I'm afab nb and my ideal body type is feminine with masc features (so like not getting top surgery but having facial hair, deep voice, etc) how exactly does T affect my fat distribution? I have somewhat wide hips that I like and want to keep, but idk if going on T will take that from me
For the purposes of this post I’m going to break fat redistribution into two parts: “Big” and “little” changes. That’s really just for ease of explanation and because I’m blanking on better terminology to use.
Big changes encourage body fat to move away from your hips, thighs, and butt and to settle around your midsection instead. This is usually what people call “fat redistribution”, and it’s limited by your bone structure, as well as by your genetic tendency to keep a certain amount of body fat in “storage”. You don’t lose any muscle tone, and the alignment of, say, your hips and knees doesn’t change (e.g. testosterone doesn’t give you a thigh gap).
Little changes aren’t really little but are just... smaller in scale. Fat deposits in your breasts aren’t maintained as much on testosterone, because your body essentially doesn’t think that it has breasts; this usually means that people’s chests are less full or that their breasts sag a little more, though it’s not significant enough to flatten their chest. Your face shape also changes; usually people’s faces broaden slightly, especially in the jaw and forehead. It can be subtle or really obvious, and there are a lot of youtube videos you can find under “picture a day” where people document their faces changing over months or years. Also, weirdly, some people go up 2-3 shoe sizes on testosterone. I’m still mad about that.
In practice: I can’t really predict if your proportions will change to the point where your hips don’t look wide anymore. It might be your bones, currently, or it might be fat distribution; the latter would change on T, and the former wouldn’t but might look less apparent if your overall body shape changed. Anecdotally, I was fairly pear-shaped prior to T, and have since gone to just... rectangular. I still have wide hips and a butt, but fat redistribution shifted most of my body fat deposits to my abdomen and over my iliac crest, which has squared the whole outline out.
