https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-photo-chest-stomach/

I think gender affirming care for minors has more support than trans participation in sports, for example.

EDIT:

In 2023 69% of Americans believed trans people should only be able to play on the team of the gender they were assigned at birth, according to this Gallup poll.

In 2024 62% of Americans oppose banning gender affirming care for minors in this Gallup poll.

EDIT2:

It’s also a little weird to call gender affirming care for minors a controversial part of a “trans rights movement” when it’s primarily supported by the mainstream medical organizations. Of course the trans rights movement wishes to oppose anti-trans legislation to ban such care, but gender affirming care for minors is not a fringe, controversial practice being pushed primarily by trans rights activists.

Here is a list of the links to statements by the medical organizations supporting gender affirming care, which includes the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association, etc.

The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of providing gender affirming care, and the only “controversy” comes from objections pushed by anti-trans activists who lie, make bad faith arguments, and appeal to pseudo-science and debunked theories to advance their cause.

I assume you’re not in the U.S.? Those sound like old Benjamin Rules and not based on current WPATH standards. If you talk to people in your local trans community, they might know doctors and therapists who are willing to give you medication without those kinds of requirements.

😭

For a second I thought these were places to escape the country from … you know, for reasons.

I think this is about where I am too - the envy transmutes to hope and a kind of reclamation of being trans. I think I need positive trans examples that don’t make me cringe but instead fill me with awe or inspiration. The value of representation, I guess.

Whoa, a lot to unpack there.

First, it sounds like you have been transitioning for a while - do you have vocal dysphoria, and have you worked on voice training? When I socially transitioned my vocal dysphoria became rather intense, and the fear I had speaking, for example to a new colleague at my work who may not otherwise know I’m trans, became panic-inducing. I found voice training really helpful, and now my voice passes enough in public and on the phone that I never get “sir’d”. If you were inclined I bet you could do the same!

Either way, I’m sorry to hear about the antagonistic situations you find yourself in. I think I would feel unsafe in a situation like that. 😞

With regards to your support circles telling you that you pass: of course they might be just polite or being nice, but there is another possibility, that they have mapped you to a woman in their minds so they interpret your voice as feminine. I found this happened for example when I watched enough Finnster (don’t judge me 😝), eventually their voice sounded like a girl’s voice to me even though if I heard it on the phone for the first time I’m sure it would be read as masculine.

Ultimately whether a voice sounds masc or fem has at least something to do with how we are interpreting the situation, and I have found myself and others capable of interpreting masculine voices as feminine when you get used to thinking of that person as a woman. The same thing happened for me with Bilal Baig’s character in Sort Of, her voice definitely has masculine features (often too heavy and large), but instead of hearing a “gay man” voice like I would over the phone, I started to just hear it as a woman’s voice and it was hard to go back and hear it as a “man’s” voice.

Anyway - this might be what’s happening with your friends, maybe they can’t hear or see you as a man anymore, even though strangers still might. Still, sounds like you are doing a good job getting feedback from strangers online about your voice. I know the /r/transvoice discord has a place where you can upload clips of your voice to be critiqued as you are working on your voice training, and there are resources like Selene’s clips and TransVoiceLessons that can be helpful even without seeing a speech language pathologist.

Thanks for sharing and being vulnerable about your experiences. 🫂

this community is also larger / more frequented - so good call all around

thanks for the clarification! ❤️

I assume they belong in /c/transmemes, but I bet nobody cares 😆

link for the lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPhrTOg1RUk

yes, there are lots of ways to optimize.

23G sounds good for drawing, and I think that is the more standard recommendation (looks like the /r/TransWiki guide lists 23G and 25G), though I haven’t used it personally.

Re-using the same needle you drew with to inject with can make the needle a bit more dull and I have found it makes the injection more likely to hurt (apparently I’m not the only one). It is also standard practice to change the needle between drawing and injecting to further reduce chance of infection. I’ve read that plenty of people don’t change needles between drawing and injecting, but I’m not sure I would necessarily advertise this as a good practice, esp. for beginners.

Part of the reason I suggested subq is because it allows for injecting with a smaller gauge needle like 27G, which is less painful and more accessible to people like me who suffer from needle phobia. That’s part of why I think of it as more foolproof, but also because subq doesn’t require targeting a specific muscle or injecting to the correct depth like IM does.

I’m not sure about irritation from subq that IM doesn’t cause, so I would love more detail on that. I just would imagine the smaller needle, the shorter length, etc. makes it less irritating than a larger gauge and longer needle.

You can also buy low deadspace syringes without using a fixed needle, but I find these kinds of optimization less relevant when regularly accruing excess medication and there is incentive to use up old medication before it expires. A vial is like $11 for me, so it is also rather cheap, and the medication waste in that context is not worth overly concerning yourself over.

It would make more sense for DIY, though, when the medication is more expensive (and supply might be less reliable and more scarce). I have never looked at the extra cost of low deadspace syringes compared to the cost of wasted medication from that deadspace, but even with normal syringes I know people have used bubbles in their doses to leave air in the deadspace and get all the medication (correct dosing becomes a bit tricky in this situation, just have to be mindful that you are measuring your dose accurately).

To clarify, I think it’s most common for people to open a vial and use it until it’s gone. Most people don’t throw away their vials after a month, though if there is a reason to suspect contamination you should throw away the vial. My point was just that most doctors will feel comfortable writing a script that lets you buy a new vial once a month under the pretext that vials used longer than that can get contaminated, especially if they are cored. It’s a plausible and reasonable excuse to get a Rx that lets you stockpile, even with a doctor that might otherwise not want to enable stockpiling.

As far as how long they last: the vials of estradiol valerate I get are 100 mg in 5 mL of oil, and I currently inject around 9 mg per week (a relatively high, monotherapy dose), so a vial lasts me almost around 11 weeks or 2.5 months. The next vial I open is just whichever one expires the soonest (First In First Out). Since I buy a new vial once a month, this means I keep accruing a back stock while using up my oldest vials. I’m currently using a vial I opened in September but bought in April.

So it’s dependent on your dose, whether you accidentally core your vial, and other factors as to how long a vial will last you, but this method should still help you have a regular excess that you can stockpile.

Besides stockpiling, injections are a better way to get the estrogen anyway. If you haven’t already, I recommend this guide which covers differences between routes of administration. tl;dr only around 5% of the dose of oral estrogen ends up in your blood stream, most of it is filtered by your liver and it’s a very poor way to get estrogen in your body. The effects on the liver in the long term might contribute to blood clotting, strokes, or cardiovascular events. Injections don’t have these downsides, most of the dose ends up in your bloodstream and it doesn’t tax your liver or contribute to a health risk (besides the typical risks any injection might carry, such as infection at the injection site if you don’t follow proper procedures like reusing needles and so on).

For more about injections: https://old.reddit.com/r/TransWiki/wiki/hrt/injections

I recommend subcutaneous (subq) injections with a small gauge needle like 27G because it’s relatively painless and fool-proof compared to intramuscular (IM) injections. You will essentially need these things:

• 0.5 mL syringes (look for ones without needles and the twisting Leur-lock connection type)
• 27G 1/2" needles for injecting
• 21G, 23G, or 25G needles (1 1/2" long is fine) for drawing the oil from the vial into the syringe
• alcohol swabs for sterilizing the vial, and for swabbing your injection site
• bandaids for after injecting

As I mentioned before, drawing with a thinner needle (23G instead of 18G for example) reduce the chance of coring your vial.

Here is a video showing how to do an injection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TP0rTlQVao

Here is a PDF guide for injections, including diagrams showing appropriate injection sites for subq: https://fenwayhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/MG-6_TransHealth_InjectionGuide.pdf

Here is a video showing proper technique to avoid coring a vial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5F0SLoMjC8

Talk to your doctor. Reducing your hormones and creating instability in your well-being is not worth the small amount you might stockpile by that method, especially in this moment where you need all the help you can get.

Also, if you switch to injections, you can ask for a new vial once a month, since drawing from the vial can compromise the rubber stopper and so for safety reasons it’s justified to get a new vial once a month (a compromised vial isn’t sterile and might cause infection). If you use a smaller gauge needle (like 21G rather than 18G) to draw from the vial, you can reduce risk of coring the vial and this can be a means of safely using the whole vial and stockpiling the extra.

Your comments are wise as usual. :-)

Unfortunately I think the reasons I want to pass are probably deeper than just the pragmatic ones, which is maybe why I feel conflicted about those desires (i.e. I think the desires could be self-defeating / harmful).

Certainly the pragmatic consequences of passing are nice: it’s safer, the social interactions are smoother, it’s more affirming, and so on. But I want to pass for more than the pragmatic reasons, e.g. I get hung-up on my own trans-ness being wrong, about feeling inauthentic as a woman, about constantly feeling afraid of being outed or clocked, etc.

I think you are right that I should shift my goals from “passing” to the more pragmatic goal of living in an assimilated / integrated way (whether I pass or not), but I am not sure how much control I have over that, considering I never entered into transition thinking I would ever pass, and it was never an explicit goal I allowed myself to have.

Honestly, I need to spend more time undoing my own anti-trans bias - I am not sure how to best do that, but I’m sure I could work on it.

ContraPoints has a great Tangent video about liminal spaces, FYI

lol, I am not even sure how to start a fight with a stranger if I wanted to. I think I would find it difficult to do.

But seriously, 20 years is a long time to feel like you are not passing 😭 I don’t get misgendered in public either, but I think that’s because people are polite, not because they think I’m a cis woman.

Where I live being trans is a risk, so in my mind the rebuttal to “so what if they do” is that it’s unsafe, but tbh I have all sorts of negative feelings about being trans, like feeling embarrassed for not having the “right” body. For the most part I just try to ignore the gender and interact authentically, but I obviously have to pay attention to my voice and I suspect I am implicitly changing a lot based on the social situation I am in. Probably I need to leave this place, it is not healthy for me to be somewhere that is so hostile to what I am.

thanks for the update 😊

Yeah, I didn’t want to say it, but my experiences were always best with queer men as well. Glad you have people! 💞

I had a person do this when I first transitioned, he started emulating my higher voice in unusual ways. I tended to feel like I was being perceived as a gay man in those moments, rather than as a woman. I think often androgynous expressions lean into “feminine man” territories that lots of people perceive as “gay”. It has been a real struggle for me to break out of “gay man” into “feminine woman” territory.

That said, it could be that the softer tone is for lots of reasons, I don’t think it’s a bad sign - much better than being viewed as a fellow man and treated as such!