certain trans women's rather insistent attempt to normalize the idea of effeminate boys transitioning for social acceptance
sincere question, do you have a source for this?
I don't know of any good studies on this, but from reading lots of anecdotes on reddit, yeah, some trans people do have quite atypical reactions to starting HRT. Unfortunately these can sometimes be negative changes to energy and mood, though 'no change' or 'positive change' is more common. Among those who have negative changes, some stay on HRT anyway because the psychological benefits from the physical changes (less dysphoria) are more significant than the negative energy/mood impacts.
wow, those changes in color perception are really interesting! I haven't heard of that before.
Your points about the NMDA receptor are really interesting, thanks for writing!
I'm transfem, HRT for 2+ years, just wanted to share my data point. The strength of the positive mental changes I experienced on E shook me existentially. I've since been fascinated by this topic. But it is pretty fraught with bias, since starting HRT almost always coincides with massive psychological turmoil, so the confounds of subjective experience here are massive. We should be careful drawing general conclusions. I still think a lot of the self-reported mental changes for most trans people are due to finally embracing feelings they've struggled with for a long time-- at a psychological level-- and that process is just as likely to produce subjective perceptual changes as are physiological effects of the HRT.
I've also read a lot of self-reports on reddit. I'm not sure how obvious this is to other LW-ers but I feel like I have to mention that your experience of changes on E seems to be in the 95th+ percentile of salience.
My own subjective data point:
By far the biggest change for me was that I simply felt inexplicably calmer and happier. Less dissociated, more present. Less depressed, less anxious, and I had an easier time focusing, and maintaining sustained attention.
I'm naturally neurotic, so I spent months interrogating my experience to try to figure out whether this was some kind of mega-placebo. As best as I can figure out, no. It really does feel like my brain was deficient in estradiol, and fixing that made everything better. I don't know how else to describe it. This all happened in about a week, all before most physical changes, and before social transition.
This may not be true in any meaningful neurochemical way. But I feel estrogen made me less "schizo" as I am now so much more happy and present in whatever I'm doing.
also I agree with this:
sexual differentiation is a fragile rube goldberg machine, prone to random breakage. I speculate that humans have intersex brains
rationalist social circle? To me, that is pretty unusual behavior. I read it as if you meant to point out a general phenomenon perpetrated by specific trans women online that the reader might know about.
I know a lot of trans women online and off and I've honestly never seen this behavior, except in spaces like 4chan, where it's piled under at least 4 layers of self-hate, irony, and sadism. One of the "gender ideology" (i.e. mainstream trans) platitudes you hear over and over again is that gender identity ≠ gendered behavior ≠ sex and people should only transition if they want to, to better match their gender identity. The whole point is that acting masculine doesn't disqualify you from being a woman, nor does acting feminine make you one (whether you agree with that or not).
Pressuring an effeminate boy into transitioning if he doesn't experience gender dysphoria is immoral. If you or anyone else reading this comment has examples of people doing this online, please link them in reply to this comment, I would be interested to see how this is happening.