You're telling me you can just go to a Walgreens in the USA and get a bag of estrogen and start injecting it without the advice and monitoring of a doctor? Even though hormone replacement therapy can lead to all kinds of problems? Is this normal?
DoctorOW · 1h ago
As a transgender woman myself, I have been witness to many in my community reduce some recreational drug use with HRT. I think it's unlikely that estrogen literally causes euphoria, but gender euphoria is real, lasting happiness. When you compare to the health effects of letting someone waste away on recreational drugs to dull dysphoria, it paints a visceral picture of transition as healthcare.
nyanpasu64 · 43m ago
It's chilling watching the latest political powers openly declare that trans people are not who they are inside and must never be allowed to become what they are inside, while eliminating legal recognition and protection and criminalizing life-saving transition healthcare. I find myself retreating into dissociation because to feel the horrors is more than I can bear.
karcass · 56m ago
I lost interest in psychedelics after transitioning.
deadbabe · 44m ago
Is gender dysphoria thus caused by the body craving testosterone or estrogen hormones, when it doesn’t have?
kelseyfrog · 25m ago
That's one way to think of it, but the root of it (imho) is a mismatch between ones internal sense of inalienable gender identity and the embodiment of that identity physically - think clothing, bodily form, social perception, etc.
It might be difficult to imagine how those two things are separable if one has lived their whole life with them in congruence. If perhaps, you close your eyes and concentrate on your being, there is a part of you that feels that your sense of manness of womanness is part of who you are? What would you do if you retained that sense, and woke up in the body of the opposite sex and were expected to behave in congruence with that contrary to your internal sense of self? It can be a bit like that.
DoctorOW · 29m ago
I haven't studied gender dysphoria but I've been diagnosed with it. In my experience, it's an incongruence between your idea of yourself and your perceptible form. In some ways it could be argued your body is "craving" it but not in the same way it may crave a specific nutrient. Instead, you're sort of surprised and often upset by the way that you are.
antithesizer · 46m ago
Amen
gherkinnn · 28m ago
What an interesting read. I wonder, are these reports a reliable way to begin to understand what it feels like to be of the other sex? Insofar as such a thing is possible, of course. The anecdotes of smell and the sensation of powering up a hill are fascinating.
On a different note,
> At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one’s body;
I never thought of it that way, but I agree.
MondayGravity · 30m ago
Perhaps this is an insensitive question/comment, but do trans women feel like they have the wrong body or the wrong wholesale gender? In my experience with trans women I know, they still seem to relate primarily to men (they still gravitate towards male dominated interests) whereas many gay men I know seem to relate primarily with women, and gravitate towards women interests.
So this reconciliation is hard, and the topic too sensitive for me to dare asking people I know in real life.
Fraterkes · 5m ago
I haven’t really found that to be true in my friend groups, but also it is really common for people on the spectrum to be trans, and a lot of autistic people in general tend to have interests that we view as male-coded.
davmar · 25m ago
don't forget that socialization plays a role. boys are guided to certain activities in their youth, girls to others.
PartiallyTyped · 21m ago
The people I know couldn't relate to men at all, felt like completely different species. While they may have some interests from their "past" life, many of them felt that they could now enjoy things women did without judgement, and so they did.
pazimzadeh · 22m ago
> It’s as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium.
What does this mean? There has to be a simpler way to get this idea across..
> Perhaps taste could be built out of something like dyadic vibrations, tuned by evolution towards consonance or dissonance in order to generate an attractive or aversive response in the organism?
Does this suggest at all that these changes could also be differences in the way (cis) men and women perceive the world? In other words, do cis women experience sweet food tasting sweeter, colors being more vibrant, etc, compared to cis men?
TheOtherHobbes · 2m ago
There are some established differences. Women have better colour, taste, and smell discrimination. Some women are tetrachromats with an extra colour sense, while men are more likely to have red/green colour blindness.
Men have better night vision, are more aware of motion, and are better at tracking location and judging distances.
mintplant · 3m ago
Women are generally better at perceiving and distinguishing colors and smells, according to the studies we have. Anecdotally, my sense of smell has gone from dull to vibrant over the course of my (MtF) transition, and I have a friend who no longer experiences the color-blindness she used to before hers, though I'm not aware of any scientific evidence or inquiry in this area.
HK-NC · 11m ago
I remember reading that autism was basically the brain equivalent of some roided out muscle beast. Too much testosterone in the womb or something.
Given the huge crossover with trans and autism, could it just be a case of giving autistic men female hormones to try to balance this out over time? I dont really buy the rest of the fluff that comes with it, especially given the attitudes around it and my own experiences getting over dysphoria before there was a culture around taking things in another direction.
It might be difficult to imagine how those two things are separable if one has lived their whole life with them in congruence. If perhaps, you close your eyes and concentrate on your being, there is a part of you that feels that your sense of manness of womanness is part of who you are? What would you do if you retained that sense, and woke up in the body of the opposite sex and were expected to behave in congruence with that contrary to your internal sense of self? It can be a bit like that.
On a different note,
> At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one’s body;
I never thought of it that way, but I agree.
So this reconciliation is hard, and the topic too sensitive for me to dare asking people I know in real life.
What does this mean? There has to be a simpler way to get this idea across..
> Perhaps taste could be built out of something like dyadic vibrations, tuned by evolution towards consonance or dissonance in order to generate an attractive or aversive response in the organism?
Same here
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Men have better night vision, are more aware of motion, and are better at tracking location and judging distances.