I am coming up on two months on T so my changing sexuality is one of the things that is on my mind, literally, constantly.

Before T, my libido was completely dependent on my partners and current life situation. If I was in a good space mentally and felt comfortable with my gender expression and my partner, I had a very high libido. If things weren’t going my way, not so much. If there was no partner in my life, I could go for months without thinking about sex or my own sexuality. As for masturbation, I went through spurts of alternately doing it all the time and never although I have been masturbating to orgasm for as long as I could remember.

I have always found that my comfort in bed has had drastic effects on my comfort socially. When things were going my way and I was having a strong and active sex life that affirmed my gender, I was less concerned about passing. When I have a hard night in bed, you can be sure that I will spend three times as long getting dressed and will definitely be binding and packing the next day.

The change T has had on my sexuality was near instant. Whereas before, getting turned on was something I could will away if it was inconvenient, now it has become something that won’t go away and stays in the back of my mind. The most challenging thing about it is that now I am forced to deal with my sexuality when I am not in a place in my head where I am okay with my body. It is an interesting struggle and definitely inspiring lots of introspection about my own sexuality.

This is something I’ve not talked about with another soul before.

Before HRT in 2003, I masturbated occasionally. But never “normally”, if there is such a thing. Not ever while it was erect, and I’d never touch it directly or even look at it. But it got the job done, so to speak.

Then I went on MTF HRT (Premarin and Spiro), and the urge to find that release ended. Plus I wound up in different living situations about the same time, and privacy had become an issue. But I didn’t worry about it, in fact I was glad to be rid of that driving need.

Flash forward to 2008, five and a half years later. One night my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to “take the equipment out for a spin”, possibly for nostalgia’s sake, possibly pure boredom combined with newfound privacy, I’m not entirely sure which. I quickly discovered that in that half-decade vacation from my sexual self, the game had changed completely. It used to be a sprint to the finish line, subtlety and grace counted for nothing, all that mattered was the end result. Not anymore, no way. Now, to stretch a car metaphor, I could start the engine and rev the accelerator, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to shift out of park.

This might have been a problem had it happened to the me that existed six years ago. Now it’s just a minor annoyance, and not one I feel like spending much effort to try to fix, especially if the whole area in question will be completely torn down and remodelled inside of a year. I’m saving the “relearning my body from scratch” studying till after then. But this whole “rearranging all the furniture in my libido while I’m away” bears repeating.