What? Hormones Were Life Changing?

Nadine Spirit writes about what taking estrogen has done for her:

So, how about this for a life rewrite? 1 - I was sad as a young child because I couldn’t rectify the discord between my male body and my female brain. 2 - I got super pissed as a teenager, because my body began developing secondary male characteristics. 3 - My vast sexual drive was actually a combination of an intense attraction to the feminine and an attempt to be as close to anything feminine as I could without it appearing to be anything related to my gender. 4 - The difficulties with my wife have actually been me being just a bit pissed off because, you know, I’m actually a woman who was trying to live life pretending to be a man.

In short - I have spent about 30 years or so thinking that I am a sad, angry, almost sexually addicted individual, and in reality as it turns out, nope, it’s just that I’m a woman. Simple right?

Hmm…… yeah, that’s a pretty life changing realization. Now, who really knows why exactly I have done what I have done and why I was who I was, but I will tell you the whole, I’m a woman thing makes so much more sense.

Read the whole blog post here.

(Via T-Central)

Studies Find That Transgender Hormone Therapy Is Less Risky Than Birth Control Pills

PR Newswire reports:

Novel studies published in the Men’s Health Issue of AACC’s journal Clinical Chemistry suggest that hormone therapy for transgender people increases the risk of blood clots less than birth control pills and does not increase the risk of cardiovascular disease at all. These preliminary results could help more transgender individuals to access essential hormone therapy by increasing physician comfort with prescribing it.

Dina N. Greene, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle and her research team estimated that in transgender women prescribed estrogen, blood clots only occur at a rate of 2.3 per 1,000 person-years. This is higher than the estimated incidence rate of blood clots in the general population (1.0-1.8 per 1,000 person-years), but it is less than the estimated rate in premenopausal women taking oral contraceptives (3.5 per 1,000 person-years).

Given that hormone therapy can save a transgender woman’s life, I think we can agree that this is an acceptable risk.

How the Next Generation of Doctors Is Learning to Treat Transgender People

Samantha Allen writes over at Fusion:

A recent study suggests that a transgender person walking into an endocrinologist’s office to begin medical transition has less than a two-thirds chance of receiving that treatment. That study, published in Endocrine Practice, found that only 63% of endocrinology providers at a 2015 conference were willing to provide hormone therapy for transgender patients. Half hadn’t even read the Endocrine Society’s 2009 readily available guidelines for that treatment.
But there was a silver lining: 70% of providers under age 40 had read the guidelines. If that’s indicative a broader trend, the next generation of endocrinologists could change the map for transgender health care. Someday in the not-too-distant future, as pioneering young doctors reshape the medical world, transgender patients may be able to access state-of-the-art hormone therapy as easily as diabetics receive insulin prescriptions.