HN Reader

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.

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?

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.

> 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

This person is having a very very different experience of gender transition than I am. Transes are "immune to optical illusions?" WTF?

They might just be looking for proof that the hormones are Doing Something a lot harder than I do after twenty-something years on them. I sure was looking for that for a while when I started. But this whole post really just reminds me of the time I got some acid that had completely evaporated by the time it got to me (if it had ever been any good in the first place) and I sat there trying to convince myself I was about to start tripping any second now.

It's certainly had an effect on me or I wouldn't have bothered with the hassle and expense of continuing to acquire and take it for more than two decades but I'm sure not seeing more colors or "changing the balance between entropy and harmony" in my awareness of the world around me. My general happiness level has changed for the better. shrug

(I'm also an artist, I was one long before the transition, so maybe I just, like, paid more attention to color and shapes in the first place, who knows.)

The estrogen-to-witch pipeline is however a real thing.

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

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.

> At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one’s body

appreciate seeing this. I've long identified as someone that's much more muscular than I have been in the past. it's interesting how steroid use for this subset is seen as so different from that same use in the gender dysphoria subset.

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I used to be into bodybuilding and the best I ever felt was when I was high testosterone and high estrogen. When I was not taking any aromatase inhibitors I felt amazing, happy, loving, and emotional in a way I can't explain but I felt more connected with my wife. I feel like it was a little glimpse into the female mind. When I crashed my estrogen I felt psychotic. Very interesting experience

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?

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.

I don’t know if it’s just effective moderation of this forum, but I’m impressed that an article about a politically sensitive subject like hormone therapy for gender dysphoria, on a public forum, has such high-quality and civil discourse.

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 made funny things seem much funnier. I wonder what the experience is like for FtM who take testosterone?

> 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.