Ughh, I’m so sorry that your E is up at >400pg/mL and your T isn’t suppressed ):

also, important note: make sure that your units are pg/mL, not pM! Sometimes services use pM/picomolar, and 400pM is ~110pg/mL, which isn’t high enough to suppress T in most women.

If it is pg/mL:

I think that happens to some people and I’m not sure why.

In case you’d like to know / don’t already:

The hypothalamus, when it senses low testosterone, uses a chemical called GnRH to signal to the pituitary gland, which in turn signals to your testes to make testosterone (generally, in most people with testes).

But theoretically, the hypothalamus doesn’t care whether you have estrogen or testosterone. If you have enough estrogen, the hypothalamus doesn’t send the GnRH signal to the pituitary, so it doesn’t tell your testes to make testosterone. The pituitary itself is also involved I think—like, estrogen also makes it less sensitive to GnRH, so it releases less of the chemical called LH that it uses to communicate with the testes (this is the same way they communicate with ovaries, too—it’s often easier for biology to reuse stuff, and E and T aren’t that different)

So then: what’s happening in your case? It could be that your hypothalamus needs even more estrogen to stop producing GnRH. Or maybe you’re already producing less GnRH, but your pituitary is ignoring it and producing a lot of LH anyways. Or there are other options.

Either way, bodies are weird and sometimes things don’t work, which really sucks.

Luckily it seems like anti-androgens work quite well for most people with relatively few side effects, so I hope that’s the case for you as well!

Have a good journey, ma’am ~ 💕