I just hit week 7. I'm not on the same dosing as you (4mg estradiol tablets, no prog, 50mg spiro) but have had no physical changes. Emotional for sure, and my spouse claims I no longer smell like a man, but that's all. I begged my doctor to put me on bica and injections, but they are all too cautious about adverse effects. I already had an episode of incredibly high heart rates this weekend that impacted activities, but that's apparently not enough to go to injections until month 3 for them. I started taking the tablets sublingual (dissolve them under the tongue) but that has had very little effect. I have had no soreness or sensitivity at all, and everything still looks like it did before. I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but I'm considering finding a new doctor. I don't want to switch to DIY and have them decline to provide referrals. It was enough of a chore to find this clinic in the first place!
ncc21166
This one was a whirlwind of things. I might have a heart condition. I would have set a new personal best in a race I ran, except that the possible heart condition and/or the side effects of spironolactone made me take walk breaks because I red-zoned a dozen times. I mustered up the courage to wear a full face of makeup and some femme-leaning clothing out to a doctor appointment and therapy for the first time. I even made an unexpected detour to buy a snack. That was an unnerving thing to do on a whim. I guess I'm not as timid as I thought. I also spent the whole weekend with the only two people who I am out with, but at the request of one of them we had "just a normal time doing normal things". Which means I spent the whole weekend in boymode and not speaking up much. And then I find out that one of them couldn't stop herself from outing me. Thankfully everyone involved is immediate family, but that kind of breach of trust hurts. On a good note, that outing went extremely well and I now have a third person in my support network who is a strong ally. So a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, altogether.
Pain can be a teacher, and it sounds like your lesson was received. You have self-worth and deserve to be loved, and have learned that at some point you stop giving chances to those who aren't willing to be a source of that love. Try to find some joy in growing as a person, and hold on to the memories while you go forward instead of letting them drag you back. I think it's worth saying again: you deserve to be loved!
I agree, and I think the conflating of pitch vs resonance (or size vs weight, depending on how we're looking at it here) is erring too far on the size/pitch side and not enough on the weight/resonance side. It's good progress, though! I've been at this for two months and am nowhere near as good.
Oh, I've been in the closet for 11 years. I've had a LONG time to do my research. The problem is that the clinic I'm seeing is being overly cautious, and I don't want to end-run them to DIY because I need them for lots of other things, some related and some not. They put me on 50mg spironolactone, which I guess did the job. Almost. T is at 70ng/dl. Since I'm in the US, cypro isn't an option and the clinic is paranoid and told me they won't prescribe anything with a side effect of "death" listed, even though you and I both know that's infinitesimally small a chance and bigger for cis-women than us. So that means no bicalutamide.
I'm also unfortunately on 4mg oral estradiol tablets. They don't want to make ANY changes until the 3 month mark, so my E2 is sitting at 70pg/ml. The clinic seems happy with this. I'm beside myself at how low it is. I have asked to move to intramuscular estradiol valerate at monotherapy dosages, but they keep pushing back. My age likely doesn't help, though. I'm over the hill. And fairly lean, since I run marathons and cycle centuries. So there isn't a lot of fat to redistribute, but I should still feel the pain and sensitivity. It's frustrating.
When I had that model, I just forced it to be function keys permanently. I spend a lot of time with strange terminal programs, so Fkeys were important. Think "managing solaris devices" or "ancient ISP hardware used via serial terminal".
I'm 7 weeks in to HRT and have no changes yet. How? How do you already have this feeling? I'm glad you're euphoric. I'm just jealous.
Arch isn't necessarily about minimalism. It's about the distro not doing things for you and mostly leaving the defaults the way the upstream developers intended. So you DIY most of your distro, but you do it exactly the way you want. I very much do the exact same thing you just did for every work-issued macbook I've gotten in the past 10 years. Excepting, of course, the current one because the M3 isn't really usable in linux! Package groups are great for bigger things like DEs because they're developed together, so you get the entire experience the way the devs intended it. I think the only really big thing that's broken for KDE is Discovery, because pacman support isn't great there. It works fine for flatpack and others, though. Use it the way you want to!
mrrp
As a sort-of developer myself (mostly network automation tools and backend things), it's not something I'd really share publicly. Not because of shame, or even worries of safety. Just because I don't really share my code or projects with the public anymore. I haven't worked on open source software in a long time. I wish I still could, but it's not in the cards for me. Most of my "a bit idle" time has unfortunately gone into obsession over "perfecting" my transition. We'll see if therapy helps there, but I honestly think it would just shift to life planning endeavors instead.
That said, maybe look at this with a different lens: while it would be good to band together and write our own things, software doesn't have a gender. Find projects that help with things you believe are worth doing. Sometimes it's tools to help the transgender community directly (https://github.com/cvyl/awesome-transgender could use some updating here!) and sometimes it's just making the world a better place for humans to be kind and helpful to each other.
I get the desire for community, though. I've posted about this myself, but it's very difficult to find people that "get it" who aren't already trans or questioning. I'd love a circle of friends to relate with. The software world can be pretty socially closed off, sometimes!
Welcome to the fold, sister 🐧🧦⚧️
The risk aversion is deviation from their standard plan and from possible mortality as a side effect of bica. Yes, I 'm aware that it's an exceedingly low chance. They are still stuck in the early 2000's for treatment plans.
The risk of heart issues is actually the spiro, which appears to be happening but they still aren't responding to the request. I was over 190bpm during a distance run this weekend, and that's considered the red zone for ages 40 and up. I'm normally around 150 for a tempo run and 50 flat for resting. This is absolutely an anomaly for me.
My doctor happens to be a trans woman. Howewver, she transitioned more than a decade ago and is comparing everything to her experience. I'm not sure if she's bothered keeping up with things. I'm not here to judge, just to get myself in order.
Try as I have, this part has been exceedingly difficult. The only meetups are youth oriented or singles mingles at bars. I'm married, don't drink, and too old for that. There's pride, annually, but this area isn't fantastic for just finding folx at local establishments being themselves. I also happen to work a later shift. It's quite lonely out here.