On the proper piloting of flesh shoots
In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.
I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.
As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn’t know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I’m fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don’t turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.
So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life.
As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.
I used to think it was a good idea to experiment with basically every psychoactive drug, but nowadays I am more skeptical of anyone’s understanding of the effects of basically any chemical intervention on the human body, and I adopt more of a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” principle towards all of it. It’s a lot easier to make my body or mind work worse than to make it work better.
(Of course, if you were already “pretty sure” you were trans, then that’s a different story.)
And for the flip side, my (cis male) partner was having acne issues and decided on a whim to take my anti-androgen to see if it helped (because it’s been used to treat hormonal acne, primarily in women for reasons that will become immediately obvious). He was absolutely miserable within a couple days. I was kind of amazed because I had a very similar reaction to you when I started feminizing HRT, I wasn’t expecting such a dramatically different reaction on his part, even though he’s a cis guy.
That being said, I don’t necessarily suggest this kind of experimentation in general. I really don’t know what the error rate of this method of diagnosing gender dysphoria is, and I don’t want people stuck with changes they’ll regret if they do feel good and decide to stay on hormones long-term solely based on that feeling (in the absence of other indicators that they are probably trans). In particular I don’t recommend AFAB people try testosterone this way, partially because that one is actually illegal to possess without a prescription due to doping and also because T tends to have superficially positive mood effects in a lot of people, to my understanding, meaning feeling good on T is not as indicative of it being “correct” for you. For presumably cis guys it usually feels pretty awful to have your testosterone levels suppressed, and/or to have higher levels of estrogen, so if you don’t feel that way on girl pills and you actually feel better, it’s a decent signal that maybe your ideal hormone balance is somewhere in the feminine direction, with all the potential implications that may have for your gender identity.
Thanks for the notes about testosterone I’m not very familiar with it
Congratulations, I’m really happy for you!
That’s because estrogen changed the pattern-which-is-you in your brain, and so now you feel differently (the feeling is in your brain as well).
Philosophical questions aside, it’s awesome that this helped you to feel better.
How do you distinguish “I didn’t know I was trans until I took the drugs” and “the drugs have an effect on my mind which warps my judgment to make me think I’m trans”?
Well if you had asked me a week before I went on hormones I would have said that I knew I was trans it’s just that taking hormones has unlocked levels of certainty I didn’t realise where possible