So, I took off my estradiol patch during [my recent nervous breakdown](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/). I still [don't think](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) it had much, if any, real effect. (In particular, the stress and sleep-deprevation by themselves seem quite sufficient to explain the breakdown without attributing any of it to a nonstandard hormone balance, especially given how similar it felt to my 2013 nervous breakdown.)
Again, everyone had _told_ me that just-estrogen without an anti-androgen doesn't do anything, but that didn't seem absolutely locked down from me from what I had read ("Anti-Androgens May Not Be Necessary", according to [a lit review](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/) that I may or may not have had a causal role in commissioning), and remember: from my perspective, if [everyone is lying](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about the etiology, maybe they got the dosages wrong, too! So I don't regret being conservative for the initial experiment. (The _starter_ in "starter dose" is code-switching for _placebo_!)
So, I took off my estradiol patch during [my recent nervous breakdown](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/). I still [don't think](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) it had much, if any, real effect. (In particular, the stress and sleep-deprevation by themselves seem quite sufficient to explain the breakdown without attributing any of it to a nonstandard hormone balance, especially given how similar it felt to my 2013 nervous breakdown.)
Again, everyone had _told_ me that just-estrogen without an anti-androgen doesn't do anything, but that didn't seem absolutely locked down from me from what I had read ("Anti-Androgens May Not Be Necessary", according to [a lit review](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/) that I may or may not have had a causal role in commissioning), and remember: from my perspective, if [everyone is lying](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about the etiology, maybe they got the dosages wrong, too! So I don't regret being conservative for the initial experiment. (The _starter_ in "starter dose" is code-switching for _placebo_!)