Hey trans fems!! I’ve had my doses for ages, but I’ve been too consumed with life to worry about trying them. I just got news that my chapter of life is going to be changing soon, and I really wanted to try them during my current stride. So I’ve decided that just for one day I’m going to give it a shot to see how it makes my brain feel, and I’m going to do a proper two week test run another time. What can I expect from the first day? Any things to be concerned about? Is it possible that this derails my productivity or something strange for the first day?
Won’t have immediate effects. It’s a slow process. These hormones don’t have a lot of direct effects on the body, they affect other hormones and other bodily functions. Even two weeks probably will have very little effect. You need several months for emotional changes and breast growth to start up.
Also are you just taking estradiol or also an androgen blocker. General guidance now is to avoid androgen blockers at first and test testosterone levels to see if your body slows production of them. Androgen blockers have side effects, but without them the changes may take more time. And if you use them, generally your body adapts and you can’t stop using them until maybe after bottom surgery. But you may have to use them if your body doesn’t switch from androgen to estrogen production as the primary on its own which can be caused by both genetic and/or environmental factors. For me I may actually need supplementation of testosterone, because even before my bottom surgery, and without anti-androgen I don’t have enough. You need a balance and it takes time for that to happen. I’m over a year and still not fully stabilized.
Anyway,
just to clarify, the body doesn’t switch from androgen to estrogen production - what happens is sufficient exogenous estrogen tells the brain there are sufficient sex hormones, and shuts down sex hormone production; if the sex hormones drop low enough, the brain knows to turn production back on - but it will still produce testosterone rather than estrogen … unfortunately there is no way (currently) to make testes produce female levels of estrogen or to stop producing male levels of testosterone 😞
So the goal is instead to get the body to stop producing male sex hormones by taking enough female sex hormones.
I think the desire to avoid androgen blockers is likely only relevant for people who opt to try monotherapy - that’s a missing component of what you are advocating; typical doses of estrogen that would be taken with anti-androgens will be much lower than necessary for monotherapy, and probably wouldn’t be enough on their own to shut down testosterone production.
Also, OP mentioned they have been prescribed anti-androgens and oral estrogen particularly, meaning the dose they were given is probably low, and is in a form that won’t work well for monotherapy - so to follow your advice they would probably have to change to injections as a route of administration.
However, you can take anti-androgens and oral estrogen - probably most trans girls in the U.S. take this route, and it’s the default way doctors handle transition here (not that I think it’s a particularly good way to go about it - it has lots of side effects and less / slower feminization with consistently low E levels, but I think doctors are afraid of monotherapy because they are afraid of high estrogen levels increasing risk of strokes based on some studies done on Premarin; though I don’t know why they aren’t also afraid of spironolactone causing heart problems, which at least has more evidence behind it than bioidentical estrogen causing strokes).
Actually that understanding is totally being reevaluated. Anecdotally, my case is a good example, but far from unusual. I never took anti-androgens and my testosterone production significantly reduced once my estrogen levels started to raise. While still only using 1 patch, twice weekly for a few months, my testosterone dropped from around an average of 400-500ng/dL to 46ng/dL. My estradiol levels at that time were still in the low 100pg/mL range. Prior to my surgery I had moved up tp using 3 patches my to bring my estradiol levels to the low 200pg/mL on average and my testosterone dropped to around 10ng/dL.
I did misspeak a bit. You’re body will consider one or the other to be your “primary” hormone and will prioritize production of that and deprioritize production of the other. But all bodies do produce both through various means. And in fact estradiol is essential to male sexual development. Just non-intersex, “average” bodies are not capable of producing as much of the opposite. But if the balance of hormones changes, most people’s bodies will switch, but just be unable to maintain the balance if the imbalance was caused by supplementation.
There is not a hard male/female separation in any species with genders and never has been. Hormones, genetics, hormone intolerance, and many, many other factors play into what genitals we get at birth and what hormones we make and his efficiently we use them. The x/y chromosomes have a little to do with initial selection of “primary” hormone and thus genital creation in the womb, but if the body can’t uptake testosterone effectively, then having a Y chromosome will not produce male genitals and the body will default to a more female configuration and produce estrogen primarily. It’s one reason the “biological sex” fanatics don’t actually want people to get their chromosomes tested. It would destroy their narrative to find out just his common it is for AFAB people to have Y chromosomes, vice versa, or totally different configurations outside of people traditionally classified as intersex.
My point on taking anti-androgens before knowing if you need them is because these are uptake inhibitors and your body us still producing the hormone, but you aren’t using it, do your body produces more, etc. This means, until your testicles are removed, it’s often too late to switch to estrogen-only if you start with anti-androgens. But it’s still not understood how common it is to need them or not, and drug companies refuse to test any hormone therapy for trans people, which is why it’s always “off-label” use, so studies rely primarily on existing data and volunteers and takes decades to compile.