men of lemmy, if you've ever taken estrogen, what was it like?
men of lemmy, if you've ever taken estrogen, what was it like?
Just wondering what the experience is like for cis men who have experienced estrogen dominance...
I've read that there are accounts of side effects in men who take estrogen for prostate cancer and who experience depression.
There are also the famous cases of Alan Turing and David Reimer. Was hoping for more first hand accounts of what the cis male experience is like on estrogen.
Just wondering if anyone has experiences they're willing to share. Thanks!
I did estrogen monotherapy for about 2 months earlier this year. Quite frankly, the only changes I noticed was an immediate and significant increase in nipple sensitivity+size, and a reduction of nighttime erections. Other than that I didn't notice any of the early changes which I had been lead to expect within the first few weeks: no emotional differences, no reduction in skin oiliness, no changes in body temperature, etc.
For what it's worth, I was taking 1.4ml/week of 40% estradiol enanthate without any antiandrogens, am in my early 20s and have a very low body mass.
is it ok to ask why you were taking estrogen monotherapy? Also, enanthate (EEn) as an ester is common with trans DIY HRT, but I've never heard of a pharmacy in the US having it (seems like valerate and cypionate are the two esters available).
I raise this because my question was for cis men, but it sounds like you were self administering estrogen likely for reasons that make you not a cis man 😅 (EDIT: based on your comments in femboy and trans communities, I'm pretty sure you're not the target demographic for my question, regardless of how you happen to identify currently).
2 months is not long given EEn's half life, it's possible your body continued to experiencd testosterone dominance for most of that time, I would guess the second month was more likely when you would experience loss of involuntary night-time erections, etc.
Did you get blood work to check your estrogen and testosterone blood levels during this time?
Re-reading your original question, it should have been pretty obvious in retrospect that I am not really in the target audience. welp, my bad :P
I didn't get any blood work done unfortunately, since my doctor's office refuses to do it without a specific request from my GP (and the whole reason I wanted to do a trial run DIY was because I can't realistically do this kind of stuff the legit way at the moment), so I just went with a dose a bit higher than the dosages I'd seen recommended online for "most" people and figured it was unlikely that that wouldn't be enough. Since I saw nipple changes almost immediately I assumed that it was doing the trick, but the expected other effects just never came and I stopped when my nipples had become large enough that I was about to start needing a bra to stop them visibly poking through my shirt.
I didn't really consider that the longer half-life was super relevant to the "startup delay", most resources I found online seemed to show it nearly reaching the steady state level after only one or two doses. If that was actually the problem that's a pretty big derp on my part, but I'm already planning to give it another shot once I'm not living at home.