When i was a child i had consistent nightmares about nuclear war. It was the eighties after all, so everyone else probably did as well. One of the places i lived for years had a population of about 75 people, most of them fundamentalists who couldn't wait for revelations to unfold. So my perspective may not have been as mainstream as it could have been.
Other times i would simply have nightmares about things that had happened to me in the past. Sometimes i would frequently dream about flying. Occasionally i will dream absolutely bizarre things that aren't relevant to anything i'm consciously aware of. Whatever it is, i always dream in full wide screen, technicolor and 6.1 audio with digital playback. They are as vivid as they can possibly be, and in the morning i remember everything i dreamed the night before. i can recall with detail dreams i have had throughout my entire life.
The only consistency throughout almost all of them is that i am actually anatomically correct. The only consistency among most of my nightmares is that, like waking life, i am not. i have never had a lucid dream, meaning i have never been aware that i am in the middle of a dream, and then taken control of it and shaped its direction.
For some time now my nightmares, along with my deep anger and depression issues, have lessened considerably since i gave up pretending to be something i am not. My dreams have frequently taken strange turns though, leading me to wonder if it might be hormone related. My testosterone level at last clinic visit was 25, and my estrogen level was 410. My endocrinologist gave me a thumbs up.
According to
Maija Haavisto, 'almost all psychiatric drugs can influence our dreaming. An overload of testosterone can cause nightmares.'
i wonder how many other transsexual and post-menopausal women have had the same problem i did. Especially if testosterone was prescribed for 'sexual' issues, past or present. The subject is brushed upon in
'Testosterone Dreams: Sex, doctors, and the male hormone'.
'Shortly after testosterone was produced in a European laboratory, following a competition among three pharmaceutical companies, Time magazine reported that: “German and Swiss chemical laboratories are already prepared … to manufacture from sheep’s wool all the testosterone the world needs to cure homosexuals (and) revitalize old men.”
'The 1940s saw the use of testosterone therapy as an experimental “cure” for homosexuality. The medical view of homosexuality as a type of endocrine deficiency made the use of testosterone propionate to reverse homosexual orientation virtually predictable. As one physician in 1940 put it: “If homosexuality is merely the result of an endocrine disturbance, the prospect for its cure must be excellent today.”
'The idea that the bodies of homosexuals contained less male hormone and more female hormone than those of heterosexuals first appeared in 1935. By 1940 a number of investigators were confident enough in their ability to assay hormone levels to claim that homosexuality was rooted in abnormal sex hormone ratios rather than the psychological complexes hypothesized by Freud and others. “It seems,” one research team wrote, “that the constitutional homosexual has a different sex hormone chemistry than the normal male.” The fallacy of this therapeutic rationale became evident soon enough. Testosterone propionate combined with chorionic gonadotropin was not curing homosexuals, even in studies that encouraged belief in the drug and did not compare its effects with those of a placebo. In fact, it was becoming increasingly clear that androgens did not reverse but actually intensified homosexual libido, so that “sometimes instead of helping one gets a worsening of the condition.”
'Testosterone drugs were also the favored pharmacological technique of the 1940s for treating sexual “frigidity” in women. By 1943 testosterone propionate was reported to be in widespread use to treat women with sexual and other endocrine disorders. In 1947 a team of authors noted that over the previous decade “the effect of androgens in increasing libido in women has been an almost universal observation.”
'In recent years the campaign against female “frigidity” has taken on a new form, as pharmaceutical companies have attempted to launch the marketing of synthetic testosterone to a potential population of millions of women supposedly afflicted by a disorder known as “female sexual dysfunction.”
'In December 2004 a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs refused to recommend Procter & Gamble’s Intrinsa testosterone patch for female sexual dysfunction (FSD) in surgically menopausal women whose ovaries had been removed. The FDA panel found that administering testosterone to these patients would produce an average of one extra sexual encounter a month, a benefit that in the panel’s view did not justify exposing women to the risk of heart attacks and strokes.'
'Proctor & Gamble announced that it would eventually resubmit the Intrinsa application once it had carried out studies on naturally menopausal women, a much larger potential market than the estimated 10 million women who have had their ovaries removed.'
'The current campaign to market testosterone devices such as the Intrinsa patch and LibiGel ointment for the treatment of “female sexual dysfunction” should be examined in its larger historical context. Given the short memory spans of our major media, it is not surprising that the history of this hormone therapy has been absent from virtually all of the coverage it has received. But knowing something about the history of testosterone for women is essential to assessing the potential benefits and hazards that today’s physicians and drug companies claim to understand.'
'The socially sanctioned return of testosterone for women has occurred in the context of the growing acceptance of hormone replacement as an “anti-aging” therapy for that segment of the adult population that is willing to pay for it and accept the risks of what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment.'
Given how much little scientific study is given to transsexuality here in America, i would at least hope that testosterone treatment in post-menopausal women would get a little more attention.
