Going through puberty is unsafe. Like, physically unsafe. Testosterone and estrogen both have consequences. It doesn’t really matter where they come from.
You can cause yourself some serious health issues if you fuck your HRT dosage up, which is easy to do if you’re DIYing. If you do sufficient research beforehand, and get regular blood tests though you should be fine.
Honestly, depending on where you live, well-researched DIY can be safer AND more effective than going to a doctor. Atleast in the US most doctors don’t know shit about trans healthcare, since it isn’t a standard part of med school curriculums. My first endocrinologist straight up just asked me what medicines and dosages I wanted then wrote me a prescription for them. Fortunately I had been researching HRT pretty voraciously before even making the appointment so I was able to guide him through my care well enough till I found a better doctor.
You can cause yourself some serious health issues if you fuck your HRT dosage up, which is easy to do if you’re DIYing.
Not really with E! I don’t know enough about T to dispute this. With E there can be consequences if you do tens or hundreds of times the regular dosage for an extended amount of time. You can read about them by looking up the increased clotting risks of pregnant people (who have way higher E levels than any trans person would reasonably take accidentally for many months) :P
Not that having too high levels are recommended or will be comfortable. There are technically elevated risks if you take even double the dose for a long time, but not by a lot.
T will fuck up your liver and also convert back to E if there’s too much* floating around in your blood at once. E is much more chemically stable than T, so it doesn’t take a lot of variance outside the correct ranges* to throw your hormones into whack. The only way to know for sure when you’re starting is to get the bloodwork done regularly (like every 1-3 months at first), and after a year or two of stability it’s fine to switch to yearly testing.
But yeah, I’ve see dudes who accidentally did like 4x their dosage at once and as long as it’s not a long term thing you do every week for months to years there’s not a lot of danger.
* as determined by your personal chemistry, some people need a high dose and some need a low dose
Your body can produce too much of either of those substances. My point stands. It’s as dangerous as going through puberty is in the first place. Caution is advisable, but to act like it is an extreme danger is ridiculous. Many things can be dangerous. In an ideal world we would have free blood tests and doctors. We dont live in that ideal world. DIY is far less dangerous than denying a trans person healthcare. The way we treat it like an extreme risk helps no one. It is also much more expensive and difficult to access by nature. If someone is seriously weighing it, then they must have weighed the risks against them as much higher. If someone has to pick between DIY and increased risk of suicide, they should pick DIY.
Healthcare isnt sacred because it comes from an approved distributor. If the knowledge can be given on how to self administer hormones, then it should be given. Everything in life bears an inherent risk. The inherent risk in DIY is miniscule compared with getting into a car. So if someone is considering it I think its pointless to try and convince them otherwise. The risk they may harm themselves may outweigh all other risks in their mind. They dont need to be reminded over and over again of the inherent risk of getting into a car. They’ve heard it before, and will hear it many times again before a vial of anything is in their hand.
my body produced 1/5th of the average hormones for my assigned gender at birth. It ABSOLUTELY fucked me up mentally, I can confirm this. On the bright side though now that I started HRT my body is like speed running transition
1 vial of E in and I already have boobs bigger than some cis women I know lmao
I suspect the “unsafe” part of DIY is more the fact that unless you’re buying pharmaceuticals, some DIY vials are compounded in an unregulated facility sometimes without typical lab equipment and safety best practices in place, for example you are probably aware of the debates among homebrewers about sterilization requirements and when or whether to use syringe filters, etc. - a lot of DIY vials are probably safe more because of the preservatives used than the safe sterilization and filtration practices that are kept.
Regardless, there is a question of the alternative - if no Rx is possible and the alternative is to go without HRT, the risks of DIY are probably justified by the clinical benefits of being on HRT, and the reality is that many, many trans people use DIY HRT without incident, and DIY vials are occasionally tested for safety, so the community has some informal “self-regulation” happening as well.
content warning: suicide
What I find so disturbing is how often the fears from cis folks about DIY don’t translate to demands for increased access to HRT, but instead usually become moral judgements on the trans person for taking risks by using DIY, as if that were categorically unreasonable and as if it were better to just suffer from the wrong sex hormones in your body.
This just exposes the common bias and ignorance about what it’s like to have the wrong sex hormones in your body, and the way being trans is seen as a matter of “self expression” and about “living authentically” rather than as a serious medical condition that they themselves would be unlikely to cope with or survive if they were put under the same circumstances (like David Reimer, or like Alan Turing, both of whom killed themselves when forced to live on cross-sex hormones - hardly surprising then to hear 40% of trans folks have attempted suicide before).
Going through puberty is unsafe. Like, physically unsafe. Testosterone and estrogen both have consequences. It doesn’t really matter where they come from.
You can cause yourself some serious health issues if you fuck your HRT dosage up, which is easy to do if you’re DIYing. If you do sufficient research beforehand, and get regular blood tests though you should be fine.
Honestly, depending on where you live, well-researched DIY can be safer AND more effective than going to a doctor. Atleast in the US most doctors don’t know shit about trans healthcare, since it isn’t a standard part of med school curriculums. My first endocrinologist straight up just asked me what medicines and dosages I wanted then wrote me a prescription for them. Fortunately I had been researching HRT pretty voraciously before even making the appointment so I was able to guide him through my care well enough till I found a better doctor.
Not really with E! I don’t know enough about T to dispute this. With E there can be consequences if you do tens or hundreds of times the regular dosage for an extended amount of time. You can read about them by looking up the increased clotting risks of pregnant people (who have way higher E levels than any trans person would reasonably take accidentally for many months) :P
Not that having too high levels are recommended or will be comfortable. There are technically elevated risks if you take even double the dose for a long time, but not by a lot.
T will fuck up your liver and also convert back to E if there’s too much* floating around in your blood at once. E is much more chemically stable than T, so it doesn’t take a lot of variance outside the correct ranges* to throw your hormones into whack. The only way to know for sure when you’re starting is to get the bloodwork done regularly (like every 1-3 months at first), and after a year or two of stability it’s fine to switch to yearly testing.
But yeah, I’ve see dudes who accidentally did like 4x their dosage at once and as long as it’s not a long term thing you do every week for months to years there’s not a lot of danger.
* as determined by your personal chemistry, some people need a high dose and some need a low dose
Your body can produce too much of either of those substances. My point stands. It’s as dangerous as going through puberty is in the first place. Caution is advisable, but to act like it is an extreme danger is ridiculous. Many things can be dangerous. In an ideal world we would have free blood tests and doctors. We dont live in that ideal world. DIY is far less dangerous than denying a trans person healthcare. The way we treat it like an extreme risk helps no one. It is also much more expensive and difficult to access by nature. If someone is seriously weighing it, then they must have weighed the risks against them as much higher. If someone has to pick between DIY and increased risk of suicide, they should pick DIY.
Healthcare isnt sacred because it comes from an approved distributor. If the knowledge can be given on how to self administer hormones, then it should be given. Everything in life bears an inherent risk. The inherent risk in DIY is miniscule compared with getting into a car. So if someone is considering it I think its pointless to try and convince them otherwise. The risk they may harm themselves may outweigh all other risks in their mind. They dont need to be reminded over and over again of the inherent risk of getting into a car. They’ve heard it before, and will hear it many times again before a vial of anything is in their hand.
my body produced 1/5th of the average hormones for my assigned gender at birth. It ABSOLUTELY fucked me up mentally, I can confirm this. On the bright side though now that I started HRT my body is like speed running transition
1 vial of E in and I already have boobs bigger than some cis women I know lmao
I suspect the “unsafe” part of DIY is more the fact that unless you’re buying pharmaceuticals, some DIY vials are compounded in an unregulated facility sometimes without typical lab equipment and safety best practices in place, for example you are probably aware of the debates among homebrewers about sterilization requirements and when or whether to use syringe filters, etc. - a lot of DIY vials are probably safe more because of the preservatives used than the safe sterilization and filtration practices that are kept.
Regardless, there is a question of the alternative - if no Rx is possible and the alternative is to go without HRT, the risks of DIY are probably justified by the clinical benefits of being on HRT, and the reality is that many, many trans people use DIY HRT without incident, and DIY vials are occasionally tested for safety, so the community has some informal “self-regulation” happening as well.
content warning: suicide
What I find so disturbing is how often the fears from cis folks about DIY don’t translate to demands for increased access to HRT, but instead usually become moral judgements on the trans person for taking risks by using DIY, as if that were categorically unreasonable and as if it were better to just suffer from the wrong sex hormones in your body.
This just exposes the common bias and ignorance about what it’s like to have the wrong sex hormones in your body, and the way being trans is seen as a matter of “self expression” and about “living authentically” rather than as a serious medical condition that they themselves would be unlikely to cope with or survive if they were put under the same circumstances (like David Reimer, or like Alan Turing, both of whom killed themselves when forced to live on cross-sex hormones - hardly surprising then to hear 40% of trans folks have attempted suicide before).