I've been off of my low dose post menopausal testosterone for a month bc the only compounding pharmacy is too far away and I'm too busy and it's fascinating to watch all the health problems that went away on it creep back. It's such solid evidence that yeah, maybe more cis women need T and more cis men need E probably to actually live healthy functional lives but we're so binary and stupid about sex and gender that T is the Man Hormone and E is the Woman Hormone and there's a baseline for cis people??? Insanity. Insane. Absolutely insane.
Off of T, my joint pain is back, my blood pressure is up, I've gained weight, I'm volatile if I don't control myself, I'm constantly an emotional wreck, and I can barely get out of bed. It took me years to get them to let me try T, and they kept arguing that all of those things would get worse ON T. I fucking hate modern medical science modern sex and gender science too bc my queer clinic was shocked to hear all this. Genuinely. They don't get it despite being THE local hormone clinic for queer folks specifically. They don't understand intersex bodies or that maybe our baselines are bullshit on an individual basis. All of modern sex and gender science absolutely ignores the natural sex differences in most people.
How many people get put on the wrong hormone for their wellness? Cis or trans. Because we've assigned hormones to gender. How many cis women deal with worsening body pain and mental issues bc they were put on estrogen when they needed T? Why are we gendering fucking hormones
I've had a billion doctors say the same shit to me. Last time I got my presh checked in-office on T, it was 110/70. Literally as perfect as it can get.
I was misdiagnosed with PCOS, but I have CAH. My blood pressure was critically high for most of my life and I was always told to lose weight. When I say critically, I mean 160/120 nearly every single fucking time. Dangerous. BP meds helped get it to a safer high, and testosterone got it to low-perfect.
I want to strangle every single doctor who nearly killed me by ignoring that critical BP and blaming ME for it. Don't ever let doctors convince you that there's nothing at all they can do on their end. Or that hormones are specifically bad for you in one direction or the other. Estrogen has nearly killed me and since I'm a cis woman, estrogen is supposed to "be the right hormone" to "fix" me. It never was.
On the other end: I'm trans and I'm on Testosterone to accomplish my gender goals like a year ago. I also was diagnosed with fibromyalgia about 2.5-3 years ago and it's widely believed there's no treatment options to manage fibromyalgia aside from exercise and muscle relaxers... which is only given in worst case scenarios.
Since starting testosterone? My symptoms have alieviated- not entirely vanished- but I have more energy and control over my life and my pain is far more manageable than when I was initially diagnosed. I relied on a cane around the time of my diagnosis. Now, most days I don't need it since my symptoms have improved and allowed me to improve my health.
I don't think T is the magic cure-all for my disability but holy shit my quality of life has drastically improved.
As someone who had fibro suggested but then got diagnosed with EDS and also still have pain but it's like cut in half? Yeah. I legitimately thought I was on a downward decline to an early grave bc I was so dysfunctional from pain. Now it's manageable.
Also - is it fibro? Is it EDS? Will we ever know the truth? Probably not :)
I really want everyone to know that modern medical science is AWARE that testosterone is an effective treatment for fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, and estrogen is not. This doesn't work for everyone and exactly how it works isn't quite settled science, but it's been known for like a decade. A LOT of doctors don't know this, because they're not up to date on the research, or are resistant to the idea because of perisexism/cissexism/prejudice against people with mixed sex characteristics in general/a misconception that giving a patient mixed sex characteristics is inherently harmful. BUT. Science, as a whole, knows! and more people should know!
Here's a fibromyalgia-specific review article that I think is well-written and has a non-technical summary of the main points. It should be open-access but let me know if you can't get at the full text.
Fibromyalgia is a diffuse chronic pain condition that occurs predominantly in women and may be under-reported in men. Symptoms include a los
White HD, Robinson TD. A novel use for testosterone to treat central sensitization of chronic pain in fibromyalgia patients. Int Immunopharmacol. 2015 Aug;27(2):244-8. doi: 10.1016/j.intimp.2015.05.020. Epub 2015 May 21. PMID: 26004314.
This article is TEN YEARS OLD. I'm printing this out and taking it to the gender clinic and stapling it to the nonbinary doctor's forehead that denied my intersex ass T gel because I identity as a woman and it would "make me gain weight and make my blood pressure go up." A nonbinary doctor told me this. A nonbinary doctor denied me fucking hormones that could have been helping me this whole time. A nonbinary doctor led the charge on forcing me to keep taking an antidepressant that was keeping me awake for days straight and making my kidneys hurt.
I'm so fucking mad. Not at the person providing this article - I'm pissed that I waited months on a waiting list to see this nonbinary doctor, hoping they'd be the change I needed, and in the end I had to hunt down a cis OBGYN with PCOS to medicate me properly. I'm sick of intersexism. I know three other local intersex people that this specific doctor has denied care to. Fuck.
Trans intersexism, y'all.
