I’ve been in therapy for a few months and I really want to start HRT soon but I don’t know if my therapist will write me the required letter. If she doesn’t by the end of this month I’m going to start doing DIY, is there anything I should know about the process before I get started, anything I should be aware of? Are there risks or side effects. Things that I should be aware of before going in
P.S. Don’t give me any of that crap about detransitioning, you don’t know me well enough to say I would, frankly I’ll never call myself a boy again, not of my own volition or to capitulate to others.
Edit: Thank you all so much for the information and resources, sorry if I wasn’t able to respond to people’s comments sooner, things have been hard and I’ve been busy lately.
I’ve seen people talk shit and try and argue that detransition rates are higher than they really are. They’ve used that to justify long wait times for HRT and transitioning. I just didn’t want people to give me the speech about how the wait is to make me sure so I don’t regret it and detransition. I know that won’t happen because I desperately want the changes, my flat chest gives me immense dysphoria.
I have no idea why or if my therapist is gatekeeping me, it could just be that she hasn’t written the letter yet, but I for one am not willing to wait more months for her to do so. The sooner I start the better.
I’m in the U.S. and I just called up my primary care physician and asked them to refer me to an endocrinologist for gender dysphoria. No therapist was required, a letter was only required for surgery. I just wonder if you might be in the UK or somewhere else, where the requirements are different.
Either way, I would talk to your therapist about the need to start HRT ASAP and get that ball rolling, no reason to wait.
And regarding detransition: where is the evidence that the rates are higher than they are? This is just asking us to ignore evidence in favor of speculation … And it’s hilarious that they then claim that the wait ensures reduced regret and detransition rates - which is it, is the wait effective at preventing detransition and the rates are low (as we know they are), or is it actually the case that loads of people are detransitioning that we have no evidence for like originally argued?
This makes no sense to me.
The way to walk through someone arguing for trans-specific gatekeeping is to walk through the same scenarios for cis people and ask why their regrets don’t matter and why only trans regret matters. Teenagers can get breast augmentations or reductions without forced wait times. Cis people can get on puberty blockers for precocious puberty, and it’s even becoming a pseudoscience fad for young men to take testosterone under misconceptions that testosterone is waning and they need exogenous sources to make them manly enough. Again, no gatekeeping, cis people have free access to gender affirming care.
Pretty soon it’s obvious the rules that are only for trans people are because they are trans, and not because there is a good, medical reason for it. This is also why informed consent is used now and why WPATH doesn’t require forced wait times for starting HRT, etc. and yet the detransition rate hasn’t suddenly exploded.
It just turns out, cis people don’t tend to want to take cross-sex hormones, and even if they do, they find out quickly it isn’t great for them.
The evidence we have is that of the few who detransition, they usually do so not because they’re cis but because they don’t have support from their family and society - transition is too difficult so they detransition because they don’t have enough support.
EDIT: some actual evidence:
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/