#anecdata

[nonartrose]

Transgender Woman's Anecdotal HRT Changes For The First Month

So, I am a trans woman and looking into transgender HRT (Hormone Replacement Treatment) before getting it, I noticed that the listed changes start from 1 month after starting HRT, however, I started to notice changes literrally 1 hour after I started (vein collapse in hands, felt like slow Pop Rocks). So, since then I have kept a diary of changes over those first 4 weeks, so that I could add to the existent anec-data out there. I don't feel like going day by day is necessary or useful, so I will just condense my findings into a giant list. CAVEAT: Hormone Treatment is different for everyone, everyone's body reacts to the treatment differently, so just because I experience something in the first month that you didn't doesn't mean that either of us is wrong. ALSO: fun fact: you don't have to get Transgender HRT to be a "propper" trans person. Anyway, list:

Softer skin

Colder hands (due to hair-line veins collapsing in extremities)

Softer hair on my entire body and the hair on my head can take slightly harsher hair products without frizzing as much as before

Potentially started seeing new hair growth at my hair line (which was quite high before)

Slightly reduced hair growth on face and on legs especially

I smell different and scents/deodorant smell different on me

Mood swings

A general sense of being happier that previous

Anger-based emotions such as frustration and rage feel less "complex", "deep" and intense than they did before

Empathy-based emotions such as love and understanding feel more "complex", "deeper" and more intense than they did before

I am more patient and understand with myself, and slightly more with others

Crying starts much more easily and the tears that come feel less viscous than they did before

My eyes often get wet simply by smiling

I get over big emotional moments more easily and quickly than before

Slight breast growth (soreness started after the first month)

Subjectively it kind of feels like puberty (genuinely thought I had homework assigned one day. I am 29 and not in college)

Alcohol affects me more quickly and intensely than before

Potentially more back problems than before HRT (this is an ongoing situation that I have yet to be tested for, I think it could be that my body isn't great at absorbing Oestrogen and so my body's concentration of sex hormones is too low which can lead to complications with back and joints)

I am personally less attracted to men than I was previous (I wasn't Bi, but I did have a man fetish, which seems to have disappeared)

I bruise slightly more easily

Several times I have woken up half an hour before my alarm because I had to go to the bathroom in spite of the fact that I went just before bed

(intimate details, don't read if you don't want to know) my penis is smaller when flaccid, it is more difficult to get erect, it is more difficult to cum, my libido is almost non-existent, and ejaculate lost the white colour after a couple of weeks Hopefully this can be of some anecdotal use to some people and give at bit of hope that changes are coming, and as soon as you start. They are slow, but they start from day one. Update 1: From talking to a nurse today, it seems that my body has had quite a big and immediate reaction to the hormones, more so that what is expected. It may be that my body accept changes more quickly, it may be that my body is good at accepting the oestrogen, or it may be due to something which I as a layperson don't know about. If I get an analysis of test result back which indicates something specific as to why I have had so many affects in my first month, I'll be sure to share it here. Update 2: Got the test result back, and I have actually had quite a small increase in estradiol in my body, going from 0.05 nmol/L, 1 month before start to 0.10 nmol/L, the day before to 0.17 nmol/L, 1.5 months after start, so who knows how I have had so many changes take place. Since the estradiol level is so low, I have decided to take my estradiol pill sublingually, which means placing it under the tongue and letting it dissolve. So far, I have noticed a difference in the feeling I get when I take it. Despite my body having regulated to the estradiol taken orally, taking the estradiol sublingually has the same feeling as taking the estradiol for the first time did. So, fingers crossed that we're seeing up to a doubling of the estradiol effect.

[un-corazon-enfermo]

Hoy fui a patinar en una pista de hielo era mi primera vez, sentía miedo así que pedí ayuda a un chico, mientras lo intentaba escuchaba que las personas decían “no sabe patinar que pendeja” “da me tu teléfono tengo que grabar esto” “que tonta”, en ese momento no le tome importancia, después me caí y todas las personas se burlaron de mi, entonces me dieron ganas de llorar (no podía hacerlo o me verían como una llorona) y me fui de ahí, es increíble como algunas personas son una mierda.

[bomberqueen17]

Tonight’s question, over dinner, was brother-in-law wondering what people in other countries/regions have on their dinner tables, condiments-wise. 

Like, we always have salt and pepper on the table, and with various meals there are specific condiments that are traditional. (Syrup for pancakes, ketchup for french fries, salsa for basically anything with tortillas and some things over eggs, jam for toast, butter for bread. That kind of thing.) 

behind the cut, more discussion and examples, and a question: what condiments live on your table, and where do you live (you don’t have to be specific)?

My dude’s mother is Latvian and has a lot of cute salt-and-pepper-shaker sets from Latvia, and they always include a third container, a little pot for mustard. She grew up in the US and so has never actually filled that pot, but kept the sets, because they came with her parents from the old country. She’s not sure you can get the right kind of mustard here, though.

My other brother-in-law is from Mississippi/Louisiana, and it was a running joke in our family to put a shaker of... some brand-name of cayenne seasoning mix in salt, that he liked to put on things but we’d never heard of. Tony’s or something. I’ve stayed in his house, though, and while he frequently cooks with spice mixes like that, he doesn’t actually keep them on his table. 

Farmsister had an Indian boyfriend in college who claimed that growing up, coriander and cumin were like salt and pepper to him, and Farmsister admitted she’d firsthand-witnessed that his dad had a drawer of whole spices in metal canisters that he pulled out and set on the counter whenever he was cooking. She qualified this statement, though, by saying those wouldn’t really be condiments on the table, but seasonings added by the cook to the whole dish, so it wasn’t the same thing, and she figured he was being poetic. 

FarmManager was over for dinner (he often is; Farmsister always complains about having to cook for everyone but then she frets that it’s inefficient to have him always cooking for himself when it would be so easy to just feed him too. He reciprocates, though, sometimes, and it’s kind of great, he’s a great cook) and commented that when he’d stayed in B&B’s in the UK they’d had bottles of HP Brown Sauce on the table all the time. I pointed out, though, that that’s more like a restaurant. That’s not the same as what a person would have on the table in their house. It’d be like an American always having ketchup on the table-- a lot of American restaurants do, because the food you eat in a restaurant so frequently needs ketchup, but that’s not the same as the stuff most of us eat at home.  

I do know of people who keep red pepper sauce-- like tabasco, or Frank’s hot sauce, or similar, the bright red, vinegar-based kind of hot sauce like they use on wings-- on the table and apply it to almost everything they eat, but I don’t know how one would live like that. I like the stuff, but find it doesn’t go with most foods. Still, I reckon that’s a common enough Americanism-- and you see a relic of that in the fact that so many of the US military’s MRE rations include miniature bottles of Tabasco hot sauce packaged with them. It’s clearly a common enough thing that the demand warranted their inclusion. 

In most East Asian food restaurants-- Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, fancy Chinese-- there are usually little jars of chili sauce in oil on the table, often not labeled, and you kind of have to guess what they are. Some are powerfully hot, some complex and garlicky. But would you have that stuff at home? My dude liked the stuff at the local pho restaurant so much he went and bought it at the store the waitress suggested, and he puts it in just about everything, but we don’t leave it on the table-- the only thing we keep on the table is the salt and the pepper.

As a kid, though, my mom sometimes forgot to put salt and pepper onto the table, and never salted the food much. I grew up with a very middle-America palate, of not many seasonings and an emphasis on the plain unadorned taste of the food. We also never had fresh garlic in the house. This kind of thing has fortunately gone out of style, but it remains a bit ingrained in the habits-- Farmsister and I both tend to be very light-handed with salt when cooking, so a lot of times, everyone at the table has to pass the salt-shaker around. It frequently does not occur to me to salt my food even if it is bland; I often wait for my dude to season his food, and then just copy him, because I honestly have such an underdeveloped palate I think. [The joke with the salt on the table for my brother in law was because the first time his mother came to visit my parents, Mom set the table all fancy and forgot to set the salt and pepper back on the table after she’d got the tablecloth and centerpiece all situated, and none of the rest of us noticed because we were used to our food being a little bit bland, but all the Southerners were eyeing one another and deciding if it would be rude to ask. None did, and when Mom finally heard the story, she was of course mortified. They were right there on the sideboard! She just hadn’t thought to put them back onto the table! So for seven years she gave my brother-in-law bags of exotic salts for Christmas, and at formal dinners marked his place with a wall made of every salt shaker she owned.]

The Assistant Livestock Manager likes to be able to taste the salt in everything she eats, to the point that Farmsister has given up refilling the decorative salt shaker, and has a jar of salt with a little spoon on it that she leaves on the back of the stove for ALM to avail herself of. It’s dead handy for cooking, though, so I admire this innovation.

I like spicy food, though, unlike my parents, who can’t tolerate even a little crushed red pepper sprinkled on their pizza. I don’t order the hot wings, but I order medium; I figure if your lips are chapped you should suffer a bit, but you don’t need to feel it the next day, if you know what i mean. 

Anyway-- what condiments live on your table?

[definitlynotdwr]

A Personal Canadian Political Reckoning

For most of my adult life, I identified as left-of-centre. I supported progressive policies on social issues, the environment, and equality. But over the past few years—especially now, at 51—I’ve found myself increasingly out of step with parts of the contemporary left. Not because my values changed, but because many of the policies being pushed today feel more disruptive than constructive. They…

View On WordPress

[thearbourist]

Grok'n on the Arbourist - A Political Analysis

I asked Grok to evaluate my posts on X and describe where I am on the political spectrum.  The AI analysis seems about right. 🙂   Given a more nuanced analysis of your posts, you appear to straddle a space on the political spectrum that can be described as:   Right-Libertarian: Your critique of carbon taxes and skepticism towards government intervention in personal freedoms (e.g., your comments…

[thearbourist]

The Pronoun Equivocation - "Respect"

Having recently gotten into a discussion about the misnamed “Gender Affirming Care” with some of my acquaintances we broached many contentious topics but one point that stuck out was when we got into pronoun territory. My interlocutor was brought up the idea that the shortening of names – like Stan for Stanley – was a preference and that people were just being polite by referring to the…

View On WordPress

[thisisgraeme]

Celebrating Educator Experiences: The Role of Anecdata and Case Studies in Understanding Teaching

What the heck is “anecdata”? Last week, while tuning into a podcast featuring Dr. Andrew Huberman, a renowned neuroscientist with a vast online following, and Tim Ferriss, famous for his self-experimentation and books like “The Four Hour Workweek,” I stumbled upon an intriguing term: “anecdata“. This blend of ‘anecdote’ and ‘data’ was used repeatedly to describe the evidence underpinning their…

View On WordPress

[ambidisastrous]

has anyone else's inboxes had a notable uptick in junk mail not getting filtered out lately?