-Title: What's My Motivation? Or, Hormones Day 87
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Title: What's My Motivation? Or, Hormones Day 89
+Date: 2017-07-22
Category: other
Tags: HRT diary, not-a-transition
Status: draft
+
+
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 my views. 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.'"
Sufficiently attentive readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with [the date I started spiro](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/). That's because I stopped the HRT during a [relapse of unpleasantness](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)—not a conscious decision so much as I wasn't competent enough to remember to take pills while everything else fell apart. So my true hormones-reboot-reboot start date, the one that matters, is 25 April.
-And really, the results so far are nothing to write home about. (Although they are _apparently_ something to blog about.) My libido is down: I've been masturbating maybe once or twice a week, down from—well, I'm not sure I'm honest and brave enough to accurately estimate my pre-HRT masturbation frequency, even to myself, so let's just say my libido is down. I _think_ I'm starting to get a little bit of breast growth?—it's very subtle.
+And really, the results so far are nothing to write home about. (Although they are _apparently_ something to blog about.) My libido is down: I've been masturbating maybe once or twice a week, down from—well, I'm not sure I'm honest and brave enough to accurately estimate my pre-HRT masturbation frequency, even to myself, so let's just say my libido is down. I _think_ I'm starting to get a little bit of breast growth?—it's very subtle, but the way my shirt drapes over my chest in the mirror and distribution of weight while running down stairs have a strange new quale of _correctness_ about them.
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?
-Although, 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 result makes my earlier [patch-only-no-spiro phase](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/) of the experiment look even more useless than it seemed at the time, as if the _starter_ in _starter dose_ is code-switching for _placebo_.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form; the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches _usually_ last the week that they're supposed to, but it's slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over.
-
-The spiro 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 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](http://unremediatedgender.space/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 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.
-[decisions to make about whether to keep this up; risks of looking too weird, hurts socially; hurts finding a partner; "directly throwing myself on a fire" level]
+Although the experiment so far may not currently feel like directly throwing myself on a fire, 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.
-Or the man who, trying to split the difference between getting the girl and being the girl, achieved neither.
+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