I feel a little alienated from my sisters sometimes and took forever to understand myself because I lack the standard narratives everyone seems to have. I never knew what was wrong with my life. Not even a little. I’m AuDHD and I grew up when Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura were coming out. I had a privileged, well-off childhood with early access to the internet and my parents told me that if I just kept acing math and science tests I’d be set for life. So I just got up in the morning, put on clothes society told me to put on, sat through school, and then went home and dissociated out of my body onto the internet. On the internet I got to be no one without a body, shitposting on 4chan (before /tttt/ existed, thank the sun) and then fark and then reddit.
I never picked girl characters in rpgs, but you know the one rpg character I really, really got into imagining myself as? My Forsaken (undead) WoW main. Because he was dead, and struggling to find some purpose in his undead existence.
Taking hormones shocked me to my core because I suddenly came alive and hadn’t even realized I was dead. I felt present in my body and feminine and they went together and felt completely right. Looking back on my life now, I didn’t feel like a girl trapped in the wrong body, I felt dead and absent and coped with it by being anon online. Life never forced me to reckon with myself and that feels embarrassing now.
Now I’m craving sisterhood and validation and being seen. But I’m well into middle age and I’m shackled to a house in the suburbs I sleepwalked into. I can be the woman I want to be but real growth is slow and I’m impatient. I keep vomiting my feelings at people like I am in this post (and people find it off-putting I think). Can anyone relate to my story?
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
For what it’s worth, if you’re able to get some of the faster-acting stuff (e.g., transdermal gel) plus a T-blocker, you can do it for a couple of weeks without any permanent changes.
Just… Don’t do what I did. I tried the herbal route, and that is fully capable of causing serious liver problems (because you have to dump enough phytoestrogens into your system to override the bioidentical stuff already present in your body). I was fine for about two or three weeks, but then I tried to tough it out through a week of migraines and finally had to give up. At least it gave me the “free trial” of my brain on HRT, so to speak, which was all the convincing I needed to go through with the real deal.
What is the herbal route? I wasn’t aware there were any plant estrogen-likes that could make it across the blood brain barrier.
There are a few variations, but pueraria mirifica (estrogenic), red reishi mushroom (T-reducer/blocker), dandelion root/milk thistle (increases bioavailability of basically all of this shit by suppressing the CYP3A4 liver enzyme [same as grapefruit]), and I think peony root (secondary T-blocker, mild estrogenic) was the cocktail that I landed on after a few weeks thanks to the goobers over on a forum for self-hating eggs with internalized transphobic brainworms (BreastNexum; do not go there, it is a silly place, and not in a ha-ha way). Suppressing CYP3A4 long-term can seriously fuck you up, and multiple people from the aforementioned forum reported landing themselves in the ER, possibly due to other interactions since that enzyme metabolizes so many other compounds.
Like I said, it’s a bad idea when so many safe alternatives exist.
Interesting!
I think I’m not supposed to have grapefruit because it messes with my meds. I’m guessing that’s related to that enzyme as well?
Yep, that’s the one. Suppressing it prevents your liver from metabolizing a whole host of things, and in the context of trying to keep a medicine dose at a specific concentration, that’s uhhhh… Not great. Dandelion root extract and milk thistle are even more potent than grapefruit juice.