My experience and thoughts as a trans person on HRT.
I’m largely right wing. This is often described by the unhinged lgbt community as ‘the tree voting for the axe’. I disagree. Being trans is not a monolith and the trans movement is fucking unbearable.
😡😡
First: on the subject of being Trans:
I originally shared this on Twitter. A friend of mine said the following and I thought that it was important context worth prefacing everything else to show where I’m coming from.
To which my answer was:
THE TRANS MOVEMENT IS HELL.
I’ll do something controversial and explain the significance of HRT and how it almost certainly saved my life. I’ve never really elaborated on being trans and what it’s like... but I see a lot of religious minded folk conjecturing about HRT and making hapless conclusions that
Such a treatment is impractical; something seen as a half or quarter measure...mostly that it’s little more than a political gesture...progressives humoring the trans folk for clout.
Absolutely not. I actually thought that, too, and it almost killed me.
Here is my experience
with being trans, treatment, HRT and the validity of the problem as something that can be addressed in a meaningful sense:
I have no idea how to word it. My issues were never specific to a gender...mostly I just absolutely hated being pushed into a male role and relegated to male behavior and aesthetics. That sounds a lot more shallow than it was, tho.
When I was like 4...I just started to truly align with girls. I didn’t like men. I didn’t like male behavior. I couldn’t talk to male doctors.
As I got older and my body changed I started resenting my body, hating it, etc. it’s not that I had low self esteem...I just hated body hair, the male voice, the personality changes, etc.
It took me a while to decide to try HRT...I knew I was trans but I didn’t think HRT was a legitimate answer to anything. But over time I just decided that it was prolly worth it. I mean...my sense of being compelled to be something against my will was just so pervasive. It colored everything. Finally I went through a series of suicide attempts and ended up being hospitalized 3 times.
The final straw that made me snap and decide to give HRT a try was strange. I became confident in myself and rather than dismiss the trans experience as political whinging...I realized I didn’t actually give a fuck what ppl thot and I decided I’d just do it my way.
That’s why I’ve never changed my pronouns, I’ve never officially changed my name and I have never once corrected someone that misgendered me.
That said...I had been using the name Ashley since I was a child and the ppl who know me knew for over a decade that I was trans and used those pronouns without encouragement from me.
Anyways...when I finally started HRT I expected it to be a mostly private, personal shift.
I thought it might make me feel slightly less resentful of my body, etc. but thats not what happened.
Literally the first week...everything changed. Suddenly I felt at home in my body in a way that I had NEVER known I didn’t. I mean...it was a night and day shift. Everything felt less frustrating, I felt calmer...and, apparently, my entire life I had been in a state of perpetual agitation and anxiety.
I’ve read a lot about the theories of gender and how they contrive a thing like being trans...and, briefly, here is my understanding:
Gender is a function of (at least) three independent things evolving independent of each other: 1. Sexual organs, 2. Hormones, 3. Brain.
Think of these things as moving parts that ultimately combine to contrive the Geno/phenotypic expression of gender. Taken all together as a coherent presentation...it’s easy to think that gender is a simple process informed by genes. But that’s not true.
Think about the brain. One of the ways that we account for individual difference between ppl is by way of the brain. The brain develops slowly and in that manner it is coordinated by a number of factors...in this context, sex traits and hormones. Put another way...the brain as an organ develops on several levels at the same time; primary, secondary and tertiary. This ultimately makes the brain specific to the context that coordinated it.
A lot of times we talk about how the brain develops as a function of neurons growing and connecting unconnected areas. In many ways this is not unlike building highways.
Hormones act on the brain to contrive a series of interconnections that show individual traits. Simply put...girl hormones help bring about a brain that is characterized to favor a different set of facts than make hormones.
This is why we talk about the girl brain & the boy brain.
I seem to have developed a female brain. I intuited things like females, I experience things like females and I coordinated and contrived order on my world more in line with females. In fact...I NEVER understood male behavior. I thought that it was stupid and I did not respect it.
Anyways...it seems that life is felt thru the interface of the brain, hormones & primary sexual traits.
On HRT I suddenly felt relaxed. I didn’t feel restlessness, edgy or frustrated. This was life changing. I had felt upset for years...but I didn’t know it. With HRT it’s like the panic attacks and irritable feelings...the panic attacks...all just stopped. Completely.
I had no idea why but it was and still is awesome. If I had known that my endogenous testosterone was experience antagonistically...I would have started HRT. So many years earlier.
But yeah. The feeling of gender dysphoria is odd. It is not nearly as clear as ppl pretend that it is. I hated being a male but that in no way suggested being a female as a fix.
But yeah...I prolly would’ve killed myself eventually. My entire life I’ve felt miserable and angry at myself...and I assumed it was a personal failure. I never complained about it to anyone else. That there was a problem was in no way predicated on there being a solution. I imagined that HRT would be little more than a glorified half measure that was more or less done in the ‘spirit’ of truth.
But it was so much more than that. I cannot even. Not. EVEN.
Yeah, I’m being silly...but I mean it. My entire life was a panic attack to the point that I didn’t know there was
a problem. Then estrogen sussed out my anxiety and frustrations almost over night…& my life became DRAMATICALLY more liveable.
Who knows?
What I will say is this: HRT is MUCH more than just a political gesture amounting to little more than a cosmetic waste of time.
I thought that’s what it was for years. That’s why I waited to start HRT for so long. Point blank: that was the WORST mistake of my life. Hrt is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I would almost certainly have killed myself without it.
Summed up briefly: being trans was a life long panic attack that made me suicidal almost every single day. That stopped almost overnight with HRT.
I wasted years of my life because I thought HRT was little more than a compromise for political expediency.
It would likely have killed me if I didn’t get the confidence to do my own thing.
Thanks for sharing
What was your age when you began HRT?
Curious about your non-ideological support for HRT as part of your lived experience. Huge side effects that are regularly denied by the ideologues. Conversely a positive side effect of taking hormones is a temporary mood boost. Wondering if you could have had the same result in a safer way.