yes, please don’t take my post seriously, it’s meant in jest 😜

if we were being serious, I would claim TERFs don’t qualify as feminists, they abandoned feminism when they started working with misogynist right-wingers (just like the SWERFs in the '80s) and started making essentialist claims about women that most feminists reject. It’s hardly surprising when TERFs like Posie Parker (the woman who popularized “adult human female” as an anti-trans slogan) started off with feminist styled transphobia, and as soon as she started collaborating with right-wingers suddenly she identifies as “not a feminist” and started calling herself a “woman’s rights activist” instead. (I could be getting the timeline mixed up, so take this with a grain of salt - but I think the point still stands about how TERFs quickly become “not feminists” in the name of their anti-trans views. The transphobia is much more important than whatever feminism they might have had.)

Some things I wish your therapist knew:

1. being masculine and enjoying hobbies that are male coded don’t invalidate your gender, e.g. there are women body-builders, there are also legitimate trans women who have male-coded hobbies - there are also tomboy trans women and so on
2. HRT can be diagnostic - you can stop after taking it for a couple months without any long term changes and that time on HRT can be useful to help evaluate whether long-term HRT is for you or not
3. some trans people don’t ever take HRT but socially transition and live full-time presenting as their gender; some people take HRT and don’t socially transition - transition and HRT are related but not the same

It sounds like your therapist might have outdated information about trans people and transitioning, for example expecting strong commitment and fully girlmoding before starting HRT sounds like old Benjamin rules to me. WPATH guidelines have changed significantly and no longer require “full-time real-life experience” before starting hormones.

All that said, your body like many bodies, probably will need sex hormones or you might experience some symptoms. Starting HRT and then just stopping is probably not a realistic way to approach this, but I do know some enbies who maintain low doses of estrogen to achieve their goals. Still, if you go that route you will want to watch out for signs of menopause and avoid hormone levels that are too low. Your experiences and desires might also shift once you start HRT, they certainly did for me.

This is a minor point, but going to Planned Parenthood and getting HRT is called “informed consent”, not DIY. DIY is when you buy your hormones from a grey market without a prescription (or homebrew it yourself), which doctors see as more risky. At least your hormones through Planned Parenthood are sourced from a regulated pharmacy, for example.

Either way, congrats!!

DIY enanthate vials usually have 40 mg / mL, so 0.15 mL should be 6 mg?

Using the injectable estradiol simulator, this is what levels would be estimated to be over time:

Notice how it takes nearly a month to even get to a steady state … EEn has a half-life of 5 - 7 days, so it takes a week to peak and another week to eliminate. This is compared to estradiol valerate (EV) which has a half-life of 3.5 days, so EV peaks faster and higher, and eliminates much faster than EEn.

When I first started EV injections, I could feel changes the night I injected, but I didn’t feel any obvious benefit or mood change until the third day or so.

But it’s important to note that not all trans women react to estrogen the same. Some feel no difference at all. Others actually have worsened dysphoria.

So early on you are not likely to notice many physiological changes. In my first month or so of HRT, the earliest changes I noticed were softening skin, changes to body odor (less spicy / less smelly), and fewer involuntary erections overnight and in the morning when I wake up. I wonder if you will start noticing these soon, too.

EDIT: I had sore breasts pretty quickly, too - I think it was a matter of weeks, but I was taking EV which brought my E levels up quickly. I would expect breast soreness in 1 - 3 months with EEn, but I’m not certain - I bet others have written about their experiences starting with EEn.

Pre-transition, I just wore cheap silicone rings because they were pragmatic.

As soon as my egg cracked, before I was passing or on HRT, my partner put a ring on my finger and had it resized to fit my fingers. Around 8 months-ish on HRT had to get it resized again when my fingers became slimmer.

Honestly, I think it’s mostly a matter of money, your gender presentation, and how much this matters to you and your partner.

I was fortunate that my spouse already had a ring on hand, I was already socially transitioned and presenting as fem full time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to afford the resizing - so it all worked out for me.

If I hadn’t fully socially transitioned, I might have only worn the ring in certain situations.

If I didn’t have the money, I might have waited and saved up money for just one resizing.

If we didn’t already have a ring, we might have waited and saved up for a ring.

It’s up to you and your circumstances, though - there is no one way to handle this. 😊

oh totally, sorry - I do this thing sometimes where I see the shape of a common belief (like LSD reveals deep truth), and then I just narrowly respond to that as though that’s the totality of what you were saying - that’s annoying of me, sorry about that 😅

LSD is definitely a powerful tool for changing your mind and seeing from different perspectives (during one particularly dramatic, high dose trip, I even experienced telepathy and merged consciousness, though of course it’s not real, it certainly felt real!!).

Anyway - thanks for your patience and kindness ❤️

I leave a lot out - like the revenged humiliation section has three really good examples of conspiracists who became conspiracy theorists right after a particularly publicly humiliating experience - two examples of which I particularly appreciated:

Naomi Wolf was a famous liberal feminist who, during an interview, had the thesis that formed the basis of an entire book she wrote exposed as a basic misunderstanding of a legal concept. After that experience, she really lost her mind and now she is a conspiracist who posts anti-vaccine content and co-hosts a show with Steve Bannon.

Likewise, Candace Owens originally was an anti-racist activist after she experienced racist harassment in school, and she didn’t become a conservative until she launched a website that essentially aimed to doxx anyone who made racist statements, which was responded to not only by universal condemnation, but also the internet doxxing her. That experience caused her to become “a conservative overnight”, and now she’s so anti-Semitic even the right-wing Daily Wire had to boot her from the organization.

There’s so much I didn’t capture or didn’t represent well, so I highly recommend watching the video. It’s not as long as it seems, lol. It also helps if you just watch a chapter at a time - you probably watch 10 - 20 minute videos all the time, this is just a bunch of 10 - 20 minute videos chapterized into one longer video.

Wherever you are, there are probably other trans people in the same city or town. Find these people, they will have local knowledge - this is how I know who is safe to go to as a hairdresser, as a doctor, as a therapist, etc. If you live in a big enough place, trans people might share this knowledge online, too, and you can search for it there.

it doesn’t really feel like gender dysphoria … I dont hate my current body.

I thought similar things, too - I just didn’t know the variety of ways dysphoria could look like. I didn’t hate my penis, so I thought I couldn’t be trans, for example. Pre-transition I repressed my feelings a lot, and once I transitioned I became much more sensitive to everything “wrong” with my body. I went from thinking I had no dysphoria, to realizing just how extreme my dysphoria had always been.

Realizing one is trans can be difficult, I lived decades of my life before I had the tools to interpret my experiences accurately. So don’t be surprised if your feelings and your understanding of your feelings shift as a part of this process, they certainly did with me.

EDIT:

Oh, and this video playlist by the Transition Channel was what specifically caused me to seriously consider that I might be trans. Previously I had only used the DSM-V clinical definition, and I assumed because I had “no” severe dysphoria / distress I must not be trans. (Turns out I developed coping mechanisms like dissociation to help me survive being trans, and those also masked my symptoms without my awareness.)

EDIT2:

Also, what I didn’t realize before is that even the DSM-V has flexible sub-categories for gender dysphoria that allow clinicians to diagnose for those who don’t strictly meet the typical criteria, e.g. “Unspecified gender dysphoria” and “Other specified gender dysphoria”.

unsolicited advice:

• get a trans-affirming therapist, ideally someone who has worked with trans patients about their gender before, to help walk through how you’re feeling
• keep a journal and sort through your thoughts on paper, not only did this really help me analyze my gender issues in a concrete way, it also created a record that later I could return to and remember why I was transitioning and what my exact reasons were (and how I was feeling, and how those feelings were changing during transition)
• start HRT as a first step, think of it as part of your diagnostics rather than as a last step after being 100% certain. It’s not extreme to take HRT, it’s relatively trivial. You can be on HRT for a few months without long-term consequences (with estrogen the long term consequence being breast budding that results in permanent growth, and won’t go away completely once you stop), and it has practically no risks - do it first and see how you feel, it can be really helpful. If you want to have children you may need to freeze sperm before starting HRT in case you become infertile, but again that’s mostly a concern with being on HRT for longer than a few months, a test run should still be safe.
• get educated: read as much as you can about trans stuff, esp. Gender Dysphoria Bible; Intro to Transfem HRT; nonfiction by Julia Serano (esp. Whipping Girl and Sexed Up), Mia Violet (Yes, You are Trans Enough), Susan Stryker (Transgender History); fiction by Casey Plett (Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love), Imogen Binnie (Nevada), Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby), Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues)

EDIT:

I also live in a far-right place, but instead of 50%, it’s more like 70 - 80% vote right-wing where I live (a political supermajority). I understand your fear, and to some extent all LGBTQ+ people live and deal with the reality that society is largely homophobic and transphobic, and violence against us is common. All I can say is that this isn’t something you can change about yourself, and not transitioning due to intimidation and fear is actually part of that transphobic violence. Transitioning is a radical act of self-care and kindness, and I have come to see it as essential, as necessary for our health and well-being, just as taking hormones is for anyone else with an endocrine disorder. Not all trans people react the same way to hormones, we are not a monolith (biologically, culturally, personally), but many of us are similar this way, and it’s worth finding out.

lol, I literally didn’t recognize her from her previous photos‼️

I bet /c/trans_joy would enjoy this being cross-posted there!

Part 6

In Contra’s final chapter, she admits conspiracists will complain that she didn’t actually prove anything they claim is wrong, i.e. she didn’t spend any time debunking conspiracy theories.

She introduces Brand’s law: the energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than the energy required to produce bullshit. Essentially debunking is not efficient, and even when something is debunked, a conspiracist will just propose a new conspiracy about why the evidence did not support their conspiracy theory.

Contra concludes that conspiracists cannot be reasoned with. This unfortunately does not bode well, since she says communication is necessary to avoid political violence.

Not only does conspiracism seem bad for democracy, it can be devastating to families, similar to the way families can lose people to addictions, people lose their family members to QAnon conspiracy theories. Contra recommends The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook on this topic. People get sucked into conspiracism, and it takes over their whole lives. Contra is at a loss about how to “blue pill” people once they go down the conspiracism rabbit hole, just like you can’t force an addict to not be an addict, it’s not clear you can cure a conspiracist of their thinking.

So Contra wonders why people get addicted to conspiracy thinking in the first place, and suggests it fulfills emotional needs:

1. relief from fear: conspiracism promises that everything in the world has meaning (a bit like how religion says God has some secret plan for everything and it is reassuring to some when bad things happen)
2. inflated self-esteem: feeling like you are one of the special few who knows about the conspiracy can be a way to feel good about yourself, and even promotes a kind of persecution / martyrdom complex - conspiracists believe they are heroically fighting on the side of good against evil
3. revenged humiliation: public humiliation seems to come before a lot of conversion experiences into conspiracism, and conspiracism shows a mindset of longing for vindication
4. denial of privilege: conspiracism provides a simple narrative that we are all at the bottom of the social hierarchy, which not only validates victimhood, but conveniently obviates shame or guilt about your role in oppressive social power dynamics, such as racism, patriarchy, hegemony, etc.

In the end, Contra insists that elites are no different than anyone else - they don’t have a special or different psychology, they are just like everyone else. Dehumanizing the elites conceals our own capacities to become oppressors. She says we should pay more attention to normal moral failings in ourselves and others, and notice how they interact with power, as well.

Rather than secret conspiracies and epic battles between good and evil, Contra thinks there are just people and power.

She ends with this:

Who really controls the world? No one. There are no adults, it’s just us. There is no plan, unless we make one.

and once you finish the Gender Dysphoria Bible, I highly recommend reading Julia Serano, starting with Whipping Girl. These were resources that really helped me right after my egg cracked (which was roughly 1.5 years ago).

Interestingly, the anti-trans activist Chloe Cole detransitioned after taking LSD:

A therapist who examined Cole said in a court filing that Cole decided to detransition during an LSD trip at 16 when she heard a female voice, telling her that she was lying to herself about being a boy, and that following this she became a Christian, and requested a Christian therapist.

The problem is that LSD (and psychedelics generally) will amplify your thoughts, whatever they are - so dysphoric thoughts while tripping can be so strong as to prompt a religious conversion and detransition experience like for Chloe. People often interpret their psychedelic experiences as revealing a fundamental truth, but the reality is that LSD doesn’t reveal anything. The strength with which something is experienced as true on LSD unfortunately doesn’t correspond to how true it is in reality.

hard to summarize, but here’s my attempt, a lot of this is paraphrased directly from the video:

Conspiracy thinking is nothing new (e.g. in 64CE after the great fire of Rome Romans thought the fire was a conspiracy by Emperor Nero), and constitutes a way of thinking. It is popular because it is fun, gives you as sense of special identity, and gives you a sense of control and power in a chaotic and often disempowering world. Being able to feel like you are personally connecting the dots is psychologically compelling, like a good detective story.

Contra names this way of thinking “Conspiracism”, and it includes:

• intentionalism: nothing happens by accident, big events imply intentional conspiracy, e.g. major climate disasters are manufactured by a secret cabal of scientists and the elites
• dualism: everything is a fight between good and evil, which are inherent, e.g. the elite are all Satanists who epitomize evil and are motivated by their pure evil
• symbolism: everything has meaning, nothing is a coincidence, e.g. the monster energy drink looks a little like the Hebrew character for the numeral 6 repeated three times, so it must mean monster energy drinks are connected to the secret cabal of satanists conspiring against us

Part 4: The Ritual

Conspiracists seem to be obsessed with rituals. Rituals usually coordinate social relations and establish status, e.g. weddings, coronations, readings of judicial verdicts, which authorize relationships of power. The assumption is that secret conspirators also have secret rituals.

A lot of the imagination about the secret evil rituals of conspirators start to seem a lot like “pornography for Puritans” - essentially false and imaginative reports are conjured up about all the evil rituals happening behind closed doors, like the Satanic Panic of the 90s, and conspiracists are able to justify their perverse obsession and interest in sexually lurid and taboo accounts by claiming to be righteously invested in saving children from those ritual abuses and so on. This also relates to the way witch hunts involved disrobing women and carefully inspecting their bodies in public for witch marks, the stated motivations are to identify witches, but it implies a repressed sexual desire that is fulfilled with righteous justifications.

From here Contra argues that we shouldn’t take seriously the claims that conspiracists are genuinely invested in children or justice, and that many of them are basically just perverts hiding their obsessive sexual fantasies and forbidden desires behind righteous and moral justifications. (She shares the clip from It’s Always Sunny where Mac says “No way, someone uploaded naked pics online, that’s disgusting! Where did he post those?” as an example of this.)

A lot of times conspiracism also takes the form of revenge porn, like To Catch a Predator which never involves child victims and focuses not at all on victims and real justice, but instead running sting operations that allow televising the entrapment and punishment of would-be predators. It’s not really about justice, it is a kind of sadism, a desire to engage in (justified) violence.

Part 5: It’s a big club and you ain’t in it

Contra points out that Conspiracists love the George Carlin quote, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it”. Common to conspiracism is that the belief that the conspirators are a powerful elite and you and everyone else you know are at the bottom of the social hierarchy (e.g. “debt slaves”).

But George Carlin isn’t a conspiracist, he’s populist socialist. Populism is defined by Contra as the belief that there is a “we” (the people) and a “they” (the establishment elite).

Who is put in each category differs by ideology - Marxists would say the working classes are the “we”, and those who exploit laborers (capitalists) are the “they”. Nationalists generate a “we” based on notions of race, ethnicity, and/or citizenship who are opposed to a foreign, invasive, or degenerate “they”.

Populism is appealing to conspiracists, who create a “we” based on those who are not in on the conspiracy, and a “they” that are the conspirators.

The “they” that conspiracists believe in usually turn out to be Jewish - conspiracism is usually anti-Semitic. This isn’t that surprising, given Hitler himself was a conspiracist, and his writings include conspiracy theories about how the Jews control the Free Masons and other typical conspiracist fodder.

Jews function as a scapegoat, a group the conspiracists can point to and blame everything on. This goes back even to medieval Europe, when Jews were barred from participating in most trades, but the one trade they were permitted to engage in was usury (the lending of money), so the medieval elite would hire “a court Jew” to manage their finances. This is how the Rothschilds family became so successful and thus wealthy, but their wealth and influence isn’t that significant as conspiracists believe, and especially do not size up compared to the wealth of tech oligarchs like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Contra then introduces the idea that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, that lots of people know something is wrong and exploitative about society and the economic situation, but they lack the education and context to correctly analyze the power dynamics. Socialism is thus always at risk of turning reactionary, and Stalin is given as an example of someone who led his own anti-Semitic purges once in power.

Jews aren’t the only scapegoats of conspiracists, similar thinking is applied to LGBTQ+ folks, e.g. their “disproportionate influence” in the arts and entertainment, which Contra points out is a grain of truth that is largely due to discrimination in other industries (rather than due to some conspiracy).

So generally this conspiracist form of populist succeeds because people don’t like outsiders, and bigotry is more successful at forming and bonding political alliances, and is more coherent even once that alliance takes power.

Richard Nixon for example was a conspiracist who even after becoming the president of the United States was paranoid and obsessed with the liberal establishment. Being in power and thus becoming “the establishment” didn’t undermine his conspiracist thinking, nor support from conspiracists. Ironically, Nixon is also known for one of the biggest conspiracies in U.S. history, and Contra points out that conspiracists are probably more likely to engage in conspiring because they believe their “counter-conspiracy” is justified by the conspiracies they think are already being perpetuated against them.

Trump likewise engaged in conspiracies to interfere with and overthrow the 2020 election, under the guise of the (falsified) “stop the steal” conspiracy theory that Biden stole the election.

Conspiracists never take responsibility, whenever something looks bad about their movement, they will claim that it’s not true or was staged - for example January 6th insurrectionists claiming it was a false flag operation planned by the opposition.

Contra despairs about viral tiktok videos of Hitler’s speeches being translated into English by AI, and all the people who find Hitler’s speeches compelling, e.g. because he burned research on trans people upon taking power and supports conspiracist beliefs about the Jews controlling banks and the economy, etc.

Contra loses it and just calls it what it is: stupidity. Listening to Hitler’s speeches and agreeing with them, and then thinking the mainstream media was just lying to you about what Hitler was about, rather than thinking there might be something wrong with the way you are thinking when you are in such strong agreement with Hitler, is just astoundingly dumb. It shows so much ignorance and a susceptibility to propaganda that it is difficult to believe.

This “summary” got too long, so I had to break this into two comments, see part two below.

I have an interest in philosophy separately, so contra was one of my favorite channels for years, even before she transitioned. Ironically her transition and her trans content did not help me understand myself or contribute to my egg-cracking at all 😆

no, but melatonin did increase my parasomnias and likelihood of discomfort if I didn’t fall asleep quickly enough, so I avoided it pre-transition (I guess I still do, but my parasomnias and nightmares are far less common since I started estrogen).

I am too, tbh - it’s natural I think for us to worry and anticipate things that might go wrong. And to be fair, it’s good to some extent to be able to anticipate and plan - but any obsessing beyond that is not only unhelpful, but overwhelming and even harmful.

I hope you’re able to re-orient around trans joy and euphoria - it does exist, I promise, even as the world around us burns. Remember that just a few decades ago, things were much worse for trans folks in this country, and we will survive worse. Help yourself survive by focusing on your own happiness and well-being. Love yourself, and take care of yourself 🥰

It’s probably helpful to remember that the political scapegoating isn’t personal, nothing is wrong with you wanting to live fully as yourself anymore than there is anything wrong with Jewish people living, or gay folks, etc. - we are victimized not because there is any wrong about us, but because it is politically useful.

Stay safe but stay focused on your well-being. Learning to pass is a useful skill, not just for safety but for reducing dysphoria - it sounds crazy but sometimes makeup literally helped me recover from difficult suicidal thoughts.

Focus on the practical, helpful things you can do - what is within your control now. Keep going in the right direction, and don’t obsess about things you can’t control. As far as I can tell, that’s part of how we can reduce unnecessary suffering.

wooooo congrats! 🥰

yes, transition first - boymode later :-)