My husband is getting older and was having some issues so got some tests done and found his e was unusually high so they gave him meds to stop the process of testosterone getting changed into estrogen and his mood improved considerably. I am in perimenopause and by the time I could get on hormones I was having hot flashes half the month and the best thing e did for me is improve my mood.
Honestly I had this discussion with my son's gf, it's really terrible when they don't dose trans ladies high enough on e, they're basically turning you into a crabby grouchy perimenopausal woman. When you don't have good levels of either hormone, you just feel like garbage.
That’s really interesting. When I got my hormone levels checked for the first time my testosterone was in the low-normal range for a guy (380 ng/dl) and estrogen was slightly elevated (53 pg/dl). I didn’t think much of it but my Dr was like that’s actually good for where you want to go. I do weekly injections and am still on the introductory dose (4mg weekly injection) and by day 7 or before my dose on the day of I have noticed I’m getting a little snippy.
My wife is fighting perimenopause and between me talking up estrogen and one of her medical providers strongly urging it, she’s going to get started on hormone treatment too. I’m super happy for her, I know being low on hormones is hell
Describing the effects of E and then offering a pill to cis guys and they will physically recoil at the thought of it. The reason some cis people get so concerned with false positives of someone potentially cis getting HRT is because they understand the dysphoria that would cause them. Most of the treatments trans people get are treatments developed for cis people with disorders or injuries to treat their incongruence between identity and body.
Cis people only have less dysphoria because their bodies align with their identity. They fully understand and experience dysphoria, they just usually have less sources for it.
Insert 40k Mechanicus quote here; but yeah I'd like to not be meat. The thought of having a plastic shell and mechanical innards just scratches my brain in ways a lot of people don't understand.
i would do a lot to have a non flesh body, imagine being able to have 3 left arms and 4 sets of wings for example, would be sick
and itd solve my dysphoria too i guess
Yeah. The reason I was opposed to trans people back when I was a kid is because I thought they all got bottom surgery and I understood the disphoria it would cause me to have different genitals. So it was like, why would anybody do that.
(As it turns out, I was also trans but didn't know that because I thought all trans people wanted bottom surgery. And this is why represetation of different kinds of trans people matters)
I low-key think that "pray the gay away" comes from smth similar.
If the stats from Gen z are any indication there are actually a lot of latent bisexuals, and it follows that that large percentage will, in a religious setting, believe that homosexual feelings are more normal and coexist with hetero-ness. And therefore suppressing only some fraction of their sexuality works for them. But as a highly hetero person myself, the message that you're supposed to somehow re-align your sexuality (and that it was even possible, for that matter) has always struck me as a clearly bisexual thing to say in the first place. I feel like I have more in common with gay people in the immutability of my sexual preferences tbh.
This sorta thing is probably at play on trans issues. Some of the biggest hate is gonna come from people who probably would have faired just as well deciding their gender on a coin toss if the Bible had said to. Because, to them, the preference itself is more mutable than the flesh, so the calculus changes. To them, it seems drastic and disordered to have such strong preferences toward one's own body. They themselves might prefer their body to be another gender just about as much as they might want super-strength, or perfect vision, or 6'5" height, so to them the solution looks like acceptance, or a semi-casual gym schedule, or lifts.
Yeah. That’s my biggest indicator that this is medical reality. Taking E turned off suicide ideation I struggled with for 30 years and dropped my anxiety by 90%.
How long did that take? I've been thinking about trying E to see how it affects me. My therapist wants me to consider that my disconnection from my body could just be autism rather than dysphoria but it would be amazing if there were a way to just... check.
Be very suspicious of anyone who tries to blame trans symptoms on autism. They are usually grasping for an excuse to keep you from transitioning. Don’t be afraid to switch therapists if they seem to be really pushing this narrative
I can’t answer for frostedpuzzle but for my mindset to shift to where I sat back and noticed it was somewhere around 2-3 weeks. Which is about when I noticed my sense of smell improving, with no other noticeable changes so far. Currently about 5.5 weeks in, still a ways off from my first blood draw to check levels.
Omg same, especially around SI. I was a little concerned about the possibility of it raising my blood pressure (which I have struggled with) but honestly it has lowered since starting e.
Addition here: as a trans guy, before my egg cracked I had a natural revolution to the idea of chemical 'birth control'. (This was for pain remediation not pregnancy issues. Not using that hole has like a 100% rate for that issue.)
I couldn't yet escape my ovaries, but the idea of putting anymore E or P into my system felt like being asked to just stab myself.
Also yes I did feel terrible on the high E section of my cycle and best (emotionally, the pain was worse) when it was the high T section. Funny that.
Yeah. E made me feel so much relief and i finally enjoyed waking up in the morning. So many mornings I’ve literally woken up and smiled into the void now
Fun fact: groups had been trying to get his conviction for "gross indecency" (homosexuality) overturned and the British government kept refusing on the grounds that it was illegal back then and he technically broke the law. It took a royal pardon for any serious headway to be made.
The British Government is like if somebody tried to distill narcissistic personality disorder into a country. They are constantly acting shitty like this even today about all kinds of topics.
Not only that, queer men were being imprisoned up until 1994 for being queer in West germany. Shout out to the gdr, which was not at all cool, but at least a man was alowed to gay around string in the 60s
To be real, this post kinda conflates dysphoria and neuroprotective effects of sex hormones.
Nowadays people get proper anti-androgens for prostate cancer, like cyproterone acetate or bicalutamide, and not estrogens. Yeah, high dosage e was used untill 60s, but it is not something that is used today.
Yeah, Turing probably got high dosage e as "chemical castration" and it's changes might have made him dysphoric. I should note though that lowering testosterone will increase estrogens levels by itself, but not that high to have non-reversible changes.
But factor that makes cis people feel like shit on prostate cancer treatment is mostly missing neuroprotective effect of sex hormones. Our bodies need at least one major sex hormone to function properly, and with both being low our brains (not only, there's a lot of adverse effects) get fucked up. Hormonal disbalance is a major factor for severe depression in both cis and trans people.
Oh yes this I was trying to explain this in another reply. Lots of us deal with this as we get older, one of the major things getting older and dropping e or t (whichever one your body prefers) does to you is mess up your mood. It sucks.
Reason #9001 a future with universal advanced healthcare is worth fighting for (and finally within our grasp for the first time ever, post-singularity).
Nothing will radicalize you more than reading how much all the rich people preventative medicine stuff helps. They have tests we don’t even know about, much less get proactively
Just earlier this week I was talking to the provider at my office about how she has a trans patient taking biculutamide instead of another anti-androgen! So it can be used for HRT, it’s just not very common
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking bica instead (unless you have preexisting liver issues)! I think it’s just prescribed less because it’s newer so there’s less information available about it and it’s more expensive so some people prefer sprio for those reasons
If I recall, Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being gay which sharply reduces testosterone and, based on the above point, induce dysphoria. I’m sure the societal hate and pressure didn’t help either
He wasn't chemically castrated in the modern sense of dropping sex hormones as those drugs didn't exist. Instead they forced him to take an early for of synthetic estrogen, so yeah the forcibly transitioned him.
At first I thought they were referring to castration, but it seems he was forcefully given hormones too?
Given the option of jail or chemical castration, he chose the latter. The hormonal treatment – similar to the ‘cure’ devised by the Nazi doctor, SS Carl Vaernet – caused Turing horrendous physical and mental distress; including impotency, breast development and depression. He committed suicide two years later, at the age of 41.
Well, T was the best antidepressant I've ever taken. Even before I realized I was trans I realized I'd been depressed since puberty and much of my dysphoria is still centered on my chest (top surgery is a near goal). And this was having grown up in a household not overly concerned with gender roles!
So specifically, that sounds like hell. To know who you are and be comfortable and to then be forced out of that? I wouldn't blame him for the suicide.
It's unclear if he actually suffered from dysphoria. He died of cyanide poisoning after eating a cyanide-laced apple. There is fairly strong evidence that he committed suicide, and his death was ruled a suicide at the time, but there has since been speculation that it accidental exposure from some lab experiment he conducted.
And if he did commit suicide, it's unclear why, though many have speculated that he was depressed and/or dysphoric from the feminizing hormones he was forced to take.
We will likely never know the actual truth, but personally I think it's completely plausible that chose to intentionally end his own life rather than spend the rest of his days living with the effects of the hormones.
I will always remember hearing about this one doctor who like did the whole boutique longevity thing. He said he would give himself microdoses of estrogen to improve his youthfulness until one day he fucked up and increased the dose by like a factor of 10. For two weeks he felt wrong. He was depressed, irritable, his chest was uncomfortably sore. He realized he gave himself dysphoria by giving him a legitimate dose of estrogen.
Ftm, when my doctors tried to put me on E growing up for pcos something always felt WRONG but I didnt know what it was, i just knew I didn't like the hormones. Fast forward to now, I realize the heightened T in my body as a child kept me from feeling gender dysphoria until they tried to reverse the effects with E. Absolutely insane to me that my body knew 100% i was trans before I ever did
I find it strange that at 8 or 9, my body language was already changing and I felt weird and didn't want to have my picture taken. I got my period for the first time when I was 10. I suspect my brain was already reacting negatively to the released hormones.
Yeah I didnt have a period until i turned 18, as soon as that happened I knew something was off and I officially started transitioning at 20
Edit to add- I never thought I was trans before that because my gender dysphoria never fit the technical definition
While this post is basically correct that you can give cis people dysphoria. I feel like it's kind of a weird conclusion to draw that "cis people will tell me dysphoria isn't real despite this". The cis people who were given this kind of hormone treatment are a minuscule part of the population, the transphobic person telling you that dysphoria isn't real most likely has no more understanding of the mental health effects of estrogen on cis men, than the mental health effects of testosterone on trans women.
But the poster is treating this as if it was a common experience and that people will deny the existence of dysphoria despite having lived it.
the transphobic person telling you that dysphoria isn't real most likely has no more understanding of the mental health effects of estrogen on cis men, than the mental health effects of testosterone on trans women.
Oh but they do, or at least, they absolutely can conceptualise it. When they speak about a cis child potentially making a mistake and going through transition, or even just when they speak about transition at all, the disgust they feel is visceral.
They don't really understand it, let alone deeply. They are under layers of misconceptions from propaganda, and their own lived experiences (which is that they were fine being the way they were born, and so this kid should be too). They hear the trans suicide statistic and think it's caused by transitioning.
Don't mistake confidence with understanding.
I myself try be an ally, but it's not like I understand transness. I can only empathise through second-hand accounts (which do help conceptualise it). And ultimately you can't understand any psychological phenomenon without having lived it.
I think it depends. Some transphobic women will be super scared about the idea of someone going on testosterone and realizing they aren’t a trans man, because they seem to be able to get why a woman may be really negatively impacted by the effects of testosterone. They just don’t seem to get that the way they’d feel about being on testosterone is the way trans people feel about not being able to transition.
I've had many transphobes bring up David Reimer, claiming that he John Money way "the father of modern gender ideology" and claiming that dysohoria isn't real. Transohobes often just have 0 awareness
It's so funny that they use that example (and by "funny" I mean infuriating and confusing) because Dr. Money's hypothesis was that a person's sense of gender is not innate, and David's case actually served as evidence he was wrong.
Yeah it's blindingly obvious that most transphobes just parrot stuff they heard online without verifying if the claim is true. Other claims they use like "the brain stops developing at 25" have been debunked for years and it takes just one Google search to find out that they aren't true.
You explained it better than I would. Its very frustrating as a lot of the hot takes on this sub require cis people to be some sort of single intelligence hivemind.
Hypocrites exist, obviously, but "X cis person did this but Y cis person said this, therefore all cis people are intrinsically evil." is just such an absurd statement but it gets eaten up because its easy and righteous and fun to hate everyone who is part of the same group that some people you disagree with are.
Cis woman here - hope that’s ok. Ignore/Remove if it’s not.
When I was pregnant my body felt wrong and I sometimes wanted to violently claw myself out of it. I hated it and literally would spend days and weeks just trying not to think about it but failing miserably of course. I have always been supportive of trans people but pregnancy opened my eyes to how a body can just actually BE incompatible. AND PREGNANCY IS TEMPORARY!
I tell everyone this whenever the subject of trans people comes up and I like to think that some people listen.
I wish I could hug (consensually) everyone with dysphoria. It’s damaging and deadly.
I’m sorry the world is shitty right now but I hope one day it won’t be and we can all be our authentic selves.
When I was in high school and I learned that Alan Turing was sentenced to "chemical castration", I always thought it was dunking his junk in acid to completely remove it, which is horribly barbaric. Imagine my surprise when I learn much much later that it was just HRT.
Hi, curious cis guy here, if taking e can make men dysphoric, does it similarly affect trans women taking e? Or does it like cancel out the dysphoria they already felt? Or do they just overcome it as they start to have the body they want?
Within a month of me starting e, all my baseline anxiety and stress and depression of dysphoria basically vanished. Granted it still exists, but the background static of it all just turned off and I started feeling things for what felt like the first time in my life and started feeling human. The chemical changes in the brain happen far before anything physical in the body.
Testosterone/male puberty felt like a toxic buildup inside, rotting and hollowing me out.
Wow, thanks for sharing! I love learning from these subs, it makes a big impact on my life and helps change my opinions for the better :)
I’m glad to hear taking e helped you so much. Describing puberty as a toxic buildup really gets the point across. I’ve never really put much thought into it because I guess I never thought about my own puberty.
Wish I had that experience. Male puberty, like you said, felt like it hollowed me out, but I managed to develop a very good mask to cope. Starting E just kinda ripped the mask of and threw it on the floor, but then again I probably have other ongoing issues that have just been laid bare with the masking rendered ineffective now.
Basically went from feeling nothing ever (other than the occasional dysphoric ick) to feeling everything, but everything is sad.
Edit: I should clarify, I do feel genuinely better in a lot of ways, I just suspect that I am chronically depressed and have been for goodness knows how long.
It affects trans people in the opposite way. It lessens dysphoria. There is a (nearly) immediate effect, not even connected to any visible physical changes. Of course the physical changes are also desired, but there is a positive effect even without them.
This is assuming you got the dosages correct either the first time, or fairly quickly thereafter of course, otherwise you mostly just get brain fog. But not more depressed usually, at least.
Are the side effects of medically induced hormone changes considered dysphoria? Are they having depression bc of E induced appearance changes or bc their biochemistry is being meddled with?
Assuming the hormone therapy is unwanted or not in alignment with the person's (felt sense of) gender, the depression likely starts due to screwing with their biochemistry, then later due to physical changes as well because it takes time before HRT causes physical changes.
So at first, it's biochemical dysphoria. Then it's that plus physical dysphoria.
the thing i always say about this kind of stuff: we have very, very little studies on medically health, normal individuals. men with prostate cancer clearly have a bunch of other factors in their health. even outside of that we know hormone levels and the responses to them vary wildly.
we cant go around giving healthy people medication to see what it does to them.
Very hot take but if you can’t knkw your gender until you’re older everyone should be on hormone blockers before they turn 18. That way trans people get to go on HRT to go through the correct puberty then cis people get to choose to go through their given puberty. Would solve a lot of problems for literally everyone.
Not only that but delaying puberty would probably help with attention and stuff in school as everyone wouldn’t be a raging bag of hormones. Senior year would be WILD though!
puberty blockers are not magic drugs that put your body in stasis. without estrogen which fuses your growth plates, your body will just keep growing in ways they probably shouldn't.
That's why for trans women you need to be on estrogen as soon as you can to fuse the growth plates that would otherwise lead to masculinization.
So with no sex hormones, the body does some things to masculinise sort of by itself?
I would have thought the bigger problem would be osteoporosis as the patient moves through their teen years, but maybe it's the changes that come from sex hormones that give us the requirement for more hormones?
The age that puberty first begins has been falling to a younger and younger figure at a horrific rate. It used to be that girls would not start their puberty till around 16 years old, whereas now it is not uncommon for them to begin around 8-10. Beginning puberty so young used to be considered precocious and was treated as a medical disorder with the prescription of puberty blockers. Now it is treated as essentially normal for young girls to begin puberty so young and there are rarely any kind of medical interventions.
Delaying all children's puberty until 18 would, ironically, probably be closer to what the human brain is evolved to deal with, giving each person a longer period to develop psychologically before reproductive hormones kick in.
Well yes, but it's not proven that the benefits of using very invasive hormone blockers to delay the start of puberty outweigh the risks involved with using hormone blockers. The decrease in puberty age has been attributed to increased stress, childhood obesity, endocrine decreasing chemicals in plastics and healthcare products, and most importantly the improvement in overall health, nutrition and genetics. I think we can all agree that increased stress, obesity and hormone altering chemicals is bad whether they influence children or adults, so we should focus on those, not just slap a bandaid on there by making every child take hormone blockers to artificially delay puberty.
Oh, I agree, I think the world is a poisoned hellscape. But I had precoscious puberty for which I was not treated and I am also trans. I WISH I had been given puberty blockers. My life has been permenantly destroyed by the fact that I did NOT receive appropriate healthcare as a child. I do not see how the use of puberty blockers would have been more invasive than my entire physical form having become permenantly wrongly developed in a way that affects every aspect of my personal, social and psychological existance, and which now requires extensive reconstructive surgery. I have developed depersonalization/derealization disorder since childhood as a consequence of having been made to undergo this traumatic body horror from such an early age. There is no potential side effect of puberty blockers that I would not gladly trade, and I have yet to see evidence that such side effexrs are even a real concern and not the result of the mishandling of data. It will take centuries to fix the world's pollution, and children's lives are actively being ruined in the meantime. We can and should do both, fix pollution AND help trans children.
I'm sorry you're having to go through that, I'd be happy to help you if you need it.
My point isn't that hormone blockers are never the right call. I think you are evidence that they can be. My point is that using hormone blockers as a blanket solution to a multifaceted problem like declining puberty age is a bad idea.
So don't you think a reasonable option then would be to provide options and education to young people instead of forcing them to take or not take hormone blockers one way or the other?
I assume you do think that but it's a noisy thread and I feel compelled to add that combination of words to it.
People hit puberty at later ages back in the day because our diets were fucking awful. Most people had some of parasite or malnutrition that prevented them from growing and developing properly. It’s why height decreased so rapidly 10k years ago with the start of agriculture. If your body is constantly in alarm mode you’re going to put off puberty a lot longer.
Flash to today and most kids in the US have adequate access to nutrition and basic healthcare; and so puberty happens at a much younger age since the body has the nutrients and proper development for it.
There is absolutely no proven evidence that it had anything to do with diet. I was underweight and abused as a child (definitely in constant alarm mode) and still had precocious puberty. I am not in the US.
Widely considered is not proof. It is a speculation and generalization which is actively being used to deny children with precoscious puberty appropriate healthcare, as it supports the false narrative that precoscious puberty is normal, healthy, or signs of a well-fed child. It is not normal or healthy and medical intervention is needed.
Well obviously I think there should still be the option to go off the blockers sooner but they should make everyone go through a mental health evaluation to see if they are trans or not. If they aren’t trans they go off them if they are trans they go off and go on HRT. But yeah I’m not supreme leader of all of the world so…
And thank god you aren’t. I get what you’re going for, but puberty blockers aren’t a medical pause button. Delaying normal puberty for every child until 18 affects bone density, growth, and development. Imposing that on everyone without a clinical need is the dumbest idea ever
No. Having literally no sex hormones can be catastrophic for health. We should not put all children on hormone blockers until 18 just because a minority of them will be chemically incompatible with their gender later on.
What we should do is advance body modding, chemistry, and gene editing so that puberty becomes minimally relevant to a person who wants to reverse or alter its effects. And let people decide to go on hormone blockers at a young age if that is what they personally want, since yes it is a permanent choice but so is not doing it and if anyone gets to make that choice it should be the person who is most effected by it.
Putting everyone on hormone blockers until adulthood just in case they might be trans is fucking insane. It's no better than sending them to Bible camp to beat the gay out of them. Outside forces do not need to be intervening in somebody elses hormone mixture without consent.
Yo idk if anyone can tell but this was literally aimed at the rhetoric being pushed on trans kids to forcibly undergo a puberty they never wanted just to “make sure” even though it has detrimental effects on their overall health
I misunderstood you as meaning literally everyone should be on hormone blockers until the age of 18. You did literally say everyone until the age of 18 should be on hormone blockers.
I am currently understanding that your prior words "if you can't know your gender until you're older" were used to narrow the scope to people that applies to, rather than posit that nobody can know their gender until they are older.
Isn't that just puberty? Idk I'm cis and I stg I got some sort of puberty induced depression. Of course it was probably dysphoria too but I feel like that is not unusual bc your body is going through so many physical and hormonal changes. It was fine once I started attending college.
I suspect the idea dysphooria isn't a thing is built on their idea of gender.
Basically, larger society regards gender as restrictive, fixed, and binary. Not only does larger society buy into this model but its also key to how a lot of people define their gender and with it part of their identity. If gender dysphoria, specifically dysphoria that motivated a change in gender, existed, then the fixed part breaks down and gender as we know it begins to crack. This threatens larger society but also threatens many people's individual identity.
Cis people can definitely get dysphoria, but I think those warnings are mostly cause hormonal imbalances and shifts can really fuck you up for a while. Bit of a false equivalency imo.
This seems reductive to the point of just being wrong. Not every side effect of being on estrogen is automatically dysphoria. If somebody gets low energy or mood from taking a hormone, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are suffering from gender dysphoria...
You say "c'mon" like we should all agree with you. But yeah, Turing was chemically castrated by suppressing his testosterone to the point where his body began feminising.
Gender dysphoria can and does happen to cis people too. It's not "that thing the transes have".
If you were to actually look into it you'd know that "chemical castration" is essentially hrt. According to everything I can find, Alan Turing's entire "treatment" was being given a synthetic version of estrogen. The thing the poster said was that Turing had to deal with gender dysphoria because of the chemical castration, which kind of has to be true, because estrogen doesn't actually hurt your body if you're amab. The only reason a man would be depressed on estrogen is because of dysphoria, which is absolutely real and can absolutely cause people to kill themselves, which is the point of the post.
Edit: It should be mentioned that Turing was going through a lot of legal and social trouble at the time because of the homophobia of the world, and it was reductive of me to imply the medical aspect was the only problem in his life.
He was allegedly given a very early formulation of synthetic estrogen which is no long used because of its serious cancer related affects, historically, older less advanced forms of synthetic estrogen used in birth control pills and during pregnancy etc. would cause mood dysregulation, and depression, even in women.
I think it’s really presumptuous to say he died 2 years after all these shenanigans (when he had been off these meds for long) because of dysphoria. The humiliation by courts, the loss of his well regarded job after conviction, and the general hate his family had for his homosexual tendencies, were much more important factors to consider.
That's fair and probably true. I think I sort of tunnel visioned on the actual medical side of things because the commenter I was originally responded to seemed unaware of what chemical castration meant. I should edit my comment
Yeah, the symptoms were the things that hrt does to you, like a lower sex drive and breast growth. Which aren't physically bad for you, but they cause dysphoria. Which makes you kill yourself.
I'm not in Alan Turings head, there may have been side effects from the specific thing they were giving him. That said, from what I can find the only intended effects of what he was given were the things I've mentioned already.
He obviously had mental health issues too but they never called it dysphoria just "decline in cognitive abilities" which if you're depressed as fuck shouldn't be suprising.
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u/Chewbacca_Holmes I came out before GTA 6 22h ago
Wait, cis guys get e for prostate cancer and it makes them feel like shit?
I think that info just destroyed what little doubts I still had remaining about my transness. E makes me feel fucking fantastic.