Apicnic

I'm not saying it implies that. I'm saying that trans people and established research both say that. Your minimal experience with one of the detrans subreddits is not more substantial of a source than first hand accounts and peer reviewed papers.

Did you spend substantial time in /r/detrans and /r/actualdetrans? Were you aware of drama around when that split happened? Discussed it in the other trans communities on the sites? Because right now, your comments make it seem like you're a passerby who has popped into a trans community and tried to say that your interactions with one community known for astroturfing are more meaningful than decades of research.

I'm sorry, but if you think that there aren't huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, then it doesn't really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/

Here's one of the more recent meta analysis papers on it. When people who detransition are asked, the majority of the cite external factors like the ones here.

NK Jemison is a great new scifi author who always includes a trans character in her stories in really natural ways. Not sure they'll be what you're looking for, but they're also incredibly good books.

Go fiddle with the calculator on the website I linked to see how injecgion time changes peak-trough gap in the hormone curves. But generally I want stable levels because research shows we need a minimum amount of estrogen in order to have feminizing effects. We don't want to overshoot it because your body will create SHBG at too high of levels. I've never seen any research that hints at varying levels be more effective.

For me personally, I got mood swings right before my next dose until I changed the frequency because my levels would drop. But in general, the goal with feminizing hrt is to change your hormone profile to something approximating that of a cis woman in order to get the changes you want. With a long enough gap between doses, the short half life of EV means that you'll have very low levels of estrogen right before your next injection, below your goal range.

It's also important to note when in your injection cycle you tested. I'm mostly interested in what my trough values will be (so immediately prior to the next injection), since that's the best approximation of steady state tissue levels. Especially on a two week injection cycle of EV, I'd be worried about my levels dipping quite low by the end of the cycle.

I really don't know why some of the more conservative dosing recommendations still give two week dosing schedules for EV. It has a lower half life than cypionate and should be injected more often, assuming you're aiming for stable levels (most people are). A lot of our original recommendations for transfem people were based around studies for populations with prostate cancer and menopause, and it seems like dosing strategies for them have stuck around.

I personally wouldnt ever go over a week long dosing of ev, and would likely switch to twice weekly injections if were I on it. The people over at transfemscience.org put together a neat way to visualize the difference in esters for achieving a steady state dose based on the pharmacokinetics of them all. Basically, at this point if I get a recommendation from a doctor for 14 day dosing of EV, I'm going to assume they're not up to date on current feminizing hrt research and are likely going to also be giving old information about things like IM vs SubQ injections.

Finally, nobody should ever be paywalled from medical information (and it's pretty abhorrent that this research even has to have hoops to jump around to get through). Just as an fyi for anybody else reading this, most articles that aren't brand newwill have a copy of it you can access by its doi number on sci-hub.ru (or another mirrored domain, searching scihub normally gives a list of current working addresses). In the case where it isn't available yet, the journal should provide a way to email them asking for specific articles for patient access.

In general, body hair will reduce slightly on hrt. It's still there, but in particular I saw a lot less growth for chest hair. If laser works for your skin/hair color combos at a practioner near you, I found it very effective and tolerable. Otherwise I use a safety razor for everything else. Once you're good with it, it's a very close and low irritation save.

For facial hair, almost everybody will see no effect with hrt. New growth (as in fully new follicles) should stop, but any existing hair will need to be removed if you want a smooth face all the time. I did laser for some initial clearing and now am doing electrolysis to finish up.

This still just feels like a muddying of technical language. If you were to write an article about autopilot killing somebody and use object to refer to them, that's certainly dehumanization, but saying that an object detection algorithm performs poorly on humans doesn't feel like it is.

Part of the problem is that in general we aren't talking about specialized human detection models that incorporate things like pose estimation. Instead it is almost always a general object detection alg, and referring to the same models differently based on the subject just adds muddiness.

I'm mostly familiar with AI within healthcare, and in my workplace, any released model is going to have a number of conversations and evaluations about the technical performance, practical impact on patients, and general ethics of the model. Those conversations blend, but it's harmful to make the language less clear in any one of those contexts.

A note for everyone who is interested in injections but doesn't like IM, you can also do subcutaneous injections. My understanding is that estradiol in common preparations is a depot injection where absorption is controlled less by physical factors and more from the lipophilicity of the medicine itself.

Anybody who's interested can look for the article "Comparison of the Subcutaneous and Intramuscular Estradiol Regimens as Part of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy" published out of Dr. nippoldts group at Mayo recently.

I feel like hair volume and fun styles, plus a lot of late 90s early 00s clothing is coming back in style right now! I'm having fun wearing it this time around.