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Based on comments, it seems that there are (at least) several people who are unsure about where I'm at now in terms of my transgender issues, and how I got there. This is not remotely surprising, given the way that things have panned out for me, over a whole lot of years.

As such, I present a brief timeline. Since a lot of my problems have been down to the interplay between the transgender issues and the depression, I'm going to cover both of them in the timeline.

1991 (age 10) - We moved house across town. I never really made any friends in my new area.
1992 (age 11) - I started a new school. I was bullied somewhat.

In hindsight, I look at these two things as being the genesis of my depression. They made me a lot more insular, introverted and wary.

1992-1997 (age 16) - The bullying got worse, most notably on the coach to and from school. I was not a happy camper. Crying myself to sleep at night was a regular occurrence. My sleep patterns started to go to pot, and it was quite common for me to sleep 4 or 5 hours a night through the week, and 12 hours or more at weekend.

1997 - This was when I started being more self-aware. I grew better at ignoring the bullying and adopting a "fuck you; your opinion doesn't matter to me" attitude. I was also better able to avoid it by, for instance, not sitting anywhere near the bullies on the coach to school. I'm not quite sure how that one didn't occur to me in the 5 preceding years. It was also about this time when I first became aware of my gender issues and started, for instance, growing my hair out for the first time.

1999 (age 18) - I left home for the first time to go to university at Oxford and I crashed and burned horribly. I'd had a very sheltered life, and was completely unprepared for the autonomy and independence I then had. I was also completely unused to work that required any sort of actual thought or effort. Without my dad nagging me to get up in the morning, I stayed in bed the whole day, and then spent the whole night in the computer room, when there were no people. I was horribly shy and had practically no social contact. I saw the other 4 physicists in my year from my college when we went to lectures or tutorials and I sometimes also saw slovakia (who I'd gone to school with) and miss_corinne (who I knew from the Internet) but that was about it.

On top of all of this, this was when I was first actually starting to deal with my gender issues. If memory serves, it was November '99 when I first went to see Dr. Russell Reid, a psychiatrist specialising in transgender issues. Then in December I started taking hormones for the first time, starting initially on Ovran, a combined oral contraceptive pill, which he tended to prescribe because of how cheap it was to get privately. (Interestingly, the first Ovran tablet I took was the first time in my life I had ever taken any sort of pill or tablet. Before that, I'd never even had so much as a painkiller. I'm currently taking 5 pills per day.) I forget the exact time for this, but I think it was also around late '99 when I first came out to my parents (which I chose to do by email because I was a moron and a coward (aka, I was 18)).

2000 (age 18-19) - In January 2000, I changed my name legally by statutory declaration. I think it might have been on the 22nd, but I can't recall for sure and am too lazy to go and hunt down the paperwork.

After my second term at Oxford, I officially dropped out, at around Easter 2000, returning to live with my parents for 6 months or so. The depression just got worse and worse over this period, even though I was still vehemently denying that I was depressed at the time. Looking back, I think that on at least some levels I knew that I was depressed, but wasn't willing to admit it because I was afraid that if I did then that would in some way detract from the validity of my gender issues.

In autumn 2000, I moved down to Canterbury, where I lived with kimble and 36, both of whom I knew from on the Internet, and also to attend the University of Kent. This attempt at university was even more of a spectacular failure than my first attempt, and lasted only a few weeks before the depression overwhelmed me.

Through 2000 and 2001, I carried on seeing Russell Reid. I can't remember the exact timing of everything here, since I was fairly racing through the process at this point. I added Androcur (Cyproterone Acetate), an anti-androgen, to the Ovran. I changed from taking Ovran to Zumenon (oestradiol hemihydrate) and Duphaston (dydrogesterone), a progestin. At this point, I passed fairly well (sample picture of me from 2000). I could, for instance, go out in public wearing a skirt without feeling remotely self-conscious. It was at this point that I had my passport changed over to an F (the process at the time was to get a letter from a psychiatrist saying that I was living full time, and to send it off to a special department of the passport office; I believe that this has since been changed).

In terms of my gender issues, this was probably the time in my life when I was most comfortable and at ease with myself.

2001-2003 (age 20-22) - However, this was also absolutely the worst time for my depression. for most of my time in Canterbury, I pretty much lived in bed. It really wasn't at all pretty. I'd get up once a week or so to go to the supermarket for food, and as needed when I had to go to the toilet or fill up my water bottles. I tended to keep my food in my bedroom rather than in a fridge, which was about as grim as it sounds (though not with things like raw meat; I wasn't quite that stupid). I'd sometimes go a day or two at a time without eating because I'd run out of food and was too depressed to get out of bed to go and buy more. I lived in what can only be described as a state of absolute squalor. Like I said, it wasn't pretty and I have no clue how my housemates put up with me.

As it finally became obvious even to me that I was depressed, the gender stuff started slipping back as a result. First off, I stopped taking Androcur since, among its many other nasty side effects (mmm, hepatotoxicity), it serves to act as a clinical depressant. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you want to be pumping into your system when you're too depressed to even get out of bed. This alone served to cause somewhat of a regression in terms of passability, especially in terms of dealing with facial hair.

I then also stopped seeing Dr. Reid. I was too depressed to want to make the trip up to London to see him, and my GP was prescribing me my hormones, so there was little motivation to go see him. I didn't feel that there was anything that I needed from him at this point.

2003-2005 (age 22-24) - After kimble finished her degree in Summer 2003, all my other housemates were moving out, so I had no choice but to move out myself, once again going back to live temporarily with my parents. My depression was abating somewhat at this point a well, so in autumn 2003, I decided to give university another shot, this time going to Lancaster University. At first, I was going there while still living with my parents in Chorley, and while the commute was a bit of a git, this was good as it meant that I had my Dad to motivate me out of bed in the morning again while I started to get back into some semblance of a routine.

In early-mid 2004, I moved into my current flat in Lancaster. My Dad is in the construction industry, and this block of flats was built by the company he was with at the time. This flat had been earmarked for me for a good while before it was finished, which was why I was commuting up to university for the first couple of terms.

This attempt at university was significantly more successful than either of my previous two tries. The first year went by fairly uneventfully, and I passed the end of year exams with flying colours. The problem that it was still a lot of effort. Dealing with being around people so much. Trying to fit my square-pegged sleep patterns into the round hole of my class schedule. And so on and so forth. It was just exhausting. By my second year there, I was becoming more and more exhausted. I was missing a lot of classes. I was seeing a counsellor. I did just about manage to scrape through the second year, but that was as far as I got. Fairly early in the third year, I burned out and crashed quite hard. The depression was back with a vengeance, and I had no choice but to drop out. Again.

What was worse, was that through all this time, I hadn't sought out a GP in Lancaster. I should have done, and I always meant to, but I was always too exhausted, so it was always something that I'd do "next week". No doctor meant no hormones, which meant an ever more masculine appearance, which meant increasing difficulty dealing with people, which meant more depression, which meant... I was into a nice vicious circle again.

2006 (age 25) - I'm not sure what happened to 2006. I suspect that most of it was probably spent playing Guild Wars in a depressed stupor.

I think it might have been 2006, or possibly late 2005, when I finally got a GP again. Needless to say, he wasn't willing to prescribe me hormones straight off the bat, since I hadn't been taking them for a couple of years or so and hadn't seen a psychiatrist in a fair bit longer than that. Which really is fair enough.

2007 (age 26) - Now. This was when I started seeking medical help again. The thing I'm doing this time which is different from what I've tried in the past is that I'm trying to deal with the depression and the transgender issues simultaneously and in parallel to each other, rather than just dealing with one and ignoring the other. At the moment I am taking fluoxetine (Prozac), which is prescribed by my GP, and oestradiol hemihydrate (Zumenon), prescribed by Dr. Curtis, my gender specialist psychiatrist. I'm also seeing a therapist, for CBT.

As of next week, I'm also going to be starting a course of laser hair removal to deal with my facial hair. I'm also seeing Dr. Curtis again next week, and am planning on asking him or Goserelin (Zoladex), which is a GnRH agonist. Provided he's willing to give me this (which I suspect he will be), it will have a similar result as the Androcur I used to take, except with a completely different mechanism, fewer evil side effects, and will generally be more effective (if more expensive).

My general hope, at this point, is that the goserelin and the laser hair removal combined will go a fair way to increase my passability, which will also improve my self-confidence, and my willingness to leave my flat, interact with people, and such likes. I'm hoping that this will then help to start off a positive feedback loop in dealing with the depression, with the CBT to help push me along and work out any knots along the way. My long term goal is that once I'm generally functional and happy is to have sex reassignment surgery (which I don't think I want to have before I'm functional and happy since that seems a recipe for post-operative depression as I realise that surgery hasn't magically solved all my woes), but I think that's sufficiently far away that it's not something that's a main focus for now.

Blimey. That turned out a lot longer than I was expecting it to be. Hopefully it helps to explain things somewhat better, and helps people understand the bizarre limbo state I'm in at the moment. Any questions?