Trans Twitter Topics

Online there are two stories:

-Medical journals and authorities that indicate that HRT may slow hair loss but does NOT restore lost hair.

-Trans women posting anonymously that HRT absolutely fixed their hairlines.

Guess which group are liars?

So, like some kind of scientific-consensus-believing dumbass, I accepted the years of programming telling me that women & especially trans people are not reliable sources on our own bodies.

Despair slowed down my attempts to navigate the healthcare system & get HRT DRASTICALLY.

Medinine ISN'T an objective science. It's full of politics, privilege, poverty, bias, stigma.

Trans advocates have made a ton of headway, but on a fundamental level, medicine wants to discourage trans people from transitioning, because that's what most (cis) practitioners want.

Medicine tries to discourage us from transitioning with HRT by:

-Creating stalls and roadblocks to navigate

-Incessantly "Are you SURE"-ing us

-Compressing us into the gender binary

-Overstating the drawbacks & presenting positives as drawbacks by removing the queer context

The roadblocks will vary depending on where you go, and other trans people will have their own horror stories. But it's pretty universally a ridiculous, expensive runaround intended to exhaust people with lots of anxiety & very little social stamina before we can START treatment.

Cis people who don't know what dysphoria feels like or how it can manifest control virtually every cultural narrative of what being trans feels like. So trans people OFTEN look at this inauthentic narrative and say, "That's not me, I must not be trans!"/"trans enough for HRT!"

Medicine exploits this by requiring, at every hoop to jump through, unambiguous confidence that you're the most extremely transgender person ever to live, that you have no traits of your assigned gender, and that you will surely die without hormones. It preys on trans insecurity.

All of which is absurd. Dysphoria, like all things, fluctuates day-to-day with how easy it is to deal with. Nobody in the world, trans or cis, comports themselves perfectly with their gender.

If you struggle with trans feelings and it keeps coming up for you, you're trans.

Only treating the most fucked-up, desperate and suicidal trans people PROVES that medicine sees transition as a last resort, not an assistive tool. In other words, if you can try to "tough it out" as your assigned gender, medicine wants you to suffer through life that way.

Hormones are very much a "your mileage may vary" sort of thing, but I want to address the spookiest parts of the estrogen-and-antiandrogens treatment, IN their queer-positive context, FROM a position of believing trans women.

Understated benefits:

-Mental relief

-Body hair reduction

-Skin quality

-Breast size and shape

Even when trans women talk about this stuff, it's usually from a position of defensiveness, dysphoria and body hate.

I'm going to be honest, but also intentionally body-positive.

Possibly Overstated/Out-of-Context drawbacks:

-Infertility

-Sexual "dysfunction"

-Loss of libido

-Increased cancer risk

Again, I'm just one trans, but I intend to shoot straight about this stuff and I also think the way that medical authorities present these is a scare tactic.

MENTAL RELIEF. Medical literature generally wraps this up in a tidy sentence, like, "Patients report better mental health outcomes through hormones." And that is a wholly inadequate way to describe the flood of mental wellness that hits trans women who finally get on estrogen.

I've tweeted about this incessantly, but even just getting onto an antiandrogen wiped away the majority of my anxiety and depression. Even stuff I thought wasn't related, like time anxiety. My brain just didn't work on testosterone.

This was in the first month and a half, by the way. Long before any physical side effects, much less permanent ones. If medicine wasn't trying to prevent transitions, it would make sense to just let anybody try out a month with the other sex hormone & just see if if fits better.

BODY HAIR REDUCTION. Medical literature is quick to point out that while estrogen "may reduce" body hair, it won't stop it entirely, and that it DEFINITELY doesn't stop facial hair from growing in. And as far as I know, this is all true, unlike the hair loss lie I started with!

BUT, let's put that into context: I was intensely hairy (and dysphoria made me seem hairier to myself) and couldn't imagine keeping up with a routine of body hair removal (which was made harder by that dysphoria). Thinking about it made me want to die.

I'm at six months now, and the "reduction" is actually pretty huge. I find I don't really have to shave body hair all that often, and the act of shaving is a lot easier and less dysphoric. The little prickles/dark roots of persistent hairs just aren't as bad as I feared.

Also, my "haven't shaved today" face is about where my "2 o' clock shadow" face used to be, and I am 100% sure that my cheeks are less dominated by beard growth area, so the "no effect on facial hair" thing is definitely wrong. It's not going to vanish but it IS more manageable.

SKIN QUALITY. The medical description is "softer, clearer skin", which before I started sounded like a negligable boon and not a constant affirmation of my newfound cooperation with my body.

Every accidental brush of skin on skin when I wipe my face, roll up my sleeves, etc, is a vibrant little reminder that my body is part of me, now, and not an alien entity. It feels REAL. I'm in it! And that's so profoundly different...

I'm positive that part of the reason trans women say their emotions are sharper on estrogen is about blood flow to your skin... the physiological feelings of your emotions match what your brain has always expected. They stop seeming fake or distant.

I've tweeted before about how we're made to feel we can't transition past a certain age, and I think that the fixation of youth for both trans and cis women is bullshit, but ALSO, if it settles anyone's fears, I feel like I look ten years younger than I did in September.

BREAST SIZE/SHAPE. Most online authorities insist that trans womens' boobs will never be as big or look as normal as a cis woman's, especially [repetition voice] over a certain age. They throw around distorted photos and talk about Tanner Stages and cite transphobic junk research

Now, I'm only at like 7 months of HRT, and my boobs ARE small and distinctly trans looking. But they're NOTHING like the scariest pictures that kept me discouraged from transitioning. They're normal boobs, albeit on a broad ribcage! They instantly felt like a natural extension.

Now, remember our rule about believing trans women when they talk about their own bodies: Plenty of trans women self-report making it to "tanner stage 5" or whatever, & having the biggest chests in their families. And remember, cis breasts ALSO come in all shapes and sizes.

(I internalized a lot of rhetoric about trans women being fetishists, and convinced myself I didn't care about having boobs, but I felt a huge weight lift-- not literally, lol-- when they showed up. I'm still a little scared to talk about them, tbh, but hi, this is honest time.)

I forgot to make a header for this but a note about PELVIC FUSION: I felt like I was too late to transition for a while because, after a certain age, your pelvis is supposed to fuse and then medicine says you can't have wider hips through hormones?

Guess what? [repetition voice] Trans women. Self-report. Exceptions!

It's always tempting to write self-reporting off as wishful-thinking or lying, but that's because we're all socially trained to doubt trans women! (And women, and trans people, both more generally.)

Moving on to scare-tactic WARNING labels!

INFERTILITY. "Hormones will make you infertile, eventually, maybe, definitely, permanently, maybe," says medicine. "If you're even a little likely to ever want kids, definitely do expensive sperm banking before starting hormones!"

It's definitely true that hormones can make you infertile! But medicine can't tell you how likely that is, or how permanent, or how long into hormones it happens.

Cis doctors did juuuuuust enough research to uncover a problem, but not enough to provide mitigating strategies.

Personally, I couldn't afford any kind of fertility preservation and just went ahead and started treatment anyway. Yeah, I wanted kids. But I wanted to be alive and happy more. (Also like not to be a bummer but the world is ending & I already struggle to make enough to live.)

I've read accounts by trans women who come off of hormones for a few months and were TOTALLY able to procreate. Sometimes trans women get people pregnant by accident. Because medicine has decided to stay uselessly vague about trans fertility, it's all just a dice roll.

SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION.

Hey, uhh, let's get into the right mind before charging through this bit.

I don't think I've literally ever talked about my junk before?

In 30 years?

A whole life.

Trying to blend in with dudes.

It was too dysphoric to think about, much less talk about.

Ready?

When medical sources say hormones can cause sexual dysfunction, that's a cis man looking at a hormonally-transitioned trans woman's junk and declaring it broken because it doesn't behave like his.

To reinforce cis normalcy and superiority.

And to scare transfemmes away from HRT.

When you take hormones, your junk starts doing its best impression of the junk of your actual gender. It changes radically enough that I'm actually opposed to calling what I've got down there a "dick" at this point, which is why I keep saying "junk."

It's it's own thing.

This information is well-hidden, because trans people are scared to talk about genitals-- we're already hypersexualized & called perverts & get genital surgery questions constantly. But it SHOULD be basic sex ed. Everyone should know this already.

I say all this to suddenly overshare: ()

What the cis doctors call sexual dysfunction is junk that *looks* like a dick but *behaves* more like a clit. It is softer, and more sensitive, and erect less (possibly never), and climaxes differently.

This is all VERY functional.

Obviously some trans women have different experiences and end up missing some aspects of how their junk used to work!

But what I'm getting at here is that medicine only recently admitted that cis women might enjoy sex, so you can't expect a fair shake for trans sexuality.

This dovetails nicely into REDUCED LIBIDO.

I was borderline asexual before I started hormones, but I see lots of un-estrogenized ladies express concern about never having sex again. And some trans women I've talked to DO say their libido is less active!

What I will say is this: I and several transfemmes I've talked to say that they thought their libido had fallen, only to realize that what turned them on and how they could tell they were turned on had changed so much they weren't recognizing the feeling at first.

I'm resistant to the idea that men and women are all that different, and to generalization about male/female sexualities, so I'm going to talk about my personal experience and nothing more:

Being turned on USED TO feel like holding my breath after an exhale; it was centralized somewhere in my chest cavity, needful, and driven. Now it's more of a full-body, flushed, electric skin kind of feeling. I'm less attracted to visuals & more to being paid attention to.

All of which is much, much more comfortable to me. And I want to impress on anyone considering hormones that it will be different, which is scary, but it's also exciting! We're lucky to get to relearn our bodies in this way! (title drop of my bad poetry anthology)

CANCER RISK. Hey, did you know, it is easier to get cancer in a part of your body, if that part exists?

Trans women have, if their hormone numbers are consistent, almost as much risk of breast cancer as cis women. This is because (stop me if it's confusing) we have breasts.

One trans woman had testicular cancer once (seriously, just one report, ever) and every online fact sheet mentions it. But the risk probably decreases. And estrogen is sometimes used in cis men to treat prostate cancer.

So. If trans women are at LESS cancer risk than cis people with the same bits, why the fuck is cancer on the hormone warning label?

Do doctors just want to say "cancer" a bunch of times while talking about hormones? Because that's incredibly dope, I'm very excited about that!

This has been a long rant, but if you made it past the gooshy sex talk, I just want to say that

MEDICINE HAS A BIAS

Is an incredibly important lesson, and cross-applies across the board to all intersections of privilege & oppression!!!

-A startling percentage of doctors think black people "experience less pain" than white people.

-Doctors actively disbelieve female patients' descriptions of their symptoms.

-Everything doctors say to fat patients and about fatness is, at this point, wholly disproven.

And these biases compound: trans women of color are gender-policed even harder by cis, white doctors. Fat trans women around the world are denied hormones based on their BMI even if their heart health is totally fine. Trans women who pass are disbelieved like cis women are.

So if your read all this radicalized trans yelling, go read some radicalized feminist yelling, radicalized fat yelling, and radicalized POC yelling!

(And feel free to link threads along those lines in the replies; also trans women in general please feel free to chime in. <3)

As a final final note: Many places (like NYS, where I live) have Informed Consent clinics now where you can skip arguing with two therapists and a private physician. And your local LGBT center can help you access a doctor who'll actually help you instead of fighting you. <3