Interesting post. Thank you for not trying to extrapolate your experiences to all trans people and kudos for trying hrt. I was shaking my head and thinking just try it halfway through the post and it was a pleasant surprise to find you ahead of me.
I have to say, the apathetic result is not at all what I had expected. I expected you to realize how wrong everything you said was, or possibly discovering what dysphoria really feels like. Instead it was… “not really a big deal, at all)”. Seems like that points to the cis-by-default theory I’ve seen a few times in rationalist circles.
Though I’d like to add that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep your mind unchanged and have a female body. Even for me, there were significant aspects of my pre-transition mind that I wanted to keep.
I expected you to realize how wrong everything you said was
What parts, specifically, are wrong? What is the evidence that shows that those parts are wrong? Please tell me! If I’m wrong about everything, I want to know!
Well, I was smiling and thinking “egg” after just a couple minutes because you describe an awful lot of little pieces of evidence that point towards being trans. So I expected that hrt would be a transformative sweep-away-all-doubt experience, like how it was for me. And on the off chance that you weren’t trans, then going on estrogen would cause dysphoria in the reverse of how being on testosterone messed my mind up.
And neither of those things happened! Which means it wasn’t you that was wrong, it was me.
One thing I’ve been wondering about for a while is, some trans women I know say that estrogen immediately makes them feel better, on a time scale of hours to a single day. For those who it is this quick, it seems like it should be testable with placebo. Unfortunately the trans woman I had arranged a placebo test with ended up too busy.
Definitely wasn’t the case for me. The only psychological effect I’m pretty much certain about is the lower/different sex drive. There’s also more crying, but I think that it’s mostly accounted for by a different physical response to the same emotions. And some other changes, but they are more subtle and hence might be placebos. (Although, when I just started HRT I had extreme anxiety about possible side effects and it might have masked any rapid positive psychological effects.)
I’ve had an odd inbetween experience. I at the beginning I had a quick but weak positive reaction, but later I’ve tried going on and off without much effect beyond the sex drive. I attribute my initial positive reaction to placebo, but I would feel more confident in attributing this stuff to placebo if I could demonstrate it for someone who had a big, clear, unambiguous effect.
It did make me feel better immediately, but I always assumed that was just placebo. The first objective changes came after a couple days, when I happy cried at a movie for the first time in my life (that I can remember, anyways). What Vanessa says about different physical responses doesn’t really feel right; the emotion was very intense and I don’t remember feeling anything like it before.
Interesting post. Thank you for not trying to extrapolate your experiences to all trans people and kudos for trying hrt. I was shaking my head and thinking just try it halfway through the post and it was a pleasant surprise to find you ahead of me.
I have to say, the apathetic result is not at all what I had expected. I expected you to realize how wrong everything you said was, or possibly discovering what dysphoria really feels like. Instead it was… “not really a big deal, at all)”. Seems like that points to the cis-by-default theory I’ve seen a few times in rationalist circles.
Though I’d like to add that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep your mind unchanged and have a female body. Even for me, there were significant aspects of my pre-transition mind that I wanted to keep.
What parts, specifically, are wrong? What is the evidence that shows that those parts are wrong? Please tell me! If I’m wrong about everything, I want to know!
Well, I was smiling and thinking “egg” after just a couple minutes because you describe an awful lot of little pieces of evidence that point towards being trans. So I expected that hrt would be a transformative sweep-away-all-doubt experience, like how it was for me. And on the off chance that you weren’t trans, then going on estrogen would cause dysphoria in the reverse of how being on testosterone messed my mind up.
And neither of those things happened! Which means it wasn’t you that was wrong, it was me.
One thing I’ve been wondering about for a while is, some trans women I know say that estrogen immediately makes them feel better, on a time scale of hours to a single day. For those who it is this quick, it seems like it should be testable with placebo. Unfortunately the trans woman I had arranged a placebo test with ended up too busy.
Definitely wasn’t the case for me. The only psychological effect I’m pretty much certain about is the lower/different sex drive. There’s also more crying, but I think that it’s mostly accounted for by a different physical response to the same emotions. And some other changes, but they are more subtle and hence might be placebos. (Although, when I just started HRT I had extreme anxiety about possible side effects and it might have masked any rapid positive psychological effects.)
I’ve had an odd inbetween experience. I at the beginning I had a quick but weak positive reaction, but later I’ve tried going on and off without much effect beyond the sex drive. I attribute my initial positive reaction to placebo, but I would feel more confident in attributing this stuff to placebo if I could demonstrate it for someone who had a big, clear, unambiguous effect.
It did make me feel better immediately, but I always assumed that was just placebo. The first objective changes came after a couple days, when I happy cried at a movie for the first time in my life (that I can remember, anyways). What Vanessa says about different physical responses doesn’t really feel right; the emotion was very intense and I don’t remember feeling anything like it before.