit flip operation finally executed | Pandemic season: "Oh, apparently part of us wants to assert some ego boundaries. Is this what it's like to be more than one person?"
Heck yeah! Also I love that you call individual members sprinkles
@@WeAreAlexandra Haha, thanks. Our hubsband's girlfriend deserves credit for that! She accidentally gave us a perfect system name, years before we came out even.
"Husband's girlfriend" is a great phase, love when people sprinkle in poly stuff into stories 😍
This video really resonated with us, I'm the host of our system and i became aware of the system when we were around 10 months on HRT and i honestly don't know if i would have if found out at all if it wasn't for HRT, the emotional changes and relief of dysphoria really helped me to be able to focus on other things. Also, i had my estrogen levels way too high with one of my blood tests too and i don't know why (was like 3-5 times the normal range and even higher than ovulating cis women according to my doctor) but they're back to a pretty stable level now - Autumn of the Evergreen System
Yeah I also feel like that just happens sometimes ┐( ˘_˘)┌
We`ve identified as nonbinary for as long as we knew this word existed, I think it was around the time we were in high school. But since we were actually free to dress as boys despite having a female body, and our family and friends never really pressured us in any way, we just used female pronouns and let it go unless we were with our GSRM friends.
We usually felt fine with everything, except from age 22 to about 25, we started feeling a lot of dysphoria, and we started questioning if we weren`t in fact trans. That didn`t immediately go away, I don`t remember when it did because we were going through a burn out and things were bad in general, but when we were 28, that dysphoria seemed to be gone unless we thought about it, so we thought we were making it up. We know now that`s because we only have one alter who really suffers with it (I can`t say if it`s better or worse for me and all the other guys, since we can`t even recognize the exterior body as our own, but at least we don`t feel bad about it).
We were always extremely confused about our gender and used the NB "label" as a way to say "I don`t know and I can`t be bothered to dig up a label", but after we separated who is who, gender is an extremely simple thing for us. The vast majority of the system identifies as cis and feels no confusion about it (except we have a few genders that aren`t Earth genders so to speak with our aliens). A few of us feel weird about the body`s height, weight, or the size of our hands, but only one really gets bothered with the gender aspect. But most of us are male, which explains why we used to always navigate towards the male spectrum even while accepting female pronouns. (we still do that, since we haven`t really come out as a system IRL) We`ll come out as NB in safe situations, otherwise we don`t mention anything and let people assume.
That's very interesting! Thank you for sharing!
We found out we were trans last year, then we're a system back at the end of april beginning of may as our body started changing, then we caught covid, and more and more of us were slowly coming out of dormancy after we came out the other end of that feeling so much more alive, with our body so much better.
Glad you recovered okay!
I found out that I was transgender a little over four years ago and now that I have a system as well there is no difference to me I’m transitioning to female and all of my alters are female I’ll be at very young and rebellious and downright ornery but that’s what happen with me and yeah I’m gonna have to ask about progesterone if I pronounce that correctly and see if I can get on that myself otherwise my boobs are going to stay tiny like they are
For us, we realized we were trans a year or so before we started to come to terms with our plurality. We think accepting that part lay down the groundwork for us to collectively start to come to terms with the plurality, because we were finally in a place of acceptance for who we are rather than just surviving under the weight of the world expectations and assumptions of who we HAD to be.
We view our body as nonbinary. It could be because of the diverse selection of genders (and lack of gender) members of the system have. (With a higher percentage of people identifying outside of the binary). But it seems more like the body has its own gender separated from us individuals. It seems to be genderfluid. Sometimes this means that sysmates are more likely to front (or be comfortable fronting),if their gender identity aligns with what the body currently is.But there are times that sysmates end up fronting, and they can tell their identity is so different than where the body currently is in the gender spectrum. Usually those times are when the dysphoria is much greater.
It is complicated though. We are a polyframented system so there is a chance that it’s just co-fronting / co-consciousness that we are unaware of, and that the sysmate currently in charge of operating the body is one gender, and the person in charge of intellectual/mental stuff is another, which is why it feels that way... But it doesn’t seem like that’s the case the majority of time. So maybe one day as we understand the complexities of our system better, we will come to realize that the fluidity is just different sysmate’s gender identities. But as the years go by, we are still feeling that that doesn’t fit. And that the body really does have its own gender wheel separate from whoever happens to be conscious at any given point.
That does sound complicated!
i’ve identified as genderfluid since 12 or 13, started realizing i was plural at 19, and now looking back i think it was connected, in our case. cause dysphoria would come on for days, weeks, or months at a time and then just kinda stop. so i’d start questioning everything, and the more bigoted people in my life would interrogate me about it too. i’d slip up and refer to myself as as a girl again for a while, after all that fighting to be recognized as nb/male, but eventually my dysphoria would come back. anyway, now i think there are a few fem alters in our lil collective, but we’re mostly non-binary or dudes. since ~15 i’ve wanted to get top surgery but now i don’t feel such strong pressure to prove definitively that i’m absolutely not a girl and there’s not even 0.001% of femininity in me lol
It's definitely complicated
Gebura: good luck with prog. no idea how common this effect is, but taking it makes us sleepy and dizzy in 1-2 hours, and we basically halved our otc sleep meds dose once we started it. also, amusingly, I think we generally consider the body to be binary trans even tho there's not a single binary person in this brain
Yeah, our doctor told us about that, she said if we get that to just take it right before bed. And that's funny! Hadn't heard of that arrangement before
Definitely check with a doctor first. When we switched to taking them sublingually, we made sure to cut our dosage by 1/3 and it was still a little high. Now, we take one in the morning split half sublingually/half orally and same with afternoon and whole pill orally at night, because it does a thing that way. we spread them out since sublingually makes it spike more and i'm neurotic so we need everything as level as possible. however, even thou WPATH guidelines state the estradiol levels shouldn't be much above 100 ng/ml or something like that, its wrong and they're totally fine to be much higher. You just don't want it to be in like the 500-600s for an extended period of time. We try to keep ours between 250-300 and we feel pretty good. Progesterone is absolutely necessary. Taking a single pill rectally or vaginally depending, is supposed to be the most effective method, otherwise, we take 2 a day orally and our levels are optimal. Progesterone potentiates all feminization, and not only regulates mood, but cell growth as well. All cis girls and women require estrogens and progesterone to function normally, so its incredibly weird that it's not the standard for trans fem regimens. we also supplement with a milk thistle complex to help the burden on the liver.
Always insist on bioidentical, never synthetic.
Side note: spiro is poop and rarely necessary, as estradiol and progesterone together typically naturally suppress it to cis levels on their own. However, bicalutamide might come in handy. it doesn't mitigate T production, but instead, keeps it and DHT from binding to androgen receptors, so it's neaty pants. have a wonderful day amazing peoples!
For us, transition was definitely a prerequisite to realizing and accepting our plurality.
Pre-transition one of our alters was locked up just about all the time, because while the body ran on T, she was a danger to all of us.
Transitioning actually triggered a several week dialog, me talking, her emoting, with me calming her down, and ensuring her that I'll make sure that our body is never T dominated again.
We consider ourself a nonbinary woman overall.
Nina is closer to an agender woman when she's alone,
Tanja is very much a girl, and often partially fuses with Nina, making Nina feel significantly more female,
Tom has settled into nonbinary dude who feels better with E than with T in our system.
🤣 love this title!!! and such great info 👍
what helped me find out I was trans was when one of our newer headmates at the time was certain she was a girl. We had a lot of conversations about what our body should be, but eventually, I realised I'd be happier as a girl, too. My eggshell was preeetty thick :p
Ha! Yes! First like! Love you all!
I love watching your channel it's been very helpful to me and my system.
I'm so glad! 🥰
We actually made a survey about gender and Dissociation which focuses on some trans experiences. It mainly aims to address issues with regards to access of treatment but it also asks a bit about timelines! forms.gle/NpVa9Tw1etYwpnJx7 here you go if you're interested I'd super appreciate it!
Yep that was me on Twitter. ^_^
Hell yes. I only came out as trans and genderless when I was 48 (10 years ago now), and literally only emerged as a system in the last few months (after remembering more about my abuse). As a system, we’re a mixture of younger amab versions of me and younger versions of an alternative timeline version of me who was afab but is as genderless as I am, we have interesting tension around ideal body (boobs are optional), but luckily for me nobody in there wants an outie, because that ship has sailed :) (oh and one of us is a forest god, so gender is irrelevant there too)
We haven't ever, once, had a cis member of our system, which is kind of funny to wis. Wi know for a fact that every single past host was either cisn't or unaware of gender; currently, we have no binary or cis headmates.
So, to us, our body is a trans body, and our whole system is a trans system. We think a lot of the trauma that made out system was likely trans related. So, I don't know, maybe our bodymind was so inherently trans that no part of it could ever be binary, cis, or gender conforming. Wi just find it interesting.
First, I apologize if this may sound rude. We're an OSDD1B system, but do have some amnesia...I especially have emotional amnesia. This is only my experience. I've been aware I've had a boy since I was 7 in my system. He cut our hair at 8 years old because he didn't like our long hair. He can recall that I was self conscious with a bowl haircut. I can recall him making a Christmas list and putting boy toys on the list. It was a confusing time, because I was a kid. I thought I was wanting to be a boy, but not really. I remember feeling like a boy from time to time, which I can now--along with my therapist--see that I was probably co-con or blended. My parents were concerned along with my grandmother at the time. I can clearly remember my grandmother asking my mom if I was okay...if it was really okay to get me the boy toys I asked for. I felt a bit confused about myself and my identity, because one of the major issues DID/OSDD individuals have is identifying with the self. But, I -- D liked being a girl. Pete liked being a boy. In my system the genders are equally split. Aside from me, I have 2 girls, 2 boys. In my situation, I'm really glad my parents were not aware of putting me on hormone blockers, or had the education to think I might be trans. My trauma was the culprit for my alter and the boy. He is homosexual, and a sexual alter. I am heterosexual and asexual. So you can see the basic issues I have with him. If I had been seen as a trans, I feel my trauma in my teen years would have been gravely overlooked, and continued. And...I would have given Pete (a persecutor) room to thrive.
Personally, whenever I hear about a kid being put on hormone blockers or a parent thinks their kid is trans, I think to myself...I really hope there isn't a hidden trauma occurring or that the child doesn't think they are in a safe place to tell someone their parent could be the abuser. So...I'm fully against children transitioning because of my own experience. Now, as a multiple, I do not think of myself in modern terms like non-binary or things like that. I am just a person with different identity states. For me, allowing them to have identities and fully develop based on terms causes too much disruption...it becomes too chaotic and they want their own lives. They're very different than I am. It's enough and too much to simply identify as OSDD1B. To add on more terms and labels to my name...it's too much. Thanks for listening. If you have any feedback, it's welcome. D :)
Hormone blockers just pause puberty. During that time kids can play around with gender presentation and identity and figure out what's right for them without potentially having incorrect hormones permanently alter their body. Just because you're a cis girl with trauma doesn't mean trans kids should suffer.