Fiona

On paper you could go to Germany and demand political asylum: You have a constitutional right to it.

In practice I wouldn’t count your chances as too high though: Some neighbouring country have in fact denied those kinds of claims and I’m not sure how well this would fare in Germany… So take this as something to look into, but not as a “this is definitely an option”.

Have you even read that Wikipedia article that you yourself linked?

The World Health Organization, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, and many other scientific organizations recommend against the use of breast self-examinations.[11] Also, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners states that teaching women to perform breast self-examination is no longer recommended.[12] In the US, however, there is no consensus among organizations related to breast self-examination as the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the American Medical Association recommend monthly breast self-examination while the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the US Preventative Services Task Force, and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network neither recommend nor discourage breast self-examination.[13]

One thing to be aware of is that transitioning reduces dysphoria, and not just by a little.

I’m well into my transition (currently on the waiting list for bottom surgery), with 1.5 years of HRT behind me and all the legal stuff completed and… I don’t feel all that much dysphoria these days… Because: Why would I? I’m beginning to really like how I’m starting to look these days and can even look at pre-transition pictures without issue and go: “This was me, can you believe it?”

The earlier you are into your transition, the bigger the focus on being trans can be, until it eventually turns into less and less of a big deal.

Self-doubts early on are btw. so common that I would frankly just consider them a symptom of gender-dysphoria in their own right.

And to be clear, I can’t tell you what you are, but I can tell you that what you describe sounds like a very common experience and nothing to worry too much about.

I mean, I’m completely down to misgendering or dehumanizing transphobes who do it first.

But that kind of situation aside, and cases where people do it without malicious intent (you example can also be because they think they misgendered you at first and are now trying wrongly trying to correct themselves) because they just genuinely guessed wrong aside, it’s almost always transphobia.

Now there is one other case that is a bit special: Intentional misgendering of people independent of their trans status: This can for example happen in pep talk in sports, if a couch refers to the members of the boy’s team as “girls” or when someone ironically refers to a group of men as “ladies”. This is not generally speaking transphobic, but it can be potentially be sexist.

To give an example: At the start of my previous job (before covid and before I transitioned), I was talking with my boss about alcohol and that I prefer cocktails. Apparently the same holds for her boyfriend and she refered to us as “the girls” over this. Nowadays when I tell that story, I like to joke that “if [her boyfriend] wants to have a private conversation with me, I’m definitely available for that”.

Firstly, if it’s at all an option, consider moving to a less transphobic country. Not just for care-coverage, but for your safety in general.

Secondly I’d say that DIY-HRT is far less sketchy than people make it out to be. The fact of the matter is that, especially if you can get blood-tests, it’s not too hard to interpret the results and that many of the side-effects that everyone fear-mongers about aren’t even applicable, because they are for example only if you take blockers-only or historically used horse-piss-E instead of bio-identical E, which is what everyone uses these days…

If you can get HRT though the medical system that’s good, but don’t be afraid of DIY-ing!

EDIT: it does have a warning for male use only so in the mtf area it might be a bad Idea. Do the research, ask your doc, and I hope you get a badass head of hair.

Nah, if anything Finasteride is better for transfems than for cis men: A lot of the potential negative side-effects become potential pleasant surprises for us; some of the concerns regarding depression remain, but generally speaking it’s a relatively safe bet for people who don’t want to take T-blockers (yet).

That said: Proper T-blockers are the much more comprehensive solution and usually make Finasteride superfluous, so the primary argument against it in our case is honestly, that it tends to be a better choice to go all the way from the beginning. Even for people who can’t get a prescription, DIY (→ /c/diyhrt) is usually still the better decision.

I see erininthemorning.com and the title and I upvote and don’t read beyond that, because I know it’s just going to be depressing (and thankfully doesn’t directly affect me)…

It might also be good to mirror some resources from /r/estrogel about how to mix your own medication and include the places where you can buy the raws. (AFAIK dragonordnance is generally trusted?)

Since I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m now officially on HRT and have DIY’ed but not mixed myself before, I’m sadly not the best source on all that, but it is kinda important to be aware of the possibility as this will be by far the hardest option to take away from us.