kronos

Having a rare dysphoric spike which I am sure will fade with him; hoping noting it down here will help. It’s simple, really – I read a paper which highlighted how for some phenotypes – lipid absorbtion, liver lipid processing gene expression, and some other related processes – there is little effect of circulating hormones directly or cumulatively, but significant effect of dosage of genes that escape X-inactivation. This couples to those other findings where amino acid metabolism seems to follow in part from a rare example of an Y-chromosome carried transcription factor.

It amounts to there being some biology I cannot femininize with HRT or surgery alone. It is true that I share this with CAIS XY women, which is my first consolation; it can’t make me any more different from a cis woman than they are.

But it still makes me feel a sense of taint about my body, wrongness, thinking of how there are gene programme systems I miss out on. It sticks on me like a dark cloud. And this indeed is dysphoria.

Well, I will do my best. And look eventually for creative solutions.

(Though what can I do? Is there any way to meaningfully amplify gene expression levels in a way which matches the dosage effect of two copies? Maybe. We’d need it to be a strict doubling, amplification, something that still followed the tame tissue- and condition-wide on/off pattern. A global transcript duplicator for chosen genes. Not there yet. Hmmm.)