HRT advice: When to start?
I have recently learned that you can get hrt medicine off the counter in my country. I am an 18 year old and I am at the last year of high school. My plan since I learbed this was to wait till my finiahing exams are done (May) and start after that which puts half a year between that and till I can move out aboard for university. What worries me is having to hide the effects especially with the summer in between and swimming that comes with it. How much does it take for breast growth to become noticable and what would you do in my place?
First off, congratulations on your upcoming high school graduation! 😊 I'm sure you must be very excited to start HRT and move out on your own.
The development of your breast ducts will happen pretty quickly early on. This will result in your nipples increasing in size and protruding noticeably from your chest. This is normal, breast fat will grow to fill in the shape around your breast duct and once enough of it has grown, the nipple will not appear to protrude and will instead be at the apex of the breast. The development of breast fat takes a longer time than breast ducts though. Certainly if you're on HRT starting in May, by July and August your breast ducts would be developed enough that your nipple would be noticeably larger and raised without a shirt on.
I recommend familiarizing yourself with the tanner breast development scale which can give you a bit more of an idea how this development happens. You could wear a shirt while swimming and a sports bra underneath it. Though depending on the material of the shirt and the color, it might be noticeable that you're wearing one. You may have to find ways out of swimming later in the summer, like saying you don't feel like it or something like that.
aight. I should probs start after the swimming season as tempting as starting as soon as I reasonably can sounds, because swimming with a shirt would be suapicious. One of my motivations to start early is that I don't want T to ruin my body further. Is there something I can take that isn't quite hrt but that will reduce the effect of Testerone till I can reasonably start hrt? does it even matter if I start a year later? What got me self concious was a friend that told me my voice had become deeper recently and my parents who said that I looked taller, I thought this shit wasn't supposed to keep happening after puberty.
Unfortunately, puberty, especially with regards to T, continues into your mid twenties. So you will still experience masculinization effects of T for some time. Your voice can get deeper, and you can grow more facial hair and so on. A year while still undergoing the effects of T would probably be really difficult. 😔
As the other commenter said you could start anti adrogens in May and wait to start E until you're away from home. Anti androgens just block T, but you can still experience some feminization taking just them.
I think I will go that route then. androcur is the popular one here anythibg I should be aware of?
You can start on an anti androgen. It's what is used to block testosterone. They can have side effects but there's a lot of people that take them.
You might want to start taking testosterone blockers (spironolactone for example) asap to avoid any unwanted changes. The T-blockers themselves won't have a huge effect on your body, it might very slightly change your body hair growth and it might make your skin a bit softer but that's about it.
Then once you're ready you can start taking estrogen -- usually in the form of estradiol pills, although there are other options.
Also, if you're from Canada -- Ontario or Alberta specifically, there's a very good service called Foria https://www.foriaclinic.com/
It's not covered through provincial healthcare unfortunately, but it is a not-for-profit service so they keep it as cheap as they can. It winds up being about $200 a year for most patients.
IIRC, the primary thing to cause breast-growth is in fact blocking T and doing so can definitely cause it.
For immediate mitigation of hair-loss, which is the most pressing thing if you already went through full puberty you can use finasteride/dustasteride, which are DHT-blockers. In rare cases they can act like weak T-blockers, but that is an exceptional side-effect; after that waiting for half a year will just make you miserable for an additional six month, which may be worth it, depending on your risk-assessment.
OTOH: You won’t see most of your school mates afterwards and if you already have six months of effects and arrive as visibly trans at uni, it can make getting into communities at uni easier.
I just want to hide it from my parents for safety, my mates at school are supportive and I am out to them and luckily have no hairloss yet. I have decided to start androcur immediatly and add estrofem into that mix after summer.
Then get that estrofem ready to use anyways, since adult human bodies are not made to have no sex hormone. If you get depressions or feel bad in general, add E to the mix anyways.
Also: Cypro (Cyproterone Acetate, Androcur is a marketing name for it) requires much higher doses if you do mono-therapy than if you use it to support E: With E the general wisdom is to not exceed 12.5mg/daily and rather increase E-intake if T isn’t properly suppressed, whereas without you may need 50 to 100mg per day, with a massively increased risk of bad side effects.
There is a reason why pretty much no one who has the choice does it that way, but it’s of course up to you!
my plan is to go 12.5mg once every two days till after summer. I mean what other choice do I even have when testerone is actively changing my body. I can maybe start estrofem very low dose.
It’s up to you of course, but don’t expect this to do all that much. I’m on 12.5mg daily and before my last blood-test I took ≈4mg E transdermal and even at that I was still very much on the upper end of the female range for T.
hey. I found a medicine called casodex, it is supposed to be better than androcur and also something I can biy over the counter. Do you know anything about it?
From what I found that is a brand name for Bicalutamide (“Bica”). AFAIK it is a competitive antagonist for the androgen-receptor, which means that it will bind to all the places that Testosteron would bind to without activating the “sensor”, thereby preventing Testosteron from doing the same with effect. The consequence of this is that your T will actually increase, but still not pose any problem if your dose is high enough. The difficulty is then, that you cannot really measure whether your T is properly blocked, because the blood-levels will still be high. Endocrinologists hate it as a consequence, but if you are fine with that, that’s okay.
Other than that Bica seems to be popular with those who take it, but you will require a liver-function test a while in since it can cause some very severe liver-issues with some people (AFAIR you either are susceptible or you are not, so if it’s fine a few month in it should stay fine, but I might be wrong on that; DEFINITELY check the details on that one).
Update: Yeah I just took the bluepill btw. Why wait when I can buy HRT over the counter. Me from the future will have to worry about hiding effects
thanks, I have decuded on androcur as it's what's availible in my country
Be careful, androcur is considered as one of the worst blockers because of how many side effects there are. Inform yourself abiut them just in case
I’m eight month in and have B- or C-cups. But I’m also much luckier than most of my transfem friends in that regard.
Yeah I'm almost three years in and I've been resigning myself to have something that can only barely be qualified as a B-cup I guess. So yeah it depends a lot