The following blog post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria. I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experience gender dysphoria – however one might even define that – as a prerequisite for taking hormones. At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one’s body; and this of course includes hormones, be they androgens, estrogens, or exotic xenohormones as yet uninvented.
I have gender dysphoria. I find labels overly reifying; I feel reluctant to call myself transgender, per se: 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. Mostly people seem to vibe it, but sometimes it feels a little like weasel words. Other times, when I’m in a sillier mood, I’ll tell people I’m genderfluid – if only because it sounds like something I’d put in my station wagon. Of course, my faithful Subaru Outback was made before 2008, which means it wants the green, long-life genderfluid…
I experience an ongoing brain-body map prediction error – my brain seems to expect a differently shaped body to the one I wound up with. I have been acutely aware of this since before I hit puberty. Out of shame and embarassment, I suppressed this, but I also made a promise to myself that if I hadn’t come out by the time I turned thirty then I was allowed to get as weird as I needed to.
During the COVID-19 pandemic I went through a phase of using self-administered ketamine therapy to refactor a long list of maladaptive behavioural patterns, and eventually this particular issue became impossible to ignore. I had avoided reifying it for long enough, and this wasn’t working for me – I had to try something different. One evening in July 2021, I sat down with a close friend. I am going to put a large amount of ketamine up my nose, I said. Your job is to start asking me questions about my sexuality.
Not long after, I had jumped through the relevant bureaucratic hoops, and subsequently found myself cycling home from the pharmacy with a paper bag filled with repurposed menopause medication – a starter pack of 100 µg/24 hr estradiol patches, to be applied twice a week.
While the physical effects of estrogen are well-documented, back when I came out I had difficulty finding detailed phenomenological reports of the subjective effects of estrogen. I did wind up reading a large number of anecdotal reports on Reddit, and found that in aggregate, people tend to report positive subjective effects. One could propose a number of non-exclusive hypotheses as to why – I’ll attempt to review these later in this post.
Did it make sense for me to try this? It was time to find out for myself. I unboxed the patches and placed one on my stomach.
It bears mentioning that I have tried a high testosterone lifestyle before, so it’s not as if I was entering into this from a state of hormonal deficiency. In my late twenties I started cycling every day, lost a ton of weight, and learned how to deadlift. I neglected to have my hormone levels checked, but if it’s any indication, my biceps got swole and my chest hair suddenly grew quite thick and curly. This felt good in its own right, but did not fix the dysphoria.
The sex hormones – androgens, estrogens, and progestogens – are produced by the endocrine system. They are released into the bloodstream in response to a range of regulatory factors – primarily the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis – as a signal for distant cells to regulate a wide variety of bodily functions.
To be clear, there are four major endogenous estrogens – estrone, estradiol, estriol, and estetrol – though estetrol is only produced during pregnancy. Most modern feminising hormone therapy involves application of estradiol. However, there do exist other estrogens – including 17α-estradiol, noteworthy for being non-feminising while also extending the lifespan of male mice. There are also other compounds with estrogenic activity, for example the androstanediols.
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