During the winter times I feel like the gender dysphoria is less intense because I can wear layers to hide my body, but during the summer I feel like the gender dysphoria is more intense. I am thinking that during the summer months I should wear looser t-shirts. In addition, I have heard from other transgender guys in the “Binder Boys” forum on Facebook that wearing darker colors and patterns may make the body look thinner and more toned and the patterns may draw the person’s attention (other people who look) to the patterns on the clothing rather than to parts of the body that may cause the transgender person to feel dysphoria. One of the transgender guys said that they think of themselves as a soul that they can customize with how they want to be seen because the soul is energy and people are spiritual beings and when they feel dysphoric they think of their body as a soul and they work on visualizing how they want to look and they find that it helps them. I think that the intense gender dysphoria that I have often makes me worried about my body which is why sometimes I find it difficult to focus on other things. I do wish that I wasn’t so anxious about myself and could relax some of the tension that I feel. Perhaps with more meditation I can work on detaching from my gender dysphoria so that it is less prominent and doesn’t interfere with my focus on life tasks. The gender dysphoria feels like a resistance in my body and I find myself holding myself tightly and feel like I am fighting myself to work on making myself look masculine because I worry about any curves on my body. This is why I am hoping to transition and start testosterone therapy as soon as possible because I know that it will help with the dysphoria. But currently I feel like I need to stop trying to fight with myself through working out a lot and binding my chest tightly because it is quite straining on my physical body. Even though the physical strain helps with the emotional gender dysphoria it is still straining on myself.

Dear Anita

I find that meditation helps me de-stress when I feel anxious. I am working on establishing a daily meditation practice and I find that it helps me have better mental clarity. The gender dysphoria is still there and I am aware of it but with meditation I can bring awareness to the gender dysphoria and tell myself that it’s okay and work on counting my breath. I often use my breath as an anchor when I feel anxious by imagining my inhale as inhaling positive energy and exhaling negative energy. I often inhale for a count of four and let out the breath for an exhale to the count of six and I imagine myself letting go of my anxiety and I envision a male role model that I look up to such as Harry Potter and I find that it helps. I imagine that with each inhale, I am bringing in positive qualities of the male role model I admire and with each exhale I am working on poking holes through the gender dysphoria. The gender dysphoria is like clouds in the blue sky of my mind and sometimes there are many clouds of anxious dysphoria that it blocks the blue skies in my mind and I become anxious. So I have been working on meditation to imagine the gender dysphoria as clouds that darken the skies in my mind and when the gender dysphoria comes and makes it difficult to concentrate, I say to it “it’s okay that I’m feeling anxious now. I’ll be okay. I embrace the feeling. The gender dysphoria is like clouds passing by in the sky and it’s okay.” Then having acknowledged the gender dysphoria, I imagine that I am taking a pin and poking a hole in each cloud of gender dysphoria that darkens the blue skies of peace in my mind and as the clouds of gender dysphoria dissipate I imagine a warm sunlight shining through illuminating my mind and helping me lessen the gender dysphoria I have. And I tell myself “It’s okay. Some days there will be clouds of gender dysphoria keeping my mind from being at peace. But each cloud has a silver lining and the sunlight will shine again helping clear my mind.” I find that meditation helps increase my focus and work on lessening the gender dysphoria so it is not too overwhelming. The gender dysphoria will always be there until I start to transition and then it may start to fade away once I start testosterone therapy but currently I am working on making it so that the gender dysphoria doesn’t overwhelm my mind and cause me to feel so strained. I am hoping that with more meditation practice I can work on building my strength to stay strong when people question my gender identity and possibly improve my communication skills when explaining to people in person because meditation will provide me with more mental awareness so that I am not completely lost in gender dysphoria. There will be times when the gender dysphoria will be overwhelming and I will have to take a break and cry to let things out and I think that that’s okay. I find that it is better to let my emotions out in healthy ways rather than holding them in because they might erupt like a volcano when the pressure builds up or if a person buries the feelings they will feel numb and I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to bury the feelings under like burying rocks underneath sands in an ocean because a wave might bring them up again, so I think that it’s best to work on releasing the tensions and not letting them build. I am grateful to have this Tinybuddha forum to help me express my thoughts and work on myself. Thank you for your advice and for spreading your positivity into my life. I think that some transgender people do develop eating disorders such as anorexia to cope with their gender dysphoria and the anorexia gives them a way to control how their bodies look. They think that they can exercise and restrict their foods and possibly find a way to control how their body looks and ease their gender dysphoria because if their bodies look skinnier they will have less curves and look more masculine and so anorexia is quite common amongst transgender men. On the Facebook forum “Binder Boys” where transgender men share their experiences with each other, I have met three other transgender men who have struggled with anorexia. Another thing about anorexia is that since transgender people don’t feel fully connected with their bodies because they feel like their bodies don’t look the way they want to in their minds is that they will become anorexic to feel like they can influence their bodies in some way and possibly feel more of a connection to it because by regulating the exercise and food their bodies take in they think that they have some sense of connection and control over their bodies because most of the time they feel like they don’t belong in the body that they were born with. Anorexia can be a way for transgender men to find a sense of control in their bodies and feel like they are actually there in their bodies experiencing life because sometimes the emotional pain of gender dysphoria can cause transgender people to dissociate from their bodies and feel detached from it and with anorexia they can feel physically what they are doing to their bodies and it gives them a sense that they are real and sometimes helps them from feeling numb when they start to detach from their bodies because the physical exertion of the body sometimes brings their awareness back to their bodies. It is like trying to substitute emotional pain with physical pain because physical pain is easier to deal with since you can heal from cuts or bruises but emotional pain takes more time. So some transgender people may become anorexic as a way to cope with the emotional pain of gender dysphoria and give them a sense of self when they feel detached from their bodies because the physical exertion provides some feeling to stop them from trying to dissociate and numb things down. In addition, the anorexia seems as a sense of a protection against the loss of self if a transgender person decides to dissociate from their bodies because the anorexia provides a way for the transgender person to try to put what they feel into the strain of their body and with that even though they have emotional pain some of it is expressed through anorexia and it seems to give them a way to express their inner emotional pain on the outside by putting their bodies under strain because they believe that by putting the pain into the physical body it may be easier to deal with rather than holding the pain inside or numbing it down because emotional pain on the inside is difficult and numbing it down can cause a person to feel like they aren’t really living in their bodies. Therefore, although not all transgender people experience eating disorders such as anorexia, eating disorders are common amongst the transgender community because they sometimes seek ways to express their emotional pain and find a way to control how their bodies look since they are uncomfortable with their bodies. Gender dysphoria varies in intensity amongst transgender people and some transgender people may have intense dysphoria that causes them much stress and can interfere with normal daily tasks thinking and for those transgender people they often benefit from therapist appointments, and having resources to help them with their dysphoria because it can be intense at times. The transgender people with intense dysphoria are more likely to develop eating disorders to help them with their emotional stress and have higher chances of becoming severely depressed. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help transgender people with intense dysphoria work on developing healthy ways to express their feelings. Some cognitive behavioral therapies include listening to music to help the brain focus on something else besides the dysphoria, working on acknowledging the dysphoria and seeing what triggers there might be and reducing the triggers or helping the person imagine a safe space when in an environment/situation that might trigger their gender dysphoria, and possibly just letting the person cry and release the tension and then have them write about their feelings when they are calmer. Some cognitive behavioral therapy suggests having transgender people write about their feelings so that they can get them out on paper and then say “I acknowledge these feelings. I am okay. I may not feel okay now, but my heart is beating and I am still breathing and it will be okay.” It may be helpful for the person to focus their attention on their heart beat or breath because it draws awareness away from the dysphoria and turns it to more simpler which can help the person relax. In addition,another technique is after acknowledging the dysphoria is to look at what you (the transgender person) wrote and have them scrunch up that paper and throw it into the trash and have them imagine that they are releasing the tension. Then have them take deep breaths and think about with each exhale of letting go of the tension. Then after they feel less tense then they can write a story about how they want to be and have them make it descriptive and imagine that as they write the words on paper that they are creating what they want. These are some of the cognitive behavioral therapy tips that I have learned from the counselors at Stockton University that I ffind helpful and I am working on using them to help me because my dysphoria is quite intense and I am working on not letting it overwhelm me. I don’t want to be lost in gender dysphoria that I lose sense of the daily life tasks that I want to learn learn so that I can thrive in life. There are some transgender people who have lesser degree of dysphoria than me and even though they may have difficult times in life with their gender dysphoria their anxiety doesn’t limit them so much that they will lose focus when concentrating on daily tasks so I think that they have it slightly easier emotionally but I am certain that on certain days their dysphoria may be greater than other days so those transgender people with a lesser degree of gender dysphoria may experience discomfort but not so intense that it causes them to fall into a depression. The transgender people with intense dysphoria often benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy and with transitioning they often feel the most happier with themselves. They know that transitioning won’t solve all their problems such as financial budgeting, but it can make the gender dysphoria fade so that they feel less stressed in life and since they are more comfortable with themselves they will have a better mindset to focus on tasks. The transgender people who have intense dysphoria yearn to transition because they want to live life being comfortable with themselves and they don’t want to watch life pass  them by lost in gender dysphoria so their main focus is to get as much resources as possible and to start transitioning as early as when they are able to. They know that testosterone therapy has its risks and they acknowledge it as well as acknowledging the risks of the surgery but they think that it’s worth it to make themselves feel comfortable with their bodies. Currently meditation is a way for me to ease my intense gender dysphoria. I have been following a regular workout routine to help me with my health and taking breaks from working out as well as not working out to the extreme by reducing the number of workout reps that I do. I have a workout app that provides me with workouts workouts that help work my entire body and they only last for thirty- forty five minutes so that I get a healthy workout without straining myself too much. Likewise, I have been eating six small meals a day and making sure that I drink at least four cups of water. I work on eating healthy with oatmeal for breakfast, apple for a snack, salad with nuts or hard-boiled eggs for lunch, orange for a snack, and seafood/seaweed soup for dinner. The nutritionist at Stockton University that I saw when I was taking classes in the fall semester was very helpful in helping me build healthy meal plans and they provided advice on eating light meals like a protein bar, some nuts and fruits when on-the-go or when anxious to help keep blood sugar levels stable and to keep energy levels stable as well. I learned a lot from the nutritionist at Stockton University and even though I am on winter break until January 14th and won’t have appointments until the Spring semester starts,  I have learned a great deal that has helped me work on my health. Even though gender dysphoria may be difficult at times, I want to have health so that I have the energy to go for my goals. And with meditation and some of the cognitive behavioral therapy tips I learned from Stockton University counselors I  hope to make my gender dysphoria easier to cope with so that I don’t get so caught up in it that it becomes difficult to focus on daily tasks. I have been actively following the Facebook group “Binder Boys ” because they provide support and advice for transgender men who are working on transitioning. I am also keeping up-to-date on news about the transgender community and reading online links to build my knowledge. Just today (December 31st), I learned that transgender people experience “cognitive dissonance” which is a term to describe that how transgender people perceive themselves in their minds is different from how their bodies look and this causes them to feel disconnected from their bodies which results in symptoms of anxiety and gender dysphoria. Since transgender people experience cognitive dissonance they feel like how they see and identify themselves as in their minds doesn’t match how their bodies look and this causes them major distress known as gender dysphoria. Transgender people identify in their minds as the opposite gender from the one they were born as and it is the mismatch of who they see themselves as and who they want to be in their minds that is different from how their bodies look that makes them experience cognitive dissonance that results in gender dysphoria because they feel like they don’t belong in their current bodies and the discomfort makes them want to transition so that their bodies match how they see themselves in their minds. More knowledge is being amassed on the transgender community and it is fascinating to explore and with new advances in knowledge the world may may gain awareness about transgender people and work on helping them through their struggles. The transgender community has the highest rates of suicide aat 43% which is higher than other members in the LGBTQ community. To put this into perspective,  that means at least one out of every three transgender people will attempt suicide which is pretty significant. Therefore with more knowledge and awareness of the transgender community I hope that transgender people will receive more support and the rates of suicide will decrease.

I am grateful to have friends like you who help me keep striving during the difficult times. Thank you so much Anita for your advice and encouragement that provides a light in the darkness to illuminate my way  when I feel lost. Friends  like you have helped make life meaningful and help me strive to become a better person each. Thank you for being the special soul you are and for spreading your positivity into my life. May the new year bring you blessings of abundance, love and light to heal your sorrows.

I hope that with a daily meditation practice that I can make gender dysphoria easier to cope with and feel less anxious when around people who may question my gender identity. I think that wearing looser clothing helps and I have chest binders that bind my chest relatively well that are much less tighter and I often use them when I am working out because it is easier to workout in them. When I am out in public I will wear a tighter chest binder so that my chest looks completely flat and I will take slow, deep breaths so that my lungs get enough oxygen.

Have a great New Year,  hope things make sense .  Thank  you so much for your encouragement.

Resonance

I spend my time searching for the person I am deep inside

Trying to understand who I am without the expectations of the world outside

The voices of the world are like drums in my ears telling me who to be

While my heart beats out of rhythm trying to tell me that the world’s stereotypes don’t fit me

But if I don’t work on trying to find a place in their expectations, will they see me as who I want to be seen as?

Days go by and I feel like I’m trying to create a map to guide me along the way,  but I don’t think the path I follow is the one the world has

I can hear the sound of my heart beating loud and clear, wondering if the sounds that I am listening to on the inside will help me build myself up here

Looking for a way to be myself and also fit into the world, looking for something that resonates with me and who I want to be and will allow the world to still see me as a guy

Working out quite intensely as I try to make myself fit into a box of expectations that has my mind all caught in a knotted ties

I dream of finding resonance within myself so that I can find the person deep within without having all the sounds of the world

Can I find the person that I am deep within listening to the sounds of my heart with the music that unfurls?

Looking for a place in the world as I shed light on my broken pieces, hoping to heal

Sometimes I get caught in the stereotypes and the expectations because I want to be seen as a guy and then I start to wonder if I am truly real

At times I feel like the struggle to be most like a guy is making me lose touch with other things in life and that makes me fear, because I begin to worry that the struggle will make it difficult for me to move forward in life

And as I search for the parts that resonates with my inner self, there is anxiety that I am not doing enough or not enough and I am caught in my own mental strife

I want to work on finding myself and building who I am as a guy because I don’t know who I am yet, but I hope that I work out some things soon

Because I don’t want life to pass me by each day feeling like I’m not finding the things that resonates with me and that makes my heart beat anxious tunes

The irridescent glow of my soul sparks in the dark as I work on illuminating my way to help me through each day hoping that I find what I can resonate with so I don’t fade away

I am letting myself journey inward because I don’t think that the outside expectations of gender fit me and finding myself on the inside and from the inside I hope that I find the pieces of myself that resonates with me and helps the world see who I want to be.

Dear Anita

I think that I worry that I won’t achieve what I want when my life is over and I don’t want to feel like I lived a life without purpose. The pieces that I have don’t seem to fit together well, but I hope that I can shed light on them to help me heal from the doubts and fears that I have that make me feel down in life at times. I think that people have broken pieces so that they can work on shining the light into their inner selves because it is through the cracks of the broken pieces that the light can come in. Sometimes I worry that my gender dysphoria and anxiety with how others may perceive me makes me wonder if I am living life at times because I always seem to be a bit nervous. The thing is that I know that I feel comfortable as a male, but I am still working on understanding who I am as a guy which can be difficult because society tends to attribute certain traits as “masculine” so I feel like I’m being made to fit into a box so that I can be seen as male, but I find that the box of traits doesn’t really fit me well and sometimes I feel stressed because I don’t know who I am as a guy outside the box of expectations and sometimes I worry that if I don’t express the expectations of “masculinity” I might not be seen as a guy by society and that causes me much anxiety. Lately it seems like I’ve been trying to work on myself and being a guy even though it’s difficult and my family isn’t very accepting of it and I feel like the anxiety with trying to work on expressing myself is straining me that I am losing myself in trying to look more like a guy and not fully living because I am always anxious and wondering about myself and since my parents aren’t accepting of it (I still live with them as they help me with the college tuition and other financial things)   it can be difficult for me as I always feel like I’m not being enough in the world. I feel like I have become quite attached to looking the most like a guy as possible because I want to be a guy and it’s making me lose sight of other things in life and I feel stressed about that. The stress and anxiety has lead me to working out intensely and following a strict diet and being anorexic because I want to look more like a guy and not have any curves on my body and I worry about myself. I think my main focus of living a fulfilled life is working my way to transitioning and working on scientific research. I don’t need to be famous or have great titles, but I just want to feel alive within myself and feel comfortable with myself in the world and I think that would be a fulfilled life for me. I want to be able to enjoy each moment in life without having to worry if my body doesn’t look masculine enough or not as well as work on scientific research that helps advance medical treatments for diseases and I feel like if I can do that then I have a purpose in life. I think my fear is that my gender dysphoria may cause me to lose myself that I lose my way to my goals and if my life ends from gender dysphoria and anorexia I will feel sad that I didn’t live fully. Hope this makes sense! Thank you so much for all your support!

Dear Anita

Thank you so much for your advice. I hope that you have a great Christmas and a healthy, happy New Year.

I think that my social anxiety stems from my fear of people judging me because I have been judged harshly by my parents and I worry about what others think of me many times. I sometimes worry that I am not good enough for the world because I don’t know all the life skills that I need and sometimes I wonder if I can make it out into the world and be an independent individual. I know that I want to go into the scientific research field because I feel I have always been a scientist at heart who loves to analyze and question the world around me and look and research things, so pursuing science is a passion for me. It’s like I can see the big picture of my life, but I’m not sure of how to fit the little pieces of the puzzle to help me build the person I want to be. There are times when I feel like I am missing in life and I feel scared, these are the times when I feel the most gender dysphoria and I feel like my life will end before it has a chance to begin and I feel like I’m a hallow person who is not real but just existing in the world and it makes me scared that if I pass away that I won’t leave anything significant behind. I feel like I want to transition to become a guy and be a scientist, but sometimes I’m not sure how the pieces will fit together and then I’m afraid that my anxiety with how my body looks will cause me to lose myself and make my life meaningless. I want to live a life where I feel like I am living and not just going through the motions each day, a life where I can truly feel alive. I just feel like although I know what I want in life- to study science and transition- I am still working on the pieces and since they are pieces I am working on building up, I feel like I’m missing myself as a person. It’s like I can dream of the person I want to be and in my dreams I feel whole , but in reality I feel like I am missing because I don’t know how the pieces fit. As I work on finding myself, meditation helps me work with my emotions. I hope to heal from anorexia because it is straining consistently checking my weight worrying whether I look masculine enough. There are some people with gender dysphoria who feel uncomfortable with their bodies but they do not have eating disorders and there are some that do. Eating disorders such as anorexia are common in the transgender community especially with transgender men who want to make themselves look more masculine and reduce their curves. But there are some transgender men who don’t have eating disorders and sometimes I wish I could be more comfortable and not let gender dysphoria be so overwhelming. I think that the reason why it is so overwhelming is that my parents don’t let me express my gender identity and say that I don’t know enough about how I feel and it makes the gender dysphoria worse because I feel like I’m not living when the place I currently reside makes me not able to express myself as I want. At school where Stockton University is very LGBTQ friendly I am accepted and the anxiety eases a bit, but when I am home on break from school then there is more anxiety because I worry about myself and feel strained trying to survive as myself and express myself as best as I can even though I feel like I’m being suppressed and that makes me feel like I’m fading away. That may be a reason why I became anorexic because I felt like I was fading away trying to hold onto my self-identify of who I am, but since it was very difficult and I felt like I was losing the fight and fading away and who I wanted to be didn’t exist there was a way for me to make me feel like I existed by putting stress on my physical body by trying to shape it into a more toned body that looked more masculine without any curves and the physical pain made me feel like there was something real that I could control in my life because I felt like I was losing control of myself. Hope this helps and makes sense! Thank you for being here and listening!

Dear Anita

Hope your Thanksgiving was great. I am on Thanksgiving break from November 28th-December 1st. I am taking this time to catch up on some assignments. I recently submitted the alternative job-shadowing assignment that my career class professor posted. I have been spending most of my time working on researching ways to improve my scientific writing skills and looking for online articles that provide advice. In addition, I have started a laboratory notebook for Organic Chemistry (I am taking that class in Spring 2020 semester) because I like to get a feel for the guidelines of a lab notebook and lab report writings so that I will feel more prepared when I take the class. The only thing that I cannot do is carry out the experiments because I don’t have the lab tools, but I can read about them and look at other scientists’ data to understand the experiments. Then I gather the knowledge of the other scientists’ data from lab experiments and I use them as sources to write a makeshift lab report. Although it is not quite as good as working on the lab experiments and collecting data myself to write the lab report, I don’t have the lab tools (because I am currently not in the Organic Chemistry class yet and don’t have access to the lab equipment), but I try to build my knowledge of what the experiments might be like by looking at other scientists’ data who have done the experiments before and I use that data as a source to work on lab reports. I hope that building up my knowledge will help me feel more prepared when I actually have to do the labs and write the lab reports with the data I collected when it comes to taking Organic Chemistry in the Spring semester. I am also working on two scientific presentations that are due on December 9th and I have both of them outlined. I just have to work on the grammar for them, and perhaps shorten the points on the PowerPoint slides. For one scientific presentation I am working with four other people in studying treatments for neuroblastoma which is a brain cancer that affects children five years or younger. I feel that some of the slides’ points are a bit lengthy and am working on shortening the details, but making sure that the information still makes sense and flows. For the other scientific presentation, I am describing how genetic research will help society, and also help me understand myself as a person and I find this assignment a bit easier, but it also takes time to contemplate about my inner self and what genetics research has to contribute to help improve society.

Hope you are well and blessings to you in your life’s path!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 12 months ago by Janus.

Dear Anita

Thank you for being the special person you are and for providing insightful advice that helps me better understand my life’s goals. The cancer genetic counselor that I spoke with on October 31st said that genetic counselors often volunteer at a crisis line or seek other volunteer opportunities to help people struggling in life because these volunteer opportunities can help genetic counselors learn how to communicate with empathy to people. Genetic counselors need to be able to communicate well with patients who have a high risk for developing cancers and they need to listen to their patient’s concerns and provide advice about how the patient can work on their health. By volunteering at a crisis line or with people struggling in life and listening to them helps people develop empathy and learn how to listen to the concerns people may have. It can be quite emotional for a person to discover that they have a high risk for cancer, and it is important that genetic counselors have the communication skills to help their patients feel more at ease and guide them in ways to better their health. This is why volunteering to help people who struggle in life may help genetic counselors build their skills and also learn how to connect with people by listening to them and understanding how they think which can help genetic counselors learn psychology as well. The cancer genetic counselor also mentioned that it is important to take time to rest because listening to patients health concerns can be stressful and that genetic counselors should strike a research/patient assessment balance where they spend some time doing laboratory research and some time with patients, as well as taking breaks to recharge. I learned a lot from reaching out to genetics counselors about the career path. I am thinking of looking for LGBTQ internships to build my communication skills, by helping LGBTQ people with their mental health I will also learn more about psychology and possibly gain more understanding about myself as a person because I am part of the LGBTQ community. In addition, I will be connecting with LGBTQ people and building my empathy skills when listening to them so I can work on building my skills for genetic research when I will communicate with patients.