I’m a queer cis woman who knew a lot about how HRT changes the body due to also being a nerdy biochemist, but even so, it blew me away to actually see how much stuff changes when I had a partner who started HRT when we were together.
It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature. It’d be real cool if we lived in a world where we could lean more into the insight we can collectively build if trans people are more actively included in research.
I say “lean more into”, because there are researchers out there who recognise the epistemic power to be found in respecting and valuing trans people. For instance, one of my favourite bits of research of the last few years was this 2022 study which used tissue donated by trans men undergoing phalloplasty surgery to show that previous estimates for the number of nerve fibres in the human clitoris was a severe underestimate.
Part of why I love it so much is the picture of the lead author in the press release I linked above. Behold, Blair Peters M.D., who looks exactly like the kind of person I’d expect to be leading research like this (affectionate tone). When I saw this, I checked their academic page to see if they had pronouns listed, and indeed they do.
Talking about this study is a wee bit of a tangent to my main comment, but I included it because it always makes me smile, and I hoped it would make you, the reader of this comment, smile too.
I’m a queer cis woman who knew a lot about how HRT changes the body due to also being a nerdy biochemist, but even so, it blew me away to actually see how much stuff changes when I had a partner who started HRT when we were together.
It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature. It’d be real cool if we lived in a world where we could lean more into the insight we can collectively build if trans people are more actively included in research.
I say “lean more into”, because there are researchers out there who recognise the epistemic power to be found in respecting and valuing trans people. For instance, one of my favourite bits of research of the last few years was this 2022 study which used tissue donated by trans men undergoing phalloplasty surgery to show that previous estimates for the number of nerve fibres in the human clitoris was a severe underestimate.
Part of why I love it so much is the picture of the lead author in the press release I linked above. Behold, Blair Peters M.D., who looks exactly like the kind of person I’d expect to be leading research like this (affectionate tone). When I saw this, I checked their academic page to see if they had pronouns listed, and indeed they do.
Talking about this study is a wee bit of a tangent to my main comment, but I included it because it always makes me smile, and I hoped it would make you, the reader of this comment, smile too.
Thank you, it made me smile