Category: other
Tags: HRT diary, not-a-transition
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Why am I doing this again?
-I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it would seem a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given our differences. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
+I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it would seem a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given our differences in outlook. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
-_But you only live once_. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing in the transfeminine direction is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_ (the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units) being around 0.2 or 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
+_But you only live once_. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing in the transfeminine direction is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_ (the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units) being around 0.2 or 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is allegedly _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
But this—_obsession_ with sex differences and genderbending has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose, because I've been ideologically corrupted by lurking [/r/GenderCritical](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/)—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?
And ... that's it, as far as I can tell. Not really a big deal, at all. Should I be disappointed, that I hoped to discover some True Secret of Ultimate Gender, only to find that the secret can't be had by taking other people's medicines? Should I be relieved that maybe there's not much of a secret to be discovered in the first place? Or do I just need to continue to be patient?
-It should be noted that my 10 July lab results put my estradiol levels well below the expectation for transitioners, so I'll be increasing my dosage. The test result uninformedly just said "<50 pg/mL", with the standard range (for males, presumably) given as ≤50 pg/mL; the doctor says it should be over 100. (This information makes my earlier [patch-only-no-spiro phase](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/) of the experiment look even more useless than I knew at the time.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form (well, [sublingual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration), anyway); the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches have _usually_ been lasting out the week that they're supposed to, but it was slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over. The spiro, however, does seem to be working as intended: the July lab puts my "free" testosterone at 20.8 pg/mL, with the standard range given as 59–166 pg/mL.
+It should be noted that my 10 July lab results put my estradiol levels well below the expectation for transitioners, so I'll be increasing my dosage. The test result uninformatively just said "<50 pg/mL", with the standard range (for males, presumably) given as ≤50 pg/mL; the doctor says it should be over 100. (This information makes my earlier [patch-only-no-spiro phase](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/) of the experiment look even more useless than I knew at the time.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form (well, [sublingual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration), anyway); the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches have _usually_ been lasting out the week that they're supposed to, but it was slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over. The spiro, however, does seem to be working as intended: the July lab puts my "free" testosterone at 20.8 pg/mL, with the standard range given as 59–166 pg/mL.
Although the experiment so far may not _currently_ feel like directly throwing myself on a fire, as things progress, I will eventually have to _decide_ what I'm trying to do here, and which trade-offs (in health risks, in the social consequences of my appearance) are worth what. Like the frog in that story about a slowly boiling pot of water. Or the man who, attempting to split the difference between getting the girl and being the girl, achieved neither.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff