Usually the blood work will vary heavily depending on when you last took a dose. When I get blood work, I do it right before I am going to inject so that the blood levels are at the lowest they could be (the “trough”). With oral I would imagine your E blood levels will fluctuate significantly, so when you last took a pill will make a big difference in terms of what your blood labs show.

The problem with taking larger and larger oral doses is that it doesn’t absorb better and you are just potentially taxing your liver. At the very least I would try out sublingual route and see if that helps 🤷‍♀️

I wish you luck dear, it’s not easy figuring this stuff out (esp. with clueless doctors).

So your testosterone is really low !! But I would personally consider estrogen too low, though you know your own body best. When did you get the blood work done compared to the last dose you took?

I think the common conservative recommendation is to have between 100 - 200 pg/mL so your blood work looks good on paper, but I personally found below 300 at trough was mentally difficult for me. I use estrogen as my anti-androgen (“monotherapy”), so I take a larger dose than most.

You might consider aiming for higher blood levels of E and with a better & safer route of administration.

I am a wuss too, it was extremely difficult for me to overcome my needle phobia (I mean, literally breaking down crying after some injections, taking a long time to overcome the mental block to actually push the needle in, just so so so hard for me). But you do get used to it, and it’s not bad after you get some practice.

Also, I inject subcutaneously, so I use really small needles that don’t hurt at all (literally, I sometimes can’t feel the needle). That was crucial for me in overcoming needle phobia, I think it would be much harder to inject intramuscularly (IM).

Even if you still can’t do injections, I would encourage doing something to avoid oral, even sublingual troches which have their own problems might still help with absorption, and even better would be patches or gel.

If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend reading this: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/

It’s a bit long and technical, but it might help (it certainly helped me).

You’ve been on HRT for a decade? If you don’t mind me asking, what ester & dose and what route of administration? Do you get blood tests and if so what are your levels like?

IRL I met some trans elders who had been on HRT for a while and didn’t see any effects from it (almost no breast growth or much change to their face beyond skin softening some, etc.). I think they were taking the estrogen orally, and they weren’t sure exactly about their blood levels, but they thought they were fine.

When taken orally, I think around 80% of the estrogen is filtered out by the liver, so it can be hard to get enough estrogen that way and there are peaks and troughs multiple times a day (it is ideal when taking oral to dose 3 - 5 times a day to ensure even and adequate estrogen through the day). Patches & gel are all better than oral, but injections seem the best in terms of getting a consistently high enough level of estrogen.

Sorry, I still don’t understand where you are coming from. Do you mean a loophole to avoid discrimination against you, or a loophole that enables discrimination?

EDIT: If it’s the latter, LGBTQ+ housing discrimination is legal because the Fair Housing Act does not mention sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes, so housing discrimination based on those attributes are legal by default, and only outlawed in states that passed legislation to do so, see the map here.

If you are asking about the mechanism of how discrimination works, and how to evade that discrimination as a person in a LGBTQ+ category, that is a big topic and the answers are highly contextual. The obvious strategy is to try to hide or make less obvious your sexual orientation or gender identity, which is easier for some and impossible for others.

For example, if you are a married same-sex couple who both want to be on a lease together, it might to be harder to hide your sexual orientation from a potential landlord you are trying to get that lease with. Others might find a way to make it seem as though they are just roommates. Not every gay person is equally capable of passing as straight.

Another example: if you have recently started transitioning and you are visibly trans (i.e. not cis-passing), you are much more likely to have your application to rent an apartment or house denied (HUD found in 2011 that 19% of trans people surveyed reported this happening to them). Whether you are cis-passing is based on a lot of factors out of your control, such as how much money and time you can sink into your transition (e.g. many trans people can’t afford expensive laser hair removal and gender affirming surgeries), how early you started your transition, how long you have been transitioning, whether you are taking hormones, and of course a lot of it is dependent on genetics.

Are you asking how housing discrimination happens?

is that a lemmy feature?

There are more carbs than represented in that radar chart.

aw, that’s nice - I’ve heard good things about progesterone as well!

It might just be that I don’t watch TV adverts and I use uBlock origin so I don’t see ads online, so my main marketing comes from native ads (like stories on the radio) or billboards when driving places. I guess I mean the environment determines whether how those associations are built, for example I will forever associate British Petroleum with dinosaurs because my parents taped a dinosaur special on VHS and the big BP oil spill had happened so they were running lots of repetitive ads, so to get through my educational dinosaur show I had to at the very least regularly fast forward through these ads.

Yeah, I agree that it is time consuming and distracting. When I was able to do it, I was studying full-time so I could afford the time and effort.

These days I hardly look up any words (digitally or otherwise) 😭

sweet - thanks for broadening my perspective!

I wonder what fields are the most networked on LinkedIn.

For example, I know for a while (like 7+ years ago now), Twitter was a place where programmers were networking and jobs could be secured that way.

oh, interesting - yeah, I try not to let the marketing dominate my associations, but tbh it’s impossible to control that; blue does seem to be a corporate favorite.

I usually think about the time I spent as a kid looking at a cylindrical bulb that had a rainbow color spectrum, I loved the color and especially the blues.

have fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance

I didn’t expect to be most places I ended up.

I wonder if linkedin is actually a way people get jobs (if it ever was) 🤔

I Saw the TV Glow

I wouldn’t recommend it to cis people, but maybe to some trans folks.

that fade from blue to purple

I use dark mode on my personal devices and light mode on my work devices, that way the screens feel more different and being on my personal devices don’t make me feel as much like I’m at work.

A word that is sometimes used is “piquant”, rocket is just another kind of mustard essentially and it can be hot like mustard can be (think how wasabi is spicy; the greens are not as spicy as wasabi generally, but it’s on the same spectrum).

this probably won’t help you, but just in case:

I went through a phase in my development where I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. There was a constant tension between wanting to stay with what I was reading and wanting to look up a word.

I got in the habit of keeping a pad of paper and a pencil nearby when reading, and I made it a habit to look up each word I wanted to know - I could either look it up later and keep reading, or I could look it up right then. After a while I got faster at navigating the alphabetic order of the dictionary and I could open the dictionary close to where the word would be. It was just a matter of practice.

Writing the word down was not just a deferral strategy, but also a way for me to memorize and appreciate the word I looked up - I put in effort to stop reading and look it up in a separate book, and when I first started I would keep forgetting the word and I had to look up words multiple times. Writing it down at first let me quickly refer back to recent words I was trying to learn or remember, but I noticed even just writing it at all made it more likely I wouldn’t forget in the first place (so my pad of paper wasn’t even all that necessary as a reference, though I could and sometimes did use it that way).

This is all much more effort than the digital approaches you are talking about, but it was a method that really helped me learn. I would say the learning phase was really intensive for a three to four month period, then it leveled out and I was looking up words less frequently and it was less necessary. It was especially helpful to study the etymology and learn Latin and Greek roots, which then helped me piece together the meaning of words without a dictionary (just from context and etymological guesses). For a while I even stopped carrying a dictionary, and instead carried a concise etymology dictionary, which let me learn the roots of the word and generally had much less about the definition (but gave me better access to the meaning and being able to memorize it).