[18] Tournelle du Soleil (Patreon)

ATTENTION. Content warning: today's writing includes blunt discussions of sexual health, anatomy, bottom growth and transition; there are brief mentions of sex and sexual assault. Some language and discussion of attitudes around transition and physical change maybe be upsetting for some readers in today's segment.

It's a longer instalment, because I didn't feel like today's subject matter was suitable for cliffhangers (about double the length of your usual reads).

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I decided to begin taking as low a dose of testosterone as I could possibly take in order to see if it could reduce the extremity of symptoms that I was experiencing every month thanks to PMDD.

Within a couple weeks of starting testosterone, the mental and emotional difference I noticed in myself was striking. It was like I’d been living my life as a heavy grey day, and then a couple week of testosterone and – bam – the sun came out. 

I felt all my feelings –the highs, the lows– but I was more even-keeled on the whole. There was none of the flatness or numbness that I'd felt from the anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, or mood stabilizers that one specialist after another had put me on before. Idly, I wondered what it meant that I seemed to be functioning so much better with more of this hormone in my body. I decided I was happy with remaining curious and open about what continuing changes might come and –for once– to try to focus less on the why of it.

Months passed.

Other changes happened, too.

By the third month, my voice started changing: it cracked, squeaked, and popped. I was hoarse –like I had a bad chest cold. I didn’t mind it. Before long, it settled into a deeper place.

After a summer of hard circus training in Montréal I was about 20 lbs / 10 kg of muscle heavier. I was sleeping better. I was healing faster and recovering from hard training faster.

My appetite was up. My hands and feet weren’t icy cold at night anymore. And I was starting to feel good about how I looked when I would see myself in the mirror, for the first time in my life.

The first time.

The first time … ever? I would wonder to myself. That can’t be true, can it?

But it was.

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Beginning testosterone therapy felt like grabbing onto a buoy in the midst of a lifetime of rough, choppy waters. While some of the changes were a little scary, it was the action of change itself –not whatever happened to be changing– that made me feel unsure at times.

Starting with a low dose was letting me experience those changes as slowly as possible, giving me time to check in with myself over and over to see if I was okay with what was happening. And I was – even in the midst of other physical changes that I'd felt particularly intense anxiety about ... like bottom growth. And that started before all the other changes – literally only a week or two after beginning T.

For those of you who are wondering what the hell ‘bottom growth’ is, allow me to put you swiftly out of your misery: 'bottom growth' is a phrase commonly used by trans men, and transmasculine and non-binary people to refer to cliteral hypertrophy (or, an increase in the length and width of the clitoris) that happens when you take testosterone. 

Not everyone who takes T will experience it, but the vast majority will. The inevitability of experiencing bottom growth if I took T remained one of the reasons highest on my list of reasons why I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on hormones. It is deeply ironic –and a plot twist I never anticipated– that bottom growth has ended up being one of the most affirming aspects of my transition so far.

It's a subject that manages to instill no small amount of anxiety, apprehension, and/or revulsion in AFAB non-binary folks who are researching and thinking about whether or not they want to start testosterone (This attitude doesn't seem to exist (or exist in the same way) in FTM/trans men's communities.) At the time I was first trying to research this (somewhere around 2016, but maybe even earlier than that) every online conversation I could find on the subject was littered with other non-binary people like me echoing all my worst fears about the subject:

Ew, that's disgusting.

I would love to go on T but ... *shudder* bottom growth.

It's fine if other people want it, but it's not for me, you know?

My sex education in the mid-2000s in a small town in Ontario certainly did not include discussions on the fact that there is already an incredible diversity in size and length of clitorises in general, regardless of whether or not you introduce additional testosterone into your system at some point. I had undertaken enough science article deep-dives on the internet as a young adult to have learned that the structure of clitorises is homologous to penises, but that self-directed learning did not extend further than that. 

Is it any wonder, though, that I didn't know any better...? The full anatomy of the clitoris wasn't mapped until 2005. Read that again. Less than twenty years ago. We have a urologist at the University of Melbourne named Helen O'Connell to thank for this research; but even since this groundbreaking study, O'Connell notes that clitoral anatomy is still largely absent from medical curriculum and medical research. (It's fine, though. It's not like it's a body part that about half the world has or anything [sarcasm])

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Bottom growth is a permanent change. It's one of the first changes that most people report experiencing when beginning testosterone therapy – in as little as a week for some people, and within three to five months for most others. Bottom growth will top out around the 1 to 2 year mark on testosterone at anywhere from 1 to 4 cm, or half an inch to a little over two inches. Just like breast size, penis size, or body hair and facial hair density and distribution, the amount of bottom growth you might have as a result of taking testosterone can be a little ... or a lot. We've all got our genetic pre-sets. 

The language that would echo around the inside of my head when I would weigh the pros and cons of going on T was cruel, loaded, and completely out of alignment with the ways I thought I held space for other bodies, other ways of being, and my own body's capacity for change with age, ability, and the like:

Oh god I'll look gross.

Who would want to sleep with me? I

If I do this and change my mind and stop taking T, I'll have f***ed up  my body.

I saw these same sentiments echoed over and over again in countless internet comments over years of quietly poking around, trying to find community online, trying to find people like me. 

Beyond the un-ignorable weight of so many internet-strangers vociferously-expressed opinions, the fact of the matter was that I struggled so much with an immediate and deep discomfort even trying to imagine bottom growth that I couldn't articulate it further. Not even to myself.

My feelings towards my pre-T genitals were complicated: 

I didn't have any problem with being born with internal plumbing. I'd never felt like I was missing something by virtue of not having external plumbing. Unlike accounts that I could read from transmen online, I didn't feel like I was missing out by not being able to pee standing up. 

But I felt deeply uncomfortable with their outward appearance, and always had. 

I felt very minimal sensation in that part of my body, too (not  to the point of complete numbness, but to an extent that I felt like I derived no positive sensation there from myself or others). More than one mental health professional over the years) had attributed this to prior experiences of sexual assault, or strong negative media messaging directed towards women, or the popularity of pornography and warped expectations around what all our bodies should look and behave like. More than one sexual partner took this as a challenge to somehow outdo the imagined ineptitude of all other previous sexual partners (unsuccessfully). 

I didn't have any better answers for this phenomenon, and none of my friends seemed to be able to relate to it, so I mentally shrugged and tried to carry on focusing on the long list of other things that I did get physical enjoyment out of, sans intense mental discomfort. We're all allowed to be into different stuff, right? I didn't mind having the genitals I had, and they functioned acceptably. I just didn't like what the outside looked like, and didn't want to think about it.

The idea of bottom growth inducing more of what I was already not a big fan of didn't stir feelings of pleasant anticipation in me. Quite the opposite. I had zero desire to amplify (literally and figuratively) what I already felt a queasy, dissociation-inducing shame about. 

I just had to ... not think about what I looked like, and then I was fine (absolutely fine, thanks!) existing in the world as I was, and/or interacting with sexual partners, and that was that.

Other people who had genitals that looked like mine on the outside? That was totally fine. Looks great on them. Just dandy! But on me? Shudder.

It was a confusing mix.

It took me getting to a state of hopelessness about my mental health to reach a point where I felt like I didn’t have much to lose by trying a low dose of testosterone. By the time I started, I'd reached a point where I decided that literally any benign physical change was worth the price of admission for waking up in the morning and actually wanting to be here. You're not going to be having rewarding sexual interactions with anybody if you decide to shuffle off your mortal coil early.

I was already uncomfortable with this part of my body; so what if I traded one discomfort for another?  And at a low dose, there wouldn’t be any extreme or rapid changes that I couldn’t live with afterwards, should I decide to stop taking it.

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Bottom growth began for me right away – like, within the first week of taking T. I regarded its progress warily, even as I noticed and eased into the comfort that all the other wonderful things about taking T were bringing into my life. And as the latter progressed, I found that I didn't really mind what was happening with the former.

After about a year on T, my body was beginning to look more and more different from any version of itself that had existed prior. And that's when something truly unexpected shifted in my mind about my entire body. Bottom growth included.

I didn't look anything like the way I did before.

I didn't look anything like the way I did before.

It was a freeing realization.

It felt incredibly validating that my body had grown into ... something different. The body that I was in now –specifically what my genitals looked like, now– didn't much resemble what I had become reluctantly familiar with over my life so far. Against all my expectations, and against all my preconceived notions and anxieties, I felt so happy about this change. As my happiness, confidence, and satisfaction with my body grew, a slow cascade of realizations followed:

But if I hadn't even been able to stand looking at myself before with anything other than an all-consuming discomfort so strong that it tipped over into dissociation, had I ever actually been happy with my body, and with my genitals in particular? 

Had I actually been experiencing dysphoria about it the entire time? 

How could I not have figured this out before? How could I not have thought of this?

Actually, scratch that –

I had thought of that. But I had immediately dismissed it as a possible explanation.

Why?

Because I didn't want something different. I just ... didn't want what I had. And if I didn't want what I had, while simultaneously not feeling a strong wish that I had been born with a penis (like some of my FTM and non-binary friends would say) ... what was there to wait for? Hope for? Think about? 

Such was the logic of my immobilization; and such are my powers of avoidance that there were long periods of my life where I successfully convinced myself that I was simply neutral on the matter.

Now, I think: how on earth could it have possibly occurred to me that I might be able to like something I felt such profound discomfort around? Such deep discomfort that I couldn't even pay attention to it long enough to acknowledge the severity of said discomfort?

I don't have a solid answer, but I've got some good theories.

Maybe this is just further indication of my tolerance for discomfort; for how good I am at blocking out and tolerating things that don’t feel good. Or maybe it’s a classic autism and interoception problem: I have a hard time figuring out if I’m thirsty, hungry, and in pain. It stands to reason that maybe I would have a hard time figuring out a complex psycho-social and physiologically-activated discomfort with a particular part of my body, right?

Ultimately I’m not sure that the 'why' of it matters that much. It’s only in the light of this that I’m able to look back and perceive that perhaps I was tolerating something about myself before that I didn’t know I could change, and that that change would be so rewarding. 

The way I look now is not what I was born with. I feel like my body is customized in a way that fits better with whatever non-binary mischief is going on inside my head. I’m far more confident and happy than I ever was before as a result of it.

That being said –

It's all well and good to have discovered hitherto unthinkable levels of happiness and satisfaction with some of the most intimate and private parts of ones body when before it was a grey and desolate landscape in your mind –

But it's another thing to road-test your shiny-new bottom growth in the context of a professional setting where you, an autistic person who sometimes loses the ability to speak in times of significant stress, might need to explain to a room full of strangers who almost certainly don’t know about this fragile new joy in relation to a very specific facet (bottom growth) of your deeply personal decision (taking hormones), as it relates to a teeny-tiny costume that involves super fine, super tight power mesh over your crotch.

Oh god.

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Your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil arrives tomorrow at 7am EST / 1pm CEST. Until then, stay strange and wonderful - XO, ess