Coping with drastic libido increase on testosterone
Hey friends! I’m FTM and have been on HRT for 60 days today. I am 39 years old. Brief backstory: I tried to transition around 1998, but couldn’t pass the “real life test” due to discrimination and harassment, so I’m just now starting transition.
Testosterone has been the best thing in the world for me, my therapist was flabbergasted at how my life has turned a 180. Stuff just doesn’t bother me like it did before, and I can’t believe how happy and positive I feel now. My levels were low at 240 ng/dL (normal range for cis dudes is 300-1,000, and most of my FTM friends are at 600-900), so my doctor gave me the OK to do my injection every week instead of biweekly. So far, other than a slight change in body odor, slight increase in acne, and a super high increase to my libido, I haven’t had any other changes. My voice hasn’t changed and I have had zero body hair, zero facial hair, zero fat redistribution, and zero bottom growth.
The one thing I’m struggling with is my libido. I have been celibate since 2010 and I am in the process of divorcing my husband, who turned out to be asexual. For a lot of years, I tried to ignore my attraction to women because I was so uncomfortable with having female secondary sex characteristics and I’m not a lesbian at all. However, now my libido is so high that it’s impacting my ability to get stuff done at work, and I was wondering how other guys have handled this.
One example I was driven to physically painful distraction when an extremely attractive woman that I work with was talking to me as she was walking away from me, then stopped and put her hand on a door frame and twisted around to make eye contact as she was still talking to me. She was basically striking a “pin up” pose and I could barely control myself. (It certainly felt like she knew what she was doing when she was standing like that in her tight jeans and tiny waist with her back arched — obviously this was the workplace and I had just pretend like it didn’t affect me and not say/do anything that could be construed as inappropriate). I was so distracted that I literally couldn’t get anything else done for the rest of the day. Weeks later, I was distracted thinking about her that I missed a step, slipped and fell in the stairwell and injured my leg. When I described how incredibly sexually frustrated it made me feel to my therapist, she was laughing and saying that I’m “just like a teenage boy”. Even while I’m driving my car, I have been surprised that I will gawk at beautiful women that I see walking. On one hand, I feel bad for objectifying them, but on the other hand, holy shit, I cannot believe how my sex drive has skyrocketed on T.
My friends in my in-person FTM support groups have all told me that they have to be really careful and mindful to watch their train of thought. They have cautioned me that if they allow themselves to start thinking about sex, that eventually it will lead to having to jerk off because they won’t be able to think about anything else until they take care of it. So the solution is to avoid thinking about sex, which I have struggled with. Jerking off has gone from what used to be a fun activity to a physical necessity, which I expected, but I didn’t expect having entire days where I couldn’t get anything done at work because my libido was so high. Obviously I can’t “take care of it” at work, so I’m not really sure how to keep the tiger in the cage during the workday.
Obviously I want my T levels to be therapeutic so that I will see changes like body hair, facial hair, voice drop, fat redistribution, muscle growth, and bottom growth. Other than meditation, cold showers, and trying to memorize hockey stats, does anyone have suggestions on how they have managed their drastically increased libido and still been able to focus on work and get stuff done?
Posted Apr 3, 2018, 12:05 AM UTC
Short answer: I know it sucks to hear, but there's ultimately not a ton you can do about it. When you are on T for long enough, you'll become less of the hormonal equivalent of a pubescent teenager. It's just the natural way of things. I'm an interesting story. I didn't manage for a while there, it was rough, but I ended up okay. It'll even out.
Long answer: I have always had an insane libido, but T months 3-9 involved a great deal of me asking myself if it's worth it to skip class to masturbate. I was
probablydefinitely addicted to porn, I was insanely distracted by both hot men and women alike (the plague of the bisexual) and I couldn't help but stare like a 14 year old boy at every pair of tits that walked by. My freshman year of college was absolutely brutal.Here are some tips that I did use to somewhat help myself, as well as some I wish I had done.
Help Me I'm Horny! Tips from a professional chicken choker:
Your friends' advice of "just don't think about sex" is well-meaning, but it's Bullshit with a capital B. You can't prevent yourself from thinking, and trying to will only lead to you frustrated with yourself "failing" for having a libido. Set aside an amount of time that you are going to spend thinking about sex and/or jacking off. Don't be unreasonable on either end of the spectrum: if you make it fifteen minutes, you're likely going to be unfulfilled, but 3 hours is excessive. It's ideal to take care of yourself at around the same time every day so that when you see some lady with a massive rack walking down the road, you can tell yourself "Wow her body is bangin" and then follow up with "I recognize I'm having sexual thoughts but right now I can't act on them and I will act on them later, when I do have time." In the same vein...
Accept you are a sexual person, and it is okay to think about sex. Do not beat yourself for needing to beat your meat. You're a person with desires and you are going through the most sexually difficult time in anyone's life. Male puberty is the subject of any number of comedies, TV eps, late night jokes, etc. for a reason. It is okay to have fantasies, and it is okay to be horny. What is not okay is letting those thoughts become actions which impact your everyday life to the point of detriment. If it takes you forever to orgasm, invest in a toy or find a method that lets you get there faster, so you don't spend as long cleaning the pipes. Be careful not to then use the rest of the time to continue fly fishing; tell yourself when you're done, you're done, whether that be no orgasms or one or two, whatever you need to do.
Exercise to all hell. Wear yourself out. You will have increased energy on T, and if you don't burn it, it's going straight into polishing the Buick. If you go for a run, or do fifty push-ups, or go shoot baskets, you're less likely to have 1) time and 2) energy for shaking hands with the bishop. After you exercise, take a coldish or lukewarm shower (preferably coldish!) and put clothes on right away, even if that's not the usual way you do things. Do not sit around half naked or in boxers for too long or you WILL begin shucking the corn.
Make plans with friends and don't allow yourself to cancel them. If you spend your Saturday afternoon with people, it will be considered socially impolite to wrestle the eel even if you aren't in public. You also have less time to rough up the suspect in the first place if you go out in the middle of the day. If you aren't social, consider spending time at the library, a public park, the movies... go out for a walk... there are infinite numbers of public time killing activities (see: exercise).
Do not jerk the gherkin out of boredom! This is the one I still struggle with and I think most men do. If you actually save it for times you want to be sexual, you will help your sexual health in general as well as cut down the amount of time you sit around and crank the hog.
Try to avoid over-consuming porn. When you use porn, use it to manhandle the man handle and then close the tab. Do not sit around idly looking at sexy pictures and porn on Tumblr etc. Unsubscribe from the subs (you know the ones), unfollow the blogs (again, you know the ones), stop looking at stories that give you a boner, stop browsing absently through the Victoria's Secret website. The less visual stimulation you seek, the more happy you will be that you aren't giving yourself a reason to be aroused. If you have to, lock yourself out of porn sites using a browser manager like Stay Focusd or a program like Cold Turkey. If you absolutely must as a last resort, consider setting a password by closing your eyes and blindly pounding the keys, and then opening your eyes when you've made an illegible passcode. Copy that into the confirm password window and now you've made yourself an uncrackable (mostly) block. Or get one of those Christian web Net Nanny things and give the password to your grandma. (Joking. Kind of.)
Hope I helped. Still having some trouble to this day but have managed to stop my compulsive dates with Rosie Palms and her sisters.
Your many euphemisms for wanking are fucking hilarious, thank you for this.
"rough up the suspect" is my new favourite euphemism for jacking off.
Hahah dude this is AMAZING, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and perspective!!!
You are really funny and this is probably better advice than my "just spank it all the time"
"Manhandle the man handle" is actually my new favourite thing to say. I'm starting T tomorrow, so this advice (and question!) feel quite timely.