Trans Megathread for the Week of 2025-01-06 to 2025-01-12 - Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

When I was on prog, I fell into a deep, sexless, and suicidal depression. It took me a long time to realize that it was principally hormonally induced and that progesterone is NOT for me. If it is safe and practical to do so, I would encourage you to experiment with decreasing or cycling your prog dosage to see if it has an emotional effect on you. If you are on a euro hormone regime that uses CPA as an anti-androgen, you must be additionally careful. I am not a medical professional and this is NOT intended as medical advice. YMMV.

i’ve been considering that i may fit into the ace spectrum, but this is an idea i’ve been struggling to accept. i want to feel sexual attraction. i want to feel like a sexual being. but it’s felt totally muted for a while now. there are other aspects than physiological, i definitely have some catholic brainworms and shit about sex. but i can’t help but feel like the main factor is HRT, as my sex drive and proclivity for sexual attraction has seemed to gradually dwindle over the past few years.

For me, I knew I was ace before realizing I was trans, so can't really comment on sexual attraction. Spiro+E really nerfed my libido within a couple weeks, but horny has returned occasionally (to my annoyance), but that might sometimes be related to missing spiro doses (not sure how the pharmacokinetics work for that - sometimes it seems delayed from the missed doses by a couple days). OTOH, I've probably started appreciating other people's bodies more, but that's probably just that I subconsciously learned to avoid paying attention to human bodies and now I have less reason to do that.

Hope you are able to figure something out, whether learning how to work with your current sexuality or get back what you had before.

honestly, i doubt any of this will be relateable or helpful but at the very least i hope you feel seen.

i have been struggling with this. i was on 300mg spiro for a number of years and it i thought it had suppressed my sex drive, but when i switched to CPA things started changing for me, i think? but years ago i was kind of insatiable.

i find that arousal for me if a longer-term thing, vs an "in the moment" thing. if i read something that really tingles me, it'll start the little steam engine in my chest in a way that's difficult to ignore. it seems for me that my arousal needs time to breathe and needs to be more stoked like a fire. i think i enjoy the feeling of it building more than the release of orgasm. there's also like a kink element sometimes to it too, and there's a specific tone of voice that really works on me, too.

i started to put this picture together in the past few months - i thought i was acespike or even entirely asexual for a while because of how little of the kind of fantasy i needed to engage with i was engaging with. now i'm not really sure but i know there's at least more to it than just an alarm clock that goes off in my head that says i need to sex.

my therapist talked about the ideas of "brakes" and "accelerators" in sex - you know, classic stuff. brakes, for example, like your parents coming home, kill arousal. accelerators, for example, [insert secret fantasies here], will build arousal. i don't know if any of that would be helpful to you but separating these two kinds of inputs has been helpful for me.

i can't deny that mood could be a factor, though. for me, brakes also include a lot of second-guessing and performance anxiety, which can really make me anxious enough to not be able to be in the moment and enjoy. explicit roles helps me with that, letting someone else take the lead, etc.