u/godsfavoriteclover

Deerhunter (basically)!

I am coming up on a year of battling seb derm and am beyond fed up with how much this condition is controlling my life. My scalp has, nearly every day for a year, been varying degrees of itchy, burning, crawling, feeling bruised, sore and extremely tender. I don't let my partner touch it anymore because it's too painful, a windy day can be extremely painful, and I worry about sweating too much which is a constant threat given that I live in the South without A/C in my car. I don't exercise nearly anymore for fear of making my scalp more inflamed.

I've tried keto, t sal, zinc, and now selenium sulfide. I've tried air drying, blow drying my hair after showers. I'm already vegan and gluten free and rarely drink. I'm trying Zoryve at the moment and am seeing my derma about low dose accutane next.

But I'm coming to terms with the fact that I might just need to buzz it and start all over. Due to telogen effluvium from surgery and early onset AGA, my hair has already thinned a lot. Would buzzing actually provide the relief I think it would for me to get a handle on my scalp? 

I'm a trans woman trying to grow her hair out so this would especially feel like a step back for me, but i wonder if it's worth all the pain to keep the hair that I have.

I feel so demoralized. I already thought I was being aggressive but I still have so much build up, and have been shedding like crazy (partially due to oral minoxidil) as well. He said my thinning was a 6 out of 10 (whatever that means). Going to try this routine for a couple weeks and see if I have any improvement:

Showering everyday, blowing until dry, alternating between these shampoos every week for 2-3 weeks and seeing if there is improvement.

Selenium sulfide - cicloprox - t sal - cicloprox - selenium sulfide - cicloprox - t sal

Using Zoryve foam every night.

Will ask for a round of oral antifungals if this isn't effective.

Hoping this works. My scalp itch is ever present and horrible and I need to have my life back. I'd love any recommendations for other treatments or any feedback on this routine.

I've had SRS and FFS and there are outcomes from both that give me significant mental distress. My aesthetics for my SRS aren't ideal and my FFS left me with a scar at my temple that is at least hidden by my bangs, but I know it's there, and there's soft tissue on my chin that (to me anyways) makes it seems bulgier and longer. I had an Adam's apple reduction that was only able to take I would say 30% off or so. Surgeries also contributed to significant hair thinning that has been horrible. I went through with them as a way of prioritizing myself and my own wellbeing, but every surgery I've had has been underwhelming and given me emotional distress.

I often get gendered correctly, HRT gave me boobs at least, but I still suffer from debilitating dysphoria often, and I feel like my brainworms are so deep I have no way of knowing if I am pretty. I have a hard time trusting my own eyes. I was repressed but I honestly miss being a guy and being able to dissociate enough to not care about how my body or face looked. I was able to enjoy more hobbies then.

Now I'm often stuck in this loop of researching revision surgeons, analyzing pictures of myself, feeling a sense of persistent dread instead of the hope that I felt at the beginning of transition.

I genuinely just want my life back. I want to feel happy and enjoy the parts of my life that are going well. Even with therapy I am having such a hard time doing so. I've experienced a lot of hardship in my life but this past year of surgery recovery by far has been the most difficult thing I've ever had to do, and I have frequent suicidal ideation and thoughts of self harm as a result. Has anyone gone through anything similar? Have any advice?

If you want to check my brainworms:

https://www.reddit.com/r/transpassing/comments/1ulis9q/how\_am\_i\_doing\_34\_4\_years\_hrt/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Transgender\_Surgeries/comments/1uwbtrx/what\_advice\_would\_you\_have\_for\_further\_ffs/

Has anyone experienced dating with noticeable/active hairloss? Did it impact your dating life at all? I've been experiencing shedding from surgery and other health issues over the past year, and hair loss is something I never see talked about much in lesbian online communities.

I am about 10 months into a chronic TE shed that revealed early AGA after multiple surgeries last year, in addition to dealing with seb derm. My shedding started dying down early in June, but then I started 1.25 mg OM and have been dread shedding for about 7 weeks now. While I still don't think most people would really notice, my ends are so thin, and my hair is so light, and it really bothers me all the time.

I know I need to stick with OM for awhile before seeing results, but what can I tell myself to reinforce my confidence and womanhood in the meantime? Toppers/wigs/extensions are off the table for me, so I mainly just am looking for things to psyche myself up and calm myself down.

My Wife (33) and I (34) had a silly argument/misunderstanding about me going out of my way to pick up food the other day, and it ended up escalating. She's autistic and oftentimes during conflict her trauma response is to take all of the blame and apologize profusely. That happened again during this instance and it was too much for me (I'm dealing with my own issues of worthiness and self-love) so I went into the other room to cool off. While I was in the other room, I learned later my wife had taken an earring and used the back to deeply scrape multiple cuts on her arm.

She says she had done it to punish herself after our argument. I put some ointment and bandaids on it and over the next two days I really started to process what happened. She had a past of self harm before I met her but it had been years. I had trouble sleeping and woke up crying multiple times because I couldn't stop being wracked with guilt, feeling like it was my fault, thinking about how she hadn't self harmed when she was with her last partner.

This made me fight my own urges to harm and punish myself. I didn't want her to feel guilt or like she did something wrong, but I couldn't hide the effect seeing her hurt had on me. The day after she made kind of a crude joke about her cuts and I felt sick to my stomach.

I love her so much, and I want to help, but I just don't feel equipped to help her, and feel like I have to do a lot of compartmentalizing of my own feelings (albeit not very well) to try to make sure things don't escalate again. I have my own mental health challenges I'm trying to work on and feel like this experience made me backslide a lot on my own sense of worthiness.

I'd love to hear anyone else's experience and how they handled and felt about a similar situation, and what to do next.

I recently hit the 11 month mark after FFS, and I'm coming to terms with the fact that I don't feel satisfied with my results. While I don't think I was botched per se, my face often feels more alien to me now, and I've had complications that made me feel more distant from myself. When I first started transitioning, I felt such an overwhelming amount of hope and joy for the future, and now around the 4th year of HRT mark I feel so much dread and depression.

I was dealing with really bad facial dysphoria before FFS and got it as a way of investing in myself, to actually address my issues and instead I'm just dealing with a weird, different type of dissociation from myself, which has been preventing me from enjoying a lot of my normal activities and leading to some suicidal ideation if I'm being honest.

The first few months when my face was still swollen I felt elated, like I was finally seeing who I was supposed to see in the mirror. But now that the swelling has settled, I feel like my face is in this in-between state between masculine and the feminine face I want.

I have a lot going for me with supportive friends, family, hobbies, a wife, and I have a beautiful and feminine body, but my face has been really degrading my mental health and I feel so alone in dealing with this.

I'm going to seek a revision in hopes that will help, but I'm struggling to know how I can cope in the meantime. I feel like I lack the ability to really know how feminine I look, and I constantly question whether I just have body dysmorphia or something.

I just want my life, my optimism for the future back. I love being a woman, I love being a lesbian, and I feel separated from those identities now because of my issues with my face.

I've been dealing with seb derm, telogen effluvium from surgery, and early onset AGA, and I recently (a month ago) started taking oral minoxidil. I've been trying to battle active seb derm for months now, and while I've had some success with the typical treatments (ketoconazole, T sal), the inflammation is still active. Can I still expect to see results from oral minoxidil while my seb derm is being stubborn? Has anyone had direct experience with this?

I've had an ongoing scalp issue for awhile now that hasn't been very treatment responsive and I'm looking for a reputable dermatologist that specializes in treating scalp conditions and hair thinning. Reviews for dermatologists in Atlanta are all over the place and it seems like there are a lot of quacks in the bunch so any recommendations from your experience would be great!

My wife and I were in Paris during the May heatwave and going to movie houses during the afternoon heat was our trick for finding A/C and something unique to do. There are a ton of interesting English language movies playing in interesting historic theaters literally every day, so it was very easy for us to pivot and find a cool movie to watch the next day or day of. Highly recommend!!!! We loved Cinémathèque Française in particular.

We have tickets for Versailles at noon tomorrow, and while we really want to go, dealing with the heat dome at peak heat at a place with largely no air conditioning sounds unbearable. So we're considering cancelling instead. What do y'all think, would it still be worth it?

I've had two rounds of surgery-induced TE that unmasked early AGA, and concurrently developed seb derm that has responded a little to alternating ketoconazole and t-sal treatments. Will oral minox still work as I'm trying to get the seb derm under control? Does anyone have experience dealing with these together while using oral minox?

My wife and I love each other deeply - we have so many beautiful aspects to our relationship. But she has been feeling less sexual for awhile, and we're starting to really take this conversation seriously because I have a higher sex drive and this mismatch is contributing to some of my insecurities while making her feel pressured to be more sexual. We both have neurodivergencies and past trauma and body image issues and working through all of that also makes this more tricky.

Has anyone had similar issues and successfully worked through it in therapy or other means and come to a compromise that meets both people where they are?

I (33F) just need to get this out so I can go about my day and think about something else. I love my girlfriend (32F). We're about to get married. We connect very deeply in many ways. But over the last year and a half of our 2.5 year relationship, sex is not one of those ways. our sexual chemistry was amazing for the first six months. But gradually ever since then she's expressed less and less of a desire for sex to the point that we just don't have sex at all anymore. She'll have short bursts of having a libido for a few minutes, but then it fades, and she rarely ever touches me sexually. She hasn't felt comfortable reaching orgasm around me for probably 8 months.

This morning I thought I heard her moaning in her sleep (no idea if that's what it was or not), and I just felt awful. when we have short sexual bursts I hear her moan a little bit (I love her moans so much), but hearing her like this I just couldn't help thinking how sad I felt that I hadn't heard her cum in so long. I get insecure too when I know that she's masturbated. I wish I wouldn't. It's just when I only get to experience such a small amount of that side of her, it's like I feel jealous that she explores that on her own without me. not a healthy feeling, I know.

My self-esteem has been very low throughout all this. not all owing to the lack of sex. I'm a trans woman who has gone through surgeries over the last 8 months or so and that has been very trying for me mentally, which has been exacerbated by my need for physical and verbal validation not being met.

We cuddle all the time, we spend so much of our time together, I know she loves me very deeply. But I feel pathetic for how attracted I am to her, and how difficult it is for her to return that to me. She's autistic and says she gets overwhelmed and feels pressured easily during sex and has some body issues of her own, and I've tried to talk with her on how I can be sensitive to these issues and how we can find other ways of being sexual, and these conversations mostly don't go anywhere except making me feel ashamed for having a need for sexual validation, and her feeling guilt for not being able to meet that need.

I'm just so afraid this dynamic will never change. We see a couple's therapist so I'm going to ask her if she would feel okay talking about our intimacy issues with the couples therapist. I want so badly to find a way for my needs to at least be partially met and most of the time things stay the same after we talk about this discrepancy.

I don't know what the best thing to do is. we've talked about me being polyamorous and exploring things outside of our relationship, which I would be interested in, but I worry that 1) nothing would take away from me wanting that validation from her and 2) if she saw someone and clicked sexually and we still didn't, I know I wouldn't be able to take it.

I just don't know what to do. I love this girl so much. I want things to work so bad, but this is killing me and really fucking with my sense of confidence and self-esteem and I often feel ashamed for not being able to provide that totally for myself.

UPDATE:

I talked to her about this last night, and essentially said that if our level of sexual intimacy stayed the same as it is, then I didn't think we were compatible long term. It was hard to hear for her but she understood, and said she wanted to work on it with me. We're going to talk to the couples therapist about it next week. I know most of the advice here was to break up outright (and I appreciate all the advice everyone 💖), but it's worth it to me to try working through things first. And I feel better stating what I needed outright and clearly, thanks everyone for giving me the push.