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dandelion (she/her)

@ dandelion @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Posts
35
Comments
1241
Joined
2 yr. ago

Message me and let me know what you were wanting to learn about me here and I'll consider putting it in my bio.

  • no, I'm not named after the character in The Witcher, I've never played
  • pronouns: she/her

I definitely feel like I'm more of like a dumpling than a woman at this point in my life.

Hannah Horvath

  • Quick question about HRT and sexual orientation.

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  • honestly that sounds a bit dismissive, reddit isn't the problem here, you should talk to her about what her actual fears and concerns are - she's seeking our reddit content to confirm her fears and it might help to talk to her and reassure her

    also couples counseling is a good idea, it helps create space for discussing and exploring these kinds of things which helps

    and yeah, I doubt your attraction to women will disappear with estrogen, even if I think you should be prepared for the possibility of changes to the way you experience that attraction

    estrogen made me much less receptive to visuals and more turned on by context, if that makes sense

  • Quick question about HRT and sexual orientation.

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  • You just don't know what it will be like ... a lot of my attraction to women shifted over time ... it turns out being a repressed woman made me react to women with a kind of obsessive reverence that diminished once I became a woman - but the changes were not a complete reversal into only wanting to date men ....

    I know some trans women feel more like women when they date straight men, and that's a real psychology, but even though I'm bi and now attracted to men, and I would feel validation as a woman by dating a straight man, I still wouldn't do that (even if I were single).

    Like you I just love and trust women, I could see sex with men but a relationship would probably be harder to make happen. Even with my most sensitive queer male friends I struggle in the friendship in ways I don't with women - I'm just not cut out to date men, I want too much emotional intimacy and feel too much like a lesbian if that makes sense 😅

    Anyway, you should talk to your partner, getting lost about the details of sexuality changes on HRT misses the most important part, which is that they are feeling vulnerable and insecure, and reminding them that you will love them regardless of how your sexuality shifts could be helpful.

    edit: (and in my experience, you might feel vulnerable and scared of losing her, too, as you transition - my partner is pan and very supportive of my transition, but I still felt scared and vulnerable when I transitioned, they are huge changes and it makes sense both people might worry the relationship could be impacted or romantic interest might not be the same as it was, etc. - I certainly became a very different sexual partner, but in the end it worked for my spouse and she is very happy with my transition)

    edit2: also might be worth exploring why it matters to your partner whether you experience attraction to men, I keep forgetting how common it is for cis straight people to have misconceptions about gender and sexuality, she might fear your gender stuff is actually repressed homosexuality, it's also possible she doesn't believe bisexuality is real and that if you experience attraction to men that you will really be a gay man rather than a bi woman - might be worth getting clarity on what the beliefs and concerns are on her end.

  • neo-vaginal microbiome: problems & personal breakthroughs

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  • not a bad idea - I could always email the researchers on the papers I read ... my GP doesn't know anything about trans care, but I could still ask her just in case she knows someone (though I am scared to admit what I'm doing, doctors tend to get nervous about stuff like this)

  • neo-vaginal microbiome: problems & personal breakthroughs

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  • I would love to be a guinea pig or talk to actual experts about this, but I wouldn't know who to reach out to or how to initiate something like that 😅

    If you know any interested doctors or researchers let me know!

    Mostly I wish solutions were already researched, developed, and made readily available, but since they haven't and it seemed plausible to me that I could work out my own solution, I have tried to ... if anyone else might benefit, all the better!

  • neo-vaginal microbiome: problems & personal breakthroughs

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  • yes, this is a great idea! I already have a donor lined up, but I will wait until I'm fully healed and not nuking my microbiome with vinegar douching every other day before trying it 😄

  • What to expect when trying HRT for the first time

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  • Your mileage may vary, but in my personal experience, estrogen gave me better mental clarity, more energy, and lifted depression and anxiety to an extent I didn't realize I had been suffering with my whole life (or more accurately since the start of puberty); that was happening within the first few months with depression lifting the fastest and anxiety lifting much later ... so based on my experience and the research that has confirmed the immense clinical benefits of medical transition, I highly recommended anyone who thinks they might be a trans woman to try injecting estrogen and seeing if it helps them as much as it helped me.

    Transitioning is rough and stressful, and hormone fluctuations and figuring out the right dose is part of that stress, but overall transitioning made me a healthier, more balanced, and more productive person ... I'm not sure those changes will happen within two weeks, especially not with oral estrogen.

    I don't know that your experiences with oral estrogen will be, as I mentioned they don't result in consistently elevated or stable estrogen blood levels, and I have never personally taken oral estrogen to compare.

    Girls I know IRL who take oral estrogen have a variety of experiences, but anecdotally most of them have slower feminization and worse mood than girls I know who inject or use patches. I know one girl who does sublingual and had decent feminization. All of this is anecdotal and not generalizable, but what we know about oral estrogen was enough for me to avoid it, though I obviously would take it if there were no alternative. Taking 3 - 5 doses evenly spread out through the day might help achieve somewhat more consistent levels, but this is logistically challenging and needless when there are other options.

    It should be mentioned I overcame severe needle phobia to inject estrogen, that's how significantly better that route of administration is. Also, injecting with very small and short needles (think insulin needles) into fat was the only way it was feasible for me, I am not sure I would have been able to inject IM with a longer or thicker needle.

    To be honest, something about trying to take HRT for just a day, or just two weeks feels off to me - it takes time for the body and brain to adjust from testosterone dominance to estrogen dominance. You can't really squeeze that into tight timelines. Even after 3 months major changes are happening and I saw significant mood improvements at 4 - 6 months that weren't present before then (namely a dramatic reduction in intrusive generalized anxiety).

    It's fine to try HRT on a trial basis, but I would just take it for 2 - 3 months and see how you feel. If it's working well for you, just continue; otherwise, that's when you would want to stop to avoid permanent breast growth that won't go away.

    Trying to glean something out of a single day of HRT, or squeezing it into a two week period (which plausibly might give you some sense of whether it's right for you) just feels a bit misguided ... It takes a while to figure out a dose that works; to be honest I never figured the perfect dose, my biochemical dysphoria didn't go away until I was post-op a whole year later.

    My advice is to start HRT and take it as long as you can up to the point of permanent changes, then make a judgement call on whether to continue or revert back. Usually it's clear for most people whether they want to continue early on, within a week or two.

    This is made more complicated by the fact that spironolactone can cause depression and can be a bad time, so opting for anti-androgens and oral estrogen makes it less likely you will feel great. Others have a great time on oral estrogen and spiro (thinking of Mia Violet in particular), though that is unusual. Still, maybe you will get the information you need anyway. (Though, being real - cis men wouldn't usually consider taking estrogen voluntarily, which is probably part of why regret rates are so low - cis people just don't tend to think transitioning seems like a good idea. Estrogen only made clear that I liked being on estrogen, it didn't cure my denial or imposter syndrome.)

  • What to expect when trying HRT for the first time

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  • I wouldn't expect anything, tbh - that's far too little time to feel much (other than placebo). It should also be mentioned that a lot of people don't feel anything at all, even after weeks or months.

    When I injected estrogen for the first time it took a few hours before I was certain I was feeling anything different at all; that night (many hours after my injection) I remember sitting on the couch and I felt a difference in my body - a kind of buzzing awareness around my breasts and hips, which didn't feel obviously pleasant or good, it was just there; it took three days for my estrogen to rise to the point that my brain shut down testosterone production, and it was then that I finally experienced literal euphoria (it was like taking opiates, I wanted to lie in my bed and just bask in the high), and that's when I knew it was "right" for me, or at least whether I was trans or not, I would want to continue taking estrogen just based on how happy it made me feel. I'm not even sure half of the trans girls I know IRL report these kinds of experiences, though it's not uncommon it's also not guaranteed.

    That first injection was 0.25 mL of estradiol valerate (EV) in oil, and the concentration was 20 mg / mL, so I had injected 5 mg. EV has a half-life of around 3.5 days when injected subcutaneously (subq) or intramuscularly (IM).

    But I assume you have pills from the way you're talking about taking them for a single day, and in that case I wouldn't expect much at all - your body won't have a chance to switch from testosterone dominance to estrogen dominance. As an aside, pills in general are not great, >80% of the estrogen is filtered by your liver, and your blood estrogen levels spike and then go back down quickly in a matter of hours so there is no stable or sustained blood estrogen levels.

    Gel, patches, and injections are preferable alternatives (without anti-androgens, injections are the best for doses high enough to suppress testosterone with just the estrogen, what is called "monotherapy"; monotherapy is harder to achieve with gel and patches). Sublingual can be better than oral, but in practice it has similar problems (particularly with spikey metabolism).

    Recommended reading: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/

  • Not having Dysphoria is kinda weird (and changeing something is scary)

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  • tbh even once I transitioned it has remained that way - but the question is whether I would ever actually want to stop estrogen and allow my body to revert to testosterone (or now that I'm post-op, administer exogenous testosterone) - and the answer is always a very strong and obvious no.

    To me this indicates the answer, I don't really need anything more than that. Even if I'm somehow "really a boy" inside or some nonsense I come up with, the fact is that I would never want testosterone to touch my body again - and as long as that's true, I'm going to look like a woman and might as well socialize myself and acclimate to life as a woman (which, wow, by coincidence - I've always wished I had been born a girl instead and I've always thought it would be better to be a woman!).

    I still wake up a man / boy every morning, though. (I'm just shy of 2 years on HRT, so it's still early for me.)

  • Im fucking scared

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  • Why is it necessary to come out at a general assembly full of potentially hostile conservatives?

    You know it's OK to just start transitioning and tell people as necessary - and it's also OK to send out an email or write a letter or something else other than ... forcing yourself to get very drunk so that you can announce it in front of everyone in a physical meeting?

    Just seems like you're taking a particularly hard and risky option when you might have better alternatives. A lot of people will just tell someone in charge and allow them to pass along the information, for example. It's not uncommon for example in a workplace for someone to tell their boss and human resources, and then the boss is able to update the other coworkers or employees.

    Also, I think people are more likely to joke and make fun of a perceived boy for wearing nail polish than to make similar jokes of someone who has come out as trans - not that being trans won't get harassment (arguably it's worse when it happens), but at least some of those people who thought it was OK to joke about the nail polish might have politeness norms about respecting something serious like transitioning such that they would reconsider making those jokes.

  • Removed

    Where are Lemmy.World servers located?

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  • nice try, FBI

  • Quick question about HRT and sexual orientation.

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  • My orientation didn't change (I was bi before and bi after), but my experience of sexual attraction changed dramatically, I went from not being capable of much attraction to men to very obvious / overt attraction to men.

    I knew I was theoretically bi and not fully straight before I transitioned, but there was never a time that I saw a boy or man and felt sexually attracted to them. I never had a crush on a boy or man, etc. and I would never actually want to have sex with men, etc. - so I was a 1 on the Kinsey scale (predominantly attracted to the opposite sex, women, only incidentally attracted to men) before I transitioned (this assumes I was "heterosexual" by being attracted to women, though my experience before I transitioned was as though I was a kind of lesbian, so ... I don't know, I just call it opposite sex because that's what everyone else saw - I don't mean it to represent more than that).

    After many months on estrogen, I started to be able to see men in a completely different way, and could feel sexual attraction to men similarly to the way I could feel attraction to random women. I remember in particular walking onto a plane and walking down the aisle and looking up and seeing an attractive man and feeling that flush of sexual feeling / attraction and realizing: oh, that's never happened before.

    I don't think this was a psychological shift due to being more open due to transitioning or anything, this was a biological change due to the hormones. I had lived as a woman for months before I started estrogen, and I experienced plenty of psychological changes and opening up during that time, but increased attraction to men didn't happen until many months on estrogen.

    Not everyone experiences this, by the way, and it's impossible to know for sure how you will feel - but my understanding is the hormones don't change your sexual orientation, even if they might balance or alter sexual attraction. I'm much more bisexual now, and my attraction to women also diminished over time such that I have more equal physical attraction to both sexes. Regardless, I only have romantic interest in women and would never date a man, lol.

    Either way, you can't control whether you start to feel physical attraction to men, but you can control staying with your partner, and you are already capable of being attracted to other people than your partner and it will be no different after HRT. I've never heard of someone's sexuality entirely reversing, i.e. starting off attracted to women and then becoming exclusively attracted to men - I'm pretty confident that's not possible, even if it is possible for incidentally bisexual women like me to become ... more bisexual.

  • You're given $20,000 USD (or the equivalent in your local currency) to spend, but anything still left by the end of the day you lose for good. What are you spending it on?

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  • does buying investments count as spending?

  • Not having Dysphoria is kinda weird (and changeing something is scary)

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    1. you don't have to have dysphoria to be trans (just wanting to be the opposite gender or having gender euphoria is enough)
    2. self awareness of dysphoria is often not great, esp. when it's so common to repress or re-interpret dysphoria as something else (I lived decades without realizing I experienced any distress from my gender, I denied and repressed it sufficiently - it's possible your "I'm not trans because I don't have dysphoria" is an example of this)
    3. you don't have to transition or do anything, but you also don't have to worry that much about HRT's long term consequences, you can always take it for a few months and quit if you don't like it or it makes you depressed, etc. and you were wrong - or if you find you enjoy it immensely, you can continue with transition and know that you're "trans enough" from the fact you feel good on cross-sex hormones (which cis people do not experience, as I understand it). Regardless, I think you're building HRT up more than it actually is, you can use it as a diagnostic, and its effects are not generally permanent until you've been on it for 3 months; and even then, worst case scenario is you have gynecomastia, which you can get access to care to fix if you turn out to be cis (not that I think that's likely given the evidence you have presented); I will note that EEn is not a good ester as a diagnostic, because it takes so long to get your initial E levels up that it can be hard to fit a diagnostic timeline within that 3 month period, for that reason I would recommend estradiol valerate as an ester for the initial test period (which will spike E levels and has a half-life of 3.5 days), and then switch to EEn if you realize you want to continue estrogen long-term

  • Got my balls destroyed today

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  • wooo, congrats!

  • FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs

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  • After Kicking Cis Lesbians Out of a Bathroom, Boston Hotel Reaches Discrimination Settlement

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  • yes, it is the underlying motivation for all of it, they don't care about fairness in sports or women's spaces at all

  • After Kicking Cis Lesbians Out of a Bathroom, Boston Hotel Reaches Discrimination Settlement

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  • In May, during a Kentucky Derby-themed event held at the hotel, Ansley Baker and Liz Victor said they were using a women’s multi-occupant restroom when a security guard entered and began banging on stall doors. The guard accused Baker of being a “man in the women’s bathroom,” Baker alleged, yelled that “no men are allowed,” and told her to leave. Baker said she and Victor were “heckled” by other women in line for the bathroom as they were escorted to the lobby, and even after she showed her ID with an “F” gender marker, security forced both of them to leave the hotel.

    this story is so dumb ... the article leaves out the guard's gender, but imagine you're a woman using the restroom and a big dude comes knocking on all the stalls ... like, isn't this the very nightmare case that the conservatives are screeching about with trans women - that men violate women's spaces?

    So the guard knocks on stalls and then physically removes a cis woman from the women's restroom, then kicks her off the property even after she proves she's a woman ... even worse, the idiocy of the guard is bolstered by the women in line for the bathroom ...

    Meanwhile, I'm a trans woman, having used restrooms along with bigoted women who are entirely clueless that I'm not cis ... they don't actually care, they can't even tell - what's the point? The anti-trans panic has mostly victimized cis women, and when trans people comply with the transphobic policies by using the bathroom of their assigned sex, they get the same treatment: harassed out of the bathrooms, punished, or worse - subjected to assault or rape.

    I'm not going to pretend we don't know why these policies exist, the people who created and push the policies are activists aiming to eliminate trans people, they want to eradicate us entirely - the end goal is to criminalize being trans, to forcefully detransition us in prisons, and when young people present as gender dysphoric, to go back to what they did in the 1960s like electroshock, lobotomies, and institutionalization.

    The nicer alternative in the meantime is conversion therapy, which was found to double the risk of suicide ... conversion therapy goes against science, medicine, and ethics, which is why so many states have legislation against it.

    This isn't about bathrooms, this is about terrorizing trans people back into the closet.

  • After Kicking Cis Lesbians Out of a Bathroom, Boston Hotel Reaches Discrimination Settlement

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  • "we're sorry we lied now that we're in trouble for it"

  • After Kicking Cis Lesbians Out of a Bathroom, Boston Hotel Reaches Discrimination Settlement

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  • having cleaned both men and women's restrooms for a living, I can confirm the women's is often just as dirty as the men's

    (overall I personally felt women's restrooms were worse; I've never had to clean up blood in a men's restroom, but it wasn't infrequent that there was blood on the floor and seats in women's restrooms)

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    any vaginoplasty advice?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    how do you deal with people who knew you pre-transition but don't recognize you?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    my experiences of being in a car accident

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    Shouldn't TERFs be the most supportive of gender-affirming care for trans women?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    CONSPIRACY | contrapoints

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    when did you change in your dreams?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    🎶 Cherry Lips 💃

  • 196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    ruleifesting

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    Locked

    What is a U.S. health insurance's "concierge program"?

  • 196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    rulesend, rulesday

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    what do you do when you feel doubts?

  • Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    Help: advice & tools for digital detox / minimalism?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    stable, consistent dose leading to tolerance / downregulation?

  • Transfem @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    how to cope mentally during gaps in HRT