trans | depression/psychosis and gender self-image

So I'm guessing I'll try posting this to

genderqueer since I really don't know where I'd get the best response.

Basically what's up with me is this...well, let me go back to an earlier moment. I've been on one antidepressant or another from the time I was 15 or 16. I'm now 23. One of the complaints I had about being on an antidepressant was that it seemed to make me just not care about my problems, and that when I was off of them they would come back.

Now before anyone jumps in here and starts proclaiming that the psychiatric industry doesn't know anything about brains and that I need to stop being taken advantage of by the drug companies (which might be slightly less likely in a trans community), I should say that I'm on drugs for a reason. Basically because 1) I don't like being who I am off of drugs, and 2) I can't stand being trapped in this body without medication--and in this I am not focusing nearly as much on gender as I am general pointless psychic pain; pain that is just there and has no reason or purpose or focus and there is nothing you can do to get rid of it. And before someone jumps in and says it's my fault because I'm not taking care of myself and I should just go for the miracle cure of diet, sleep, exercise and psychotherapy, I'd like to say that while that might help the situation (as I am taking certain of those measures), it won't alleviate it. But I don't want to have to go on and bitch to preemptively defend myself. I *don't* want this thread to turn into a debate on the merits of psychiatry. Back to what I'm really writing about.

Anyway...I'm also on a neuroleptic with antidepressant properties due to my specific condition. This, *and* I'm in some way trans on top of it, to omit diagnoses irrelevant to this and to assume that my cross-gender feelings are really ingrained as part of me and not an aspect of psychosis. At this time I'm thinking that there are two major paths I can take...that either at this point I am in a final delay phase before transition (in which I make a conscious decision to stop thinking about transition), or I will never transition and what I'm going through now is just negotiation of what balance of masculine and feminine traits I want or need to carry throughout my life.

I feel like either way I'm going to have to end up giving myself permission to be more masculine or 'butch' (as in butch or masculine male or extremely butch female) than I am now. What happened recently is that I went down on two of my medications--the antidepressant and the neuroleptic. This coincided with my crashing into a pretty bad depression. I'm now on my way out of the depression, which became noticeably severe last Sunday. But what's interesting to me is that at this point I've begun thinking about the desire to be a man. The butchness also started becoming more potent before I went into depression...and I had noticed myself slipping about a week before I went down on my medications, though this didn't really become clear until after I crashed.

I had been taking weight training...starting to get some muscle definition, you know? and there was the according body shape change, my curves going down...okay I'm forgetting my topic. The thing is that I had been thinking I might be genderqueer (though I suppose I could still be)--I had been gradually moving back to a more feminine or androgynous/queered femme expression and then there was this sharp reset. This occurred around the same time that my body started shifting.

Now I am not sure why I am thinking what I am thinking at the time I am thinking it--to what extent I'm thinking about transition because perhaps I still am depressed and/or psychotic and that this is affecting my judgment; or to what extent going down on the medication and having the depressive crash revealed something that was being masked by the medication so that I was able to ignore it.

I do think that in me it could be seen as attractive for me to go about building muscle mass the hard way, and keep my hairless face and breasts--and just be who I need to be--but then also there is the route of becoming more or less permanently masculinized. I'm aware that I'm not in a state to make a lasting decision about my future right now. That maybe it won't ever be possible for me to be a "real man". So I'm trying to get this out now while it lasts, as a record. Then there is the possibility that what I'm feeling is part of a slow entry phase into becoming a really well-adjusted man. I say I have 'desire to be a man' because at this point it is desire and not reality. Or--at least I'm not viewing myself as a man quite yet, and I'm not filling the social station. At least--I don't think so.

Then there's the parallel concern that I'll slowly go insane...but that's for another community...and another time.

Edit: I'm adding 'psychosis' to the subject header as it is relevant. But then I have to explain myself. Psychosis is simply becoming disattached from 'reality'. It doesn't mean I want to kill anyone.