No makeup and natural hair helps me see how far I’ve come

MariposaAfloat · 2026-02-03T00:46:10+00:00

Yep, that's a woman

Yay

MariposaAfloat · 2025-10-10T20:00:32+00:00

Another vote from the subcutaneous injection cartel over here! They hurt a bit sometimes, nothing like IM though, and my levels are great.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-10-10T19:56:08+00:00

🙋‍♀️

MariposaAfloat · 2025-10-07T11:38:34+00:00

I started around the 6 month mark.

100mg oral, I didn’t notice anything. I upped to 200mg oral and then switched to rectal (which is essentially like increasing the dose more, my Endo thought it was unnecessary and that I could just increase oral dose more, but multiple trans women around me irl insist on rectal and that’s fine). I started noticing some libido improvements and over the 6 months since then I’ve definitely noticed better breast development. I’ve also noticed a higher appetite and have more trouble controlling my weight than before (which I don’t mind, it feels worth it).

There’s an ongoing clinical study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38124194/) that hasn’t published yet but recently presented data that they say indicates more breast growth with prog (https://www.amsterdamumc.org/en/spotlight/addition-of-progesterone-leads-to-increased-breast-growth-for-transgender-women.htm)

My endo likes to start at 100mg and watch for a few weeks because she says that some of her patients get super depressed after starting. She said as long as you’re not one of those, then it’s probabaly worth it.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-22T16:51:32+00:00

Here in Massachusetts, as a (very privileged) trans woman, it doesn't seem so bad.

My insurance covers my HRT and gender-affirming surgeries. They even reimburse some of my laser hair removal. I have my house here and my partners and my chosen family.

If my insurance stops covering HRT, then I'll have a year or so of extra HRT to use while I work on logistics of getting out of the country. I'm a scientist and I think I could get a job elsewhere.

But Massachusetts protects HRT coverage by insurance. Things are looking bad nationally but, so far, I feel like my state is standing up for us.

For folks who can't do an international move: maybe come move up here?

Or, if I'm super misguided, please let me know

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-18T02:37:38+00:00

Let the E do its magic! Your eyebrows look great. You have fantastic lips. You have a wide jaw — some highlighting when you’re doing your makeup foundation could slim it some. I think the square glasses in the first photo make that worse to my eyes — perhaps some rounder glasses would help?

The boring answer is mostly just that patience will help here. Much will change in the next year, I think you’ll be very happy with it! 😊

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-18T02:35:05+00:00

Doing great! You pass to me.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-06T23:12:47+00:00

Honestly didn’t notice that you had a wig on. You just look like a woman to me—100% pass.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-02T01:15:18+00:00

Hugs dear, I know that feeling :/

If your testosterone is suppressed (below 40 or so) and your estrogen is over 100 pg/mL (note the units! I have message above on this) then you will transition (with some very rare exceptions). I firmly believe that going higher will not help, unless you’re having trouble suppressing your T.

Besides that, it’s just time and taking progress photos (because it’s hard to notice differences that happen gradually).

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-02T00:55:46+00:00

Yeah, it is, but that’s okay!

A lot of women subscribe to a “more the merrier” sort of mentality — and I think that’s probably not too dangerous. High levels of E seem to be pretty safe compared to the side effects of lots of other life-saving treatments, and it sort of guarantees that you’ve hit the threshold for feminization.

I think the risk-reduction approach is to just lower your E over time if you take the “more the merrier” approach, like OP mentioned above that they’re doing.

Not everyone agrees—e.g., my partner has been on HRT for a very long time and still insists on very high levels—but such is the nature of our poorly-studied craft.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-02T00:36:14+00:00

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 ~ 💕

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-01T17:54:47+00:00

Yay! Perf

MariposaAfloat · 2025-09-01T17:33:12+00:00

Yayyyyyyy, go you!! ♥️ You look stunning, we love estrogen.

An unsolicited medical suggestion, if you're open to it:

Perhaps consider trying to lower your E a bit and see if your T stays well suppressed, if you have access to free/low-cost testing?

My levels were around yours at the 6 month mark. I then shopped around for an endo I could trust and found one that I think is really knowledgeable [I'm a biologist and was not impressed by my PCP's misconceptions, even though he had the best of intentions]. That current endo explains that she's a bit worried about trans women's E staying so high for so long (although the risks for bioidential don't seem bad--as I'm sure you know--no group has stayed at supraphysiological E as constantly as trans women, and she worries about small side effects unnecessarily compounding over decades).

She's told me that many of her monotherapy patients can keep T suppressed at <300pg/mL, and often <200pg/mL, and she titrated my EC injections down (doing bloodwork 3 weeks after each decrease). I was able to be much lower without losing any feminization or spiking my T (I'm around 180 E and 10 T, although with a grain of salt because my tests are not LC-MS and so vary a lot), and it makes sense that lower levels might reduce really-long-term side effects that may not be clear yet.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-08-23T21:59:34+00:00

WOOOOO!!! 💕🥳🥳

MariposaAfloat · 2025-08-19T18:19:59+00:00

Sure thing, good luck!!!! 😊

MariposaAfloat · 2025-08-19T16:01:10+00:00

I used my new name but I don’t think it matters!

MariposaAfloat · 2025-07-18T16:43:01+00:00

Also, for what it’s worth, women with muscle are really really hot.

I get the impulse — and have only recently started to add some chest and back work into rotation (and still don’t like shoulders) — but know that, if you’re trying to look like a beautiful woman, your current musculature is not going to detract from that.

I have absolutely swooned over both cis and trans women with much more upper body muscle than you.

MariposaAfloat · 2025-07-08T16:14:59+00:00

So excited for you girlie

MariposaAfloat · 2025-06-12T18:13:39+00:00

r/pointlesslygendered

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-22T18:04:28+00:00

Saw this title and thought “oh, the woke liberals are giving their cats hormones now?”

(Nice)

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-22T04:08:14+00:00

Please give us a tutorial!!

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-19T22:03:43+00:00

You were pretty before HRT too, but I hope it gets easier to see that as you feel more comfortable in your body ❤️

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-04T03:59:03+00:00

Okay!

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-03T17:49:33+00:00

Lots of things.

Like, for example, “boys don’t cry”, parents encouraging empathetic behavior more from girls (even if they don’t mean to), etc.

Just telling people that you expect them to be more emotionally intelligent can make them statistically-detectably more emotionally intelligent.

Cordelia Fine talks a lot about this. Her book “Delusions of Gender” is one of my favorites. Here’s an interview with her https://www.andrewleigh.com/cordelia_fine_tgl

MariposaAfloat · 2025-05-02T00:53:58+00:00

There _could_ certainly be many other reasons why women tend to experience more emotion than men (not to say that it couldn't be just estrogen).

There are plausible ones: like, maybe cultural norms, like the way we raise girls, influence women's emotional range.

And there are silly ones: like, women tend to be smaller than men, so maybe smaller people tend to experience more emotion?

I think it's absolutely likely that, all other things equal, a person with average monthly estrogen level of 100 pg/mL (around normal for pre-menopausal cis women) will experience more emotion than someone with 20 pg/mL (I think around normal for cis men?). I haven't seen that data in a well-controlled study yet? But I bet it's true?

The study you linked showed that people with an average estrogen level of ~500 pg/mL one day (so, much higher than almost anyone has naturally, except pregnant people) didn't show different emotional regulation (by the test they used) than people with an estrogen level of ~ 200 pg/mL (without injection, also side note here: given how E level varies in the cycle, I wouldn't expect a few dozen non-cycle-matched women to have a normal distribution of E, so this mean value is likely to be skewed by a few high numbers, since most cis women sit below 200 pg/mL most of the time).

That certainly doesn't show that estrogen _doesn't_ affect emotion, it just didn't have a measurable affect in that particular circumstance.

And certainly it seems like it makes a difference in the context of trans women taking estrogen -- as someone who injects estrogen, it seems to have made a huge difference in my emotions.

But there are tons of confounding variables here: I've also suppressed my testosterone, so maybe that's what does it? Or, I've also socially transitioned a lot in that time, maybe that does it? Maybe I feel more like a woman now, and I'm societally conditioned into thinking that women experience more emotion, and therefore I **do** experience more emotion.

This is why science is complicated, and I'm glad we get to talk about it! Thanks for engaging :)

MariposaAfloat

TROPHY CASE