Good life advice is to not take random medication from people in pubs.

Ok dad jeeze.

Well yeah fair enough. I posted this because I read it as hyperbole but I could be wrong. I just felt like this kind of represented the idea that the act of questioning your identity isn't an indicator of your "actual" identity. It just shows that you're open to understanding yourself better.

If I were better with words I could explain my thought process better but the best I can do is communicate in memes.

It's possible, but cis men who are totally comfortable may have never even considered it what so ever. So the recoiling can also be from the very prospect of questioning something that they've never had an inkling to question. Introspection on a deep existential level is a little scary, after all, so tapping a new vein regardless of what comes out can be off-putting.

Yeah there's more to it. I'm just a random cis guy who came across this post on his feed. I'm definitely not an egg, but no way I'd react like that. I'd probably be bewildered that someone would offer me their medicine, but a severe reaction like that sounds very weird.

True. I'm not trans, I feel ambivalent about my gender but I certainly don't think I'd recoil in horror. Probably just say no thanks. I don't take anything that isn't prescribed for me or won't actively interfere with the cocktail of meds I need to take for a chronic illness.

Whaaa....

To me, it sounds plausible in a way that's more than just "woman" bad.

Using myself as illustration, I'm a cis woman working in stem who has a heckton of trans friends such that it's probably more accurate to describe my gender as cis+ because I had a big identity crisis thing when it clicked to me that you're not stuck with your assigned gender at birth. Inexplicably, I seem to be pretty attached to my assigned gender, and the rare instances I have been misgendered causes me deep distress.

Part of this gender evaluation was that in the abstract, I have wished for more masculine traits. When weightlifting, I am envious of how quickly most men pack on muscle compared to me. In my career, I often find myself wishing I was a man, and then feeling a sinking discomfort because I don't actually want to be a man, I just wish my field wasn't so misogynistic. I'm about as sure as one can be in one's gender. And because of that, when I was given the option of trying T, my internal reaction certainly was one of horror.

I agree though, it certainly is complicated.

I think you're reading into it a bit much. If you offered your mates an antidepressant in the pub (that they didn't need) there's a good chance they would react the same way right? There's nothing wrong with antidepressants but taking strong medication when you don't need it won't do you any good.

It depends.

Yeah, you won't get any sort of externally visible changes from a single dose, but for some trans people that first dose can still be a life-changing experience.

They don't warn you about it in the informed consent documentation, but for me that first day on HRT brought on an almost overwhelming feeling of gender euphoria. It was like a part of myself that had been missing since puberty finally fell into place. The weight of 25 years of repressed dysphoria fell from my shoulders and I couldn't stop smiling, couldn't even walk across a room without breaking into a little dance.

It took the better part of a week to start seeing some physical changes, and that was mostly in skin texture.

I took one pill and my dick propelled off. It just flew off got damnit. I still miss it.

there's a little voice in my head telling me to try one just to fuck around