ah, my lovely Schrödinger’s forehead

it’s not too bad, tbh - I’m just dysphoric about it, but most people probably won’t notice (it’s a subtle difference). My hairline bothers me more, and my nose, and my lips, and my jaw, and my chin … etc. 🙈

accurate, how tf else will I hide my hideous man-forehead?

the meme is almost funny because it doesn’t work

like, what about all the stereotypical trans goth and alt girls?

also, the image is so generic that it almost describes nothing, like saying: all trans women look like women

m e t a

yay for selfie posts; they also like selfies on !trans_joy@lemmy.blahaj.zone if you felt like x-posting 😁

Mr Burke was initially suspended from the school in 2022 for refusing to call a transgender pupil by the surname ‘they’, and “the manner in which he conducted his objection to transgenderism,” towards the principle, according to the judgement.

The school also obtained an injunction restraining Mr Burke from trespassing on the school premises, which he has defied a number of times.

Should be clarified:

https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms

TERM TO AVOID:

“transgenderism” “gender ideology”

These are not terms used by transgender people. These terms are used by anti-transgender activists to dehumanize transgender people and reduce who they are to “a condition” or a “dangerous ideology” that threatens “free speech.” Learn more about the term “transgenderism” via GLAAD’s Guide to Anti-LGBTQ Online Hate and Disinformation

BEST PRACTICE:

Refer to being transgender instead, or refer to the transgender community. You can also refer to the movement for transgender equality and acceptance.

From that “Guide to Anti-LGBTQ Online Hate & Disinformation”:

The current, popularized usage of the term “transgenderism” arises from anti-trans extremists who seek to delegitimize and dehumanize transgender people by falsely implying that being transgender is an ideology rather than an identity. (See here for a longer history of the term’s usage.)

In her March 2023 essay, “On the Right’s Call to “Eradicate Transgenderism” (It Means Exactly What You Think It Means)” journalist Parker Molloy further explains: “words like ‘transgenderism’ and ‘gender ideology’ are almost exclusively used by anti-trans activists to obscure the fact that trans people are simply people who just happen to be trans. It’s not a belief system.”

For example, the term “transgenderism” was notably weaponized in a speech by far-right commentator Michael Knowles at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where he pronounced: “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Knowles posted versions of the speech on YouTube, as well as variations of the same rhetoric on his other social media accounts, while disingenuously asserting that his call for violence was not violent.

On social media, Knowles and other far-right media figures employ the term (along with other variations of the trope such as “gender ideology”) to disingenuously evade platforms’ hate speech and harassment policies — which prohibit speech targeting people with hate on the basis of protected characteristics such as gender identity (while speech targeting ideologies is allowed). Anti-trans figures and groups continue to promote the term online and offline as a dog whistle expressing contempt and hatred of transgender people.

I am so disappointed, I would have expected more from NZ - I wonder how this came to be?

yeah, sorry - I meant emotionally mostly - reworded it to make more sense

I was pretty afraid of what would happen if I fainted, so having someone nearby was supportive for me, and it makes sense in general to have emotional support in that moment.

quick googling shows that fat memory operates over a decade

https://www.dw.com/en/fat-cell-memories-why-its-hard-to-maintain-healthy-weight/a-70840434

“In the timespan we looked at — 2 years in humans and 8 weeks in mice — we still found changes that persisted in cells of the adipose tissue. It is possible that these will be erased over a longer period of weight maintenance,” Hinte told DW.

Human fat cells live for around 10 years, which means it could take 10 years for the obesity memory in cells to vanish.

that’s super disheartening 😞

I mostly spent the first year on estrogen gaining weight, I was worried that losing weight during early breast growth would be a problem, but my high body fat might have made that irrelevant - my breasts seem to maintain the same relative size, as I lose weight I seem to lose it from all over in roughly equal proportions? I wish my neck, shoulders, and belly would melt, though.

+1 to having someone there who can help support you (for me other people being around made it worse, so I did it alone, but it was good to have someone nearby in case I fainted).

Also can confirm I would get so scared I just physically couldn’t do it - this still happens to me sometimes. I find it helps to have eaten enough food just before (as well as hydrating significantly) - this is grounding and helps reduce chances I’ll get faint or mentally struggle as much.

And also can confirm it gets easy over time - now it’s no problem at all, I inject once a week and it’s almost never dramatic or painful.

Also, might be good to have a little towel nearby in case you have a little blood come out - it didn’t always happen, but early on I started with injections into my thigh, and my thighs are very vascular and I frequently would bleed from subq injections; now I inject in my belly (which was mentally something I had to work up to), and I have far less bleeding. Either way, just have something to catch a drip in case it happens.

Tips and Tricks for Injecting Hormones

Location: do the injection somewhere that you will be safe if you pass out (somewhere soft, for example). It helps if the place is comforting as well. Do what you can to create a safe and comforting environment.

Position: when you are injecting, keep your legs propped up (when you start to faint, blood can rush to the legs and keeping them level with your heart can slow or prevent fainting). I like to sit on a couch with my back supported and use a firm pillow under my knees so that my legs can completely relax while remaining elevated / level with my heart.

Blood Pressure: to help avoid fainting, do what you can to increase your blood pressure:

• be as cold as you can tolerate (it shunts blood to your core from your extremities and increases blood pressure)
• drink lots of water and “overhydrate” before injecting (this also helps reduce pain)

Subq: to help with needle phobia I choose to inject subcutaneously (into fat) rather than intramuscularly. This is because subq injections can be done with a smaller gauge (not as thick) and shorter needle, so there is less pain and less anticipation of a big needle going into the body; I use 27G 1/2" needles (the grey ones) to inject and I barely feel any pain, sometimes there is literally no pain.

Draping: drape blankets over the parts of your body you’re not injecting into to make it easier to forget you’re injecting into your body (instead, make the injection site a foreign object, essentially dissociate from it and treat it as if it’s all just mechanical, don’t identify with the part you’re injecting into)

Body part: inject into body parts that you don’t find as disturbing to inject into; I find injecting into my belly much more distressing than injecting into my thigh (note: where you inject is constrained by the method you use, you can’t just inject anywhere - I’m relying on you knowing where you can or can’t inject, but figure out among those options which places are easier or harder for you mentally, if there is any difference at all)

Short break: especially when I first started injections I found it helpful to take a short break between drawing medication into the syringe and injecting; essentially this is about titrating exposure and minimizing built-up fear and anticipation. Over time I have found the need to do this has gone down, but I suggest it anyway - do something else, think about something else, don’t look at needles or think about injecting at all for a few minutes after drawing up medication and before injection.

Quick jab, not slow push: when injecting subq (I don’t do IM, so I can’t say if this applies), pinching the fat and injecting quickly in a forceful and committed way helps avoid pain, slowly pushing the needle in is not only more painful but much harder psychologically (it gives you time to think about it and panic), so it’s better to almost surprise yourself and let your hands do the motion without having to think about it too much, and doing it quickly means you can’t hype up the fear as its happening

Look away: I prefer not to look as the needle is going in, or out, and I like to keep a finger in the way of being able to see where the syringe meets the body while pushing the plunger down. Thinking about the needle in my body is part of what freaks me out and not seeing it helps reduce exposure - this may or may not apply to your needle phobia, and obviously you want to know you’re injecting in the right place - so I look and orient where I want to jab first, and sometimes I try to look at the rest of the syringe to coordinate the injection.

Don’t aspirate: subq injections of small volumes don’t require aspiration (that’s where you pull back a little on the plunger to see if there’s blood which indicates you’ve accidentally hit a vein), so don’t fret about whether you have hit anything and keep the injection mentally simple - I find it best to keep my mind elsewhere while the needle is in me, and to only think about the injection as little as is necessary to do it, make it procedural and stay narrow-minded. Keep yourself from thinking anything beyond that simple procedure (like: OK, thrust needle in; good, now slowly increase pressure on plunger; good now slowly remove needle) fill the gaps between steps in your mind with a distraction - I like to look out a window and take in a view, others might find music helpful. Don’t think about what you shouldn’t be thinking about, instead actively distract yourself with something else.

Distract & Mentally Cope: This tip is a bit weird, but sometimes my anxiety builds up such fear around injecting I almost cannot physically do it, and in those moments I find it helpful to take a deep breath and then think about other times I have experienced much worse pain or physical trauma. Remembering those instances, and in particular how those sensations were not as bad as I would have thought and how I survived those helps put the injection into perspective: this barely registers as painful, and is causing almost no physical damage to me. Don’t do this for a physical trauma that you are still disturbed by, it works best for cases where you’re not distressed by the example. Most people have stubbed their toe and that hurts so much more than the injection, but you may have a better example - experiment and find what’s helpful.

Contextualize the pain: similarly weird and maybe specific to me, there have been times where I have had things impale me by accident (like when gardening a dry reed of grass once shunted into my hand, or one time a stray sewing needle left on a bed ended up poking into my leg, etc.) - in my experience these were not traumatizing or fainting type episodes, there was something just matter of fact and not fear-inducing about these experiences for me, so sometimes I like to pretend that I’m not pushing a needle into me, but instead I think of it like that reed of grass - a benign object, nothing to be scared of. Somehow this bypasses some of my needle phobia. I suspect it’s because my needle phobia is based on medical trauma and by taking it out of the medical context in my mind I find it much easier to cope with. Depending on where your needle phobia comes from or what you are sensitive to this may or may not help (it may even make it worse).

Control: finally, I would just say that my needle phobia is minimal when injecting myself now and I realized having control over the injection was important to managing and overcoming that fear. I have more needle phobia when others draw blood now than when I inject myself, and at first the relationship was inverse: injecting myself seemed so much worse than having my blood drawn. Also each injection seems easier than the last for me, and if you can successfully inject without panicking or experiencing fear or other negative emotions, having those “positive” or at least neutral injection experiences helps build a little bit of mental safety, and you want to protect that sense of safety. You may not have control over this, but for me that has meant to whatever extent I could, I try to reduce exposure to negative experiences with needles and emphasize positive experiences (and when I’ve had a negative experience, I try to give myself time to recover before re-exposing myself, so I didn’t “spoil” the next experience as much).

Positive Associations: eat something sweet right after your injection as a way to build positive association with injections (there is actually research showing this helps, that’s part of the reasoning behind having candy at pediatrician’s offices). Likewise you can use fun bandaids (I use Welly bandaids) as a way to build some positive associations into your injections.

I had horrible fear of needles (would almost faint when blood was drawn for blood labs, for example), and basically came to terms with injections being necessary and learning how to injectand how to work with my phobia.

What made it possible for me to do injections was when I learned that you can inject subcutaneously with extremely thin needles - often I don’t feel any pain when I inject, and you can use much shorter needles as well.

I have a whole list of tips I came up with when I was learning to overcome my extreme needle phobia, I’ll share those in reply comments (there is too much for a single comment).

oo, thank you!

hard not to read this as misogyny…

it’s smart to worry about infertility and to freeze sperm - I agree with panathea, get on that quick!

however, you should know not only is it not 100% you will be infertile while on estrogen, there’s a good chance you will regain fertility if you pause HRT:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9873819/

There is a common untested assumption that this inhibition is permanent, resulting in infertility. In this longitudinal study, we report the recovery of viable spermatozoa in nine trans women who stopped GAHT for reproductive purposes. Our preliminary findings suggest that the negative impact of GAHT on spermatogenesis can be reversed, casting doubt on previous claims that GAHT in trans women inevitably leads to permanent infertility.

sample sizes are small and we can’t generalize from such a small group - but it at least falsifies the common belief that HRT will make you permanently infertile, it seems like the opposite is true - that fertility is regained in the majority of observed trans women when they pause HRT.

But you may have to use them if your body doesn’t switch from androgen to estrogen production as the primary on its own which can be caused by both genetic and/or environmental factors

just to clarify, the body doesn’t switch from androgen to estrogen production - what happens is sufficient exogenous estrogen tells the brain there are sufficient sex hormones, and shuts down sex hormone production; if the sex hormones drop low enough, the brain knows to turn production back on - but it will still produce testosterone rather than estrogen … unfortunately there is no way (currently) to make testes produce female levels of estrogen or to stop producing male levels of testosterone 😞

So the goal is instead to get the body to stop producing male sex hormones by taking enough female sex hormones.

General guidance now is to avoid androgen blockers at first and test testosterone levels to see if your body slows production of them. Androgen blockers have side effects, but without them the changes may take more time.

I think the desire to avoid androgen blockers is likely only relevant for people who opt to try monotherapy - that’s a missing component of what you are advocating; typical doses of estrogen that would be taken with anti-androgens will be much lower than necessary for monotherapy, and probably wouldn’t be enough on their own to shut down testosterone production.

Also, OP mentioned they have been prescribed anti-androgens and oral estrogen particularly, meaning the dose they were given is probably low, and is in a form that won’t work well for monotherapy - so to follow your advice they would probably have to change to injections as a route of administration.

However, you can take anti-androgens and oral estrogen - probably most trans girls in the U.S. take this route, and it’s the default way doctors handle transition here (not that I think it’s a particularly good way to go about it - it has lots of side effects and less / slower feminization with consistently low E levels, but I think doctors are afraid of monotherapy because they are afraid of high estrogen levels increasing risk of strokes based on some studies done on Premarin; though I don’t know why they aren’t also afraid of spironolactone causing heart problems, which at least has more evidence behind it than bioidentical estrogen causing strokes).

that’s pretty interesting - I guess being in the closet as a trans woman made me appear to be in a cis-het relationship with a woman, so I could totally understand feeling some ick around going back to that … but I am still too stuck in the pragmatism of passing as cis (and relatedly as straight) - I don’t like looking queer or being perceived as queer (and I don’t generally feel a belonging to the queer community - though I try anyway, lol)

my hang-ups / struggles are probably from self-loathing and internalized transphobia as well as just more practical considerations about not enjoying the discrimination that I experience when perceived as queer (and the fear of violence, etc.)

all this to say, I like the closet, thank you 🙈

yeah, I wasn’t repressing my sexual attraction to men before estrogen but never felt attraction to men anyway; I was open to it before and even considered myself technically bisexual, but it took estrogen to actually finally experience attraction

I’m not sure you can prevent rumors, even if you communicate clearly and directly - people lie, people won’t believe what you tell them and come up with and share their own explanations, etc. … and again, you can do that communication in an easier way … do you really think getting drunk and announcing it in person will really ensure the best outcome?

Are you able to see a therapist and work on this with them? It feels like you are exposing yourself to unnecessary hardship, and there might be better ways to accomplish what you are hoping to accomplish.

Either way, I understand your anxiety, it is reasonable to be anxious about that scenario, and I hope you take care of yourself and find a way to be compassionate to yourself 🫂

honestly that sounds a bit dismissive, reddit isn’t the problem here, you should talk to her about what her actual fears and concerns are - she’s seeking our reddit content to confirm her fears and it might help to talk to her and reassure her

also couples counseling is a good idea, it helps create space for discussing and exploring these kinds of things which helps

and yeah, I doubt your attraction to women will disappear with estrogen, even if I think you should be prepared for the possibility of changes to the way you experience that attraction

estrogen made me much less receptive to visuals and more turned on by context, if that makes sense