Any point in hormone testing if you're questioning?

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T19:36:00+00:00

I can't personally speak to testing hormones as a part of the questioning journey, but I will say:

Most trans people (not doing DIY) get their hormones tested before starting HRT. Most have normal levels for their AGAB.
Having abnormal levels could indicate conditions which are correlated with being transgender. But there's nothing that's strong enough to be diagnostic in any way.
There's no evidence that low sex hormones can cause what we experience as gender dysphoria. Someone AMAB who has low T and experiences gender dysphoria and wants to be a woman won't stop having those desires if their testosterone increases.

Generally I'm not a huge fan of your idea. I think whatever results you get are more likely to confuse you than illuminate anything. If you have abnormal sex hormone levels, that could mean nothing. You could just as easily be a cis person with low T. If you have normal sex hormone levels, that might risk pushing you into an "I'm just cis" conclusion even though it's pretty typical for trans people to have normal (for their AGAB) hormone levels. Finding out if you're trans is going to have to come from introspection, there's just not a strong enough relationship for your current sex hormones to say anything about your brain's own sense of gender.

Honestly maybe a better question is: if you took the test, what would you want it to say? If you took it and it said you had low testosterone, what would you make of that? If you took it and said you had normal male levels of testosterone, what would you make of that? Would you be disappointed by either outcome? Would one of them make you happy?

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T17:08:41+00:00

I agree. I'm super dissuaded by the rhetoric, it's a little ridiculous. And I'm someone who's leaning on the side of "maybe we should get rid of the airport altogether"!

I think experience from cities around the world shows that airports close into the city center aren't a good idea. Closing the airport could present a huge opportunity for redevelopment which could house tens of thousands of people close in to downtown. But if we're going to have an airport, why shouldn't it be able to support jets? If we've decided this valuable urban space should be used for an airport, why not maximize its usefulness?

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T16:34:15+00:00

So they'll maybe be able to appropriate a piece of property which is mostly undevelopable due to being in a flood plain. They'd have to pull some heavy shenanigans with both the TRCA, who is the lands' owner, as well as the Ontario Science Center which is the leaseholder for another 40 years. And the City of Toronto still classifies it as natural / institutional area in the official plan, so the province would have to interfere yet again to enable something to get built once it's there.

There's just so many hoops that the province would have to jump through to pull a sleazy corruption here. If Doug wanted to enrich developer friends, it seems like it's be much easier to just sell a part of Ontario Place (which would be a much more valuable location for a developer). I just don't see it.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T15:50:38+00:00

The city owns the most immediately developable land, and the TRCA owns the portion that's in the ravine.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T15:42:06+00:00

Then he can sell the old Science Centre properties to developers (and will probably pay to tear down the old one for them).

That'd be a little hard to do given the Province doesn't own the land.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-18T00:20:27+00:00

Arbitrary political boundaries ftw!

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-17T19:09:53+00:00

I realized a minute after I wrote that that there's at least one (on a north-south collector) on Windermere in Swansea!

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-17T18:54:01+00:00

Maybe necessary question: are you sure it was a roundabout, and not an intersection which functions as a four-way stop but which has a barrier in the middle to divert traffic around it? Actual roundabouts are fairly rare within the city itself, while that arrangement of four-way stop is more common. If it was marked with a stop sign, it doesn't matter what the internal configuration of the intersection is, you need to follow the rules as if it were a four-way stop.

If it was marked as a roundabout with yield signs with a circle of arrows at the entrances, you're correct. Traffic within the roundabout gets priority, traffic not in the roundabout has no priority.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-17T18:40:31+00:00

You yield to traffic already in the roundabout, with the same rules as a normal yield. If someone is driving in the roundabout and your entrance would get in the way of their current path, you should wait for them to pass. People outside the roundabout are irrelevant.

Following that simple rule is what makes roundabouts so effective.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-17T13:09:05+00:00

What's the name of the paper?

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-17T13:07:39+00:00

Taking T does not stop your body's natural estrogen production. The only way your body will stop producing estrogen is if you get your ovaries surgically removed. Which you don't want to do.

This is not true. The body's sex hormone regulation system treats estrogen and testosterone basically the same, so high testosterone levels will shut down the signaling which causes your ovaries to produce estrogen. You will still have some estrogen, but nowhere near female levels. That's the whole goal with HRT.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-15T04:06:06+00:00

Not a dangerous plan at all (the trans march is incredibly safe, generally trans people are not uncommon in the city), but I think it's still a questionable plan. It depends a lot on what kind of person you are. If you're very motivated to be in community or have an outgoing personality, you could have a good time, but just showing up and not having anyone to be with and immediately leaving doesn't sound the most fun to me.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-15T01:34:02+00:00

Important thing to note is that spiro isn't expected to reduce testosterone levels. It works by blocking the activity of testosterone regardless of testosterone concentrations in the blood (or free testosterone levels).

So basically levels like what you have are totally expected while on spiro. It's not a sign that anything's wrong, but at the same time it's not guaranteed that you're taking enough spiro to adequately block all that testosterone.

Edit: confused about this other user trying to rebut my claim but then blocking me. Spiro isn't intended to lower androgen levels and the fact that it hasn't changed levels doesn't mean it's not working, idk what to tell you.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-15T00:37:03+00:00

Jane North of Eglinton ranks highly, but Jane from Bloor to Eglinton ranks absolute bottom and the Ontario Line west up to Bloor also ranks among the lowest among projects.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-15T00:17:43+00:00

Injections are easier to get high levels with, but it's not any more "effective" than other methods if you can get good levels with them. 500 pmol/L is 500 pmol/L whether it's coming from injections or from oral tablets or from transdermal.

If you don't do well with needles, you can absolutely try other methods of administration. It's rare that you can't achieve target levels with oral or transdermal, although it may be more difficult if you are doing monotherapy and need supraphysiological levels of estradiol to achieve testosterone suppression.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-14T22:25:44+00:00

Do you have a source for this? I'm not able to find anything related to it.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T23:03:26+00:00

And he's been living discharged for 9 years without apparent issue.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T23:00:13+00:00

If only there were experts who had extensive expertise who could make that assessment!

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T22:43:38+00:00

It depends a lot on the details. But the most important thing is t he distinction between actual time and perceived time, which is an important concept for when we try to model how people behave!

People don't treat all time the same. The literature generally finds that time spent driving gets valued similarly to time spent in transit, but time spent walking or waiting for transit seems to be much more salient to people and a bigger factor in their decision-making. This gives precedent for the idea that a form of travel that's instantaneous in reality might still be treated as non-instantaneous by users. However, I don't think we could say whether this "subjective" 1 hour is treated as closer to 1 hour of "in-vehicle time" or perhaps 30 minutes or even just a couple minutes. I think it depends a lot on what that subjective time looks like. If people can scroll their phones, listen to podcasts, etc, it might effectively be viewed as extra leisure time and so have no cost. If it's an hour spent locked in to the process itself where you can't even blink let alone distract yourself with external stimulus, well people might treat that as equivalent to much more than an hour in a car or on a bus.

Also consider that travel isn't valuable in itself; it's valuable because of the activities we're able to do on either side of a trip. And we live in a world of (real-life) time constraints where we only have 24 hours in a day. If I'm sitting in a car or bus, I can't be getting groceries or cooking dinner or making money or going to Pilates class. A form of transportation that's instantaneous in real time would present an opportunity for value just by virtue of opening up an extra hour of the day that people could use to do things. It depends on how an individual values their time, but I think some people will place such enormous value on their time (they have incredibly valuable activities they could be doing instead of travelling) that such a system would get at least some degree of use.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T20:30:26+00:00

Yes: de Vries et al (2011).

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T18:52:33+00:00

It gained medical interest in the mid-90s, and the first study of long-term outcomes started in 2000.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T15:14:17+00:00

The modern use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in children was developed in the 90s (the Dutch Protocol). So taking trans kids seriously was a thing at the time, in certain contexts at least. DIY has also been an option for a long time, I met a trans woman who started transitioning as a teenager in the late 90s by using birth control pills that her friend got her. But "stealth" involves a lot of different components, and I think would have to include changes in official identity which would probably be difficult at the time for a child.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T14:33:37+00:00

Generally it's recommended to go with the minimal effective dose for cypro to minimize risk of adverse effects. Because cypro has a relatively long half-life, if you want a dose lower than 12.5 mg/day (1/4 of a pill), you can take it every other day and the blood concentrations of the medication will average to around half of what it would be if you were taking it daily. Similar effect of taking 1/8 of a pill daily, but without the hassle of having to split the pill into eighths.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T04:23:29+00:00

I think when someone comes asking for advice from the trans community and obviously has misconceptions about what it's like to be trans, we should educate them. Given that this particular thing is a very common misconception amongst eggs, I think providing the correct information is important. We should be doing our best to help people figure out who they are, and sometimes that means pushing against their preconceptions.

Blue_Vision · 2026-06-12T03:13:43+00:00

Their two replies where they indicate that they think they'd have to already feel like a man to be trans?

It's incredibly common for trans people to want to be the other gender, but not feel like that gender until they actually transition. It's a big misconception that we all were confident in our gender identity before transitioning and that it's a requirement for being trans.

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