i experienced a psychotic break that ended about 8 months before i started HRT, and i did notice some psychological changes after i started estrogen/spiro (not any psychotic symptoms though, which i am much more familiar with personally than i’d like to be). in particular my ability for self-care drastically improved (taking a shower every day became significantly easier after about 1.3 months on HRT) and my emotional regulation improved to the point that i became capable of holding a job. granted, the changes could have been primarily related to my brain continuing to recover from psychosis, but i guess i’m curious if you really had zero psychological changes. did you not feel slightly less anxious, or did you not sleep better once you started?
i guess i’m just curious because one would think that if trans women had brains closer to cis women than cis men do, that pre-HRT trans women would experience similar psychological symptoms that cis women with elevated testosterone do.
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 experienced a psychotic break that ended about 8 months before i started HRT, and i did notice some psychological changes after i started estrogen/spiro (not any psychotic symptoms though, which i am much more familiar with personally than i’d like to be). in particular my ability for self-care drastically improved (taking a shower every day became significantly easier after about 1.3 months on HRT) and my emotional regulation improved to the point that i became capable of holding a job. granted, the changes could have been primarily related to my brain continuing to recover from psychosis, but i guess i’m curious if you really had zero psychological changes. did you not feel slightly less anxious, or did you not sleep better once you started?
i guess i’m just curious because one would think that if trans women had brains closer to cis women than cis men do, that pre-HRT trans women would experience similar psychological symptoms that cis women with elevated testosterone do.
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.