Yes, I recommend watching all those videos. They were what finally forced me to admit I was probably trans and that I should at least try hormones and socially transitioning to see whether it made things better or not.
Been feeling a little bit weird gender-wise the past couple days. Yesterday especially was a "butch" day for me, spent a lot of time working in the garden in my overalls, talked to my neighbor in boy-mode. I can't bring myself to tell them I'm transitioning because they're a right-wing sovereign citizen and I think it would probably kill an otherwise cooperative and amicable relationship (don't exactly want to feel unsafe in my own home). Still, it's getting harder to hide my breasts and my face is obviously different after almost 5 months of HRT.
Managed to get my name changed with my employer after getting my updated social security card. Mailed off my passport and waiting for that.
Also learned that my state recently passed legislation that prevents me from updating my gender marker on any legal forms of ID, so I won't be able to update my gender marker on my driver's license. I think it's probably illegal and there is already a lawsuit by the ACLU, so I'm basically just waiting for the litigation to overturn the new law.
Otherwise I have unprecedented amounts of energy and ability to handle stress. I've been baking a lot for other people, and going to a lot of social events, even opting to go to social events on my own (something I have never done in my life; I only have ended up in social situations through obligation and pressure from others in the past). Life is really different on estrogen, much better than I could have anticipated.
I recommend watching this video if you haven't already: Common Excuses to Avoid Transitioning
Can confirm, I still don't know that I'm trans, all I know is that I started HRT and transitioned socially and I still like it so I keep doing it. Sometimes you just have to admit it's scary and you're taking a gamble, but you can always take stock and see if the transition is still right for you. It can feel like you have to commit up-front and know for sure, but I'm not sure anyone knows for sure.
When I'm feeling the most doubt I like to sit down and write out the reasons I think I'm trans or why I think I might not be trans. Usually by writing it out I am confronted with all the reasons I have for transitioning and I feel better, more grounded in my choices. I think this is probably just fear and internalized transphobia that causes me to endlessly doubt and question whether I'm actually trans.
Not a sports-bra, but I love the bralette I got from pact:
https://wearpact.com/women/underwear/bras/lace smooth cup bralette/wb1-wbb-fgn
Only issue I've had is that I can't cinch the straps tight enough so sometimes they slip down a little.
I've heard for transfems that men tend to have down-turned eyes and that you want to draw your eyes a little higher (using eye-liner), so basically don't draw the eyeliner all the way to the end of the eye-lid and stop a little early to "lift" the eye. Just wondering if this is others' experiences as well or not - it's something I found useful before estrogen started to change my eye-shape.
For me, I personally reacted differently to different labels and pronouns as I transitioned. When I first started I didn't think my deadname or old pronouns bothered me at all, nor did I think they would in the future. It only took a few months for that to change.
In my opinion, early transition is not a time to make these kinds of promises, your intuitions might not be the same a year from now if you medically transition and live as a woman. You also aren't thinking about what it might be like for your children to call someone who looks and lives as a woman their "dad".
If possible, I think it would be wise to seek couple's counseling (ideally someone with a PhD who has experience working with couples where one of them is transitioning), not because anything you're doing is wrong but because it will give you a context for working through the active issues in your relationship. (Sometimes people see couple's counseling as something you do when you're failing, but in my experience if you are proactive and seek couple's counseling before the relationship has reached a critical point where it's too late and the relationship is ending, the counseling is more like an investment in the relationship that breathes life into it and can help sustain it.)
I wish you luck in your transition, I wish you lots of gender euphoria. ❤️
Came here to say the same. I've seen other people claim Leviticus 18:22 was mistranslated, but all the actual Biblical scholarship and evidence I have found does not support this and the word is indeed a generic word for "male" that doesn't imply age. Would love to see evidence to the contrary, though!
However, there is a debate about what "Paul" (the author was probably not actually Paul) meant in the New Testament in Corinthians by malakoi ("soft") and arsenokoites ("man-bed") and some people argue this is about pederasty and not about homosexuality, and that is at least more plausible than the claims about Leviticus 18:22.
Of note perhaps to @June and OP: a documentary was also recently produced called 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture, which makes these kinds of arguments.
Thanks, I love how genderqueer the underwear models are 😁
I do have one of their gaffs and it works for me really well. I tend to wear underwear over the gaff, and while it doesn't entirely eliminate all bulge or completely smoothes out the area, it does a much better job than just underwear. I wore the gaff through a couple TSA pat-downs and it was perfect for that kind of situation. It also lets me wear dresses that otherwise show too much, if you know what I mean.
Strangely I hid my legs before the hair started coming in, but I do think it got more intense after that.
I guess that's another memory / thought that didn't make sense until after transition. When hair started to come in on my legs when I was a teenager, I really didn't like it and started shaving it, despite also feeling insecure about my masculinity and wishing I were like the other boys in my puberty (which was coming too late and too weak to keep up). I wanted to be normal and that was more important, but I still hated the changes that came with male puberty (though I didn't think of it that way, I didn't really contextualize it, I just instinctively shaved it until I felt I couldn't keep getting away with it).
I recommend a gaff from origami customs, as they don't charge for making your gaff to custom measurements, and they have a free gaff program.
EDIT: Origami Customs is based out of Canada and they ship internationally. Since I don't see any of their in-person free gaff programs partners in Austria, your best bet will be their online free gaff program through Point of Pride, here are their requirements:
We have only two requirements in an effort to be as inclusive as possible:
- You identify as transgender (MTF, genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, and every other non-cis identity assigned male at birth within the trans umbrella.)
- You cannot afford to purchase femme shapewear, or you cannot safely obtain femme shapewear.
We accept all requests for support, and applications are open year-round. Once you complete your application, your request will be added to our waitlist. Shipping is discrete and 100% free, and we ship internationally to 90+ countries and counting.
Point of Pride sources their gaffs from Origami Customs. You have to take measurements, fill out an application on this Google Form, and they will contact you when it's ready to ship. They do ship internationally for free.
I think the main "catch" is that there is a wait-list and presumably a long wait time. Even buying a gaff directly from Origami Customs I placed my order in December 2023 and it didn't ship until March 2024. I suspect it will be a much, much longer wait for a free gaff through Point of Pride.
I could never explain why I always wore long sleeves and pants when I went to school. I don't think there was a single day where I went to school in shorts, and not a single day I went to school without long-sleeves (some days I would wear short-sleeve shirts but I would bring a long sleeve shirt to put over it). I felt exposed and uncomfortable otherwise. I was a good student, but the only class I did poorly in was gym because they graded you based on whether you dressed according to dress-code, and I refused because it required changing into shorts and a short-sleeved t-shirt in a locker room full of boys. I tried it a couple times but just couldn't keep doing it. I think the teachers thought I was just defiant or something, but I was meek and just uncomfortable.
I remember being in third grade and wearing a literal winter coat to school every day in the heat of summer (this being in the south). I remember being extremely sweaty and uncomfortable on the bus rides especially where it was crowded and there wasn't AC, but I never took that coat off.
I never understood why I always felt ashamed of my body and wanted to cover every part of it. Before realizing I am trans I thought maybe I had a repressed memory of sexual abuse or something, but now it makes more sense to me why I had that kind of relationship to my body.
I feel that I should preface this by warning questioning people that looking for signs is generally not a good way to find out if you’re trans. Different people experience being trans in different ways.
What is a good way to find out if you're trans?
Yeah, that was one of my hypotheses - that sustaining too high of a dose causes downregulation of the estrogen receptor, or something along those lines. A bit like a drug tolerance. That said, it's unclear to me whether that kind of thing is actually likely or possible; I can only say it's what the experience is like.
That does seem like a strong possibility, but then I don't know how to explain why taking 0.4 mg more estrogen seemed to fix the mood issues I was having and made me feel more like taking 5 mg used to feel.
they debunked the myth that caffeine causes pancreatic cancer:
https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2015235
EDIT: Caffeine might make you more likely to have issues with your heart, and isn't good for your blood pressure.
I would take bio-identical progesterone (P4) prescribed by a doctor. The common recommendation is to press the pill (normally taken orally) up into the rectum, since taking it orally causes the liver to filter most of it. Bypassing the liver by putting it up the rectum allows it to absorb readily in the lower intestines.
See:
https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/#rectal-progesterone
A common recommendation is to start progesterone a year or two into HRT once the breasts have reached Tanner stage III, as taking it too early supposedly can negatively impact breast development (take this with a grain of salt, may or may not be true; there is also no empirical evidence progesterone helps breast development, it's all anecdotal reports).
I started injecting into tummy around mid March, so I guess it's been a month since I gave up on injecting into the thighs. I started the 5 mg / 4 days in mid February, so I guess it's been two months at that dose.
In that case it seems like injecting into the tummy shouldn't be the reason I started to experience dysphoria. I do think sometimes that some injections depot better than others, and that it depends on various factors like whether I hit any blood supply, how much bleeding I cause when I inject, etc.
Thanks for the tip on the thigh - I can't remember if I've heard that as well, but it's good to hear what people are experiencing.
❤️
Hi!
tl;dr after injecting the same amount of estradiol valerate (subq) for a month or so, I started to experience more dysphoria and signs of testosterone (esp. mental) started to come back. Any reason this might be?
Longer version / details:
I injected 5 mg (0.25 mL) of estradiol valerate subq into my thighs every four days for a while, and for a couple weeks I started injecting into my abdomen instead to avoid blood supplies.
This dose seemed like more than enough. In the past 3.4 mg every 3 days gave me blood estradiol levels of ~350 pg/mL at trough. Recent labs showed 5 mg every 4 days had ~300 pg/mL at trough for me, which was lower than I expected.
It's a good level, but I was having weird dysphoric experiences that commonly happen when my hormones are out of wack (usually when I'm taking too little estrogen). Things like really doubting my gender identity, depression (lack of motivation, lethargic), anhedonia (little pleasure, flat affect, often leads to craving short-term reward behaviors). Physiological signs of T were not as evident in this case, and the dysphoria was not as severe as in the past when my estrogen was too low. Still, it seemed a lot like my estrogen was too low.
I increased my dose to 5.4 mg and the dysphoria went away within a day and I felt amazing and continued to feel amazing. I intended to switch to 5.4 mg / 4 days instead, but on day 3 I could feel my hormones coming down and trusting my experience I injected 5 mg a day early with the intention of trying 5 mg / 3 days (which is a lot more than I have taken before in terms of what this should do to my overall levels). Still not sure what I will do next. Part of me wants to stick with a 4 day cycle to keep lower peaks and to minimize overall levels (out of principle, I know injecting is not as risky as oral routes).
I'm trying to figure out why a stable dose that seems so high and was for the most part effective would suddenly not be "enough" (assuming that's indeed what's happening).
For context I'm close to 4 months on HRT, I took bicalutamide for a bit but stopped because I don't think it helped my mental symptoms and that's the most important therapeutic goal for me with taking HRT. I switched to monotherapy after 2 months which is when I started the 5 mg / 4 days.
I've heard sometimes the body can go through phases as it adjusts to estrogen early in HRT, so maybe this is just one of those lurches or adjustments?
Anyway here are some guesses I came up with:
- I gained some weight (like 15 lbs), some maybe I need a little more EV than before?
- injecting into abdomen depots the oil differently than the thigh, so maybe I am seeing a slower or lower circulation of EV (or alternatively a much faster circulation that is causing a crash earlier?)
- maybe the estrogen receptors are downregulating due to taking too high of a dose too regularly? (I see lots of debate about whether this is a thing, mostly people on Reddit rejecting the idea that this has any clinical relevance.)
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this or has suggestions.
Thanks so much!
Non-binary seems like it could have several non-compatible meanings, so I wanted to list some of those meanings and see if there are any others out there I don't know.
One way I could think of non-binary is as being a kind of third gender category, like there are men, women, and non-binary people. In this sense of non-binary a butch woman who considers themselves a woman would not be non-binary because they are a woman.
Sometimes non-binary is used like "genderqueer" is sometimes used, as a generic description of anyone who doesn't fit perfectly in the narrow confines of the binary genders (i.e. men and women). In this sense a butch woman could see themselves as a woman, but also as genderqueer and non-binary, as they do not conform to binary gender norms for women.
Another way non-binary seems to be used (related to genderqueer in its historical context) is as a political term, an identity taken up by otherwise cis-sexual and even cis-gendered people who wish to resist binary gender norms and policing. In this sense even a femme cis-sexual woman might identify as non-binary. Sometimes this political identity label might come with a gender expression that cuts against the gender expectations for the assigned sex at birth, but it doesn't have to. (I recently met two people whose gender expressions matched their assigned sex at birth but who identified as non-binary in this political sense.)
I was wondering what other meanings of non-binary are out there, and how they are commonly used.
Note: gatekeeping what is "really" non-binary seems pointless to me, since I agree with Wittgenstein that "language is use".
I know people get heated about policing what a word means (and I am guilty of this myself), but in the interest of inclusion, pluralism, and general cooperation in our community I think we can find a way to communicate with overlapping and different meanings of a shared term.
I recently had an injection that seemed to go wrong (CW: blood, I inject EV subq and I hit something like a capillary, there was a lot of blood and it bruised badly afterwards). Within a couple days I felt unusually dysphoric as a result of what I assume was a failure for the oil to depot and slowly release over time.
I get these "dysphoric thoughts" that maybe the estrogen is causing the problems, that I don't have objective proof that I'm trans, etc. Lots of doubt, paranoia, and increasing amounts of anxiety and irrational fear (about transition, but also in general, e.g. thinking spiders are in my bed), and I start to experience depression and anhedonia (things aren't as pleasurable, everything feels pretty flat emotionally, I just feel "bad").
Of course when I inject again and it goes well, I feel much better and I forget about these problems.
I was just wondering if anyone has advice on how to deal with dysphoria when there are gaps in the HRT. Obviously in the long term, surgery will fix the hormone issue and I suspect that will fix this problem. Until then, though, I am stuck in a rather fragile place where I feel normal (even good, even amazing) when my estrogen levels are high and suppressing my testosterone. Any small slip in that and I barely function as a person.
Before HRT I would just do whatever I could to increase mental well-being:
- physical exertion (aerobic exercise, weightlifting, etc.)
- going outside and getting sunshine
- keeping up with hydration
- keeping good sleep hygiene (sleeping enough, going to sleep at the same times, etc.)
- meditation every day
But now it feels harder for me to "bootstrap" when there are gaps in HRT and my hormones aren't right, it's like I'm no longer used to how hard it was before.
Anyway - any tips or thoughts, would like to hear other's experiences.
