Message me and let me know what you were wanting to learn about me here and I’ll consider putting it in my bio.
I could sleep 12 hours every night and wake up feeling not fully rested … once I was on estrogen, I could sleep 8 hours and wake up on my own feeling fully rested. What a huge difference, it’s not surprising my health is so much better post-transition.
does polyamory imply non-monogamy (ethical or not), or is ENM and polyamory the same thing?
also congrats on a new community!
yay, estrogen is amazing ✨
I lost interest in recreational use of cannabis after a few months on estrogen, now I only use it medicinally to help me sleep or for pain, usually less than once a week.
here is that voice training beginner’s guide, by the way:
Broadly the two main gendering qualities to a voice are weight and size. With voice training the general idea is to:
ear train: learn to recognize when you weight is heavy vs light, when size is large vs small
mimic and experiment: learn to produce voices that are different weights and sizes, and esp. how to balance those to produce a typical feminine voice (suitably light and small)
practice: just keep listening and recognizing when you’re slipping up and to adjust your voice back into the feminine range, over time and lots of persistent practice, this habituates and becomes your voice!
For exploring weight:
For size:
For more about the balance of weight and size:
Videos to help guide expectations for beginners:
For beginners it can also be helpful to explore more achievable lower-pitch feminine voices:
To ear train, it’s commonly recommended to listen to and “play along” with Selene’s clips:
Note: as you experiment or do any voice training exercise, make sure to pay close attention to:
Experiments to try:
drug abuse is unfortunately common in trans populations, but the good news is that those numbers go down significantly with medical and social transition - transition is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria, so that is great news.
+1 for tucking, especially wearing a comfortable gaff - even just not feeling the gentials slapping around is a benefit
also +1 for getting fertility treatment and freezing sperm, even if you don’t currently want children - it’s not uncommon estrogen changes a trans woman to want children. I never once wanted children, but estrogen flipped a biological switch for me and now I wish I could be a mother.
with voice training, I agree you shouldn’t spend much time on exercises each day (some people spend hours and that can lead to strain and injury) - but you should experiment with the voice and be “training” frequently, so maybe a few minutes, but many times a day. Ideally you are always voice training, paying as much attention to your voice and feminizing it as you can.
Frequency is pitch, which I’m not sure is related to “height” - maybe you meant pitch? The pitch is one of the less relevant aspects to how a voice is gendered, compared to weight and size (resonance). It’s mostly important you don’t drop pitch too far below F3 (180 Hz), and ironically this is partially because of the impact of pitch on weight (a low enough pitch makes it hard to maintain a light voice, and a high enough pitch is harder to make heavy). It’s a misconception that pitch is the main gendering factor of someone’s voice.
Resonance I have never heard referred to as “intensity”, but I have heard weight referred to as “intensity”, so I don’t know where you are getting this from.
I have a voice training copypasta I can share that explains these concepts of weight and size, etc.
Also not sure what is meant by “creakiness” or “coarseness”, these aren’t terms I have encountered in voice training.
(for context, I’ve been training for almost two years now, here’s a clip of my voice I recorded 5ish months ago - I’m open to critique)
Also, for hair removal, laser can be helpful for hair reduction for those with pale skin and dark hairs, but electrolysis is the main and most effective method of permanent hair removal.
Unfortunately electrolysis is expensive, painful, and time consuming - so I agree laser is a great place to start if you are a good candidate for it. Not uncommon to start with laser and then switch to electrolysis for what laser couldn’t treat.
have you read transfem science’s An Introduction to Hormone Therapy for Transfeminine People? Particularly the section on progestogens might be helpful here, but the whole article is pretty amazing, tbh.
(EDIT: I should say, gender-affirming care is the number one way to alleviate dysphoria: hormone therapy, surgeries, hair removal, etc. should be prioritized and come first. My response assumes you are already on top of that.)
Some tips that have helped me:
Generally, dysphoria is not as bad for me when other things are going well, e.g. if I’m well hydrated, had a good night’s sleep, and I’m eating healthy my skin tends to look softer and more feminine and is more likely to look “nice” to me. My mental health is also usually better, I’m less likely to spiral from insecurities and poor self esteem, and so on.
So, follow the basic steps of being healthy as well:
It’s less about being perfect and more about doing what you can.
Less conventional tips:
See also:
previous /c/mtf posts similar to your question:
This comment was originally an answer for those posts.
I would also add that journaling has been helpful for me, esp. for helping when feeling acute imposter syndrome / fears that I’m not really trans or trans enough. It helped me to write down the reasoning and walk through the evidence on paper. Sometimes going back and reading my journal would be enough to remind me.
yep, that’s Medroxyprogesterone (MP), a synthetic progestin, which is not progesterone.
I recommend switching to micronized, bioidentical progesterone, which is safer (has fewer side effects and long term risks).
Taking MP is not the end of the world like some in the community think (there is a lot of fear about it because it increases risks of cancers, etc.), but it’s definitely not ideal and does carry risks. Plenty of people do experience side effects like mood problems and depression from taking it.
Also, while it’s not the same as having progesterone (the hormone you would have if you were a cis woman), it does have some anti-androgen effects which might be helpful for feminizing.
are you taking bioidentical, micronized progesterone? It sounds like you might be taking a synthetic progestin, which is different…
I have a link to a resource on the differences if I remember to come back, I’m AFK right now so I don’t have it, sorry
I was also curious about this, what differences were noticed? Based on interactions with trans girls IRL, I just assume most people are taking prog for breast growth, so when people talk about it working or not, I assume they mean it made their breasts larger or not. Of course it is pseudo-diagnostic reasoning, because breasts will continue to grow from estrogen alone and lots of trans women report major growth at 2 - 3 year mark and later on just estrogen, so it’s unclear what breast growth would have happened without the addition of prog.
Lots of trans women don’t think to include route of administration or dose when talking about HRT either, so that makes it even harder to tell from anecdotes that prog helped with breast growth what might be effective.
because when my E is higher, I don’t sleep as easily and prog helps counter that effect; when E is low I don’t need it for sleep, allowing me to stockpile the extra.
To a lesser extent, I like the idea of cycling because cis bodies tend to have fluctuating levels as well, and that may or may not help keep my body sensitive to prog, by keeping from homeostasis happening in whatever ways that may or may not happen, such as number of receptors adjusting to a regular level of the hormones if you don’t cycle.
It’s just speculation that this helps, and the stockpiling so I have a reserve in case of supply chain problems is a more straightforward reason for me.
how long on HRT before you noticed your hair thinned or lightened in color?
I’m so jealous, my legs still have thick, dark hairs even after nearly 2 years on HRT.
If you have dark hair and light skin, laser is a great option for hair reduction, and it can be a cost and pain effective way to reduce how much electrolysis you will require after. For this reason, it’s fairly typical for people who make good candidates for laser to do laser first, then follow-up with electrolysis.
I personally find electrolysis more painful and harder to tolerate for various reasons. With laser, a whole area is treated at once and the hair falls out in a cycle. It doesn’t take much time for the laser to zap you, and I can be in and out of a laser session in 20 - 30 minutes.
With electrolysis, you pay by hour and they go hair-by-hair, so it takes a very long time for a small area to be treated, and you have to come back regularly to try to clear an area. For example, you might have an hour of electrolysis once a week. Not only does this make it more expensive, it also means you have to withstand a much longer exposure to pain, where laser might be 10 - 20 minutes of pain once every 5 weeks, electrolysis means pain for an hour once a week.
So I endorse taking the laser-first approach. They’re both very painful in my experience, and I really struggled to cope with the pain (despite consistent feedback that I have a high pain tolerance by hospital staff and physical therapists over the years).
Even after 20+ laser sessions I still have facial hair, though now the hair is sparse enough I can shave with one of those portable electric face shavers marketed to women. I continue to need laser sessions, I actually need to schedule one because I’ve missed some treatments.
At some point I will finally switch to electrolysis, once the laser techs think they can’t do anything more for me.
citation backing up your claim about oral prog not sufficiently raising blood progesterone levels: https://transfemscience.org/articles/oral-p4-low-levels/
However, newer studies using more accurate blood tests (immunoassays with adequate purification and mass spectrometry-based assays) have shown that 100 mg/day progesterone—with or without food—achieves very low peak progesterone levels of only about 2 to 3 ng/mL and average progesterone levels over 24 hours of only about 0.1 to 0.6 ng/mL
In accordance, oral progesterone has often shown only weak progestogenic effects in clinical studies.
While the progesterone levels with oral progesterone are apparently sufficient for endometrial protection in cisgender women, they are unlikely to be adequate for desired effects in transfeminine people. For these reasons, transfeminine people and their clinicians may wish to avoid oral progesterone if the aim is therapeutic progestogenic effects. Instead, non-oral forms of progesterone with greater bioavailability like rectal or injectable progesterone can be used.
Personally, I only take prog to help me sleep, and anecdotally I have better sleep with rectal administration than oral. I also notice stronger libido with rectal administration than oral.
My dose is 100 mg - 200 mg per night, averaging 100 mg / night, and I don’t take it when my estrogen is low, so on a weekly basis I cycle my prog taking it only half of the week in accordance with my injected estradiol valerate metabolic cycle (half life of roughly 3.5 days, I take prog as my estrogen blood levels increase and peak, then stop once E blood levels start to drop).
i’m totally not crying right now
that sweater is adorable, omg 😻
for imposter syndrome, I highly recommend reading Yes, You Are Trans Enough by Mia Violet, that book was really helpful for me when I first transitioned 💜
hm, maybe my confusion stems from not understanding a meaning of non-monogamy that isn’t just “multiple sexual partners” … what is relationship anarchy and it’s relationship to ENM and polyamory?
any good resources or books you recommend for me to educate myself?