[HN Gopher] Estrogen: A Trip Report
___________________________________________________________________
Estrogen: A Trip Report
Author : sebg
Score : 111 points
Date : 2025-06-19 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smoothbrains.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (smoothbrains.net)
| calico96 wrote:
| Lynn Conway, fellow (former) MIT student documented her
| biochemical journey with estrogen therapies of the 1960s:
| https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnsStory.html
| calico96 wrote:
| In 1966 Dr. Harry Benjamin (who worked with Lynn) documented
| early 20th century hormone research and treatment options in
| his book, "The Transsexual Phenomenon":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transsexual_Phenomenon
| DoctorOW wrote:
| As a transgender woman myself, I have been witness to many in my
| community reduce some recreational drug use with HRT. I think
| it's unlikely that estrogen literally causes euphoria, but gender
| euphoria is real, lasting happiness. When you compare to the
| health effects of letting someone waste away on recreational
| drugs to dull dysphoria, it paints a visceral picture of
| transition as healthcare.
| karcass wrote:
| I lost interest in psychedelics after transitioning.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Amen
| deadbabe wrote:
| Is gender dysphoria thus caused by the body craving
| testosterone or estrogen hormones, when it doesn't have?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I haven't studied gender dysphoria but I've been diagnosed
| with it. In my experience, it's an incongruence between your
| idea of yourself and your perceptible form. In some ways it
| could be argued your body is "craving" it but not in the same
| way it may crave a specific nutrient. Instead, you're sort of
| surprised and often upset by the way that you are.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's one way to think of it, but the root of it (imho) is a
| mismatch between ones internal sense of inalienable gender
| identity and the embodiment of that identity physically -
| think clothing, bodily form, social perception, etc.
|
| It might be difficult to imagine how those two things are
| separable if one has lived their whole life with them in
| congruence. If perhaps, you close your eyes and concentrate
| on your being, there is a part of you that feels that your
| sense of manness of womanness is part of who you are? What
| would you do if you retained that sense, and woke up in the
| body of the opposite sex and were expected to behave in
| congruence with that contrary to your internal sense of self?
| It can be a bit like that.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| It's chilling watching the latest political powers openly
| declare that trans people are not who they are inside and must
| never be allowed to become what they are inside, while
| eliminating legal recognition and protection and criminalizing
| life-saving transition healthcare. I find myself retreating
| into dissociation because to _feel_ the horrors is more than I
| can bear.
| wahern wrote:
| The glass-is-half-full take is that no states have prohibited
| gender affirming care for adults. All the present bans in the
| U.S. only proscribe treatments for minors. But one would be
| forgiven for not knowing this because it's not how it's
| reported.
|
| Point being, even the most conservative states haven't (yet)
| sought to limit treatment for trans adults.[1] Which is not
| nothing considering how many were so quick to ban abortion.
|
| Also, it's not just the U.S.; plenty of "liberal" Western
| European countries have reversed course on care for minors.
| Even the Netherlands, the origin of the WPATH protocol, has
| pulled back on the reigns for minors, though they haven't yet
| instituted any prohibitions.
|
| IMO, the trans advocacy rhetoric that equivocated hurdles to
| gender affirming care for minors as murder backfired. The
| fact there seems little motivation to limit treatment for
| adults suggests substantial openness to the issue among even
| conservative populations. And there are many in the LGTBQ
| community, include trans community, who share similar
| sentiments, at least regarding the rhetoric.
|
| [1] Not sure about legislation dictating certain aspects,
| like waiting periods, but those were widespread as a
| practical matter in even the most liberal states.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Yeah but the whole point so far has been to pass laws under
| the guise of "protecting children" because that was easy to
| justify politically. Now that SCOTUS has green-lit denying
| healthcare on the basis of assigned gender at birth, the
| gates are wide open.
| titanomachy wrote:
| "Denying healthcare on the basis of assigned gender at
| birth" seems like a deliberately loaded way to state
| this. Isn't it more accurate to say it's a blanket denial
| of a certain type of treatment to all minors?
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're still allowing puberty blockers
| for premature puberty, inducing puberty in cis teens, and
| surgically and medically forcing intersex people into a
| binary sex without consent.
| wahern wrote:
| Much of the majority and most of the dissenting opinions
| in the recent SCOTUS case are exactly about that--is it
| sex discrimination?: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion
| s/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf All the opinions are worth a
| read. The best arguments for both sides are there.
| Though, I thought all the best arguments on both sides
| kind of sucked; it's just a very difficult issue.
| Transgender questions lay to waste 100 years of sex and
| gender discourse on both the right and left.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| No, because puberty blockers can be assigned to children
| (in fact, children are the only applicable group here).
| They just can't be assigned to children _specifically
| because they are transgender_. Similarly, mastectomies
| are available treatment for teens... they just can 't be
| used as a treatment for teens assigned female at birth.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Personally I think it's less accurate to rephrase medical
| treatment as "a certain treatment". It's also false to
| say all minors, since cisgender minors are still approved
| to receive puberty blockers (and are regularly prescribed
| them for various reasons).
|
| It's the same medicine from the same medical
| professionals and the only difference is your gender
| identity.
| wahern wrote:
| > Now that SCOTUS has green-lit denying healthcare on the
| basis of assigned gender at birth, the gates are wide
| open.
|
| Yes, we're at a juncture. But my point is I don't think
| bans for adult care are inevitable, nor that strict
| prohibitions for minors need be permanent. If trans
| advocates and their supports took a breather and figured
| out how to reframe things, the backslide (such as it is)
| could be arrested and even reversed. But that will
| require, at a minimum, taking back the microphone from
| the most radical "advocates". And probably to
| depoliticize it. The issue has become highly politically
| polarized, but that's a relatively recent thing. I was
| gobsmacked by the generally tame and sympathetic
| conservative response to Caitlyn Jenner among
| conservatives 10 years ago. The turn was avoidable and,
| arguably, reversible.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| From the point of view of a conservative and non us citizen,
| you have a good life there compared to the rest of the world.
|
| Technically, most countries don't allow people to be openly
| gay. In some countries, being gay even privately means you
| get beaten to death or your head chopped off.
|
| Needless to say that transgender people are not even taken
| into consideration.
|
| If I was gay or transgender, god knows I would rather be in
| the USA or maybe north Europe than any other country and
| especially not Africa, Arabia, South America.
| xiande04 wrote:
| Ah, the old "it could be worse" fallacy.
|
| So to recap, you're saying, "don't worry about what's going
| on in the US right now, because you still have it better
| than most of the world"
|
| Just because something could be worse does not mean that 1.
| It's nothing to be concerned about 2. That we shouldn't
| take steps to improve the situation.
|
| Things can always be worse, so this "logic" is always
| applicable. It's a vacuous argument. Even if you lived in
| the country with the worst homo/transphobia in the world,
| you could tell the person, "well, at least your alive."
|
| Moreover, there's nothing constructive about this line of
| thinking. If people actually lived by this logic, we would
| live in a static world, because "it could be worse."
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Does this suggest at all that these changes could also be
| differences in the way (cis) men and women perceive the world? In
| other words, do cis women experience sweet food tasting sweeter,
| colors being more vibrant, etc, compared to cis men?
|
| Edit: I'm aware there's evidence for differences in color
| discrimination and taste preferences between the sexes. But
| seeing the differences described from a first person perspective
| of someone used to being a male is fascinating. It's a common
| cliche that women laugh much more than men, for example -- and
| here's someone saying that being on estrogen actually made funny
| things seem much funnier. I wonder what the experience is like
| for FtM who take testosterone?
| mintplant wrote:
| Women are generally better at perceiving and distinguishing
| colors and smells, according to the studies we have.
| Anecdotally, my sense of smell has gone from dull to vibrant
| over the course of my (MtF) transition, and I have a friend who
| no longer experiences the color-blindness she used to before
| hers, though I'm not aware of any scientific evidence or
| inquiry in this area.
| tofof wrote:
| Women (here I mean XX individuals) have two different alleles
| present for each of the green (OPN1MW, also the OPN1MW2
| duplication) and red cones (OPN1LW), since these are found on
| the x chromosome. X-inactivation means that only one gets
| expressed in a particular cell, but this means individual
| photoreceptor cells can express either allele. The individual
| proteins and gene encodings of the cones can differ, and
| small variations shift the spectral sensitivity to slightly
| shorter or slightly longer wavelengths. It's possible, then,
| for a woman to express as many as five unique-ish cones in
| theory -- though there's only been one 'true' tetrachromat
| found so far. Still, having red and green cone variants that
| respond with a peak preference shifted 10-20 nm in addition
| to another unshifted cone (or, better, shifted the opposite
| direction) provides a biological basis to expect women
| (again, specifically XX individuals) to have finer color
| differentiation. This explanation, however, could not occur
| following a hormone replacement.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There are some established differences. Women have better
| colour, taste, and smell discrimination. Some women are
| tetrachromats with an extra colour sense, while men are more
| likely to have red/green colour blindness.
|
| Men have better night vision, are more aware of motion, and are
| better at tracking location and judging distances.
| antonfire wrote:
| > Some women are tetrachromats with an extra colour sense,
| while men are more likely to have red/green colour blindness.
|
| If I'm not mistaken, red/green color blindness is more common
| in men because it's caused my a mutation on the X chromosome
| (which men tend to have fewer of). I would guess a similar
| thing about tetrachromacy.
|
| So those are probably unrelated to color-perception changes
| due to exogenous estrogen.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Gendered cliches are incredibly common, but I've never heard
| one that involves women liking sweet food more or less than
| men, which you'd expect if there were actual differences in
| taste I think
| vinoveritas wrote:
| It's an extremely common pattern for alcoholic drinks, to the
| point that a man ordering a very sweet drink or a woman
| ordering neat whisky is likely to draw comments (not even
| necessarily negative ones, especially in the case of a woman
| preferring usually-masculine drinks). It's also present in
| wine marketing--the lower end of the market has heavily
| feminine-coded marketing and tends to be very sweet (at least
| in the US), and in fact that aligns with actual preferences
| I've observed (I'm not sure I know a single woman who prefers
| dry wines?)
|
| Chocolate (dark vs milk) and coffee drinks (heavy on milk and
| sugar versus light on them, or black) follow similar patterns
| in perception (and actual observed preferences, IME)
|
| Of course, how much of that is nature versus socialization is
| another matter... but also, the kind of risk-taking and one-
| upsmanship behavior that might drive men to be more willing
| to acquire tastes for things that aren't initially appealing
| and to so-expand their palates may itself be hormonal, so
| even one plausible "nurture" cause for this might actually be
| "nature" one step removed.
|
| But either way, and even if data doesn't bear any of that out
| (pretty sure it would, though), the perception that all
| that's generally true is certainly common.
| blindriver wrote:
| You are assuming that people mostly experience the world in
| exactly the same way. That is a huge assumption that's likely
| to be wrong.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| What? How in the world did I make that assumption?
| foxmoder wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I found that my sense of smell improved
| significantly after a long time taking estrogen, and I've heard
| many similar one-off stories from other people who've done so
| too. It certainly does change your physical perception of the
| world in a few ways, as well as the general feeling of existing
| in one's body.
|
| One recurring theme I've heard from people going from majority
| testosterone to majority estrogen is a feeling like a
| continuous 'buzzing' sensation in their head had finally
| stopped; this is something I personally experience, and there's
| a certain degree of relaxed serenity that comes with it for me.
| (This said, experiences vary a lot, and many who have had both
| primary hormones prefer the feeling of testosterone.)
|
| I personally think that it's a beautiful opportunity to get to
| experience life through both sets of hormones; it's offered a
| lot of interesting perspective on my personal notions of
| 'self', and allowed me to develop empathy for different
| experiences others experience in their bodies.
| MondayGravity wrote:
| Perhaps this is an insensitive question/comment, but do trans
| women feel like they have the wrong body or the wrong wholesale
| gender? In my experience with trans women I know, they still seem
| to relate primarily to men (they still gravitate towards male
| dominated interests) whereas many gay men I know seem to relate
| primarily with women, and gravitate towards women interests.
|
| So this reconciliation is hard, and the topic too sensitive for
| me to dare asking people I know in real life.
| davmar wrote:
| don't forget that socialization plays a role. boys are guided
| to certain activities in their youth, girls to others.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The people I know couldn't relate to men at all, felt like
| completely different species. While they may have some
| interests from their "past" life, many of them felt that they
| could now enjoy things women did without judgement, and so they
| did.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| I haven't really found that to be true in my friend groups, but
| also it is really common for people on the spectrum to be
| trans, and a lot of autistic people in general tend to have
| interests that we view as male-coded.
| antonfire wrote:
| > Perhaps this is an insensitive question/comment, but do trans
| women feel like they have the wrong body or the wrong wholesale
| gender?
|
| It varies.
|
| > In my experience with trans women I know, they still seem to
| relate primarily to men (they still gravitate towards male
| dominated interests) whereas many gay men I know seem to relate
| primarily with women, and gravitate towards women interests.
|
| For whatever it's worth, I think observations like this are as
| useful a cue to look inward for an explanation as they are to
| look outwards.
|
| For one thing, part of the whole "gender" thing is the way
| people's preconceptions lead them to parse information about
| others (and themselves!), and your sense of trends is probably
| influenced by that. (E.g. when a (gay) man gravitates towards
| "women interests" that may just be more _salient_ than when a
| woman does, so you notice it more.) For another, you might be
| _in_ a lot of male-dominated spaces (e.g. this one), so the set
| of trans women you know is probably not that representative.
| These might not be the whole story, but they certainly have a
| role to play in whatever reconciliation you 're seeking. Gender
| is difficult to navigate: we're all swimming in it.
|
| For me personally: I'm "nonbinary", whatever that means. As I
| see it today, for me being trans feels like more of a "wrong
| wholesale gender" thing than a "wrong body" thing. (But I'm
| open to the idea that I'm just not in touch with my body.) Part
| of the "wholesale gender" thing is the realization at some
| point in my life that "gender" was playing a much bigger role
| in my life than I had realized, including how I relate to
| people, what interests I gravitate towards, and so on.
| Something I find deeply aversive.
|
| But I'm also averse to, like, rearranging my whole life to
| retroactively "fix the gender story" around it, just to make
| myself more legible. You might parse me as gravitating towards
| interests that line up with my assigned gender at birth (AGAB),
| and maybe even as relating to people primarily of my AGAB, and
| so on. I'm sure some people go further and functionally take
| this as an excuse to continue to relate to me through the lens
| of my "birth gender" or what have have you. I'm sure it's
| easier. From my perspective, I suspect those people are
| underestimating how much of a clusterfuck the whole "gender"
| thing is.
| brooke2k wrote:
| I don't think it's an insensitive question at all. To answer -
| As a trans woman, interests/hobbies are not really a marker of
| gender that I feel is important to me. I would say the same is
| true of all my trans friends, although ofc that is not a
| representative sample, so take it with a grain of salt.
|
| For me, in no particular order, these are the elements of
| sex/gender that I find important (and which were crucial for me
| to align during my transition):
|
| * My body. This was perhaps the single most important one.
| Hormones worked wonders here, as well as growing out my hair,
| shaving, learning to take care of my skin, etc.
|
| * Clothing/makeup went a long way towards making me feel better
| about myself. It takes a very long time and a lot of practice
| and skill-building to be "good" at fashion/makeup/etc, but it
| was worth it.
|
| * My personality. This one is the hardest to describe. I can
| only say that when my body ran on testosterone, I was
| miserable, antisocial, arrogant, and annoying, and after
| switching over to estrogen, I am much happier, better at
| conversation, more empathetic, and by all reports much more
| likeable.
|
| * My relationship to other women. It's hard to describe, but as
| I transitioned I became a lot closer to the women in my life,
| and grew apart slightly from the men in my life.
|
| I think in part this emerges from the negative side of being a
| woman in society (being leered
| at/catcalled/harassed/stalked/patronized/discriminated
| against/etc). It leads women to stick together and trust each
| other more implicitly than men. So as a trans woman, gradually
| being welcomed into this "club" was very gender-affirming
| (although the negative stuff still sucks :/)
|
| * Name and pronouns. At this point (~4 years) I pass enough in
| public that I am essentially never misgendered, but on the rare
| occasion I am, it certainly ruins my day. Pronouns matter more
| than cis people might think.
|
| * Relationship to my family. Being called "daughter" by my
| parents, doing mom/daughter stuff with my mom, etc.
|
| There are probably other factors that I'm not thinking of right
| now, but this is what comes to mind as I write this. And
| notably, my interests/hobbies aren't really included there. I
| do software development, I'm into skateboarding and punk music
| and videogames, I play dungeons and dragons. All "male-coded"
| hobbies for the most part, but I really just attribute that to
| the fact that I developed my hobbies as a kid, and as a kid I
| was a boy with friends who were boys and who did boyish stuff.
|
| I personally don't find that that affects my perception of my
| gender at all. Hopefully this helps clear up your confusion!
| Let me know if there's anything I can clarify further.
| RebeccaTheDev wrote:
| I can't speak for other trans women, but is kind of how I
| describe my experience with this. And this is from someone who
| is a later-transitioner, talking about this specific type of
| social dysphoria [0].
|
| It took me _enormous_ effort to relate to other men, and I was
| never sure if I was doing it correctly. I would go out of my
| way to try to learn "how to man," including having typically
| male-coded interests (like sports, or home repair) that I
| really didn't actually care about but knew I had to because it
| was socially expected of me. I knew I had to, because I had to
| operate in that world, but I was never comfortable, none of it
| ever came naturally and all of it just felt _wrong_.
|
| I was desperate to relate to women. It would hurt that I
| wouldn't be able to participate in that world even though I
| longed to be a part of it. Often my wife and I would have grill
| out parties, and I would be at my expected place outside with
| the guys, talking stuff I hated, but I longed to be chatting
| with the other women inside. I feel comfortable as a woman, and
| much more comfortable relating to other women in my life.
|
| Do I still have male friends? Of course. I have men I worked
| with for decades and that I'm still friends with. Our
| relationships definitely changed a bit, but we still have
| shared experiences that bind us together. At the same time,
| with my female friends, our relationships definitely changed as
| well. Things felt different. Our conversations got deeper and
| more meaningful, and I feel like I "know" some of them better
| than I ever knew any of my male friends.
|
| I also kept some of my male interests because _I 'm interested
| in them._. I still love aviation and trains. Definitely male-
| coded interests (though there are quite a few more women than
| one might expect.) I also picked up, or in some cases learned
| to stop repressing, typically feminine-coded interests. I have
| far more fun with dress than I ever cared about doing as a guy.
| Or, now I proudly own that I read romance novels instead of
| sheepishly hiding my kindle.
|
| [0] https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/social-dysphoria
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Can't you just be a man that loves spending time with women
| instead of a woman 'trapped' in the body of a man ?
|
| I have known several men, non gay, that just behaved more
| like women than men. that was fine, and as far as I know they
| didn't swapped gender.
|
| Like you can be a duck, happy when around dogs but still be a
| duck.
| RebeccaTheDev wrote:
| You can do whatever you like. Many do, and are totally
| happy about that.
|
| Note, again, I am talking about one specific "type" of
| gender dysphoria, social dysphoria. There are usually far
| more facets that come into play as well.
|
| And that's also a way you know you're trans, and not just a
| man that loves spending time with women. Because the
| relationships dynamics and social expectations are totally
| different regardless, we feel out of place. And not being
| seen in the correct way causes ... pretty deep negative
| feelings.
| srinivgp wrote:
| Some people certainly can simply enjoy spending time with
| people not of their assumed cluster of traits. But that's
| not what's going on with trans women. They aren't doing
| some sort of "going overboard when you'd be perfectly happy
| with less" or whatever you're asking. Is it really so hard
| to believe trans women? Brains do _all sorts_ of things
| that seem weird if your own brain doesn't do it.
| Aphantasia, synesthesia, plurality, autism all come to mind
| immediately.
| heterodoxlib wrote:
| A slightly different but closely related question for those who
| are answering: what do you attribute the difference to? Is it
| biological in basis, spiritual/metaphysical, or cultural?
|
| I keep hearing people say "gender is a social construct" and
| those same people then go on to emphatically support
| transgender as a concept. This leads me to wonder: if gender is
| a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of
| feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of
| what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? If so,
| is being transgender _also_ just a social construct that can
| and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight
| expectations for gender roles? Or is being transgender more
| biological than cultural for you?
| ghushn3 wrote:
| You are asking a good question (it reads to me like a good
| faith question that comes from a desire to learn more about
| how others think).
|
| > Is it biological in basis, spiritual/metaphysical, or
| cultural?
|
| Personally, I view it as cultural leading to physiological --
| what does it _mean_ to be a man? What is "manly"? I think
| everyone can agree that "manliness" is different globally. Is
| Bill Gates manly? He's very _successful_ , but is that
| something that's manly? Is Tom Cruise manly? Or Kid Rock?
| What about George Takei? Manliness has some multi-axis
| definition that exists in each culture around the world.
|
| We call that set of vectors "being a man", and we push people
| who are born with penises into it because it seems to fit
| most people who are born with XY chromosomes. Personally, I
| think it's useful to decouple the two ideas -- what my body
| is, and what the cultural expectations are in how I should
| behave because I have that body. This is what people mean
| when they say gender is a social construct -- they are
| saying, "The piece we call 'manliness' is a separate concept
| from the piece we define by bodies."
|
| Now, say I experience anxiety, fear, and revulsion about the
| set of vectors that define "manliness". I have a penis, but
| absolutely all the vectors for "womanliness" line up with my
| understanding of how the world works. Clothing, presentation,
| speech patterns, interests, activities, etc. etc. etc. What
| do I do in such a case?
|
| I could just live my life in pursuit of the 'wrong' set of
| vectors -- but socially that's quite dangerous. When people
| who are "supposed" to maximize one set of vectors try to live
| with another set, they tend to get bullied (if not violently
| attacked.) This puts me in a bind -- either live a miserable
| life pretending to be manly OR push my body to try and match
| the set of vectors associated with womanliness. (Or, change
| society to stop caring so much about people who fall outside
| of the traditional vector space, but that's a lot harder than
| either of the two other approaches.)
|
| > is being transgender also just a social construct that can
| and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight
| expectations for gender roles?
|
| For me, absolutely! That's the exactly the sort of ideal
| world I'd love to be in -- let people just... pursue what
| makes them feel happy. If someone with a penis wants to get
| way into makeup and the color pink, stop beating the shit out
| of them for it.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| What an interesting read. I wonder, are these reports a reliable
| way to begin to understand what it feels like to be of the other
| sex? Insofar as such a thing is possible, of course. The
| anecdotes of smell and the sensation of _powering up a hill_ are
| fascinating.
|
| On a different note,
|
| > At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put
| whatever one likes inside one's body;
|
| I never thought of it that way, but I agree.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| > It's as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the
| space around me and increased the degree to which every point
| within that could influence the location of every other point,
| recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a
| more harmonious equilibrium.
|
| What does this mean? There has to be a simpler way to get this
| idea across..
|
| > Perhaps taste could be built out of something like dyadic
| vibrations, tuned by evolution towards consonance or dissonance
| in order to generate an attractive or aversive response in the
| organism?
|
| Same here
| ghushn3 wrote:
| > What does this mean?
|
| My understanding was like... you know those spring diagrams,
| where edges of a graph are all attached by a spring, and
| physics sorta causes nodes to cluster naturally? I think this
| is saying, "I wish all the space around me could order itself
| into a more natural and pleasing shape."
|
| > Same here
|
| Dyads are like... imagine you had two vectors, represented by
| lego bricks. After attaching them, rather than having a red
| brick and a blue brick, you have a particular Red-Blue brick.
| So, one can imagine these unique shapes move and vibrate in
| ways that are unique to that pair.
|
| The author is saying, I think, "Individual preferences aren't
| composed of atomic units, but rather subtle adjustments in all
| the combinations of those individual pieces. Evolution probably
| looks for places where those combinations line up nicely (and
| avoids places they don't line up nicely), and tunes the
| organism to seek those combinations."
| HK-NC wrote:
| I remember reading that autism was basically the brain equivalent
| of some roided out muscle beast. Too much testosterone in the
| womb or something. Given the huge crossover with trans and
| autism, could it just be a case of giving autistic men female
| hormones to try to balance this out over time? I dont really buy
| the rest of the fluff that comes with it, especially given the
| attitudes around it and my own experiences getting over dysphoria
| before there was a culture around taking things in another
| direction.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| > before there was a culture around taking things in another
| direction
|
| You are talking about a time before culture? Trans identity
| shows up as early as Mesopotamia, and there are cultures around
| the globe that have different genders than just Man and Woman.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Interesting also that penis size is directly correlated with
| testosterone levels in the womb...
| comrade1234 wrote:
| You're telling me you can just go to a Walgreens in the USA and
| get a bag of estrogen and start injecting it without the advice
| and monitoring of a doctor? Even though hormone replacement
| therapy can lead to all kinds of problems? Is this normal?
| wtfwhateven wrote:
| Where on earth are you getting this idea from?
| comrade1234 wrote:
| From the first few paragraphs of the article?
|
| > and subsequently found myself cycling home from the
| pharmacy with a paper bag filled with repurposed menopause
| medication
|
| and then no mention after of monitoring of health effects?
| roughly wrote:
| So, the beginning of that sentence is:
|
| > I had jumped through the relevant bureaucratic hoops
| cobertos wrote:
| No. This is incorrect. OP explicitly mentions "jumping through
| bureaucratic hoops"
|
| > Not long after, I had jumped through the relevant
| bureaucratic hoops, and subsequently found myself cycling home
| from the pharmacy
| cthalupa wrote:
| Wait until you hear about how easy it is to get testosterone.
| yuriks wrote:
| Ironically, testosterone in theory is _harder_ to get. Since
| it is widely used for sports doping, it 's considered an
| anabolic steroid, and is a scheduled substance in the US, and
| so has a bit more oversight to prescribe and dispense. (But I
| imagine there's probably also a larger black market for it
| for the same reasons.)
| cthalupa wrote:
| There are a billion TRT clinics that will prescribe you
| testosterone with basically zero oversight and at dosages
| that are supraphysiological.
|
| And yes, the black market is huge - anyone with google and
| the ability to purchase crypto can get it easily delivered,
| either domestically, or from china.
| runeblaze wrote:
| My opinion is that at least (safe, not spiro) anti-androgens
| should be able to be bought OTC. If some people want to place
| blockers on themselves they should be allowed to
| looneysquash wrote:
| > when prompted to state my gender identity or preferred
| pronouns, I fold my hands into the dhyana mudra and state that I
| practice emptiness on the concept of gender.
|
| That's fine, but when I tell people "Cube Flipper wrote this
| great blog post!", what pronouns do you want me to use actually
| use?
|
| I guess I'll refer to you as "they" since you didn't otherwise
| specify. But the "unknown/unspecified" version of "they" and not
| the "prefers they" version of "they".
|
| Looks like a great article. I didn't quite make it to the end.
| The science is interesting, but that isn't a trip I am
| considering, so I skimmed a little.
| kushan2020 wrote:
| Waking up everyday and drinking monster energy drink followed by
| Diet Coke in theory should have some effect on your brain. Does
| abstaining from them have any effect on your HRT?
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