I've heard different versions of this. What my therapist has said is that she is had several patients who have started hormones and stopped. Some of them "didn't feel right." She said some of them were disturbed by the physical changes. Is this GD? I don't know. All of them thought themselves good candidates. She doesn't write letters unless she strongly believes them to be so. In the end, they were not.Originally Posted by PaulaQ
I associate anxiousness and irritability with testosterone, not lack of estrogen. I would think that lowering testosterone in any male would calm them down. That's the effect on sex offenders when they treat them with anti-androgens. Estrogen, on the other hand, brings me clarity, presence, and a sense of being myself. When I started HRT, I was on anti-androgens alone at first. It did calm me down. It did not eliminate my experience of dissociation. That didn't happen until I was on estrogen for a period of time.
Regarding some of the comments on brain sex – whether or not the brain physically changes under the influence of hormones in adults, I don't know. It does during fetal development and later on in adolescence, but in adults? I recently posted a Journal of Clinical Endocrinology cite that mentioned one kind of dimorphic (sexed) adolescent brain development, in this case the "NKB system in the infundibular nucleus." This particular difference is driven by genetics, however, not by hormones, and having a female typical NKB system is characteristic of MtF transsexuals. To the extent that dimorphic differences in the brain are driven by hormones in adolescence, I suppose it's possible to have a partially masculinized, partially feminized brain.
