When it’s bad enough I learned to do a “farmers blow”, which is admittedly super gross - but it’s effective at clearing my nose and doesn’t require bringing tissues (esp. useful when I am cycling or running in bad weather).

There are so many book recommendations, lol - just let me know if you want a list.

I wouldn’t say suicidal ideation is the same as self-harm, and that was meant to just be one example of harm that comes from not transitioning - dissociation, depression & anhedonia, anxiety, drug abuse & other addictions are all examples of other harms that are commonly found in trans populations and which improve with gender-affirming care:

https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

I had no idea that I was depressed, anxious, or suicidal until I started HRT. Within a month or so I was having what felt like randomly happy moments throughout my day, and I noticed I no longer felt like it would be objectively better if I were dead. It turns out I had been passively suicidal since I was 13, and this was the first time since then that I had genuinely (irrationally!) felt happy to be alive - even when engaging in otherwise stressful events, like running errands. It is a bizarre experience.

All this to say, I completely understand if the benefits of HRT seem theoretical or unlikely, or that you don’t really struggle that much or that it’s not that important (and certainly not that important relative to your marriage and family, etc.).

I’m not sure there is much I could have said to myself pre-transition that would have made me take this seriously, and I had no kids and a spouse that wanted me to transition (because she wanted what was best for me). I felt transitioning was selfish and irresponsible, and I worried it would disrupt relationships with my in-laws. And it did! But looking back it seems absurd to me that I dismissed transitioning because of them (even knowing now that my fears came true and I lost those important relationships). I mostly feel immense grief and regret at having not transitioned a decade ago, of having dismissed my dysphoria as just a likely fetish or clothing preference (and not seeing or understanding it was much more than that).

I do think I want to begin HRT, but I also don’t want to just charge ahead in without her. I understand what you’re saying about not letting her hold me back for my own sanity and health, but I think I’m going to need to find the balance between keeping her trust and doing what I need to do for me.

Definitely need to find a balance (it would be worrying if you didn’t care about your wife’s needs), but that balance probably also shouldn’t be not taking HRT because your wife is afraid of you becoming a woman.

This is part of why a couples counselor might be helpful, to mediate those conversations and ensure some fairness and proper perspective.

There is a lot working against you as a trans person. People don’t understand trans folks, we are not well-liked and we are vilified as a political scapegoat. There is immense pressure against us socially, and this means it is hard to stay grounded in reality and what is evidenced. So from my perspective it’s important to compensate for that anti-trans bias by being clear-sighted about the clinical significance of transition and its medical necessity, mostly because I know most trans people drag their feet to please others.

I have endless stories of people who don’t transition or who delay or slow their transition for some reason or another, and the reasons are rarely legitimate and are often based on misinformation, anti-trans bias, or simply another person’s preferences. For example, one trans woman I know can’t get bottom surgery despite her dysphoria because her wife wants to continue having penetrative sex. Even more of us just never even consider social or medical transition because of what it would mean for our relationships.

So, I get it - it’s hard, but it’s also important, so working on finding a way forward is important.

I also fear what impact coming out more broadly might have on our son, especially at his age, and remembering how miserable middle school could be.

In the past people have pointed out that by not transitioning you also communicate something to your kid about what is or isn’t acceptable, that it provides a poor role model and message. I understand the concern, though - I just think if you’re like the rest of us, you’re likely to be a much better human and thus a much better parent if you transition. Those are the clinical facts.

I would see if you could get a referral to an endocrinologist that your local trans community recommends, and then ask them your questions. Unfortunately doctors are generally clueless about trans healthcare, though, so educating yourself first is a necessity.

I think most doctors will tell you that estrogen will make you permanently infertile, but you should take this with a grain of salt. I’m not sure how many will know that trans women have regained fertility when pausing HRT.

in particular start with this article: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/

Transitioning can be really tough, and a lot of people find themselves in your position.

When you marry a straight woman and you turn out to be a woman, it can lead to the end of the marriage. And getting to that end can be a difficult, embittering, and painful process drawn out over years. Lots of trans women don’t feel they have a right to transition (because of how the dominant narrative is that we are selfish and immoral for wanting to transition), and so many of us never do, or we capitulate to the fears of the straight spouse and don’t take some of the most important steps for our well-being. We hold on, we capitulate on our needs and our identity, and we think we’re being responsible and good for doing so.

But not taking transition steps because of a straight spouse who is afraid of losing the person they married isn’t necessarily as responsible at it may seem to us - trans people who capitulate and don’t take seriously their biological & hormonal needs can be much worse for their family than they realize.

They can think they are being responsible and putting their family first, but all they are doing is delaying the inevitable and risking everything in the meantime. Suicide rates are very high for trans folks, and social & medical transitioning is the only known treatment that improves trans welfare. In my view, not transitioning is the more irresponsible option, even in this situation. You can’t help who you are, being trans isn’t a choice - it’s genetic. Finding out you are trans is not that different than finding out you have another genetic endocrine disorder like diabetes or hypothyroidism, foregoing the only known useful treatments for that disorder is not a reasonable option, not only is it not what is best for your well-being, but by extension it is what threatens the well-being of people who care about you and depend on you.

Either way, here are some common pieces of advice I try to give:

• find yourself an individual therapist who is trans affirming, well credentialed, and ideally has worked with trans patients before
• find a couples therapist that is trans-affirming, ideally someone who has experience with trans patients
• start HRT ASAP, like it should be the first step. It’s extremely low risk, the effects take months and years to happen so you need to get that started now, and the mental benefits will help you become a more stable and happy person making it easier to handle all the other difficulties and making you a better spouse and parent. For most of us this is necessary medical treatment (which I understand can be hard to take seriously when you’re not on HRT, which is why I’m emphasizing it). Read this article several times, I highly recommend monotherapy injections, even if you have a needle phobia, like I do. I specifically don’t recommend oral or sublingual routes (these can cause mood swings and inadequate & inconsistent blood estrogen levels), and anti-androgens like spiro commonly causes negative side effects.
• get very educated, read everything you can - I highly suggest Julia Serano (Whipping Girl, Sexed Up), as well as The Gender Dysphoria Bible, etc.

I should say, this conflict doesn’t always result in the end of the marriage. Some people stay together and make their marriage more platonic. Some straight spouses learn that their sexuality was more open than they realized, and they continue to love and be sexually compatible with the person they married.

It’s often not obvious to us what our needs are, so be careful about making promises. The first several months after social transition I wasn’t sure I would ever want a vaginoplasty, and within 6 months of transition I was increasingly dysphoric and aware how bottom surgery would help me. Spouses sometimes push for promises to take things slow or gatekeep … the system will gatekeep you already, going slow is only going to hurt you. So be careful about making promises you shouldn’t.

Either way, I hope you are both able to make responsible choices that mutually respect one another’s needs. Your wife shouldn’t settle for a marriage with someone they can’t be attracted to (they can’t help that they’re straight), and likewise you shouldn’t settle for a where you are required to forego necessary medical treatment and consign yourself to suffering in a body and life that is not yours.

we don’t know if drags pronouns are trolling or not, we respect them on principle whether drag is trolling or not; the fact that drag has done nothing but troll actually seems like evidence drags pronouns could also be intended to troll, we just avoid saying that part out loud because it shows skepticism of their identity, and we want to be respectful of people’s self-identities here (a kindness that ironically drag does not do extend to others)

this is my last week of electrolysis! 🥳 Only a few weeks left until surgery.

I am fairly nervous, I have had only a couple laser sessions and fewer than 20 hours of electrolysis … but the surgeon seems confident and they do follicular scraping (they told me they can realistically get around 50 hairs during the surgery, I think they individually cauterize each of the follicles on the skin graft).

and either way, the joke is that the drama of the body is unexpectedly literal and her death is thus like a good show being cancelled

tl;dr

in Victorian times the author wanted to warn people about the arsenic in wallpaper and its dangers, so he published a book of wallpaper samples with arsenic that then itself poisoned and killed people who handled the book

🩷🩷🩷

yes, thank you for making sure I saw it!

It definitely gets the idea across. It’s disturbing to me that a video like this even needs to be made, it makes me want to study how things got to this point, why people view sex differently, etc.

Basically, how long would you have to be on estrogen before you could start getting some of the mental and emotional effects, but before you would start having any irreversible physical effects?

I had emotional effects within the first week. For me I think injecting a sufficient amount of estrogen to block the testosterone from being produced is what helped my mood.

The testosterone was the problem, and the only anti-androgen I tried was bicalutamide which didn’t help because it doesn’t block androgen receptors in the brain very well. It was previously thought to have no effects on the central nervous system, now we know it does act on the CNS but it’s not clear how much. Either way, I can confirm bica didn’t help my biochemical dysphoria at all.

I have heard spiro can help with biochemical dysphoria (it helped Mia Violet), but can also harm mood (I know several trans women IRL who swear it causes problems for them).

So I would personally recommend estrogen monotherapy. The ideal would be lupron, but it’s too expensive, so until an orchi is possible I think monotherapy is the least medically risky (estrogen is very safe, even in high levels), the option with the fewest side effects, and the most feminizing.

Also, mood continued to change and improve over time, and figuring out the right dose took a very long time for me. There were mood changes happening at the 3 month mark, and the estrogen does actively change your brain. I remember distinctly my intrusive anxiety disappeared somewhere in the 3 - 4 month mark.

I am pretty interested in starting HRT, but I don’t necessarily want to go through the whole hassle of freezing sperm first if I end up not liking how HRT makes me feel. Nor do I want to wait a long time before starting HRT just to find out that it me feel like garbage. So I’m thinking about potentially taking it for like two or three months as a “trial run”?

This seems reasonable to me. Depending on dose, frequency, and route of administration, you might have some breast growth that starts around that time that could be irreversible, that is the main risk. I think stopping within two months rather than three months should avoid that, however.

I believe it is actually recommended by The TransitionChannel to try HRT first since you can stop before permanent changes around the 3 month mark.

General recommendation is that you freeze sperm first, it is a risk you will lose fertility. However, it seems to be a bit of a myth that you will permanently lose fertility, most women seem to regain fertility when they stop HRT.

You should really think through the possibility that once you start estrogen you will not want to ever go off of it, even to regain fertility. I vastly underestimated the effects of estrogen on my mood, and once I started, the thought of quitting was tantamount to suicide. It was actually unsafe for me to quit. I don’t know what it will be like for you, though.

I do highly recommend injections rather than oral or sublingual routes though. I have needle phobia, so I went with subcutaneous injections with very small needles that are painless to inject.

I also recommend reading this document a few times: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/

I know people IRL that are like this, it’s always shocking to me the way even decent men (kind men, liberal men, emotionally sensitive men) are just so entitled and blind to the way they expect the woman to do all the housework…

Honestly I don’t see a relationship like that working in the long term, I think it undermines marriages and builds resentment, it’s a shitty and impractical approach as well as unjust.

It only “works” as long as the woman is willing to subject herself to that, but no matter how much she tries it is going to be exhausting and create problems in the long run. (If not total failure of the relationship, at least increased instability and conflict. )

Unfortunately then it makes it look like the woman is at fault, when things fail because she just can’t keep going, especially when the man just thinks this arrangement is “normal”. The victim becomes the bad-guy and is easy to blame (when someone is at the end of their ability to keep going they don’t always act in the best ways - they probably get angry, or spiteful, or cold - either way it’s easy for the man to think the problem is the woman).

But men sometimes get even worse notions in their head, I listened to a man complain once about (trigger warning: sexual assault) how women he let stay at his place were so awful for not understanding the “obvious” rule that if someone lets you stay at their house they have a right to have sex with you any time they want. Honestly it sounds like he initiated sex non-consensually and was frustrated when the woman didn’t go along. I was so shocked and then scared I didn’t say anything, but this kind of thinking among men is terrifying and I worry more common than is comfortable to consider.

💀

too much, so much shaving, omg 😭

??

I will not shave my eyebrows

yesss Animal Crossing! 🙌

super gender-affirming, I spend so much time on my outfits in that game

and +1 for SDV, Sims, and Terraria - all great recs

Personally:

• Stardew Valley
• Skyrim / Oblivion
• Unpacking
• Gone Home (admittedly this was more relevant to me as a lesbian)
• Life is Strange
• Long Dark (survivalist game, esp. relevant to my pre-transition state of mind, but also feminist themes and switched gender perspectives make this more trans-coded for me)

Stereotypically:

• Celeste is specifically a transfem game
• Fallout New Vegas is a stereotypical transfem game
• TF2 is pretty popular with transfems
• Minecraft

Also, worth mentioning Sims, I played that more when I was younger but it’s a common favorite among women and girls.

confirmed, I am myself ✅