Yeah.

So… I am totally officially up past my bedtime. But still a long night of further blogathoning waits ahead.

This where it starts getting difficult.

So, to make things easier, I will be pulling from my requests something that hall-of-rage requested…

A post about cookies!

I seriously love cookies.

I suppose I have no idea what I could actually SAY about cookies that would be in any way interesting. Though there is the advantage of the term having multiple meanings, and metaphorical associations.

I guess they are connected to an interesting fact about HRT…

It always strikes me as silly when hard line social constructivists make the argument that gender is wholly socially constructed, and that all behavioural differences between men and women are simply byproducts of social conditioning. While I’m not a hard line bio-essentialist either, and their claims seem just as ridiculous to me, the reason hard social constructivism seems particularly absurd is because of the degree to which the obvious facts of my life contradict their claims. It essentially comes across as someone who has lived indoors their whole life attempting to explain to me, through convoluted theories, that there’s no such thing as the sky. Or that the sky is actually red. Or something equally absurd. Something that I  DIRECTLY know to be false.

The thing is, taking HRT, and being able to compare who you are and how you behave with an estrogen-driven endocrine system to who you were and how you behaved with a testosterone-driven endocrine system, it becomes very, very, very clear that yes, hormones DO influence behaviour, emotion, sexuality, etc. It becomes as plain as the fact that there’s such a thing as the sky.

That doesn’t mean our hormones determine our destiny, or dictate who we are. But they DO have an effect. They DO matter.

There’s lots of things about me that are different. And I sincerely treasure pretty much all of those differences. I experience emotions more deeply, with a broader range, with more nuance. I can cry, where in my male life I literally went a period of over ten years only really crying once. I feel more interpersonal connection with other people, and I’m a lot more responsive to touch. The sexual differences are profound, and, if you’ll forgive the sharing of TMI, although my libido is considerably less strong, I now feel I’m in control of my sexual desires rather than my sexual desires controlling me, my whole body, my whole tactile field, has erogenous potential, where once everything seemed to boil down to one particular place and one particular kind of action, I now have a world of possibilities to explore, and the orgasms I now have are amazing. Like mind-blowingly awesome. I’ve even been multi-orgasmic on occasion.

But one of the weirder and sillier and less consequential differences? I used to be a salty-snack person. I now have a horrible sweet tooth.

And I get chocolate cravings, ice cream cravings, and cookie cravings, in a big, big way.

In particular, I often find myself craving white chocolate macademia nut cookies. The soft kind. Mmmm.

Which is also kind of odd. My favourite cookies used to be snickerdoodles, molasses, oatmeal and coconut macaroons. I still love all those cookies, of course, but when even my favourite cookies change with hormones, well…

You really want to tell me gender is only a construct?

Shut up and pass me some more chocolate-chocolate-chunk cookies. And sugared shortbread. And pumpkin spice cookies. And jammy dodgers. And oreos.

And maybe some pecan and caramel ice cream too.

And a bar of 75% tanzanian bean-to-bar single source dark chocolate, too.

Thanks!