So the good news is that I’ve been on hormones for about a year. The bad news is that the official medical instance gives everyone the exact same dosage of the medication, no matter your weight, metabolism, current hormone levels, age, or any other factor that may introduce meaningful variance. All this is to say that, for some months in 2020, in the middle of pandemic isolation, I was also being chemically depressed.
I’m on a mix of testosterone blockers and estrogen supplements. This makes sense: it is intended to bring my hormone levels closer to that of an average cis woman. And the package works. My blood levels have changed. But they changed a bit too radically.
After very few months, my energy levels were at an all-time low. My concentration was shot, and my mood was bad. Very bad. I mean: when I’m in a bad mood, I’m grumpy but energised. What was happening here was new to me. I was empty. That’s bad. I never feel empty, for better or for worse. But now I did. Horribly so. I was, for the first time in years, beginning to feel suicidal.
And I remembered something about Alan Turing. A fun little distraction, the man who won the war and who was hated by his country for loving men. What the government did to him after the war is one of those despicable things so horrible that the government officially apologised for his treatment. Posthumously, of course. It was so bad that Queen Elizabeth II pardoned him 59 years after his death. I’d be more impressed if he hadn’t died during her reign. She could have been a little quicker on the call there.
What the government did to him was, well, first of all to consider him a criminal, but also to give him chemical castration treatment. If that sounds spooky, it is. It’s a medical program that is intended to lower one’s testosterone levels, with the hopes of reducing their libido to zero. And, because Alan Turing was Criminally Gay, he needed to have his libido slashed, so that he wouldn’t gay so much anymore. It was that, see, or incarceration.
Now, one of the side effects of testosterone reduction is that, if done at too great of an effect, you also become depressed. Horribly, horribly depressed. A prominent theory about Alan Turing’s death is that depression took him really low, and he died by suicide. And this brings us to my 2020 realisation.
On a rough day with a lot of introspection, I stood in a corner of my apartment, and I realised that I was also being chemically depressed. It struck me that my misery was being induced. When I finally got my blood levels tested, the results indicated no measurable testosterone. The dosage was up to four times too high.
We adjusted my dosage, and I learned that every patient, no matter their medical information, gets the same treatment. I learned that all my trans friends have been through the same process, with the same doctors at the helm. And we all improved measurably upon changing the dosage. I stopped being suicidal, for example. Pretty good improvement in my book.
There’s a story the doctors tell every patient at our clinic: We’re just looking out for you. We’re helping you make the right choice. We’re just here to provide guidance.
But it’s hard to take that seriously when nobody looks at the data, when nobody considers the impact of a mistake, and when even my primary psychologist routinely forgets my pronouns. The only bitter consolation is that at least in this way I am being treated as a woman: having my medical concerns ignored by men.