HRT advice: When to start?
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.
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.
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
