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what is your science

My dearest Anon, thank you for giving me this gift and a great opportunity to not reply to my emails, i keep re-writing my answer because >2500 words (without sources just yet) seems like a bit much for a tumblr post (might still end up around that range at some point though, depending on how much background I'm putting in) so please stand by on that, full yappy answer might come later today or sometime in the next few days

I’m currently working on my thesis on the effect of gender affirming hormone therapy on the immune systems of transgender people, with a main focus on epigenomic modifications, innate immunity, and innate immune memory! (im also interested in adaptive immunity in this context, like what's going on with memory lymphocytes, but for now i'm mainly working with peripheral blood and bone marrow (derived) cells).

Or as my friends have taken to calling me, I’m a ✨transgender blood scientist✨!

If you’ve been following me for a couple of months you will have probably seen me post about asking people if they have blood and if i may please have said blood? That is part of my project! :3 (I have a couple of ongoing things so we can tackle this from a wide variety of angles and are better capable of getting a full picture)

Anyway, full proper reply later, either in the reblogs or I'll update the post and then reblog it so it pops up again in the dash, i do sadly actually have emails to send (they are finding me sort of well)

Slightly more proper reply now! I did so well on my email reply as well! Truly stellar, I think I appologised for the 'all over the place-ness' and 'general scatter brain' at least three times but i did open with stating that i wasnt able to look at the data due to bad headache

My main background is in molecular life sciences with a specialisation in epigenomics, immunology is much more new to me but it is a lot of fun! (dont yell at me for saying immunology is new, virus production is very much something different than what im doing now)(also i am actually decently familliar with immunoligy now so i wouldnt say that it is newnew, but still newer than the things i actually have degree in)

So anyway, my science under the read more! (structure is all over the place and generally sorta scatterbrained but i think legible and hopefully understandable!) Feel free to ask any and all questions on anything i say in reblogs or tags or comments or messages, i love to talk about my science

What do I mean gender affirming hormone therapy (GAHT, often people say HRT) affects the immune system?

Well, GAHT affects nearly everything in your body! And our immune systems are sexually dimorphic. In general, cisgender women tend to have better outcomes to infections when compared to cisgender men but that leaves them at an increased risk for autoimmune diseases.

The exact mechanisms behind this difference are not fully parsed out, and how much of this difference is hormonal and how much is genomic is unknown. Lets be honest, they both affect each other anyway! Yes your genes are pretty set but like, hormones are able to make epigenomic alterations (simplistically, the epigenome are changes made on top of your DNA, they raise flags for genes that need to be used and put up stop signs or tightly pack away genes that aren’t needed)(yes there is so much more to it, this is really so very simplistically said). Specifically GAHT makes feminising or masculinising alterations (yay!).

We know that people on GAHT have an immune phenotype that is more in line with that of their gender, but again, what specifically causes that immune phenotype is unknown! And, there are still differences between the immune phenotypes of cis and trans people of the same gender.

So we want to look into how GAHT affects the immune system, looking into functional immune responses, and integrating that with a broad -omics (epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, we are debating if we also want to look at the metabolome) analysis approach.

Alright, that seems fair, so what do I actually do?

Firstly! The largest part of my project that I might not even be able to actually complete before I need to finish up (but hopefully will be able to continue working on but then as phd candidate or otherwise researcher) is collecting blood from trans people without and with gaht (and on different time durations of gaht) and running a whole bunch of tests on the cells in there!!!

Sad thing is that i will be doing the analysis of the samples all at the same time so ive actually not got a whole lot to show for it for a while despite it being my main source of stress.... (Im buildign both longitudinal and cross sectional cohorts of both feminising and masculinising gaht (so E and T) but for the longitudinal stuff i need to wait for the people to actually have that time on gaht for the follow-up samples)

But there are other things that I'm doing in the mean time!

Thing ive been losing my mind over the past 2-3ish weeks is bone marrow, megakaryocytes, and platelets. (cz that side of the project has finally started picking up!) There is a good immune related reason to look into platelets (which im also doing) but for hormone relatedness i feel like it is really important to get actual data on the blood clot and thromboembolism risk for transgender women! like if it is actually true and what the mechanism for that is! (platelets are some of the really important things that make up blood clots.) So I’m currently (well, not right now, rn I ran a test run with interesting results and more data to still look at but stopped cultures until after im back from vacation) working on transing megakaryocytes and getting them to produce platelets in various conditions to assess how the clotting potential is affected, and also how their cargo changes. (immune reasons we are looking into them is to see if they are trainable and how that would influence clotting and interactions with other immune cells, also with looking at their composition and cargo n stuffs)

✨Im transing so many cells :3✨

In general you can assume that i am transing a lot of cells, firstly by directly adding hormones and measuring but that is giving us the acute responses, so im also working on in vitro gaht models where i am able to differentiate cells into ones further down the haematopoietic lineage in the presence of all the various sex hormones in their biological concentrations. Then i can compare the cis-like and trans-like cells and their omics and responses, which gives great direct comparisons but i am still working on validating that the trans-like and cis-like states are similar in responsiveness to the same cells when harvested from trans and cis people.

Yay that is so cool! Transgender blood scientist really does sound like an apt descritption!

Yes i am also still indeed asking people about their blood and if i can come into possession of it, and i do work with a lot of blood but in essence i am functioning as an immunologist right now and not a blood scientist, haematology is a completely separate thing (lovely people, big fan, their emails are gigantic, holy shit)

Also assorted things:

Yes ive made a bunch of forcefemming/forcemasking jokes already!

Yes I did sneak the pamphlet on DIY HRT into my supervisor’s paper pile on the off chance that his continued joke comments about desiring to have more oestradiol in him do have something true to them

Anyway!

This turned into more of a ramble more directly on my science, as in the science that i am performing, moreso than the scientific knowledge that the scientists want you to know in my science but I have a headache and cannot be arsed to sort through all of my sources to properly cite in the responses that i wrote earlier that are more like reviews... that might still come at some point (i want to have something like that written anyway, even just as an overview for myself, but not now)

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