Notices by Doc Impossible (impossible_phd@hachyderm.io), page 4

@ValerieMars @siege Injections weekly? Levels taken on day what of the cycle? Dose, and concentration, and type of injections?

Need a bit more info about the actual injection cycle and such to give halfway decent advice.

@ValerieMars @siege Well, first of all:your math is wrong. 0.3ml of 20 mg/ml is 6mg/week, not 7. Even .33 is 6.6, not 7. You'd need .35ml to get 7ml.

Regardless, that's damn weird. A 7mg dose should have you running hot, but you should be *peaking* at about 530, give or take, and your reported dose should be peaking at like... 455.

Are you taking any multivitamins, biotin, anything like that?

@TonyaMarie @ValerieMars @siege Yeah, something somewhere has *got* to be off.

There's a very specific piece of gendered violence that the trans community rarely talks about, and which was inflicted upon us by WPATH (before WPATH was WPATH) and the APA, and which I will *never* forgive them for.

By requiring trans people to go stealth after transition, to pretend that there had never *been* a transition, by effectively making generations of us a shames of who we were, these organizations have robbed us of our elders. Of the people we can look to to see the future we...

... can have *after* transition. Because, sure, you look around a gender support group or even around here on Mastodon, and ***overwhelmingly***, it's people who transitioned no more than five years ago, maybe ten at the outside. There are a few exceptions (Cait, I will never stop loving you for being so visible), but all this is a young person's game, it feels like.

Where are those of us who transitioned thirty, forty years ago? They're out there, I know, just living their lives. But invisibly.

And representation is how people imagine a better future for ourselves.

This is why you see people despairing, crying out, "is it too late for me to transition? I'm 25." Absurd, on one hand, but... all too understandable, really. And it's a great sadness to me that I've only ever met two trans people over fifty who transitioned more than a decade ago.

I have no interest in burning bright and dying young. I want to live a long, long life and be a menace at whatever retirement home I land at, chasing the residents down the hallway alongside my cackling wife.

But that's hard to imagine when I've never seen other folks like that.

WPATH and the APA stole our elders from us. I will never forgive them for it.

@siege Damn, CJ, your work kills!

I CAN FINALLY TALK ABOUT SECRET PROJECT!

My dear friend and colleague, Jamie Garner, and I are now OFFICIALLY under contract to write and publish a scholarly book on the rhetoric and cultural retransmission of transgender comics, particularly webcomics! Yes, this is an outgrowth of "Can I Offer You An Egg In These Trying Times," and I'm delighted and excited to get to work writing a whole book on why the Queerantine flood of trans comics was something really special.

#Trans #Transjoy #academia

@roadriverrail @Dani @NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege YES!!

Run towards the thing that scares you. It's just as fadt, smart, and determined as you are. If you flee, all that'll happen is it catches up to you when you're exhausted.

@NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege I'd like to offer an alternate thought, informed very much by CJ's take on dysphoria being, ultimately, a specific type of CPTSD:

In order to not come out to ourselves before, or to keep ourselves from transitioning, we had to inflict upon ourselves (aided and abetted by cissexist, transphobic society) a daily, minute-by-minute trauma that boils down to one thing:

"The real me doesn't deserve to exist."

(1/3)

@NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege And to enforce that belief on ourselves, we had to place others' acceptance and approval far, far over our own well-being. We had to minimize ourselves and our needs, until the "me" part of it disappeared, or near enough as the difference doesn't matter.

That instinct built an intense trauma reflex in us. And, as a result, we see that the only "acceptable" trans person is one who isn't visibly trans...

(2/3)

@NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege ...and we believe that our transitions will only be seen by others (whose opinions we believe to be more important than our right to exist) as legitimate if we manage to be cis-passing, invisible.

Invisible.

The urge to pass is the urge to remain invisible, to continue to act out that exact same trauma instinct that kept us closeted before. It's an urge to dart from one closet to another.

(3/3)

@NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege As a postscript, I think that the reason that urge (and the plans connected to it) often falls apart is because transition is an act of profound self-love. If, as psychology argues, we generally become who we pretend to be, by enacting self-love on ourselves for long enough we come to love ourselves whether we believe that love to be worthy or not.

@Dani @NicolaElle @JoscelynTransient @emmalilian @faithisleaping @rooster @siege I know I'm a broken record on it, but...

It's a leap of faith. Doing the thing is the one and only thing that makes you ready for it.

Today is a special little anniversary for me.

Three years ago today, I came out to myself. I was so scared of what it'd mean for my life, my marriage, my job--all of it. Instead, I was welcomed with open arms, and while parts of the last three years have been tough, they've been, by far, the best of my life.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey, everyone! 💙💗🤍💗💙

5. Pre-HRT banking will remain a smart move for transfems with known bottom dysphoria. For people who don't *want* to use their natal bits, this changes nothing.
6. Sperm *quality* was not ideal for 5/9 of the cohort. This is not an uncommon problem in fertility (esp. for cis men who are aging), but it must be noted.
6.a. It is not known whether the quality issue is because of the participants' age or HRT. This is impossible to determine without a much larger, more varied cohort.

(3/?)

7. All but one participant used e val. This *shouldn't* matter, but it's possible that different estrogen formulations could have an unknown effect.
8. One participant who had been on HRT for EIGHTEEN YEARS regained full fertility within 3 months.
8.a. Jesus Christ, wow. That's a really, really big deal.

(4/5)

Now, some deets which matter:

1. One of the participants was only able to produce viable sperm with intervention (extracting directly from her testes). This sucks, but it happens to cis dudes sometimes too.
2. The study size is only 9 people, which is much smaller than is ideal. Larger work needs to confirm this.
3. Fertility resumed in 3 months for 1/3 of the cohort.
4. Aside from the outlier who needed extraction, fertility was back within 10 months for all members of the cohort.

(2/?)

HUUUUGE news for #MtF and #nonbinary #transition #fertility! A (small, admittedly) study confirms that, even after very long-term HRT, transfeminine people should *expect* to be able to regain *full fertility* after stopping feminizing HRT. Of the test cohort, *EVERY SINGLE PARTICIPANT* was eventually able to produce viable sperm, and the duration of HRT was not related to how long it took for fertility to resume.

This means that pre-HRT banking is *OPTIONAL*.

https://tinyurl.com/ztrbfue9