if you think youre probably trans but youre hesitant about actually going on E i would just like to tell you that you cant even halfway estimate the degree to which it is just the Fix Brain Juice. i know youre mostly considering the physical changes but the mental benefits are 100x more significant
if a mischievous fairy jumped out at me from the brushwork and menaced me with a 9 millimeter handgun to choose between the mental and physical effects of E i would first of all ask it what its fucking deal was but then after it fired a warning shot i would very much choose the mental benefits
there are like 5 separate, increasingly deranged patterns of self harm that plagued me for years and totally melted away within 30-60 minutes of taking E for the first time and like im still sometimes plagued by echoes of some of them but yknow what i'll take the fucking echoes over the thing itself
if you'll allow me a Gamer (tm) metaphor, starting E was like switching from morrowind to oblivion and suddenly having a mana bar that actually recharges by itself rather than only ever depleting except instead of mana it measures your will to live
It took many slow months until the GP got my E levels up.
Found myself on the other side of that realising that I felt... coherent... whole for the first time in almost 5 decades.
That I didn't feel like I was a bunch of broken parts held together with duct tape and sheer force of will any more.
Eh, that seems to be often true, but not really been my experience. Made some things a bit better, some worse but overall didn't do much mentally.
I'm slowly feeling more at home in my body which does improve things, but that seems to be a different from an immediate effect from changing hormones
i dont know if its the E but a lot of my problems no longer seem overwhelming, i see a way through now.
When i get bad, painful days where emotion threatens to drown me, it's no longer inescapable. I know it's fleeting and i can do things while under to make it better.
I never could before.
The amount of clarity was something I did not expect
Once my body stopped screaming about a chemical imbalance? I actually could take a step back and really think about every other area of my life that required improvement/work
I'd had so much just from realising I was trans for the years I did socially, but the last 6/7 months have been tenfold
Starting strength training/weightlifting at the same time was also such a great way to help aid in feeling connected to my body in a way I've never experienced
This is literally why I finally figured out that I'd lived with DV my entire life to that point and proceeded to divorce, go NC with my family, etc., greatly improving my life. It took being on appropriate doses for me, though; five years of too low only made things worse.
I'm grateful you got yourself out of that situation, but I'm sorry it took so long to figure out
Thankfully so far the only major issue I had was being put on way too strong a blocker dose at first, which sent my mood spiraling for a month till someone told me I could drop it even lower and be fine
god thats a mood. i used to take 25mg cypro as a blocker even though my T was pretty much properly suppressed without it and it just basically took me out until i stopped
Same dose! Made so little sense when my baseline T was already so low before I started
Like I've always been emotional, so having a whole month when I felt nothing was so weird (even if I did get a lot of work done)
Baseline low T has been both a blessing and a curse with HRT but getting there
My issue was low E doses. They were happy to prescribe 200mg per day of Spiro but were convinced that more than 2mg/day oral or 100MCG/day transdermal would cause me to have a DVT immediately
There is apparently an SERM in research (with applications for Alzheimer's iirc) that only applies estrogenic effects in the brain.
And like damn there is a lot of trans girls and non-binary folk that would be interested in that, either as a stepping stone or long term.
Obvs a different hormone but it's been eight months since I started microdosing t and it's helped me so immensely. I get so excited about how my body is changing and the little monkey with cymbals that's usually clattering around in my brain is so quiet now. It's not a magic cure but hrt rules
Fuckin mood. It's almost unsettling how much less of a vibrating ball of stress I am now my levels are actually where they should be. Now I just need to fix problems I picked up along the way 😶
I feel it hasn't really helped me there much. Hopefully switching types will work better.
I feel like it's barely doing anything in general (except for my skin), but I don't want to give it up, even if I'm still a mess. I might be even more of a wreck, but I spent like 20 years emotionless.
i get that fear tbh, i felt the same way before i started. while ultimately your mileage may vary though its pretty likely youll derive some benefit, whether slowly or quickly. like i am on a far extreme of how strongly i responded but most people eventually notice a rise in mental health
also to some degree it will make some problems worse in ways that make them ultimately fixable. like for me a lot of my insecurities got turned up for a while because i was able to care for the first time in years, but that enabled me to work on them
internal and invisible physical changes, too, sometimes! it felt like a lot of my body functions were using the boy parts “drivers” and not functioning properly until i installed the girl parts drivers by taking estradiol.
Been on E now for 2+ years and it is by far the best thing I have ever done for myself.
I am a different person, in a positive way, than before.
Others have noticed this too so it is real.
i wouldnt say it fixed my brain bc that shits irreparable probably but it feels like it has helped me perceive things better and also process my emotions better
I already thread on it fixing the white noise (bsky.app/profile/oxin... )
But also it got rid of my debilitating deja vu, and improved my ADHD.
(Cracking and coming out, which I did 12 and 6 months prior did a lot for my anxiety and sense of identity. And gave me a desire to keep body functional.)
Weirdest so far has been quieting the background "sound" I head in my head that was like an white-noise of an argument indistinctly heard in another room that I had my whole life. HRT just stopped it. Quiet.
I know 2 other trans femmes who had the same thing. I guess was some biochemical inbalance.
