I didn’t rigorously track things like mood and sleep. What I really meant is that I had no clear changes in my moment-to-moment experience.
Personally, I’m skeptical of neurochemical explanations of gender dysphoria, and I suspect a lot of the emotional benefits of HRT are due to the positive experience of affirming your identity.
But haven’t you read about the BSTc findings? It’s a sexually dimorphic region in the lizard brain and trans women’s BSTc regions were similar to cis women’s while trans men’s were similar to cis men’s. This was controlled for HRT as well.
There’s no solid proof for it yet, but the idea that something went wrong during fetal development where the body masculinized but the brain feminized or vice versa makes the most sense to me.
I suspect that the reason it works might not be the reason we think it works. E.g. there is some neurochemical benefit to HRT, but whatever is happening is not having the wrong sex brain for your body.
I didn’t rigorously track things like mood and sleep. What I really meant is that I had no clear changes in my moment-to-moment experience.
Personally, I’m skeptical of neurochemical explanations of gender dysphoria, and I suspect a lot of the emotional benefits of HRT are due to the positive experience of affirming your identity.
But haven’t you read about the BSTc findings? It’s a sexually dimorphic region in the lizard brain and trans women’s BSTc regions were similar to cis women’s while trans men’s were similar to cis men’s. This was controlled for HRT as well.
There’s no solid proof for it yet, but the idea that something went wrong during fetal development where the body masculinized but the brain feminized or vice versa makes the most sense to me.
I suspect that the reason it works might not be the reason we think it works. E.g. there is some neurochemical benefit to HRT, but whatever is happening is not having the wrong sex brain for your body.