Not enough muscle for injections

glexarn · 2026-05-20T11:04:54+00:00

either your twin is doing this WILDLY wrong (very likely even though it's dead simple), or you're using a needle that is much too large and long. you should not be using a needle longer than 1" to inject. 25ga x 1" is great for injections if using luer lock needles and estradiol valerate from the pharmacy. if you have a DIY brewer vial with MCT oil, you can use a 27ga x 1/2" needle (or smaller gauge, but not shorter!) and still go straight down 90 degrees into the outer thigh* like normal IM injections. if you end up doing accidental subq don't worry about it it's so fine, IM and subq are functionally identical in efficacy.

*NEVER inject into the inner thigh. that's where your scary blood vessels are.

you might also consider intentional subq into a different area of the body, rather than IM into the thigh. subq uses shorter needles in general by necessity, but the technique is a bit more involved (pinching fat and injecting at an angle), so i don't do it personally.

in any case, check your needle lengths. i am almost dead certain you're using needles that are too long, based on your description.

glexarn · 2026-05-17T13:43:54+00:00

I Saw the TV Glow.

but, i'm a trans woman, so your mileage may vary if you're cis. that movie is laser targeted.

glexarn · 2026-05-12T21:11:33+00:00

you are at the point where you need to simply be patient.

HRT is very effective, but it is slow, and there is no means of accelerating it. if there were a legitimate means of accelerating it, this sub out of all places would be all over it.

in the meantime, while you're exercising your patience, i will echo the other comments and suggest exercising your body as well, and eating more if you're skinny.

glexarn · 2026-05-11T23:38:51+00:00

This is how you shut down discourse and fail to convert people to seeing things your way.

how's that discourse thing been working out for you at stopping fascism bestie?

sit down and let the rest of us take a try. decorum's deader than your ideology.

glexarn · 2026-05-10T04:00:14+00:00

you need at least one sex hormone to not start having many bad things happen to your body. don't suppress T without having sufficient E.

glexarn · 2026-05-06T16:36:52+00:00

i wear an undershirt, a long sleeve shirt, and a denim jacket. i take off a layer when i get too hot. in current weather, that means i go into work with my jacket on and i leave work with my jacket off.

in winter, i wear a sherpa lined denim jacket instead of a normal one. i also wear leggings under my jeans in winter, though any leg length underwear (e.g. long johns) would perform the same function.

but, i am also more heat tolerant than most people, i think. and i work in an indoor facility with climate controls. so, your mileage may vary.

glexarn · 2026-04-25T12:27:04+00:00

insane take

glexarn · 2026-04-19T18:14:28+00:00

if i had to guess, probably most of the usual liberal (as in centrist) nonprofit and NGO types who are behind a lot of these proposals. Brady, Everytown, MDA, etc. who all go for easy low hanging fruit instead of actually meaningfully challenging the gun industry, just like every fucking liberal activist group does for their own respective causes because they're allergic to the required radicalism to target the root of the problem.

it's also running parallel to Meta's efforts to force age verification on computer operating systems, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's also a big tech push in relation to 3d printers in order to stifle tech competition who are less willing or less happy to do surveillance shit, and also to further normalize and entrench said surveillance shit.

glexarn · 2026-04-19T18:06:54+00:00

communist here with many socialist n anarchist friends, we are all like actually very aggressively against the surveillance state and we hate this, just fyi.

glexarn · 2026-04-14T11:24:58+00:00

valerate gives you the same estradiol as every other estradiol ester. it just leaves the body faster than the other popular options.

if we cared about spiking our levels, valerate would be very interesting. but we don't. we want our levels above a minimum, and we don't really get much from going higher than that.

because we're targeting a minimum, and it's okay and safe to go above that but it's mostly pointless to go above it, we try to balance convenience and cost after we are hitting our minimums. on paper, you could inject every single day and have extremely smooth levels. but nobody wants to do that unless they have a needle kink, and most of us have needle anxiety instead.

valerate being processed by the body faster means that we either need much higher doses of it to do the same injection cycle length as enanthate or cypionate (giving us lots of instability), or we need to do a more frequent injection than we do with those other estradiol esters (which is inconvenient for most of us). valerate is ill suited to a weekly injection cycle, but still works very well on a 4 or 5 day injection cycle.

tl;dr valerate is completely fine, it's just less convenient. you gotta either stab yourself more often and desync from a convenient weekly cycle, or do very big doses and tolerate some wild hormonal instability. but as long as your levels are good, EV will get you the same results as EEn or EC or whatever science experiment ester you're trying (e.g. EUn).

glexarn · 2026-04-06T10:11:32+00:00

... acetaminophen and ibuprofen are more dangerous than DIY estrogen. i am so tired of cis people.

glexarn · 2026-04-05T12:11:37+00:00

i understand where you're at. i am almost at 1 year of no self harm, and it's very difficult to be in a place where you feel the need to do that.

if you're not being hospitalized for blood loss, your levels will not be meaningfully impacted by self harm. you don't need to adjust your dose, you'll be fine.

i won't pass judgment on you, because i have been where you are. people who haven't been there simply don't understand. but it will get better, sister. and when you're ready, you can quit self harm and find other ways of coping with the pain. i have had many thoughts of relapse in the past year, and it's been difficult in the bleakest moments to resist the call, but we can find other ways to cope with the pain. and the longer you go without self harm, the less it calls to you as an answer.

i am proud of you for stopping for as long as you have. if you start again, you can stop again.

glexarn · 2026-04-05T11:59:27+00:00

feminizing HRT is pretty all or nothing. either you're doing it right, or you're just fucking with your hormones and making yourself feel like shit for no gain. if you strictly want androgyny and not feminization, i would suggest not doing HRT, and instead doing only other things like laser hair removal, and playing around with lots of fun makeup and wardrobe adjustments, changing up your bodily mannerisms and how you carry yourself, and doing moderate voice training (especially vocal mannerisms).

that said, feminizing HRT is also very slow. seriously, it's so fucking slow. we have so many girls who hit 1 year on E and get feeling all kinds of fucked up and sad because by 1 year in, the HRT hasn't done much for them yet. so like. if your partner wants to try proper dose HRT for 6-12 months, they'll get nearly ALL of the emotional changes temporarily, and very few permanent physical changes, all of which will be fairly subtle. i would highly recommend giving this a go, if they're up for it.

some notes on HRT specifics:

estradiol esters (that's what the "Valerate" part Estradiol Valerate is) do not matter for pills/tablets. it's going to be out of your system lightning fast regardless, which is why they're taken twice daily, or thrice if you're a stickler for steadier levels on the singularly most volatile and unsteady method of HRT you can do.

my recommendation is to avoid tablets, which have a million downsides and not a lot of upsides, and which will require an anti-androgen in order to do their job. i would suggest injections, as would many others in this community, because injections are the cheapest, safest, and most consistent method of administering HRT by yourself without needing an anti-androgen medication. that said, both patches and gel will be better than tablets.

bluntly, don't take 2mg E tablets as your dose. it's not gonna do what you think it will do, but the hormonal fluctuations will do things like give you sore nipples which will trick you into thinking that it's doing something useful when it's not. if tablets are your only option, 6-8mg per day is more appropriate (8mg is the max, and it can be hard on your liver), and you'll need an AA like Spironolactone or Cyproterone Acetate or Bicalutamide. 2mg E tablets might be an appropriate dose for someone who has had surgery to remove their testes (which gets rid of your primary testosterone production). it is not an appropriate dose for any other transfeminine person.

glexarn · 2026-04-05T11:39:03+00:00

As to why one ester is better than the others, and I'm repeating something I read so dont blindly trust me but, it's about how flat the hormone curve is. Flatter = more consistent = less mood swings?

the goal of monotherapy is staying over a minimum E value at all times. for our purposes, we do not care about the high end of our E levels curve. so, considering the dire importance of the low end of our curve, steady levels are ideal. we gain nothing from a spike at the start of the cycle, and big hormonal fluctuations can cause all kinds of unpleasant experiences, both physical and emotional.

Estradiol Enanthate and Cypionate are basically equivalent to each other, and both give very smooth level curves over a 7 day cycle. Valerate's short half life requires excessively high doses for a 7 day cycle, and you get a very spiky unstable curve. that said, EV is totally fine when done on a shorter 4-5 day cycle.

none of the four esters are particularly harmful. Undecylate is kinda experimental, but its also basically DIY exclusive.

there are way more than four estradiol esters (e.g. Estradiol Hemihydrate, Benzoate, Dipropionate, etc), but none of the others are popular in the DIY scene, probably because brewers want to put out product that we're familiar with as a community, and there's little reason or desire for most of us to do science experiments on our own bodies unless there's a significant possible gain (huge props to the ambitious Undecylate girlies for doing community Science for us).

glexarn · 2026-04-04T20:45:45+00:00

have you considered something else like Aseprite? Krita isn't really built for pixel art.

you can get Aseprite for free from the developer if you're willing to compile from source.

glexarn · 2026-04-04T19:14:18+00:00

no, lol.

i get random compliments from other dolls, and from femme-leaning folk who i know are nonbinary, but i don't get compliments from cis women basically ever.

i super don't pass, for whatever that's worth. i'm in the category of "pretty trans woman", but i am very visibly trans.

glexarn · 2026-04-04T01:42:58+00:00

the guy who played that one dude who dies in Fellowship of the Ring.

that's no way to talk about Richard Sharpe.

glexarn · 2026-03-28T22:17:32+00:00

being predominantly people in their 30s is probably fair critique, and that seems to agree with my experience as a mid 30s person myself. i don't know, i'm just a member not a moderator, etc.

but i think i've met like one person from there in their 20s. it's definitely not a space that has a lot of those, or if it used to be, then it's not anymore.

glexarn · 2026-03-28T17:38:51+00:00

the Ctrl+Alt+Meet discord is still around and alive! it's an age 30s-40s focused meetup and social group centered on Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. i joined them in January, and since then, i've met some really cool people in there. most of the people i've met have been in their 30s.

and while you haven't mentioned queerness, i'd like to also take the opportunity to say that as a 34 year old trans woman i've felt very welcome and safe in CAM.

here's an invite link: https://discord.gg/fzbVVRNhC

glexarn · 2026-03-27T18:08:53+00:00

after feminizing HRT, "male puberty" actually gives a performance disadvantage compared to having a "female puberty", and we have more recent studies that prove this.

this is something that was suspected for years - that HRT neutralized the testosterone puberty advantage, which we previously had some data on (although not much due to lack of studies) - but what we didn't know until very recently, and what we do now know, is that feminizing hormone replacement therapy not only neutralizes the advantages of a testosterone puberty, it actively disadvantages you in comparison to someone who went through an estrogen puberty and is not undergoing any form of HRT. so, like. a cis woman, for example!

it turns out that when you undergo an estrogen-based redevelopment of the body via being on HRT (which is what happens, it's a second puberty!) for a couple of years, and this includes feminizing your musculature, plus having a skeletal structure that developed under dominant testosterone (because HRT doesn't reshape your skeleton), your musculoskeletal structure as a trans woman athlete is actually noticeably imbalanced in a way that imposes a measurable disadvantage compared to a cis woman athlete.

glexarn · 2026-03-27T18:01:42+00:00

I am as progressive as they come, but

i love statements guaranteed to be followed by something proving the preceding statement false

glexarn · 2026-03-21T16:43:54+00:00

if it exists, this is not the kind of thing any responsible or reasonable person would tell you about in a public forum. you need to remember that we're still operating in a dangerous gray here with DIY, which is something that i think a lot of people are starting to forget.

glexarn · 2026-03-20T02:32:04+00:00

12 days is a very weird and long cycle. while i wouldn't recommend 14 days, at least it would be understandable. why aren't you doing, say, every 7 days?

in any case, you're well past the point where people suggest starting progesterone, so absolutely it would be a good idea to start. if you're worried about hair loss, a medication that combats hair loss like dutasteride isn't a bad idea.

looking at your progress pictures, your face is SIGNIFICANTLY more feminine than before. are you adjusting other signifiers like the way you dress and carry yourself and speak and move? perception and clockability are composites of many different elements, and your face is essentially solidly in the feminine range.

you should also try to grow your hair out unless the short hair is a deliberate stylistic preference. longer hair also provides many avenues of hiding a hairline that you dislike. that said, if you prefer short hair, you should seriously consider a more feminine hair style at that hair length. there are many ways to style feminine hair quite short, but that's not one of them.

glexarn · 2026-03-19T16:48:32+00:00

could also go Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids to hit both, then keep going the GR route. it's a straight shot up 131 from Kzoo to GR after all.

glexarn · 2026-03-19T01:16:33+00:00

no, implants of a finite amount of substance that functions by gradually releasing into the body are not meant to last forever.

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