Sex Change Regret website

[LeaP]

I was on HRT for five months before I went full-time, but I could pass quite easily without hormones if I presented as a woman. After five months, I had a hard time passing as a man, except with my co-workers, who saw zero change. One thing that never changed was my perception of myself. There was no change with hormones and no change with SRS. I never started to "feel like a girl" or feel "differently" for that matter. What changed was how others perceived and interacted with me. In short, the brain did not follow the body, it's the body that followed the brain.

My experience and path has been a little different, but with the same conclusion. I started hormones without a transition commitment, though with the knowledge I am TS. It will be in the two-year range on hormones by the time I transition. I did have the experience of consciously perceiving female identity (which seems unusual). That happened WELL before starting hormones or even deciding to go ahead with them, for that matter. What that turned out to be, though, was the re-emergence of my pre-adolescent self-sense. I instantly knew it as female, though I have no rational explanation for why this is so. This replaced a pervasive sense of not being gendered at all. My identity had stabilized the time I started hormones. When I did, the body followed, as you said. I simply feel more like me. There is no sense of becoming something different than I was, of "transforming into a woman.

I am one of those are reluctant to support "trying HRT."

While I started them without knowing whether I would transition, I did so fully accepting probable permanent physical change and the willingness to transition if that wound up being the right path. Both my therapist and I were interested a level of confirmation within the first few months, but that was not diagnosis. I had the diagnosis already.

My therapist tells me that she has had patients who started and stopped. They feel sluggish, uneasy, anxious, etc. Despite that, it is obvious that some people experience significant relief - especially from anti-androgens and usually very quickly. That can easily delude them into thinking they are TS when they are not. (I found the effects of estrogen far more subtle, if pervasive, and really only started understanding how much they "rewire" you only after a year in.)

Further, some start seeing physical changes, get quite uncomfortable with them, and stop estrogen and keep taking anti-androgens. HUGE mistake!!!

There is some danger of continuing to press down a transition path on emotional and psychological grounds, even out of motivations like belonging, obsession, neediness, and for other reasons not related to identity. People find themselves caught up in this, creating what Kathryn has described as a dynamic toward transition.

But it gets worse! There are those who start and stop hormones repeatedly! Not out of medical necessity, but because they can't settle on their identity and proper direction. Let me tell you, that will screw up your health in a hurry.

Dreamer – if you don't believe hormones are powerful, go talk to an endocrinologist. Forget secondary sex characteristics for a second and even effects on things like emotion and mood. Sex steroids affect the majority of functions in the human body. Estrogen is the most powerful known.