#testosterone help

[undefbug]

the transmasc transitioning experience is really just being told again and again that you’re making yourself gross. which there is a big narrative surrounding all transitioning no matter which side that you’re going to end up “undesirable” i think there’s a lot of hate surrounding trans masculine transition that surrounds becoming a gross man.

really it’s enough of a mental challenge going from fem presentation where any body hair is immediately seen as disgusting to trying to become comfortable with yourself in masculine transition with your body hair. even facial hair which is something that is a big part of masculine transition and something a lot of trans masc people may look forward to can still bring shame and guilt especially around how people will perceive you with that very masculine presentation.

honestly in my personal experiences with medical transition, the amount of negative comments i’ve gotten on body hair and facial hair from close people in my life can be disheartening and really does push on that “gross man” mentality, i transitioned for those traits. i transitioned to be a big hairy guy with a nice beard. and people thinking that’s gross or whatever shouldn’t take the fun and euphoria out of transitioning. but it does sometimes and that sucks

remember that’s it’s okay to be big and hairy and masculine! it’s beautiful too!!!

[transmascissues]

it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?

first of all, i don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what you’d look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it can’t hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.

basically, entertain the possibility that it won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you don’t find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and don’t like how it looks, your life won’t be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.

just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad that’s making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.

[davidthephoneguy]

Hey uh I need a lil help to afford to see a doctor about getting a Testosterone prescription and I don't think my new job is gonna be able to provide the money needed in time so I'm asking for help

I don't really know how you're meant to ask for help like this so I feel a little embarrassed about it without like making it an exchange of some kind so I'll do a game stream if I reach the goal and any commissions go to it as well, my commissions are 5% off on Ko-Fi

I just need some amount of money before the 20th of August

[seri-tonin]

You can't tell me he wasn't getting hrt from the demon while he was a dungeon lord

[uncanny-tranny]

I'm going to be real, I've been on testosterone for multiple years and my levels have been very consistently high and whatnot, and yet I haven't gotten to the point where my testosterone "makes" me act in possessive, creepy ways toward women. Not even the women who are drop-dead gorgeous to me!

And that's because it's not about testosterone. It's about the way you choose to interact with women. When you devalue them already, no amount of testosterone is going to influence you further.

[holy-reference-in-a-username]

Just did my first T shot by myself yesterday!! Perhaps you could draw smthn about tord doing his own t shots?

Content warning: needles

CONGRATS!!!! I FEEL BAD FOR NOT ANSWERING THIS SOONER!!!

i dont personally hc tord as transmasc, but he would definitely pretend to use tom's prescription to fuck with him (hes actually just giving himself a shot of vodka. shhhh its fine)

[oddparentsaday]

trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo trans cosmo

[venstm]

so, for anyone who saw my previous post tonight one of our pipes burst which has caused a great deal of damage to a lot of our house. we're doing all we can to try and clean up on our own but if anyone can help by donating that would be immensely appreciated. i spent the last few hours alternating between wanting to cry and scooping water into our bath to try and minimalize the damage.

i'll add the link here and some photos under the cut so people can see what has happened.

[slutforpringles]

visacashapprb: Time to regroup and learn from Quali as we get prepped for race day 🇳🇱

[lekrow]

Self Portrait '23 10" x 8" Gouache

A loose still life of my packer and my man juice 🤠 The colors in the actual painting are way too vibrant for my camera to interpret correctly and despite painstakingly adjusting the colors in ps, every digital screen I've viewed the images on look significantly different so 😂hopefully it looks okay on everyone else's end. (This and CBT were both made for an art show about penises in case anyone is sensing a theme lol.)

[yuribeam]

I need to see some transition timelines from fat transmascs / nonbinary folks / others on low dose testosterone aiming for androgyny

[de-pengu]

they need to start selling testosterone in lil capri sun packs, much more fun…

[transmascissues]

i love helping other transmascs speedrun getting over their doubts and fears about going on t. there are two people in my personal life who have been contemplating going on t for a while, and both of them talked to me about it because i’m the resident Guy On T, and by the end of our conversations one of them was fully decided that they want to start t and the other had realized the thing that had been stopping them was actually probably not a real barrier at all. i’m making it my life’s mission to become the little trans devil on as many people’s shoulders as possible whispering “you should totally go on t i think you would really like it” in their ears. maybe the real transgender craze seducing our daughters was the friends we made along the way.

[davidthephoneguy]

HEY HEY JUST GONNA SAY TIME IS REALLY RUNNING OUT GUYS 14 DAYS ARE LEFT FOR ME TO GET THE MONEY FOR HRT AND IM STILL AT 26% PLEASE HELP I AM BEGGING I WILL DO ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING

Please just share this anywhere, even off site PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I WANT TO BE ABLE TO AFFORD HRT BY THE TIME THE APPOINTMENT COMES

[ransomdemands]

yknow sometimes the way trans women talk about testosterone and being on estrogen is indistinguishable from the way terfs try to convince afab people not to start hrt

this is not a criticism mind you, their experiences are their own and completely legitimate, it's just a matter of competing needs - they need a safe space to talk about their dysphoria and how testosterone makes them feel and i need to not hear about how i am destroying my body with hrt

ordinarily these things are pretty insular to transfem circles but since instagram has been feeding me transfem content i'm seeing it more and more and yet again the algorithm is fucking me

[uncanny-tranny]

For some reason last night, I felt like celebrating something and then I looked at my clock and it's my T-versary.

I thought about doing a "changes I've noticed" kind of post, but if I'm honest, the physical changes pail in comparison to the sheer contentment I feel. It's a feeling that no words are adequate, so words are not needed. I hope everyone feels this way - I certainly never thought I could, ever would. And yet, it is something I've had for years now.