Trans woman - 9 years HRT

Intersectional feminist

Queer anarchist

  • 2 Posts
  • 227 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My mother passed away from young aggressive breast cancer 2 years ago. I have done a fair bit of research to try and determine my relative risk of developing it.

    Sadly, trying to determine relative breast cancer risk of trans fems is confusing, conflicting, and tiresome. The science has until relatively recently been heavily biased and made many assumptions about trans fem people. A lot of earlier studies state that there is essentially 0 risk of trans women developing it. They usually say it has something to do with the Y chromosome or with the prostate. This has always failed to take into account exactly how breast cancer develops, the factors that influence it, and the way that trans fem bodies are different from cis male ones.

    More modern research shows that trans fems undergoing long-term HRT have a similar rate of breast cancer to AFAB people. If you have family history, there is a stronger risk of you developing it. This becomes even more relevant if your family history involves young onset, stage 4, and fatality associated with breast cancer. All those factors are significantly more relevant than most others. Current best medical practice is to treat transfems undergoing long-term HRT as having risks comparable to cis women of the same age range and family history risk factor.

    I personally take progesterone and have for a couple years now. I don’t intend to stop as of now either. The body of research showing harm isn’t substantial enough and is usually based on how it affects people undergoing HRT in menopause. How it affects young trans fems is not established.

    I am planning to do BRCA gene testing within the next year to get some assessment of my inherent breast cancer risk. If you have family history, you can ask your doctor to have the tests done on you as well. Those results will at least give you advance warning so you can do more screenings and plan accordingly if you do develop it.


  • I’m saving for vocal surgery personally. I’ve voice trained with professionals and by myself for years. My voice can pass for 5 minute conversations with massive amounts of effort, but any longer than tnat and theres no way for me to maintain it. My voice also gets exhausted very quickly doing it.

    Lots of people genuinely can get by on training alone. But others can’t, and surgical options have expanded a lot over the last few years. Something like 60% of trans fems report dissatisfaction with their voice after transition. Read a study on that a while ago. A lot of trans fems just cope. It’s worth trying training first, but surgery also exists and is worth looking into.







  • I am extremely happy. I had surgery last April. I never honestly believed that being this happy was possible. I hardly recognize the person I was pre-op and it has affected every possible area of my life. I’m so much more confident in myself, so much more comfortable in my body, and I can fully see the way that I used to passively feel dysphoric literally constantly no matter the circumstances. Having a penis was severely detrimental to my mental health and made it essentially impossible to feel at peace in my skin. I love who I am today, I love my body in spite of it’s flaws, and I feel like I can express myself in ways I never could before and like that shines through and my relationships with everyone in my life have become a lot healthier as a result. It’s weird sounding to say that, but yeah not being in constant dysphoria has changed everything haha. Yes I’m very very happy and have no regrets whatsoever.

    I had hypergranulation on part of my labia in the short term after my surgery date. I had to travel quite a distance in less than ideal circumstances only 10 days post op. In the process of that significant strain was put on my labia and some of my stitches opened. It was a relatively small area on the inside of my vaginal canal and the bottom of one side of my labia. It looked pretty scary at first but healed mostly fine on its own without intervention. Not entirely though, and due to complications I ended up having to get some granulation tissue treated with silver nitrate. Took around 6 months of silver nitrate treatments every 3 weeks for it to fully go away. I don’t have any granulation tissue anymore, though, and I was at the point of being fully healed as of around 14 months post-op.

    Yes, I am able to orgasm. There’s a lot I could say there, but yeah, I can. Sex in general, is infinitely more enjoyable for me now. Learning how sex with a vulva functions has been an experience to say the least but with patience and time I’ve been figuring myself out haha. My sexuality and relationship I have with sex has changed a lot since surgery. I think my first orgasm was around 4 months post op.

    Nothing unique no. Pads are annoying but I only had to deal with them for the first 2 months. Still need liners sometimes but they’re not nearly as uncomfortable.

    The massive difference that having no T made in my life. I experienced a big jump in breast growth, a shift in my body and facial fat placement, a surge in hair growth especially my hair line. Like my body not producing any T made me hormone levels a lot more stable and a lot higher consistently. The difference has been pretty wild honestly. I’m mostly used to it now but a lot of people have remarked on it.

    I also noticed at first the lack of like. Anything there. And I’d also notice just how often I used to feel it being there and just sorta tune it out. The novelty of it is short lived and by this point the thought that I had one at all feels distant, like I know that I did but I’m losing my memory of what it was like having one.






  • There’s not a lot of genocides that are entirely ignored historically speaking. Loads of nations who deny them, and use propaganda machines to spread disinformation about them, but global scale denial is not really possible.

    Genocidal acts are not dependent on the scale of those actions. What matters is the acts themselves and the intent behind them. The context of the situation in which those actions occur is also a consideration. But we recognize thousands of genocides throughout modern history. The Armenian Genocide is the progenitor of modern conceptions of Genocide, but the term is retroactively applied to lots of historical cases of ethnic cleansing.

    The actions Israel is taking are and have been genocidal. This situation is not new. Israel has massacred Palestinians en mass for nearly 80 years. They are taking systematic actions to kill Palestinians, to disrupt their way of life, to destroy their culture, to grass their history, to steal their land and their homes, to mass incarcerate them, to mass sterilize them, to forcefully relocate them, and to cause mass scale healthcare emergencies by way of starvation and dehydration under prolonged siege and blockade. These are all very common actions under imperialist colonial regimes.

    This is a genocide. The only reason there is pushback on that is because the nation in question is Israel. If this happened elsewhere in the middle east there would be 0 hesitation to label it as genocide. The existence of a terrorist organization does not provide justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing.



  • How many pages of dead babies are necessary before this becomes unacceptable to you? 20? 50? 100? 200? Where’s the line where you step back and say “Okay this is too far”? Or is absolute genocide of the entirety of Palestine acceptable to you?

    You have no fucking idea whether those babies parents supported hamas or not. You have condemned all Palestinians to death because of Hamas.




  • This is offensively uninformed and misguided. Giving your very life to protest the way your people are being oppressed, how your people are being slaughtered, is maybe one of the most heroic things you can do. It’s wrong that these people felt they had to give their lives. Not that they did. If we lived in a just world, people wouldn’t have to martyr themselves to draw attention to genocide.

    The suicide letter you’re referencing in the first paragraph has literally nothing to do with the subject of this post or my previous comment. You’re trying to conflate suicidal attempts and ideation from mental health problems with martyrdom. They’re not the same thing. And I know that you know that, and you conflating self-immolation to protest genocide with suicide over peer rejection is disgusting on both sides.

    “To advance a political or military agenda of an organization” is such a wild misunderstanding of why Thích Quảng Đức died that I’m almost convinced you skimmed the article just to find out if what he did was effective without even glancing at why he did it. If you’re going to look him up, I gave his name so you could do, have the decency to learn why he died.

    His self-immolation was actually a defining moment at the end of the Diệm government. Him and his peers were absolutely successful in drawing international attention to what was being done to buddhists in South Vietnam, and the picture taken of him burning is one of the most famous pictures ever taken.


  • How is ensuring his message is heard celebrating suicide? Are you saying it’s better if we ignore this message that he felt so strongly about as to literally end his life? What in God’s name are you trying to say? He ended his life in an act of protest against the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The idea that we should not respond to that is genuinely offensive. Your description of him as scared and lonely without even knowing him is also genuinely offensive.

    I have lost friends to suicide. I myself have been suicidal. I don’t know anyone who ended their lives by committing acts of self immolation in front of a genocidal colonial nation’s consulate.

    What about the Vietnamese monks who self immolated in protest of the persecution of buddhists in South Vietnam? Thích Quảng Đức was one of them. His action is regarded as heroic. It would be offensive to suggest that his message in death not be remembered. It would also be offensive to suggest that he killed himself for some other reason. As though there’s no conceivable motivation someone could have for taking their own life other than mental health problems.


  • I deleted my comment, not really in the mood to argue the many flaws of the judicial system today.

    But it’s noteworthy that I don’t believe such a thing as “rule of law” is ever achievable without corruption and that there exist only varying degrees of corruption but more or less every judicial system on earth is corrupt to some extent. I made a much longer writeup responding to you, but again, I felt that I’d rather not spend my day arguing this.

    Long and short, the only way the current system works is if you assume that all politicians are acting in good faith and that all voters have equal political power. Neither of these is true on a foundational level, and that is reflected in widespread corruption and manipulation of appointed judges.