Message me and let me know what you were wanting to learn about me here and I’ll consider putting it in my bio.
oh nice, thank you! as someone who dumpster dives and eats off the floors all the time, this is good advice 😂
Here’s a video I found that answers a lot of questions about vaginoplasties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOtejnYWAU
was pretty helpful, I should probably re-watch it soon
thank you so much!! I had not considered the power bar, and I haven’t planned audiobooks and podcasts but those are great ideas!
On the donut pillow: for clarification, I keep reading and hearing contradicting advice about the donut cushion / circle pillow - most advice is that it’s the wrong thing to sit on post-op (that it increases pressure on the wounds rather than relieves it, but that it’s also a common mistake that people use it or are suggested to use it).
In one of my pre-op appointments they explicitly told me first of all that I should basically avoid sitting at all costs, never sit pre-op (only lie down flat for up to 2 hours, otherwise try standing), and if I have to sit e.g. in a car to get home, put the seat all the way down to lie down as much as possible and to always use a waffle cushion and not a donut cushion / circle pillow. That’s what I was told by my physician’s assistant last week anyway. Just passing along in case.
I think the no sitting rule is to prevent pressure on the sutures and thus to prevent wound dehiscence.
penile inversion, and I’ll be in the U.S., I will only have to drive to a different city.
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/
too much, so much shaving, omg 😭
I will not shave my eyebrows
then I would pay the $2 once to get access, then just grab all the links (they’re just private youtube videos) of the tangent videos, and then unsubscribe 🤷♀️ not the most ethical, but … it’s still technically feasible
it’s only $2 to get access to all the Tangents, well worth it
fair, but her tangents are more varied in topic she has videos on psychedelics, spirituality, the Barbie movie, etc.
oo, thanks - that’s good to know.
oh, sorry - didn’t mean that as a critique, just was thinking out loud and wondering if there was a reason I wasn’t seeing to moderate from a single open instance (like you) vs the approach of having a moderator account for the instance of the community you moderate 🤔
right, but wouldn’t it be best to have an account on the instance the community you moderate is on? Presumably this is the best way to have exact parity - the the community won’t support comments or users from instances it defederates from, right?
ContraPoints, she only charges on months she produces content- it’s not even every month if she isn’t productive. Her Tangent videos are worth it.
it’s still debated whether the anti-trans movement in the US has genocide as a goal, but I think it’s a fair characterization since the movement has explicitly stated their goal is “the eradication of [trans people] from public life”:
since the goal is total elimination, it makes it a candidate for genocide more than other kinds of oppression, e.g. the enslavement and oppression of Africans in the US (another case some have argued as being a genocide).
the Lemkin Institute is one of the organizations arguing the anti-trans movement is genocidal:
either way, methods like legally removing a concept of a group is a method of genocide used in the past, which is why I bring it up.
in particular it’s an example of social death:
ah, yes - that one basically doesn’t allow the state to recognize anything but assigned sex at birth (or some other reality-denying fabricated definition of “biological sex”), thereby eliminating trans identity - this is a form of genocide, called social death. Other states already have passed laws like this:
Looks like the bill passed the house in TX (waiting to see what the Senate votes):
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/10/texas-house-trans-bills-advance/
yes, the TX law is to declare trans people as committing the crime of “gender identity fraud”
yes, exactly - criminalizing porn and the obscene is the first step in Project 2025 to genocide trans people:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17416590241312149
Pornography, he writes:
[is] manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children [. . .] It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed (Roberts, 2023: 5).
This invocation of pornography is intentionally broad, vague, and amorphous. By equating trans issues (“transgenderism” and “transgender ideology”) with pornography, child abuse, and misogyny, this vision takes one step toward the outlawing of trans people altogether. Roberts (2023) goes on to detail the draconian and restrictive mechanisms necessary for eradicating pornography and all that comes with it: “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered” (p. 5). Such extreme rhetoric signals a no-holds barred approach to regulating gender, sexuality, and privacy. Aware that more left-leaning states would be unlikely to arrest trans people on such counts, the document later details a wider plan through which the Department of Justice would intervene and prosecute any local officials not willing to bring criminal action against LGBTQ people (Hamilton, 2023: 553).
yeah, except this is the first step in Project 2025 to genocide trans people:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17416590241312149
Pornography, he writes:
[is] manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children [. . .] It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed (Roberts, 2023: 5).
This invocation of pornography is intentionally broad, vague, and amorphous. By equating trans issues (“transgenderism” and “transgender ideology”) with pornography, child abuse, and misogyny, this vision takes one step toward the outlawing of trans people altogether. Roberts (2023) goes on to detail the draconian and restrictive mechanisms necessary for eradicating pornography and all that comes with it: “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered” (p. 5). Such extreme rhetoric signals a no-holds barred approach to regulating gender, sexuality, and privacy. Aware that more left-leaning states would be unlikely to arrest trans people on such counts, the document later details a wider plan through which the Department of Justice would intervene and prosecute any local officials not willing to bring criminal action against LGBTQ people (Hamilton, 2023: 553).
Paging:
Wondering if any of you have advice? 🙏🙏🙏