perspectives from the middle space: holding both sex hormones, divine masculinity and femininity

This thought piece takes you on a ride of what it means to live in the “middle space” between genders, holding both sex hormones in one body. It blends lived experience with the science of testosterone and estrogen, evolution and history of HRT, and looks at how these hormones shape emotion, empathy, perception, and identity. Then from here, takes a spin into the wider forces surrounding us: life saving alignment, patriarchy, mature vs toxic masculinity, cultural feminist movements and stories of women, the language we use to describe harm, available spaces, oppressor hive mind, and the natural Spectrums of life. It is an unfiltered look at bias, biology, and conditioning. highlighting how an awareness of the hidden strings that move us, opens the possibility for change. shaped by a time when our culture is being forced to confront the topics of gender, power, oppression and humanity. A front-seat view on the often unseen but unifying experiences of gender-diverse people, women, and men.

20-25 minute read // please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Leave your thoughts in the comments below. and enjoy the ride.

i. Seeing between the lines

To be both man and woman is to sit in a million-dollar position. You see the full spectrum of who we are. You see where we’re blind, where our reasoning collapses, where our biases hide. You feel the pressure and the oppression from both ends, and in many cases you experience it on a larger scale. You can become fluent in their contradictions. You learn the price and the privilege of each. People who hold both make us as a society more whole.

ii. coming online

When you start to transition, huge changes take place. The human self is impressionable and adaptable, and it becomes hard to know what is shaping you. and 1. How much is coming from society and the world, from the way people suddenly look and treat you. 2. How much is coming from your own inner bias and old programming from that same society. And, 3. how much is simply biology, a completely new hormone flooding every cell in your body, shifting your mind, your emotions, your behaviours.

To have the experience of both, to be raised a woman and now perceived more as a man. To have both sex hormones within your biology, and to know what it is like to awaken femininity and to awaken masculinity. This is a one in a million experience, one that sees more than what most will ever be capable of seeing. and for me, seeing this through the Intuitive lens of the Universe and nature’s guiding principles.

When I first started testosterone, I could describe it as a feeling of coming online. The sparks of what was inside me finally a flowing current. Parts of me online to complete me as a whole.

iii. life saving alignment

I look at gender care and gender recognition the same way I look at any other out of balance cause and effect. And when I think of gender care as life saving, this is what i think of.

When humans are not in alignment, when they are not able to express their truths or be the totality of who they were designed to be, they tend to act out in self sabotaging, self destructive, or self harming ways. In our society this often isn’t so literal as intentional acts of life-ending harm, (Although it can Certainly be that). but more often comes out as taking more risks, not taking care of their bodies, diverting to high risk thrills, drugs, alcohol. Often the normal experience is shifting in and out of anxiety, depression, panic, fear states. There is an overall lack of care of what happens to them, and a need to seek out non healthy avenues that make them feel better.

It doesn’t make me think in a literal way that more people are actually gender fluid or missing that part of their life. though we are unnaturally locked into so many binaries, and i truly believe that seeing life more as the Spectrum that is is, would solve for this. But I think mostly, a lot of people lack the care, support, guidance, systems, availability, and acceptance to be their authentic selves. We also don’t see people as extensions of who they were.. as youth, or from generational / past life experiences.

Because when you come online, and you are given the tools and the permission to be in harmony with yourself. when you understand exactly who you are, why you are, and where you have been. When you witness growth, healing and change… well you protect that. You recognize your life to be a gift, that you protect and honour. And bi- product of this act of self love is living a better life, doing the things you actually want to do and then wanting to give it back and share it with others. a life saved.

iV. Testosterone is

one hell of a drug haha i took my time slowly starting with this journey, with very gradual increases, so i could really pay attention and be with each change both internally and externally, to allow my body to process and adapt and to check in with myself.

One thing with testosterone is that it lights your sexual center. It is always on, this dull hum under everything. You don’t always notice it, but when you pay attention, you feel it instantly, and the flame is always ready to jump. It interacts with your mind and your behaviours even if you don’t consciously register it. it is a process of learning just common respect and consent, while also learning to work with this energy. a continous practice knowing when to dispersing it, move it or Indulge in it (it pretty much always wants this option). Having a foundation in meditation, mindfulness and energy work greatly helps with this.

It also changes you emotionally. You react faster. You get irritated faster. There is a new sense of confidence and strength, but also a difficulty connecting to sadness and certain regulating emotions. in some ways you its a relearning to regulate, because the old patterns don’t work with the new chemistry.

right away, i started noticing how people give you more space, or listen differently, or assume you can take control. also, something that was difficult was noticing how people show you less softness. Fewer held doors (both literally and figuratively). Fewer instinctive gestures of care. The feminine is treated as divine in ways people don’t even realize, and you feel the absence of that immediately when the world stops reading you that way.

Estrogen feels more wavey, it keeps things fluid, connected, responsive. Testosterone feels more liner, it makes things sharper, more direct, more contained. testosterone helped with my post concussion syndrome, with more energy and less fatigue in the mornings. and less brain fog / headache / stimulus Sensitivity crashes with the dips of Estrogen. Estrogen changes by 20x throughout its cycle, it has a huge spike around ovulation, a 2000% increase from its lowest point. At no point in the roughly 28 day female cycle are the hormones the same, it’s an ever changing rollercoaster pattern. With testosterone, the levels repeat every day, starting high in the morning, and going lower in the evening, changing about 2-3x. with mini dips and troughs along the way. placed on an estrogen chart, it would like like a Straight horizontal line.

There was something so powerful about having a period, Specially while being in the bath, connected to water, it could really feel like you were connected to deep emption, to the moon and beyond. I feel lucky that i’ve had this experience so i could learn more easily how to have big crys and emotional releases, since testosterone does tend to hold it all back, and it can build like tension, a restlessness in the body. Funny enough, I didn’t lose emotional empathy from testosterone, I actually couldn’t access empathy at all until I came online through testosterone. It aligned me enough that I could finally feel it. Could finally open my heart. But once I could feel it, I had to actually grow into it. I had to open, and reconnect with my femininity from a new position.

That opening came with its counterpart: grief. A lot of it. Empathy and grief arrived together and hit hard. And balancing the masculine and the feminine became a whole process of its own. I’ve been learning how to keep the softness and surrender of the feminine while holding the directness and intensity of the masculine.

Sometimes the two feel like oil and water, separate and competing. For me, it is a continuous process of weaving them together, checking in, adjusting, being honest about what is leading the moment. I am constatly in some sort of scienftic self-study with this.. chemically, internally, externally, phsyically, psychologically and spirtually.

It’s important to say that these are masculine and feminine characteristics, yin and yang, and they exist in all bodies. Anyone can develop them, bring them forward, or soften them back. We are all built with different levels of each, regardless of hormones. We should all be finding our balance between these threads. But there is still a real link between these stereotyped characteristics and the biology of the sex hormones themselves.

v. beyond the binary body

When we talk about masculinity and femininity, we have to remember that these forces are real, but they’re not fixed. They’re polarities that exist in all of us. Raw power can feel feminine or masculine depending on where it’s coming from and where it lands. Nature itself works in ranges. For example things like: Vision, skills, sexuality, height, sensitivity, etc. Even in the animal world, some species naturally change sex or take on fluid roles. So why would sex hormones or gender expression be the only thing that must stay rigid and binary.

all humans already have a mix of hormones. Some people naturally have higher testosterone or lower estrogen. Some intersex people have hormone profiles that sit between the typical ranges. I’ve known people who look like they’re on HRT even though they’ve never taken hormones.

Hormone therapy isn’t just for trans people. It’s used across the world for menopause, andropause, fertility, endocrine regulation, and medical conditions. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that once humans discovered we could support or correct hormonal imbalance, we would use it. Before HRT, Cultures used plants, herbs, rituals, clothing, roles, energy practices, and social structures to help people express themselves across gendered lines.

But we also inherited a cultural fear of hormones from flawed outdated medical studies that linked HRT to cancer. due to this, Millions of menopausal women and women who had hysterectomies were denied hormones, left without estrogen, and now face major issues like osteoporosis and cognitive decline. Mix that with anti-trans bias, and it created a deep subconscious prejudice toward hormone use in general.

There’s also the psychological side. When someone uncovers who they are, or simply stops masking, the body responds. Voices shift, posture changes, body composition adapts. Spend time in a new culture, environment, or relationship, and your nervous system adjusts to match it. This isn’t imagined. It’s the brain’s neuroplasticity, the endocrine system’s responsiveness, and the way stress, safety, and identity shape gene expression. We literally change when we understand ourselves more accurately.

This is why trans people and gender-diverse people matter. They show us the full spectrum of who we are, and what we can be.

vi. Ancient Initiation into Mature Masculinity

To me, it felt very important to learn and seek out mature Masculinity, Especially after the first 6 months of starting Testosterone, where i … ran wild…. a bit, i wanted to give myself the young boy experience, and quickly realized that it couldn’t stay thay way. In some societies, and I’ll talk about more Indigenous and ancient societies, there were rituals to mature men at the time this “light” starts to turn on. There was an initiatory structure. A transition out of the boy psychology and into the mature masculine. They were sometimes more brutal. Taken deep in the woods, beaten, left with no water, left to hunt and fend for themselves, and then returned to a big healing ceremony full of dance and feminine energy. A balancing act. a container that stripped the inflated ego of the boy and that collapsed shame of the boy. The point was to show them the consequences of this new power turning on inside their bodies, and to teach that power without consciousness becomes destruction, but power rooted in awareness becomes service.

We don’t have that in our society anymore. We have no ritual threshold that pulls men out of boyhood. Instead, men seem to never mature. The archetypes of men (magician, warrior, lover, king) stay distorted. The Warrior becomes aggression instead of protection. The Lover becomes addiction instead of connection. The King becomes entitlement instead of stability. And the Magician becomes manipulation instead of insight.

And for the men who don’t fit these dominating stereotypes or archetypes, it can be almost worse. They fall through the cracks. Without initiation, without mentorship, without a place to land, they become lost, broken, and confused about what their masculinity is even supposed to feel like. They don’t identify with the domination model, but they are also not taught another map. So they drift in this no man’s land where their sensitivity becomes shame and their potential becomes collapse.

vii. Shame Cycle of toxicity

I can recall a distinct moment of what felt like looking down the barrel of toxic masculinity. through my own behaviours and Seeing it so clearly for what it was. and at the root, at the bottom of the barrel, the thing that fuels the loop is Shame.

The Masculine nature may take hold and perhaps do something manipulative to get what they want. And ultimately it might hurt someone. It might try to control someone of the feminine. There is a part that knows this. It feels the guilt and the shame. It creates a void. In this void is a lack of self love, a growing self hatred and insecurity for who they are. With this void, it is inevitable that the behaviour repeats.

Often this void is covered up, by a sense of “Plausible Deniability”. As the body’s defensive mechanism is protect oneself from hurt, even to burry truths and memories. to conceal the intent Behind the action, so well, that you yourself believe it. So well that to question it, brings question to the minds of others that Challenge it before it can be highlighted back onto yourself. A great mask of Deniability, so much of it Subconscious… but anyone aware enough can see the little sparks of truth.

To stop this cycle is to know the cycle. To accept who you are, what your nature is, and to give yourself forgiveness. Radical forgiveness, through accountability of course, but sometimes the last thing you want to do is give yourself love. If you don’t, you are doomed to continue this hurt. And this hurt casts deep into others, into society, into women. Those that are most nurturing, attentive, here to balance us and teach us and love us.

viii. Fighting the Patriarchy

This process has allowed me to also see that when we fight against the patriarchy, casting more shame into their voids, we often accelerate the issues. There are so many men ashamed of what their counterparts have been doing, and seeing the micro chasms of that behaviour deep within themselves.

There need to be places and spaces to heal through expression of rage and sadness. To grieve the loss, the abuse, the years of repression, and for that call to be heard clearly through our communities. There also need to be spaces where men are not present, so women and gender-marginalized people can feel safe, gather, reconnect, strategize, and rebuild.

But I also believe there needs to be a path together. In all my years of man-hating, raging, yelling, I now realize there has to be a space to love the masculine too. To invite the masculine to soften and see the beauty in embracing their own feminine. The relief of putting the armour down, putting the shame down, and finding flow. Without that, it becomes a war. Fire with fire. Each side with their backs up against the wall.

it would be our greatest blessing to be able see eras of human Matriarchal living, these have existed, and still do exist. Like everything, we need cycles of polarities, clean breaks and changes. In some ways, it feels like we need this change to be able to see a Better vision of the world.

V.iiii the stories of women

I felt a lot of conflicting emotions at a women’s march I went to in Mexico recently. It was powerful and deeply moving. It took place in an artist town, so the whole event had this raw creativity to it. Music, poems, stations of art and resistance, women singing, crying, dancing, reclaiming their bodies and their stories. Every stop felt like an eruption of pain and strength at the same time.

But throughout it, I didn’t fully know my place. And I felt guilty for even thinking about myself in that moment, because it wasn’t about me. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling. I’ve lived the cruelty of men and the patriarchy firsthand, but now I’m also becoming a version of man, and I’m seen somewhere in between. I felt the shift in how some people looked at me. I didn’t feel welcomed by everyone, and inside myself I questioned if I was meant to be there at all, if my presence took up space that wasn’t mine. I felt like I didn’t fit anywhere. Not with the men. Not fully with the women. Not fully with the rage. Not outside of it either.

I asked my guy friend if he was going, and he said no, that march is not for men. Which surprised me, because if fifty percent of the population isn’t part of this transformation, how are we ever supposed to change anything?

A lot of this is cultural, and I won’t pretend I can fully grasp the exact weight these women carry. I wouldn’t challenge what they felt needed to be done. But what I kept feeling is what often goes missing: the integration. The aftermath. How we bring things back into harmony after the pain. How we unite and strengthen. How we call men to grieve in their own ceremony, in their own reckoning.

I’ve travelled the world. I’ve been in so many different spaces with women. I’ve heard the stories, the trauma, the rage, the grief. I’ve seen different levels of both abuse and progress on the surface, but the same flavour of repression underneath.

A queer woman in Japan shared the difficulty of escaping the confines of her narrow-minded society. A woman in Bolivia told me how her parents forced her to keep wearing a scarf gifted by an abusive boyfriend. I hosted a woman who needed safety after her husband threw objects at her and her baby in public, right in front of a police officer who said it was fine because it was her husband. An Indonesian woman told me how rare it was for her to simply be outside, how the cafes, surf shops, and social spaces were filled with young men and foreign women, while most women her age were expected to stay home and care for the family. And in my own upbringing, I held the hand of a best friend during a movie while she cried because she had been taken advantage of by her older boyfriend.

The list goes on, and all of us have our own lists. The things we’ve seen. The things that were done to us. The things we carry.

In these stories, I connected with these women as a woman. I understood the fear, the tension, the ways we adjust ourselves to survive. I was also a beacon for them, a symbol of female empowerment and independence, a reminder that women can lead and stand strong. And sometimes I grieve not being able to hold that space in the same way anymore. I worry that I’ve lost parts of my feminine connection because of my choice to transition and live in my gender fluidity.

And now I am learning how to connect as a man too. It is different. I can feel the shift in vulnerability, the change in openness, the different kind of trust that is required. And now, probably more than ever, I seek out the dialogue and the stories of men. Not to excuse anything, but to understand our roles in all of this. To understand where it breaks, where it begins, and where it can heal.

x. The language Spectrum of Harm

One time, I expressed to someone that I felt unsafe in the relationship. I wasn’t planning what to say, I was just speaking from my body in that moment. They questioned my use of the word unsafe. They reminded me that in many places, especially outside western societies, to feel unsafe means fearing for your life. It isn’t a word to use lightly.

And they were right. It wasn’t the right word for what I meant, and it wasn’t right for them hold that. What I was actually feeling was insecure, but the way that insecurity landed in my body felt identical to the feeling of unsafety. That conversation unlocked something for me.

It showed me that what I’ve experienced, and what many of us raised in western environments experience, is a different type of progression around the language of harm. We’ve expanded the vocabulary of abuse, not to water it down, but to name the entire spectrum. Because if we only call something abuse when it’s extreme or physical or undeniably violent, we ignore the long build-up. We ignore the hundreds of subtle behaviours that create the conditions for harm long before it erupts.

If “consent” only means yes or no to sex, we miss all the ways someone’s boundaries, comfort, or trust can be crossed in smaller ways. If “unsafe” only means fearing for your life, we miss all the moments where our nervous system is telling us something is wrong. If abuse only counts when it’s loud and unmistakable, we overlook the repeated fractures. the gaslighting, the breaking of trust, the slow erosion of self.

What I’ve seen growing up in the western world is that expanding the language actually protects people. It protected me, given me more freedom, and more safety. It gave me the ability to name the early signs, the micro-patterns, the things that would have been dismissed in other places as nothing, but were actually the roots of something harmful.

At the same time, I know this language doesn’t land the same everywhere. Different cultures carry different histories, different thresholds, different realities. And we have to respect that. We can’t walk into someone else’s home or community with our “advanced vocabulary” and impose it or dramatize things that don’t need dramatizing, especially in places where the dangers are much more literal and immediate. And even in western culture, we can’t Weaponize the Language, we must still give space for us to be messy, to make mistakes and to embrace our innate natural reactions.

But there is a balance. There is something to learn from both. We can respect where people are at, while still seeing the value in naming the whole spectrum.

xi. Without Spaces

What I’ve noticed is that it is difficult to find men or spaces to talk about these things. That is how deep and isolating this shame runs. Spaces to learn, to mold, to heal the masculine, so that in these marches men can stand up, walk side by side, and demand better from themselves as a collective. To show visibility of what it feels like to be in harmony with yourself and with the other sexes.

When I meet other men, cis men, trans men, who are able to talk about their experiences, who see mature masculinity as a practice that never really goes away, it feels like a blessing. I long for this. Growing up as a woman, we always discussed the joys and hardships of our sexual designations. Part of my fear of transitioning was losing access to these spaces.

Part of the allure of spirituality and spiritual settings is that they tend to give space for this. And I don’t mean structured religions, which are often still deeply patriarchal. I mean the freeform spiritual spaces, the ones rooted in nature, intuition, community, and presence. The spaces that experiment with older teachings, or reinterpret religious ideas in ways that feel alive rather than controlled.

Spirituality, in its truest form, feels like it transcends the binary codes we’ve built. In those spaces, femininity and masculinity are seen as divine elements. where gender can be explored without fear or without judgement. but even here, i do not know if i can attend a mens circle, or a womens circle, i often wait for there to just be a queer space.

I’m learning that I can hold both, even if the world keeps trying to point me to one side or the other. But what I didn’t expect is how often I end up taking the brunt of the anger that each side carries toward the other. Sometimes it’s heavy, because I get treated in ways I don’t feel I deserve. Somehow I’ve become a safe outlet for what people can’t say or do around the “other” sex, but feel comfortable directing at someone gender diverse.

I can feel invisible when I try to name the truths behind someone’s bias or unconscious behaviour. Many women cannot look at certain truths. especially truths about their own bias, internalized oppression, or the subtle ways they’ve adapted to survive. until they feel safe, resourced, and ready. Many men do not want to be exposed for the conditioning they’ve inherited. not because they’re evil, but because shame, fragility, and lack of initiation make it unbearable to face.

And of course, here I am doing both of these things myself, while also trying to explain them. I’m not outside of any of it. I’m unlearning and learning at the same time.

I’ve come to believe it’s our job to notice these puppeting strings. Our subconscious, our bias, our biology, our generational history, our conditioning, our culture, the societal systems around us. None of us are free from these influences. the work isn’t to cut the strings but to to see them and to understand how they work.

Because once you can see the strings and understand the Mechanisms, You can choose differently. And that little bit of awareness, that tiny gap between impulse and action, is what opens the door for real change.

xii. The Hive Mind

It is hard to watch this patriarchal world turn women against the gender diverse, particularly against trans women. It is obvious that the patriarchy is held together by the division of man and woman and the oppression of women. Otherwise maybe we would have more of a matriarch or at least a balance.

When trans women in particular break this binary, it is extremely threatening. The patriarchy works like a hive mind. They might not fully realize why they target who they do. They think danger. Which is funny, because that is only a reflection of the danger they hold.

They do not realize that it is the hive mind, the one that strives for power, the one that comes from survival, where survival is dominance as it often is in the animal kingdom. And what is sad is watching that instead of women continuing to make strides together, the focus is turned. Now there is a version of a common enemy to focus on, one that will never strengthen their position, only weaken it. It will cause women to turn on women, a tactic as old as time.

x.iii A Cultural Moment of Shifting Power

In this time where there is an energy of empowerment, when women are realizing their worth and coming into abundance, leaving the ball and chain of control behind, men are having to face themselves. To face their abandonment and realize it wasn’t women that needed them, it was them that needed the women.

It is a harrowing experience to feel both of these happening inside me at the same time. The bliss and joys of freedom, of attachments, of masculinity that is driving so much of my happiness and success. And also the loss of the women leaving me, leaving my masculine. Leaving the threads of oppression and control it was impressing on them.

It triggers my own abandonment and sense of worth without their validation and love. To be aware and grateful for their growth and my growth, but also heartbroken, fighting the reins of my own desire to have them back.

It both delights me and hurts me that women are moving away from the need of man. To feel like what I have become, my need to come online, may make me less desirable from the class of humans I have been and loved the most.

That triggers the masculine hive mind within me, the mind that wants to be in control. And that calls me to continue my journey of maturity, of speaking these truths, of loving myself, and doing the best that I can in the most honourable way. Learning when it is best to walk away. To give the matriarch, which is also within me, the space they need to grow into their power.

Sometimes it feels like I am trying to beat my new masculine down with a stick, based on how my feminine believes it should behave. But a good friend told me, you can’t fight peace with war. And that is what it is, it is peace. it is natural, it is source, it is love. I do believe that Masculinity is best served humble. i love who i have become, who i am becoming. Learning to be a man is the greatest gift i have Received. It is about letting, not forcing, the world come to you, to see your greatness, your skillful power and the source love within you. Find balance within ourselves, our divine energies of both Masculine and feminine, and let that be a replicated model for how we find harmony as a greater community.