Here follows the first interview. These interviews are recorded in conversational fashion within a few hours after each injection, about once every two weeks. This first interview addresses the question of “why”, as it pertains to both Matthew and James.
Matthew: So six.. June thirtieth, six thirteen PM, took 300 ml each of.. it’s milliliters?
James: Yeah.
M: of uh Depo Provera, one shot in each thigh earlier today about 2:30. Um.. sore, feels like someone punched me in each thigh.
J: laughs This feels sore, but I only feel this limited soreness about one in every four shots, but I’m also a little more used to it.
M: So why are you doing this?
J: Ah.. a question I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand, but, well, it started with me being excessively sexual, pawing off[Masturbating -Ed.] many times a day, and then pretty much got attached to castration as a large kink and started focusing on chemical castration as a way to acheive the same, but as a potentially reversable thing. And there was something nagging me in the back of my mind constantly that just did not leave me at peace with having a sexuality and it’s taken several years even after starting chemical castration for the first time to realize it was guilt from my mother.
M: Well, and some talk therapy as well, too, right?
J: Um.. yeah, though I had kind of realized it on my own before then, but it pretty much took the talk therapy to drive it home.
M: And there was a defining moment of the whole guilt aspect, right?
J: Yes. That was the end of 2005 beginning of 2006, I came down with tonsilitis which pretty much wound up with me being not entirely bed-ridden, but I had to go home to my mother. Immediately saw an ENT specialist and scheduled a tonsilectomy surgery. But that pretty much led to three weeks at home stuck alone with my mother and sister and that was pretty much the worst time of my life. I had come out to my mother about six months before hand and there was just an uneasy tension, complete resentment, guilt on her part for not raising a perfect son. And also one particular incident after the surgery when I was taking percodan as a painkiller I was getting fairly high and was pawing [Masturbating -Ed.] at the computer while my sister was watching tv looking the opposite direction and at one point she turned around and saw me in the middle of it. That led to about an hour or two of stern…partially screaming and other talking to that made me feel horrible.
M: And so the chemical castration aspect of that sort of…sorry, the guilt aspect of that sort of led into the chemical castration aspect.
J: Yeah. This time around I’m trying to not let it be a part of it this time around, but it certainly was the catalyst that allowed me to do it the first few times.
M: And this time instead of the guilt being the catalyst, is there more of a fetish aspect?
J: Primarily that, and also a connection to you, because, well, I’m sure you remember how guilty I felt just bringing up the subject when we were starting to get together and I was considering doing it for the first time. I was scared you would resent me as much as my mother did for coming out to her.
M: laughs No pressure or anything!
J: Yeah.. fortunately that was not the case!
M: pokes D in the crotch See you’re a little hard just talking about it.
J: Yes. It’s often times, when I’ve taken large doses and had lower testosterone in the past, there were only two things that got me motivated to do anything, and that was talking about castration further, either by upping the dose or going through a procedure for actual castreation or diapers, and that entire fetish.
pause
M: So, on my end, I guess there’s sort of combination of aspects involved. There’s sort of two big areas. One is sort of a need for experience. Part of me wants to experience what you go through in the whole process. I want to see what the draw was, and I want to experience it with you. Another part of the need for experience is wanting to experience an asexual relationship of sorts. I want to experience what it’s like to have a relationship that we know works with sex without, sort of understanding what draws us together. But beyond the experience, there’s the other aspect of need, and this ties a lot into gender, which has played a very large role in the last six to nine months, but has always been an issue with me. Having sort of a tough time nailing down what is involved in gender, how it relates to biological sex, how it relates to sexual orientation as well. In the past having come out as totally gay, great, you know, whatever, then realising that okay, not necessarily totally gay, I was just all about the whole…I require not necessarily approval, but just interaction with parents, I came out as gay in order to get the maximum of interaction, whether or not that was actually the case. Bi would be a better fit in terms of language, but in reality, it has a lot to do with this problem that is inherent with gender.
My own psychiatrist has said that the word identity is only used in a psychopathological sense, as in identity only comes up when it’s a problem. When I started feeling like I was really struggling with gender identity, it was when gender became a problem for me, not necessarily that I ahven’t always had these issues. I’ve had female characters online, I’ve always had sort of this fixation on gender, why am I stuck with this one, or whatever. So this has sort of the aspect of removing sexuality from the equation of gender. If I there’s only a sexual aspect to my problems with gender, then maybe it’s just a fetish, but if I have this ongoing problem with my own gender even when sexuality is not necessarily involved, then it clearly goes deeper.
The second aspect of that whole need side is really escapism. If I’m having problems with gender as it pertains to being a sexual person, if I have problems where I try to express my gender and it leads to problems like being called disgusting for something that I get a commission of or if I decide to play around with gender and alienate somebody, then it would be easier for me to just not have that sexual aspect of this need. It turns into escapism in that I need to, if I just don’t have this problem, then I don’t have to deal with it. I freely admit that, I don’t think that this is some sort of saintly experiment where I am going to remove sexuality in order to experience purity. A lot of it is, if I don’t have the sexual aspect of the problem of gender, then I won’t have to deal with that problem, so it is sort of escapism, and I admit that. It’s something that I’m not proud to admit, and it’s certainly a little embarrassing, but I need to be honest about that.
So yeah, the goal here I guess on my side is wanting to experience my marriage, still seems weird to say that, on more than just sort of a physical D belongs to me as property so we can always screw plane; more emotional, more intellectual, these might be pipe dreams, but it’s kind of cool to think them. And also to work on my own internal issues with gender and feeling un-male, not necessarily female, but definitely not male.
J: I had never realized until you started talking a bit ago that any of this was wanting to experience whwat I’ve been through, in part something caused by me. So if this turns sour…
M: laughs No, don’t feel guilty; you know it’s like we got that picthre where you were drawn as a female character, and that was sort of you wanted to sort of be on the other side of that whole me having a female character; you wanted to be the other end of that role and sort of also experience the same thing. This is like that: it’s, you know, wow, D is really into this. I feel like I have said “I’m not into this” and have yet to try it. To be totally honest, and this is really, really embarrassing for me, but in high school, I did play around with – not necessarily diapers, but a facsimile thereof, and found it wasn’t for me, for sure. And so when I say to you that I don’t really understand, like, want to participated in the whole ABDL fetish, it’s speaking from experience. For me to say – sorry, super embarrassing – for me to say the same thing about chemical castration is not true because Ihave no experience with that. I can’t say I am not into this there’s no historical precedent for me ever having gone through this
J: laughs Well, that’s changed now
M: laughs Yeah, there’s certainly no going back, at least temproarily. If nothing else, this will – and this is pure guesswork – this will knock down my libido for a couple weeks and probably give me all sorts of side effects like feeling more emotional, and a lot of people on the forums say this is – when you start you go through a sort of oscillating back and forth between high and low hormone levels when you’re first starting before it starts to drop, because your body doeen’t quite know hot to change, and I’m sure if I were to stop now, I’d sill see some of the effects from that.
J: Now I have a question for you. When you first got the injections, did you have any immediate feelings rush over you?
M: No. I was kind of hoping there would be. I was hoping for a sense that something momentous had occured at the very least, at most a sudden and immediate decrease in sexual thoughts, followed, by laugh hotflashes, and all sorts of stuff, but really I got the injections, one in each leg, and all I felt was – and I remember saying this for the left leg – my leg feels full, because I’d missed the exterior muscle in my thigh and gotten in the middle and there’s not quite as much room in there. So you know, I wanted there to be sort of a sudden and immediate tangible effect, even if it was a sense of no return, as if it had been an orchidectomy, I’m sure that I would’ve felt welp, no going back now, but that’s not the case, so I didn’t even feel like well I’m commited, I felt like well, “I sure did just do a thing”. I don’t know. What about you?
J: For me in the past at least there was, I think it was relief of the guilt, a huge rush of calmness by lifting that burden off my shoulders, followed by the fetish side of it, of getting rather horny. This is one of the few times that I have injected myself and not pawed off within five minutes thereafter.
M: Well, I was kinda sitting right there.
J: it’s also the first time that the feelings of guilt or relief of that guilt did not wash over me, so that I’m pretty darn happy about.
M: Yeah I suppose there was sort of a – now that you bring up the psychological side – there was sort of almost a rush of adrenaline like well, here we go. If not adrenaline, at least excitement, me thinking I’m finally to the point in my life where I feel comfortable doing something that is, for the most part, reversable and not a huge change that I have to fear how coworkers and friends will respond to it. We have mentioned to a few friends that we are doing this just in case emotions get the better of us, we have a bit of a history there, so it’s…I don’t need to worry about the fact that I’m dealing with gender in my own way in such a way that it would be a problem at work.
My boss has told me to my face that he thinks that every MtF transgender person is insane, that every FtM transgendered person is…slightly less crazy,but still very crazy, but maybe that’s just the sexism that is inherent in our industry, but I think it has a lot to do with personal experience, and I don’t necessarily doubt it. I think when hormones are at stake here, you’re gonna go through some pretty crazy emotional changes, and if you were to go through those changes on a very aggressive scale such as transgender hormone therapy, you’re going to see some emotional consequences, and to somebody who is wrapped up in computers in a totally technical world, that probably comes off as crazy, I don’t doubt that.
This is me dealing with gender such that I won’t disappoint my boss. I’ve talked al lot with my psychologist about the need for approval in my life, and that’s had a lot to do with my interactions with my boss, so if I – back story, boss being a rather good friend of ours who wound up hiring me due to me graduating right as he needed a lot of workers – there’s so much that I think that I would get out of approval from him, why I worked seventy to eighty hour weeks in order to feel that approval, if I were to lose that because I was dealing with transgender issues in my own way, then that would be a big disappointment, so this is me dealing with that in a way that won’t necessarily cause him trouble [redacted phrase - Ed].
J: How would you feel if I had given signs of disapproval towards any of your transgender thoughs?
M: I don’t think I can really picture you doing that. We’ve known each other for so long, and we’ve been going out on and off for, what, seven years now? I just can’t quite picture that being the case and this only really became an issue in the last year or so to the point where I was actually thinking of it as a gender problem. But I guess if you had, it would’ve…it probably would’ve cut me pretty deep. I don’t think it would’ve been “I’m going to leave you over this”, It would’ve been along the same lines as you’re not going to participate in this, and I’m not going to participate in the ABDL stuff. So I would’ve…it would’ve stayed online, I would’ve felt bad about it everytime I dealt with it, it would be another sort of thing where I have to live with the fact…my dad doesn’t approve of my nature, I have to live with the fact that D doesn’t approve of the whole gender thing. I feel like there’s some aspects of life that you can’t share with other people and if that not being able to share comes down to disapproval, well, so be it. It’s going to hurt, but so be it. I don’t think that our relationship is something that would need to suffer over that, even if it would be uncomfortable for me.
J: I think in the back of my head along those same lines, I had always thought of this about the same as ABDL where you never approved of it, but just were able to stand it. But then the last month or so when you’ve actually shown serious interest in it, and now have actually started it yourself, that little bit of grief has been completely lifted. I’m still not sure what to think about that.
M: I don’t think that even if we live into our seventies together that we will ever completely know each other.
J: Oh, not possible
M: I’ve thought about that a lot, on one side it’s kind of disappointing; you’d think that after that long of time you’d really know somebody, but it’s not feasible so it’s probably best to be excited by all these things that we learn about each other, and when you learn that I’m willing to actually kind of go into something that you’re into, well, not necesssarily for the same reasons, I think it should be exciting. If we find out that there’s something the other person doesn’t like, when I bought you four boxes of popcorn because they were on sale, not realising that you hated popcorn, that’s something that is kind of like “wow, now I’ve got four boxes of popcorn, um…cool…” laughing
J: I know we did have that conversation..
M: I know, I know, I just some part of me forgot about that.
J: I’m amazed at the things I remember where other people forget.
M: Better that than all these memory problems that people have mentioned. pause Alright, we’ll talk in two weeks when we do the next injections.