Abortion, Atrophy, Family Planning, Hormone Replacement Therapy, PCOS, PrEP, UTI
Ale: Can you tell me your name? How old are you? Where are you from, and your pronouns?
Cyd: My name is Cyd, I’m 40, and I live in the Catskills, but I’m from New Mexico, and my pronouns are he/him.
Ale: Obviously, you wanted to participate in this project because you’re my friend and I asked you to, but let’s say we hadn’t known each other and somebody approached you, telling you they’re working on a project about trans masculinity, reproductive health, and community care. What would have made you want to participate?
Cyd: When I first transitioned, that was such a far-away part of the conversation. Reproductive care in terms of either having or not having a child, was something that kind of felt like it was to the side of transition. The conversation was that if you transition, you’re sterilized. It’s been really world-shifting to see that become a much more present conversation, the idea of continuing to have births or raising children. Also thinking about abortions and having that be a conversation of something that could happen, instead of what it was originally, which is you hope it doesn’t happen, and you don’t have a lot of information about how likely it is that you will become pregnant or not.
Ale: Honestly, I still think it isn’t. Do you want to tell me more about how reproductive health for trans men wasn’t part of the conversation and how you became aware of it?
Cyd: The first time that someone asked me what my wishes were around reproductive health, and whether or not I was considering forms of fertility maintenance, or freezing my eggs, or something like that, was when I lived in New York City. That would have been almost 10 years after I transitioned. Even though at the time I wasn’t necessarily thinking that I wanted to give birth, I think that really opened the door for me to consider it, which then I did in a much more intentional way with my partner a few years later.
Ale: Do you want to tell me more? How was that experience of wanting to have a kid with your partner and figuring it out?
Cyd: I think I had talked with my partner about whether or not children would be part of our future a couple of years into our relationship, but I always thought of that as an adoption thing or fostering. As I looked into adoption, I just kind of found out how inaccessible that was. It was so high cost, and there are a lot of regulations around being two trans people, so it seemed very impossible.
So we kind of negotiated that conversation about whether or not we wanted kids at all. She really wanted kids if they were our [bio] children. For her, there’s something that felt really powerful about being two trans people making a baby. I don’t want to speak for her, but for her in the early parts of coming to terms with being queer and trans was the idea of taking yourself out of the genetic pool, a part of being queer is no longer reproducing.
Ale: That feels like such a damaging rhetoric of being queer. At the end, I just see it as another form of controlling our bodies.
Cyd: Yeah. That was a really powerful thing for her to reckon with and not see as part of the bargain. I think for both of us the idea of making a baby together — being two very differently looking people — to create that life felt like a really beautiful thing for us to do together as a family, but also conceptually. We tried for a year and a half, and it was really difficult because I’ve got off my hormones kind of circumstantially. I didn’t go off hormones being like “it’s time for me to get pregnant.” No, I went off hormones because COVID started, and it was kind of hard to get a doctor. I was also wondering if being off hormones would help me process my feelings a little bit better about what was happening in the world, because sometimes testosterone can be a little bit blocking haha.
Ale: For someone like me, that could be so relieving because I don’t have to feel everything so deeply haha. But I get that after being on it for so many years, you just want to see what happens if you’re off it again.
Cyd: Yeah. And I think it started as “nice, the world is opening up, my emotions are opening up,” but then I’m like “Whoa, too much. Too much.” So I started for not those reasons, but then I had already been off T for four months when we started being like “we’re home all the time, we have a lot of time for each other.” I think that’s also a big part of why everyone tried and got pregnant during COVID. We were spending a lot of intimate, relationship-building time with each other.
So that’s when that conversation was allowed a lot of breathing room. Then we started trying, just the two of us, without any conversations with a doctor or anything. I think we did that for like four months before seeking support around fertility because she’d been on estrogen for at least five years at that point, and it takes a while.
Ale: That feels kinda radical to me. Right now, there are a lot of bigots boiling down health care for trans youth to infertility, and never being able to reproduce again, so two trans people being like “that’s not how it works” and “it’s not as simple as hormones,” feels cool to me. I get excited whenever someone shamelessly claims their bodily autonomy.
So what happened after you kept trying?
Cyd: I think it usually can take between six months and a year for someone to become fertile again after stopping estrogen. So we went to a fertility specialist to see if we could get support with that, and it was a pretty mid experience. We looked for an LGBTQ fertility specialist, and we went to somebody who could not figure out which one of us was the person getting pregnant, and we were being really upfront about what was going on, and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around it. So we went to somebody else who was definitely more professional, but she just didn’t have a lot of information. She had really general advice, like stop smoking weed and don’t wear tight underwear.
Ale: Was she not trans competent?
Cyd: No, it’s not that they weren’t trans competent. I think they were. They were professional, but I think they didn’t really know what it would look like to change hormonal balance and how long it would take or what would support that. I think now that I’m an herbalist, there’s a lot of support that I could think of in terms of liver clearing and trying to get estrogen out of your system faster, but that kind of stuff didn’t occur to them.
“I was thinking about the similarities between being pregnant and early transition, of the thing where you’re in this new relationship with your body changing all the time in ways that are unexpected. You kind of know what to expect, but it is new and different, and it puts you and your body in a way that I think I can tend to be pretty checked out from what’s going on in here.”
Ale: So you both got off hormones, and I know you can only speak for yourself, but how did that make you feel in your body or your mind?
Cyd: It was an emotional roller coaster. We were doing this thing that once you’re pregnant, your life is going to change forever. We were living in a house of seven people, our life was super social, and we were part of really big communities and doing big things all the time. Once you have a baby, your life has to become a lot smaller, and not in the nuclear family kind of way, but you have to control your environment a little bit more. So it felt pretty wild to be daring that every month, and then also getting your hopes up about it and creating a narrative around what that would mean for your life together. Friends were really excited, and people in the community wanted a baby. Everyone kind of had their own investment in it, but then be let down every month.
It was a really beautiful experience. I think that the process changed our relationship and our trust in each other in a way that I feel so grateful for. It was something that was not always easy for us to navigate because I was crying and sad all the time and she was horny. It wasn’t the easiest match-up of our emotions all the time, but I think we navigated it really well together. That trust really enabled us to think about — even if we’re not trying to have a baby — we now know that we could care for something together. We can do a really hard project together.
Ale: I’m someone who feels extremely dysphoria when I have to deal with my reproductive health, but I’m wondering how it was for you, the thought of being pregnant?
Cyd: I don’t know if I ever truly answered that. I have some friends who are very pregnant right now, and I was thinking about the similarities between being pregnant and early transition, of the thing where you’re in this new relationship with your body changing all the time in ways that are unexpected. You kind of know what to expect, but it is new and different, and it puts you and your body in a way that I think I can tend to be pretty checked out from what’s going on in here.
I think I was excited about the challenge of dealing with that, of things that are changing, and I have to acknowledge it, and I have to feel it. People get really into the idea of being pregnant and I think there’s a little bit of an erotic thing or eroticness that sounded interesting to me, but I wasn’t excited about what that would mean socially. I wasn’t really excited about having a baby come out of my body. It’s scary. It’s a dangerous thing to have happen. I think I wasn’t sure how I was gonna feel, if I was gonna feel really dysphoric, or if it was gonna be a cool project, and that was always the interesting kind of blooming part of it.
Ale: It might feel like a second reborn, especially when comparing early transition to pregnancy and being in that in-between stages. Things are changing and you’re giving birth to a new version of yourself, a new life.
Cyd: And if you want to get what you want, you have to kind of go through this usually very awkward period.
Ale: It’s like two different forms of giving birth. If you had actually gotten pregnant, how do you think you would have done it?
Cyd: I definitely would have wanted to do a vaginal birth, because it’s way healthier for the baby, and I can deal with a lot of pain and I’ve dealt with pain before. There were some online groups I went to, of people trying to get pregnant or being pregnant or having kids who are trans and queer, and that was a really cool resource. I was looking into midwives and stuff like that. I would have wanted to work with somebody who could really support me through that process. I think I would have preferred not to do a hospital birth.
Ale: There are so many trans and queer doulas now. There are a lot of trans people trying.
Cyd: Which is kind of cool. It’s so interesting and it’s not that novel anymore.
Ale: You’re also a sex worker, so I wanted to ask if you’ve had any other experiences with dealing with your reproductive health — things like birth control, or abortion or PrEP.
Cyd: I did just use testosterone as birth control, and I was lucky enough that it worked hahaha. I definitely knew people who it didn’t work for and who unexpectedly got pregnant, but I just got lucky.
Ale: That’s the best case scenario. Did you know that it was going to work as birth control when you first started T?
Cyd: I think it was just told to me that it would work like birth control and then I started finding out that it didn’t always. And you know, I guess I could get sloppy with my shot, but when I first started taking testosterone, there was an idea that you would take testosterone and then it would take six months for you to start menstruating again or something like that, and that just really isn’t true. It’s different for everybody, but I think I started menstruating two months after I stopped taking T. There are some people who are still menstruating and taking T, everybody is very different. It’s interesting because I worked in reproductive health for a while at St James Infirmary and I was mostly doing STI work, which is such a part of it, and I definitely had many experiences there.
Ale: Any you want to share?
Cyd: I mean, other than getting a lot of STIs, specifically when it comes to trans health, one thing that feels pertinent is how hormones change a lot of things about your reproductive organs. Atrophy is a part of that and I had this period of time where I kept getting symptoms of what seemed like gonorrhea, but I was just getting it every month. I was doing sex work, but I was doing it with condoms and I wasn’t clear as to why it was happening all the time. I kept going to the doctor, and they just kept treating me with antibiotics for gonorrhea, and not really letting me wait to get the result of the tests.
Ale: So they didn’t really know if it was actually gonorrhea?
Cyd: They didn’t know, but they were like “you’re here and we have to treat you.” I ended up getting treated for gonorrhea like six times before I did my own research and learned that those symptoms were really common on people who had been on testosterone for over a decade, because it was atrophy and the doctors had no fucking idea.
Ale: I’m not surprised. It sucks that this is not the first time I’m hearing this.
Cyd: I also had the same thing where I was getting new UTIs all the time, and getting treated for that, and that is also a part of atrophy, but both times, I kind of had to do my own research around that.
Ale: When these things were happening, and you had the fake gonorrhea and the UTIs, did you have anyone that you could talk to, other friends that you could be like “hey this is happening?”
Cyd: For the UTI thing, I learned about that on Reddit, for the discharge thing, it was just by oversharing with lots of different trans men, because that happened before Reddit.
Ale: So you were just talking among each other?
Cyd: I didn’t want to overshare, but now it’s a little easier. At that time, it was just being like “I don’t understand what’s happening,” and having to talk a lot with other sexually active and older trans men.
Ale: Did you ever had any pregnancy scares while you were doing sex work or even before?
Cyd: I got pregnant when I was a teenager. It was really scary. It was with my boyfriend who was a lot older than me and my parents didn’t know. I gave myself an herbal abortion, which worked and that was great.
Ale: Were you at all aware of your gender and your transness when that happened?
Cyd: I think I always grew up being like, “there’s something off about me and maybe I’m queer,” but then I wasn’t really attracted to women, so I thought that was weird. I had never heard of a trans man, the only trans people that I kind of knew of at the time living in New Mexico were people in town that were like “those people are weird.” I wasn’t even allowed to watch Jerry Springer.
Ale: Do you remember who was the first trans person you met?
Cyd: When I lived in Australia, there was a trans guy called Jack, who I remember just being like, “wow, the mystery of this person, why do I like him so much?” I never really spent time with him until after I became closer to queerness. Then I met this guy Ambrose, and became obsessed with him almost immediately. That was in the 20s part of my life, where I was very headstrong. I left my boyfriend and then transitioned a year later.
Ale: So you came out while living in Australia?
Cyd: I came out as nonbinary in Australia, or genderqueer, as we called it then.
Ale: People still call it genderqueer, I think. I like that term better anyway, more than nonbinary because that just feels too academic to me.
Cyd: Too academic and just defining yourself by what you’re not feels weird.
Ale: So you didn’t start all the gender fuckery in Australia?
Cyd: I was out as gender queer for a year after I met Ambrose and then I went by myself to the United States to live a fabulous queer life haha. The thing that happened right before I moved to San Francisco where my brain started to really think about my gender is that I had really bad Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome [PCOS] and that had been a really big issue in my life — really bad PMDD [Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder] heavy menstrual periods that were really disruptive to my life. I went to somebody in Australia, and they said “this is what’s happening, you have all of these follicles” and I don’t know why they said this to me but they’re like, “your have two options, to go on birth control or to go on testosterone.”
I remember being like, “Oh, great an excuse to go on testosterone,” but that idea was kind of very surprising to me. I’d been nonbinary and I was dating a lot of trans men and stuff like that, but I remember that being kind of shocking. It was kind of like a thought process for me. I remember walking around town after a doctor’s appointment being like “that’s really weird that I’m so excited about going on T.” That was right before I went to the United States and I was part of all these big groups of trans and queer people and I think I saw a lot of possibilities and it was a lot rarer at the time to be of gay and trans identity, which is how I identified at the time. Then on the morning of the Trans March, I woke up, went to the park with scissors, and asked someone to cut my hair and then change my name, and that was it.
Ale: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, the gateway to transness hahaha.
Cyd: Hahaha honestly, there seems to be a bit of a connection.
Ale: Honestly, if there are any takeaways from this project, it’s how much reproductive health is tied to transness. Do you think you would associate the way you felt about your reproductive health to dysphoria, or that doesn’t even feel accurate?
Cyd: I don’t think so. It’s interesting, I definitely do have dysphoria. When I went off hormones to try and get pregnant, I became very dysphoric, but I think maybe more mentally than physically. I definitely didn’t like how my body was changing, but I think it’s more that I don’t like how estrogen feels in my system. It’s not my drug of choice. When I have estrogen as my main hormone, I don’t feel good. It’s really bad for my mental health and I think that’s always been true because I really struggled with my mental health in my 20s. Two years after starting testosterone, I just started to become a lot more stable as a person. Some of that is age, but definitely being on testosterone played a big part.
In a similar way to how I unconsciously crept into the idea of transition, I think my approach to thinking about my body also doesn’t feel as straightforward. I was doing sex work, and I was used to thinking about my body more as how advantageous certain things were. Maybe I was always a little bit checked out about how it felt for myself. I remember when I got top surgery, I don’t think I felt like I hated my boobs and that I needed to get rid of them. For me, I was like “that’s not how I want to move through the world. I want to be able to move through the world more as male and this is getting in the way of that.” I think some people experience dysphoria by looking at their body with disgust, but I don’t think I’ve had a lot of disgust about my body in that way.
Ale: It sound like for you, it’s definitely more psychological, or more of a mental process
Cyd: Yeah, more mentally, but on the other hand, I think that’s the easier way of thinking about it. Like, how would I feel about having boobs right now? I wouldn’t feel great.
“I don’t think I could have imagined being this happy and this content in my life and in my body, you know? And that’s the thing, my parents don’t talk to me, and people think the process of being trans is one of damage and destruction and I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know why someone’s trans, but I do know that I was very unhappy, and now I’m happy and that’s it. That’s my reality.”
Ale: None of this is a monolith. For some people, it’s very physical. For some others, it’s more internal. For me, I think it’s a combination of both. The association of certain things to femininity really annoy me, and I don’t like it, and it makes me feel really bad.
Cyd: Once I transitioned and I was like, I’m a man or whatever — this doesn’t feel great to say — but it made me really upset to have people be like, you’re a dyke. I really didn’t like that because that’s what people thought I was.
Ale: That is really annoying though, to be perceived as something you’re really not. Talking about PCOS as the gateway to transness makes me think about my life right now and whether to get on T again, but there are just certain things I don’t want to change about my body – I wish I could pick and choose.
Cyd: There’s always a give and take – do I enjoy having a hairy back? No! but I do enjoy having an extremely consistent emotional range? That’s really nice. I don’t think I could have imagined being this happy and this content in my life and in my body, you know? And that’s the thing, my parents don’t talk to me, and people think the process of being trans is one of damage and destruction and I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know why someone’s trans, but I do know that I was very unhappy, and now I’m happy and that’s it. That’s my reality.
Ale: When you were doing sex work, were you ever on PrEP?
Cyd: I started on PrEP a couple of times, but it gave me really bad digestive issues, and I think it kind of fucked with my mental health. Also, I think I had some political questions about how PrEP was operating in society. I think it’s a good tool, but I still feel uncomfortable with it.
Ale: Want to say a little bit more about that?
Cyd: PrEP came out when I was in Act Up. A big part of my life was Act Up. The profit motive for drug companies to have everybody taking HIV medication instead of really addressing the health needs of people who are HIV positive worldwide feels gross. There’s a lot of ways in which PrEP may have destigmatized HIV, but I think there’s also a lot of ways in which it kinda stopped people from having conversations and maybe having deeper conversations and care work with each other. Take a pill, absolutely, it can be a really great tool, but the way that it has played out in society feels concerning to me. Especially because that tool is most likely going to go away, and now nobody has the skills to talk to each other.
Ale: That’s the thing with big pharma and their for-profit model — they’re never going to do it in a way that it’s actually beneficial for the people using it. It’s more of a band-aid on a bigger problem. Just to wrap it up, what else do you want to share about any of the things I asked?
Cyd: One of the things I just want to say is that before she passed, Cecilia [Gentili] was thinking about donating her sperm to a couple of different people, and my friend Major had a baby when she was a lot older. The idea that people have babies to continue themselves on is problematic in a lot of ways because it makes people treat their children really shitty, but that’s also a really beautiful thing to have as well because biology is real.
From having a dead mom that I didn’t really get to meet, but got to learn about through letters I can tell that we’re similar, so I think there is something that feels really important about brilliant, beautiful, wonderful, trans people that are a part of our lives continuing on into the future after their bodies are gone.
Ale: I know it’s problematic to have that mentality of having your kids carry your legacy, but some people’s legacy should continue whether it’s through their bio children or someone else.
Cyd: Their kids might be really different from them. I’m not saying that they’re going to be the next trans savior, or that they’re gonna be trans, but it would be really nice to have some elements of Ceci here with us today. You know, whether that’s just her smile or parts of her smile, or personality, because that does come through whether we want it or not.
