Our son received a letter from Planned Parenthood where (unbeknownst to us) he was getting estradaviol: the letter informed him that recent tests had found his risk of stroke and blood clotting is at dangerously high level and that he should see a primary care physician.. BUT THAT HE SHOULD FEEL COMFORTABLE CONTINUING HIS DRUG THERAPY!!!!! No mention made of what is clearly causing a perilous health condition in what was a perfectly normal and fully healthy body!!!!! EVIL!!!!!
Whaaat?? Was this recently …are you saying his own personal test results have drawn this conclusion…or test results from a study prompted planned parenthood to send the letter & advise him to visit his pcp?
There is a young man who died from a stroke because he didn't stop. I can't recall his name, but he had even reported feeling unwell and had never self-reported feeling suicidal over his gender dysphoria. I hope you can convince your son to stop. Good luck and take care of yourselves.
None of these "discoveries" are surprising. Estrogen "therapy" is an all-out assault on the natural processes of the male body's chemistry. Literally, an aggressive suppression of everything the male body is hard-wired to do. Incredible that this must be pointed out.
I agree. But lawyers, politicians, doctors, educators etc etc all need that concrete evidence to cite. Otherwise the old guard just churns out the old ones regardless of whether or not they have been discredited
Men who plan to have their testicles removed are unlikely to care about the degeneration of those body parts. Irreversible changes to testicles and reproductive functioning are of more concern in the population of minors who want to medically transition. With this population, however, there are major psychological resistances to information about long term damage to the body. These include the normal inability of young people to imagine growing old and sick, and strong self-harming tendencies in the pediatric gender clinic patients. It seems unlikely that many of the patients themselves would be dissuaded from using hormones even if well-conducted research leads to the conclusion that cross sex hormones have poor long term outcomes. The combination of peer group disapproval and age-based laws restricting usage might be more effective, as has been the case with tobacco use.
Thank you for this analysis. Based on what we know about the profound effects of hormones on physiology, we should've seen this coming. Thanks again. My best, Frederick
It seems like these risks were well known for decades. I remember reading of a Canadian study about thirty years ago. They gave men estrogen on the premise that since women had fewer heart attacks and maybe estrogen could protect men as well. They had to halt the experiment because of multiple adverse effects the estrogen was having on the men.
It's outrageous that there are mountains of evidence of the harms of exogensis hormones, while still being used haphazardly. As of 2015 about 3 million women died from breast cancer tied to birth control pills and HRT as compared to about 600k people who died of AIDS.
“ hey I wonder if taking opposite sex hormones will have negative health impacts”
It is unfortunate we live in a time when research showing “yes, it will” is both necessary and possible when this is a “I wonder if a hot glue gun is dangerous” level question
This is terrifying. And the no contact aspect of the many kids/young adults caught up in this mess will never hear of this study. Or they will be ‘counseled’ to dismiss it as irrelevant
You say "In postmenopausal women, estrogen use has already been linked to a doubled relative risk of dementia" but the menopause doctors I'm reading say the opposite. I don't know who is right. I'm postmenopausal and considering HRT for REDUCING dementia risk. Now for a biological male taking estrogen it may be a different story, because their body is designed for a different hormonal set-up.
It would be good to hear the absolute risk not the relative risk, as relative always sounds a whole lot more. But either way, I will be continuing to read up on this topic. Menopausal women find it harder to access hormones than trans folk. This is totally weird to me, when there are major health issues menopausal women are trying to avoid, and the recent thinking from my reading is that some cancers, cardiac problems and dementia risk are improved on HRT
HRT horrible cardiovascular affects. I know. Increase in blood pressure is linked to dementia. Menopause is a natural human process. Blocking it is not natural. You can't turn back the clock, or halt it, anymore than you can use puberty blockers safely to deter the course programmed in your genes.
Yes, I'm of the mind that adding hormones to ameliorate a natural process will come out in the wash as a huge mistake later on.
I went off the Pill almost as soon as I started it, because I hated how it made me feel.
Years later, I went back on the Pill, and got very, very sick. Multiple canker sores on my tongue. Could barely climb a flight of stairs. Zero appetite. It turns out that I had an underlying condition that the pill exacerbated.
On the one hand, this sudden rise in my liver enzymes pushed me into treatment sooner. On the other, the effect seemed to clearly indicate that taking the pill is not harmless. It's affecting the liver in some way, however mild and undetectable. However, I did detect it when first on it, and went off.
My mother had a hysterectomy (so have I). She has not partaken in Big Pharma in any way, and I have studiously followed her lead. I've heard that hysterectomies can increase the potential for dementia. My mother fell into dementia in her early 80s, and at 89, is incapable of living independently, whereas my grandparents did so until 92.
My grandmother did not get dementia. She also never exercised. My grandfather did get dementia in his late 80s. He exercised. He never had a hysterectomy. But he also stopped exercising his mind...
I suspect that there's really only so much we can do to stave off the ill-fated effects of aging, is my point. But adding artificial hormones does not bode well.
I think you're 💯 percent right underdog. I could immediately feel the adverse effects of birth control pills, in the short time I took them, which did irreversible damage to my circulatory system. Still, we women will risk death if needs be to avoid pregnancy. It's the doing of the Pharma industry which will profit from bad products without concern for consequences as long as it makes them rich. I also believe it has to do with insuring men have sexual access to women by providing birth control even when it costs millions of women their lives... just as unnatural hormones may eventually kill trans people.
Menopause may be a "natural" process, but the fact is that women only recently started living that long beyond it. Just because it's natural doesn't mean that it can't wreak havoc on the female body. "Naturally", we weren't meant to outlive our reproductive years by that much. Read our new FDA commissioner Marty Makary's book "Blind Spots" on the extraordinary potential health benefits of HRT.
You are correct that these scary figures are based on the WHI studies, which were done on an older cohort of women and which used different forms of hormones, and are now widely thought of as having unnecessarily scared women away from HRT, which has many benefits. Read Marty Makari's recent book (Blind Spots) on it.
The global hormone replacement therapy market was valued at approximately $21.3 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to around $35.6 billion by 2030 because of the aging population. It is of great concern of big Pharma to allay any health misgivings connected to HRT.
I want to add that as always when trying to assess the effects of any medical intervention, it is important to look critically at any study that makes claims in either direction.
And my main point here is that replacing the hormones your own body used to make after it stops making them is a completely different matter from administering the hormones of one sex to the other. The latter cannot be used to discredit the former, as they are completely different interventions.
It is appalling that this kind of reporting needs to be done. One might as well do a study proving that people who jump off tall buildings are statistically likely to die or that staring at the sun can lead to blindness. What happened to Hippocrates' rule: "First, do no harm." ? Somebody reload the Matrix, please.
We should stop giving blood transfusions if the blood came from a different sex. It's just like giving a blood transfusion from a different race or species. In fact we should not give blood transfusions at all. People should be forced to bank a couple of liters of their own blood every year, just in case they need it. That way we avoid all this trouble!
Just thinking back to thalidomide and DES and how they impacted the women who took them. We all know about the missing limbs of children whose mothers were given Thalidomide to preserve their pregnancies. The fallout from DES (a form of estrogen) is probably still going on. Daughters of mothers given DES during pregnancy often developed ovarian and vaginal cancers. Later, it was learned that sons of mothers given DES developed testicular cancer. While many pharmaceutical companies manufactured DES (diethylstilbestrol), Eli Lilly was a prominent manufacturer and one of the first to receive FDA approval for its production in 1947. Years ago, a woman lawyer, whose mother had taken DES, sued a company that manufactured DES after she developed ovarian cancer (I saw a documentary about it). The opposition male lawyer, defending the DES company, fell in love with her and they got married. Ironically, at some point the husband developed testicular cancer and discovered that his mother had also been given DES during her pregnancy. The discussion link below talks about the possible implications of some of the drugs given during pregnancy by a person who has been investigating the subject.
A puzzlement. Surely no one takes significant doses of these hormones for a prolonged period of time. For both ftm and mtf, they presumably are on de minimis doses after they're post-op. And even then it would tend to be transdermal or via pellet-release, not something going through the liver. This essay does not touch on any of these questions. Perhaps later on someone can expand.
A lot of people stay on cross sex hormones at significant levels even after reaching maximal possible changes in their appearance from the hormones and surgeries. Most common reason given is that the hormones "make me feel more like myself."
Reportedly, the vast majority of transgender males retain their genitals, and the same is likely to be true for females because the surgeries available to them are complex and expensive.
Transgender females may suffer reproductive anatomy atrophy from testosterone use, but not all of them will have a hysterectomy right away. So there will be people on high doses of these wrong-sex hormones for years. There are even men who take so-called 'puberty blockers' after puberty in an attempt to suppress their natural testosterone production.
“Reportedly”—i.e., nonsensically or factitiously. Over the past four or five decades I’ve known a number of women who, for whatever congenital or neurological mixup, had been born as apparent males, though they sensibly got this corrected when young. So 100% of these real-life examples had "full sex changes,” I suppose you would call it. Perhaps your friends who are “transgender males” and giving you misinformation should simply call themselves what they are, which is transvestites!
Your “transgender females” sound like those who tried to begin a sex change but never got past the hormones.
The medical papers referenced in this essay covered a wild grab-bag of conditions, yet each individual study had only a handful of subjects. It’s high time we stopped taking these weekend hippies seriously, and these quasi-professional medical surveys limited themselves to genuine specimens.
No one can change sex. One of the studies proving the damage of wrong sex hormones was in Finland, and they were trying various methods of giving men estrogen. It was found that in all of the different delivery methods, the men ideating a female persona developed statistically significant cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, strokes, pulmonary embolism and heart attacks. This study changed the mind of Rita Kailtiala, a formerly "affirming" researcher.
From a medical and legal point of view, your first statement is just wrong. It's like saying someone with knee replacements can't walk, or doesn't have legs. The doctors disagree, the judges disagree.
Furthermore, you're arguing limitations of medical technology as proof of — what, exactly? In 20 years when most of the limitations have been overcome, what will your argument be?
Are you going to go, "Oh never mind, there used to be a problem, but I see it's been solved"? Or will you reach for something mystical and metaphysical: perhaps an assertion that there are magical female and male essences that live inside tiny invisible beasties, in cell organelles or nuclei, and they all carry a sort of date-stamp of one's sex? That is not a joke, but an actual argument some nutters try to put across. Well, sex doesn't work like that.
More fundamentally, those subjects whom you characterize as people who "change their sex" don't think they've changed their sex at all. (I haven't done a survey; I'm hypothesizing from common sense.) They just had their bodies *corrected* to conform with their true sex. They had deformities fixed. And they had some legal documents corrected to bring them into conformity with reality.
This is unintelligible. Take a walk or something. I don't claim that anyone can change sex. No one can change sex. Disorders of Sexual Development are not related to believing you've been born in the wrong body, and individuals with this unfortunate condition have been co-opted by the "trans community" to prove that a psychiatric illness is a medical, physical illness. They also use the diabetic narrative to justify ingesting hormones known to cause stroke, heart attacks and cancer, as if these hormones were insulin taken by a diabetic.
No, you take a walk, "Ute." You are half male and half female by heredity. So is everyone else. Just deal with it. It is the source of all your problems. You have never had a stroke or heart attack or cancer from hormones. You are a fantasist.
Just because some gets surgery on their genitalia doesn’t mean that their bodies will begin to make hormones inconsistent with their biological sex. They will have to continue to take cross-sex hormones.
This is fact. My ex-husband, who thinks he's female and claims to be me, mother of our children, has been taking estrogen for 30 years. Despite the fact that his father had 2 heart attacks and a stroke, indicating a medical history inconsistent with taking these risks.
So sorry about that, if it’s true. But a single claim about an individual is not proof. You are claiming that you had a husband...who had a sex change about 30 years ago...and is still on heavy doses of exogenous sex hormone? (What pharmaceuticals? What dosages? Injection, transdermal, gel, vaginal cream, or what?) Sorry, but that doesn't happen, certainly not under any responsible clinical guidance. Even those women who do Estrace or Estraderm patches during and after menopause, do not do them forever, and those doses they get are tiny, like 25 or 50mcg. That's not going to give you an embolism.
Another problem here is that you claim the “husband” is now claiming to be you. So this leaves us with a Greek dilemma. Is the person signing herself Ute Heggen the postop transsexual Ute Heggen, or the woman that Ute Heggen was married to 30 years ago? With no evidence either way, I have to assume neither version may exist, and I'm just talking again to a prankster I've encountered before.
Terhune, I collect the sole data in the world on trans widows. Your response is the typical troll reaction to the realities of this sisterhood. I now have data from 70 trans widows; the rate of crossdressing husbands assaulting the wife is between 1/3 and 1/2 of the time. Just google Ute Heggen and you'll find my interviews, the articles written on my story and my memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022) My ex husband's PhD psychologist diagnosed him as transsexual in the first appointment. She put this detail in her 1997 sworn affidavit submitted to court during our divorce. The ex-husbands who fathered children usually demand the children call him some version of mother and do try to pass themselves off as the mother. My ex took pills. I saw them. Here's a short clip with a photo from our wedding. Please do not come as a troll in the comments on my channel. You can find the profiles of the trans widows on my Trans Widows' Testimonies playlist. Of the 70 ex-husbands, 2 detransitioned.
“I collect the sole data in the world…” Shouldn’t that be “sole datum”? It’s just you, you admit.
Even if your self-indulgent story is true, it’s all on you. You married a weirdo, because you didn’t catch the warning signs. So? People make mistakes and move on. What happened to you?
And then you want to move the goalposts and say it isn’t about husbands who turn out to be transsexuals; no, they are really “crossdressing husbands assaulting the wife.” So which is it?
Known for decades, the harm of excessive and continuous drug and alcohol use should have been a warning. Instead, removing body parts and administering drugs with no long-term studies seems to have replaced those old-timey means of making billions. Collateral damage be damned.
Doctors mostly stopped prescribing estrogen long term for post menopausal women because of risks (like blood clots, strokes). Typical dose when used is about 1 mg a day.
I met a mtf trans person who was taking 10 mg a day. He wasn't too concerned about the risk, and I didn't ask him if he'd been advised.
Most of my friends are going through it. So! it is my business . Your also not responding to any kind of trans actvist but a very well informed right wing Blanchardian.
If your not going to play nice, and be obtuse. I'll only say this! I live in the real world and reality. Not the lefts social construction nonsense. Byeee
Unfortunately most of these studies used cisgender males as the control group. However, transgender women are transitioning to be as close to 'female' as possible and thus aren't typically concerned with risk compared to men. While I believe the data on cisgender male outcomes should also be included, it will likely be ignored as irrelevant in absence of data comparing outcomes to those of cisgender women. I suspect the providers of care, having embraced medical transition as a legitimate choice, would be similar in terms of being most interested in the risks compared to cisgender women. I'm glad at least some of these studies do include that info... hopefully that will become standard moving forward.
The reason they use “cisgender” males in the study as the control group, is because putting estrogen into a biological female body is now where near the same thing as putting estrogen into a biological male body. Biological females make their own estrogen and only need to take it during menopause, when our bodies stop making estrogen and if you were to compare those women to trans women, it would be like comparing apples to oranges. When my female body stopped making estrogen several not so good things happened to my body. So giving my body estrogen, the hormone my body needs to function properly, it does not have the same ill effects as giving it to a biological male. But if you take too much during menopause there is still higher risks of blood clots and stroke.
Also, just to say, I believe the link between women taking estrogen and dementia was found in women who began HRT ten years or more after menopause, not those who took it from the start of menopause. That may or may not make a difference to what we believe happens when estrogen is introduced into the male body, but it is an important distinction for women.
Definitely an important distinction! I need to clarify that with my own doctor who already has me on a low dose patch for perimenopause symptoms. No way am I going to keep using it if it's going to increase my dementia risk!!
Your GP may know very little about hormones tbh. Most are very conservative with women’s HRT, influenced it seems by both misleading and patchy research. This very incomplete knowledge base, which has been problematic for women across the decades, makes it even more worrying that transitioners are given - I’m guessing - quite high levels of opposite sex hormones. We just don’t really know the possible outcomes, because the research hasn’t been done. “Why?” Is a big question.
Agree- is apples to oranges. It's absolutely important for the male data to be included since that's the physiologically relevant data.
I really just wish medical professionals who prescribe cross sex hormones hadn't given in to pressure to be accommodating in language in the first place. Several years ago, they didn't pretend that trans women were actual women... this has rapidly evolved over the last 15-20 years. Trans patients may be uncomfortable talking about their biological realities, but in the context of medical care, it is crucial that we use accurate language.
Now that we have abandoned that, folks are free to deny their biological realities even in the context of medical care. It deeply troubles me... especially because I have people in my life who are receiving this treatment and I worry about the serious implications for them. Doctors are essentially reinforcing and enabling a fantasy that, when medical and surgical treatments are involved, has very real risk.
That's where my desire to see female data included came from... but you're right... it isn't relevant. We need to expect more from medical professionals, not sink deeper into avoiding difficult realities. Sensitivity is important, but using accurate language and data is absolutely crucial to patients being informed of the risks of treatment. This should not be compromised.
Yes, "Sensitivity is important," especially when considering millions of school girls who avoid using school bathrooms because they fear encountering boys there. It not only is bad for their kidneys, but they suffer anxiety and stress fearing the might have an "accident." Many girls are also now avoid participating in sports teams where change rooms might include males trying to impersonate females.
Giving up sports can also have long-term effects on girls health. I see this happening to girls like my niece and her friends. The situation also makes them angry and resentful. That can't be healthy.
Testosterone is a known carcinogen, as is estrogen. You cannot change sex, so of course the controls should be the same sex as the study cohort. Free yourself of this captured language. The Swedish study of death records (Cecelia Djehne, et al, Karolinska Institut, 2011) found that women who "transitioned" were 40 times more likely to have killed themselves than age and income matched females. That means for every one "non-transitioned" Swedish woman who committed suicide, there were 40 suicides of women who had undergone the regime of testosterone and surgeries. For the men, it was 18 times higher suicide rate. This included huge cohorts of data. The study his hard to read exactly because of this language you use. The captured language prevents the facts coming out to the public appropriately. Note that all Scandinavian countries outside of very captured Iceland have reversed these "transition practices" for children. It has been more than 3 years since these policy reversals and we do not hear of waves of suicides by "trans youth."
Our son received a letter from Planned Parenthood where (unbeknownst to us) he was getting estradaviol: the letter informed him that recent tests had found his risk of stroke and blood clotting is at dangerously high level and that he should see a primary care physician.. BUT THAT HE SHOULD FEEL COMFORTABLE CONTINUING HIS DRUG THERAPY!!!!! No mention made of what is clearly causing a perilous health condition in what was a perfectly normal and fully healthy body!!!!! EVIL!!!!!
Whaaat?? Was this recently …are you saying his own personal test results have drawn this conclusion…or test results from a study prompted planned parenthood to send the letter & advise him to visit his pcp?
Thanks
His own personal test results. Yes.
I’m sorry but this is shocking. How is that not malpractice? How long has he been on estradaviol?
There is a young man who died from a stroke because he didn't stop. I can't recall his name, but he had even reported feeling unwell and had never self-reported feeling suicidal over his gender dysphoria. I hope you can convince your son to stop. Good luck and take care of yourselves.
None of these "discoveries" are surprising. Estrogen "therapy" is an all-out assault on the natural processes of the male body's chemistry. Literally, an aggressive suppression of everything the male body is hard-wired to do. Incredible that this must be pointed out.
I agree. But lawyers, politicians, doctors, educators etc etc all need that concrete evidence to cite. Otherwise the old guard just churns out the old ones regardless of whether or not they have been discredited
It's time we stopped saying 'gender affirming care' and call it what it really is... 'sex deforming medicalization'.
To label this as "care" is moronic.....
Men who plan to have their testicles removed are unlikely to care about the degeneration of those body parts. Irreversible changes to testicles and reproductive functioning are of more concern in the population of minors who want to medically transition. With this population, however, there are major psychological resistances to information about long term damage to the body. These include the normal inability of young people to imagine growing old and sick, and strong self-harming tendencies in the pediatric gender clinic patients. It seems unlikely that many of the patients themselves would be dissuaded from using hormones even if well-conducted research leads to the conclusion that cross sex hormones have poor long term outcomes. The combination of peer group disapproval and age-based laws restricting usage might be more effective, as has been the case with tobacco use.
Thank you for this analysis. Based on what we know about the profound effects of hormones on physiology, we should've seen this coming. Thanks again. My best, Frederick
It seems like these risks were well known for decades. I remember reading of a Canadian study about thirty years ago. They gave men estrogen on the premise that since women had fewer heart attacks and maybe estrogen could protect men as well. They had to halt the experiment because of multiple adverse effects the estrogen was having on the men.
It's outrageous that there are mountains of evidence of the harms of exogensis hormones, while still being used haphazardly. As of 2015 about 3 million women died from breast cancer tied to birth control pills and HRT as compared to about 600k people who died of AIDS.
“ hey I wonder if taking opposite sex hormones will have negative health impacts”
It is unfortunate we live in a time when research showing “yes, it will” is both necessary and possible when this is a “I wonder if a hot glue gun is dangerous” level question
This is terrifying. And the no contact aspect of the many kids/young adults caught up in this mess will never hear of this study. Or they will be ‘counseled’ to dismiss it as irrelevant
My stomach is sinking
You say "In postmenopausal women, estrogen use has already been linked to a doubled relative risk of dementia" but the menopause doctors I'm reading say the opposite. I don't know who is right. I'm postmenopausal and considering HRT for REDUCING dementia risk. Now for a biological male taking estrogen it may be a different story, because their body is designed for a different hormonal set-up.
It would be good to hear the absolute risk not the relative risk, as relative always sounds a whole lot more. But either way, I will be continuing to read up on this topic. Menopausal women find it harder to access hormones than trans folk. This is totally weird to me, when there are major health issues menopausal women are trying to avoid, and the recent thinking from my reading is that some cancers, cardiac problems and dementia risk are improved on HRT
HRT horrible cardiovascular affects. I know. Increase in blood pressure is linked to dementia. Menopause is a natural human process. Blocking it is not natural. You can't turn back the clock, or halt it, anymore than you can use puberty blockers safely to deter the course programmed in your genes.
Yes, I'm of the mind that adding hormones to ameliorate a natural process will come out in the wash as a huge mistake later on.
I went off the Pill almost as soon as I started it, because I hated how it made me feel.
Years later, I went back on the Pill, and got very, very sick. Multiple canker sores on my tongue. Could barely climb a flight of stairs. Zero appetite. It turns out that I had an underlying condition that the pill exacerbated.
On the one hand, this sudden rise in my liver enzymes pushed me into treatment sooner. On the other, the effect seemed to clearly indicate that taking the pill is not harmless. It's affecting the liver in some way, however mild and undetectable. However, I did detect it when first on it, and went off.
My mother had a hysterectomy (so have I). She has not partaken in Big Pharma in any way, and I have studiously followed her lead. I've heard that hysterectomies can increase the potential for dementia. My mother fell into dementia in her early 80s, and at 89, is incapable of living independently, whereas my grandparents did so until 92.
My grandmother did not get dementia. She also never exercised. My grandfather did get dementia in his late 80s. He exercised. He never had a hysterectomy. But he also stopped exercising his mind...
I suspect that there's really only so much we can do to stave off the ill-fated effects of aging, is my point. But adding artificial hormones does not bode well.
I think you're 💯 percent right underdog. I could immediately feel the adverse effects of birth control pills, in the short time I took them, which did irreversible damage to my circulatory system. Still, we women will risk death if needs be to avoid pregnancy. It's the doing of the Pharma industry which will profit from bad products without concern for consequences as long as it makes them rich. I also believe it has to do with insuring men have sexual access to women by providing birth control even when it costs millions of women their lives... just as unnatural hormones may eventually kill trans people.
Menopause may be a "natural" process, but the fact is that women only recently started living that long beyond it. Just because it's natural doesn't mean that it can't wreak havoc on the female body. "Naturally", we weren't meant to outlive our reproductive years by that much. Read our new FDA commissioner Marty Makary's book "Blind Spots" on the extraordinary potential health benefits of HRT.
You are correct that these scary figures are based on the WHI studies, which were done on an older cohort of women and which used different forms of hormones, and are now widely thought of as having unnecessarily scared women away from HRT, which has many benefits. Read Marty Makari's recent book (Blind Spots) on it.
The global hormone replacement therapy market was valued at approximately $21.3 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to around $35.6 billion by 2030 because of the aging population. It is of great concern of big Pharma to allay any health misgivings connected to HRT.
I want to add that as always when trying to assess the effects of any medical intervention, it is important to look critically at any study that makes claims in either direction.
And my main point here is that replacing the hormones your own body used to make after it stops making them is a completely different matter from administering the hormones of one sex to the other. The latter cannot be used to discredit the former, as they are completely different interventions.
Sure. Marty Makary is not exactly a pharma shill though. And some women are so miserable without HRT they'll take a tiny increase in risk.
It is appalling that this kind of reporting needs to be done. One might as well do a study proving that people who jump off tall buildings are statistically likely to die or that staring at the sun can lead to blindness. What happened to Hippocrates' rule: "First, do no harm." ? Somebody reload the Matrix, please.
Gas in a diesel engine=====
We should stop giving blood transfusions if the blood came from a different sex. It's just like giving a blood transfusion from a different race or species. In fact we should not give blood transfusions at all. People should be forced to bank a couple of liters of their own blood every year, just in case they need it. That way we avoid all this trouble!
Just thinking back to thalidomide and DES and how they impacted the women who took them. We all know about the missing limbs of children whose mothers were given Thalidomide to preserve their pregnancies. The fallout from DES (a form of estrogen) is probably still going on. Daughters of mothers given DES during pregnancy often developed ovarian and vaginal cancers. Later, it was learned that sons of mothers given DES developed testicular cancer. While many pharmaceutical companies manufactured DES (diethylstilbestrol), Eli Lilly was a prominent manufacturer and one of the first to receive FDA approval for its production in 1947. Years ago, a woman lawyer, whose mother had taken DES, sued a company that manufactured DES after she developed ovarian cancer (I saw a documentary about it). The opposition male lawyer, defending the DES company, fell in love with her and they got married. Ironically, at some point the husband developed testicular cancer and discovered that his mother had also been given DES during her pregnancy. The discussion link below talks about the possible implications of some of the drugs given during pregnancy by a person who has been investigating the subject.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stellaomalley/p/poisoned-in-the-womb-when-medicines?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=17i9pe
What a story! Thanks~
A puzzlement. Surely no one takes significant doses of these hormones for a prolonged period of time. For both ftm and mtf, they presumably are on de minimis doses after they're post-op. And even then it would tend to be transdermal or via pellet-release, not something going through the liver. This essay does not touch on any of these questions. Perhaps later on someone can expand.
A lot of people stay on cross sex hormones at significant levels even after reaching maximal possible changes in their appearance from the hormones and surgeries. Most common reason given is that the hormones "make me feel more like myself."
Reportedly, the vast majority of transgender males retain their genitals, and the same is likely to be true for females because the surgeries available to them are complex and expensive.
Transgender females may suffer reproductive anatomy atrophy from testosterone use, but not all of them will have a hysterectomy right away. So there will be people on high doses of these wrong-sex hormones for years. There are even men who take so-called 'puberty blockers' after puberty in an attempt to suppress their natural testosterone production.
“Reportedly”—i.e., nonsensically or factitiously. Over the past four or five decades I’ve known a number of women who, for whatever congenital or neurological mixup, had been born as apparent males, though they sensibly got this corrected when young. So 100% of these real-life examples had "full sex changes,” I suppose you would call it. Perhaps your friends who are “transgender males” and giving you misinformation should simply call themselves what they are, which is transvestites!
Your “transgender females” sound like those who tried to begin a sex change but never got past the hormones.
The medical papers referenced in this essay covered a wild grab-bag of conditions, yet each individual study had only a handful of subjects. It’s high time we stopped taking these weekend hippies seriously, and these quasi-professional medical surveys limited themselves to genuine specimens.
No one can change sex. One of the studies proving the damage of wrong sex hormones was in Finland, and they were trying various methods of giving men estrogen. It was found that in all of the different delivery methods, the men ideating a female persona developed statistically significant cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, strokes, pulmonary embolism and heart attacks. This study changed the mind of Rita Kailtiala, a formerly "affirming" researcher.
From a medical and legal point of view, your first statement is just wrong. It's like saying someone with knee replacements can't walk, or doesn't have legs. The doctors disagree, the judges disagree.
Furthermore, you're arguing limitations of medical technology as proof of — what, exactly? In 20 years when most of the limitations have been overcome, what will your argument be?
Are you going to go, "Oh never mind, there used to be a problem, but I see it's been solved"? Or will you reach for something mystical and metaphysical: perhaps an assertion that there are magical female and male essences that live inside tiny invisible beasties, in cell organelles or nuclei, and they all carry a sort of date-stamp of one's sex? That is not a joke, but an actual argument some nutters try to put across. Well, sex doesn't work like that.
More fundamentally, those subjects whom you characterize as people who "change their sex" don't think they've changed their sex at all. (I haven't done a survey; I'm hypothesizing from common sense.) They just had their bodies *corrected* to conform with their true sex. They had deformities fixed. And they had some legal documents corrected to bring them into conformity with reality.
This is unintelligible. Take a walk or something. I don't claim that anyone can change sex. No one can change sex. Disorders of Sexual Development are not related to believing you've been born in the wrong body, and individuals with this unfortunate condition have been co-opted by the "trans community" to prove that a psychiatric illness is a medical, physical illness. They also use the diabetic narrative to justify ingesting hormones known to cause stroke, heart attacks and cancer, as if these hormones were insulin taken by a diabetic.
No, you take a walk, "Ute." You are half male and half female by heredity. So is everyone else. Just deal with it. It is the source of all your problems. You have never had a stroke or heart attack or cancer from hormones. You are a fantasist.
Just because some gets surgery on their genitalia doesn’t mean that their bodies will begin to make hormones inconsistent with their biological sex. They will have to continue to take cross-sex hormones.
I’m sorry, what is this assertion based on?
This is fact. My ex-husband, who thinks he's female and claims to be me, mother of our children, has been taking estrogen for 30 years. Despite the fact that his father had 2 heart attacks and a stroke, indicating a medical history inconsistent with taking these risks.
So sorry about that, if it’s true. But a single claim about an individual is not proof. You are claiming that you had a husband...who had a sex change about 30 years ago...and is still on heavy doses of exogenous sex hormone? (What pharmaceuticals? What dosages? Injection, transdermal, gel, vaginal cream, or what?) Sorry, but that doesn't happen, certainly not under any responsible clinical guidance. Even those women who do Estrace or Estraderm patches during and after menopause, do not do them forever, and those doses they get are tiny, like 25 or 50mcg. That's not going to give you an embolism.
Another problem here is that you claim the “husband” is now claiming to be you. So this leaves us with a Greek dilemma. Is the person signing herself Ute Heggen the postop transsexual Ute Heggen, or the woman that Ute Heggen was married to 30 years ago? With no evidence either way, I have to assume neither version may exist, and I'm just talking again to a prankster I've encountered before.
Terhune, I collect the sole data in the world on trans widows. Your response is the typical troll reaction to the realities of this sisterhood. I now have data from 70 trans widows; the rate of crossdressing husbands assaulting the wife is between 1/3 and 1/2 of the time. Just google Ute Heggen and you'll find my interviews, the articles written on my story and my memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022) My ex husband's PhD psychologist diagnosed him as transsexual in the first appointment. She put this detail in her 1997 sworn affidavit submitted to court during our divorce. The ex-husbands who fathered children usually demand the children call him some version of mother and do try to pass themselves off as the mother. My ex took pills. I saw them. Here's a short clip with a photo from our wedding. Please do not come as a troll in the comments on my channel. You can find the profiles of the trans widows on my Trans Widows' Testimonies playlist. Of the 70 ex-husbands, 2 detransitioned.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Sgl9Vl8_bk
“I collect the sole data in the world…” Shouldn’t that be “sole datum”? It’s just you, you admit.
Even if your self-indulgent story is true, it’s all on you. You married a weirdo, because you didn’t catch the warning signs. So? People make mistakes and move on. What happened to you?
And then you want to move the goalposts and say it isn’t about husbands who turn out to be transsexuals; no, they are really “crossdressing husbands assaulting the wife.” So which is it?
Get your story straight, then get back to us.
Science.
Known for decades, the harm of excessive and continuous drug and alcohol use should have been a warning. Instead, removing body parts and administering drugs with no long-term studies seems to have replaced those old-timey means of making billions. Collateral damage be damned.
Doctors mostly stopped prescribing estrogen long term for post menopausal women because of risks (like blood clots, strokes). Typical dose when used is about 1 mg a day.
I met a mtf trans person who was taking 10 mg a day. He wasn't too concerned about the risk, and I didn't ask him if he'd been advised.
10 mg, is bound to potentialy cause a problem. HRT for women, is routinely prescribed for menopausal symptom, as well as testosterone as well now.
You really have no business commenting like you're in any way knowledgeable of what menopausal women are prescribed.
Most of my friends are going through it. So! it is my business . Your also not responding to any kind of trans actvist but a very well informed right wing Blanchardian.
OK, then... learn what women are actually prescribed and in what amounts? I'm glad you're not 1000% wrapped around a tree delulu.
If your not going to play nice, and be obtuse. I'll only say this! I live in the real world and reality. Not the lefts social construction nonsense. Byeee
Unfortunately most of these studies used cisgender males as the control group. However, transgender women are transitioning to be as close to 'female' as possible and thus aren't typically concerned with risk compared to men. While I believe the data on cisgender male outcomes should also be included, it will likely be ignored as irrelevant in absence of data comparing outcomes to those of cisgender women. I suspect the providers of care, having embraced medical transition as a legitimate choice, would be similar in terms of being most interested in the risks compared to cisgender women. I'm glad at least some of these studies do include that info... hopefully that will become standard moving forward.
The reason they use “cisgender” males in the study as the control group, is because putting estrogen into a biological female body is now where near the same thing as putting estrogen into a biological male body. Biological females make their own estrogen and only need to take it during menopause, when our bodies stop making estrogen and if you were to compare those women to trans women, it would be like comparing apples to oranges. When my female body stopped making estrogen several not so good things happened to my body. So giving my body estrogen, the hormone my body needs to function properly, it does not have the same ill effects as giving it to a biological male. But if you take too much during menopause there is still higher risks of blood clots and stroke.
Also, just to say, I believe the link between women taking estrogen and dementia was found in women who began HRT ten years or more after menopause, not those who took it from the start of menopause. That may or may not make a difference to what we believe happens when estrogen is introduced into the male body, but it is an important distinction for women.
Definitely an important distinction! I need to clarify that with my own doctor who already has me on a low dose patch for perimenopause symptoms. No way am I going to keep using it if it's going to increase my dementia risk!!
Your GP may know very little about hormones tbh. Most are very conservative with women’s HRT, influenced it seems by both misleading and patchy research. This very incomplete knowledge base, which has been problematic for women across the decades, makes it even more worrying that transitioners are given - I’m guessing - quite high levels of opposite sex hormones. We just don’t really know the possible outcomes, because the research hasn’t been done. “Why?” Is a big question.
Agree- is apples to oranges. It's absolutely important for the male data to be included since that's the physiologically relevant data.
I really just wish medical professionals who prescribe cross sex hormones hadn't given in to pressure to be accommodating in language in the first place. Several years ago, they didn't pretend that trans women were actual women... this has rapidly evolved over the last 15-20 years. Trans patients may be uncomfortable talking about their biological realities, but in the context of medical care, it is crucial that we use accurate language.
Now that we have abandoned that, folks are free to deny their biological realities even in the context of medical care. It deeply troubles me... especially because I have people in my life who are receiving this treatment and I worry about the serious implications for them. Doctors are essentially reinforcing and enabling a fantasy that, when medical and surgical treatments are involved, has very real risk.
That's where my desire to see female data included came from... but you're right... it isn't relevant. We need to expect more from medical professionals, not sink deeper into avoiding difficult realities. Sensitivity is important, but using accurate language and data is absolutely crucial to patients being informed of the risks of treatment. This should not be compromised.
Thanks for your comment.
Yes, "Sensitivity is important," especially when considering millions of school girls who avoid using school bathrooms because they fear encountering boys there. It not only is bad for their kidneys, but they suffer anxiety and stress fearing the might have an "accident." Many girls are also now avoid participating in sports teams where change rooms might include males trying to impersonate females.
Giving up sports can also have long-term effects on girls health. I see this happening to girls like my niece and her friends. The situation also makes them angry and resentful. That can't be healthy.
Testosterone is a known carcinogen, as is estrogen. You cannot change sex, so of course the controls should be the same sex as the study cohort. Free yourself of this captured language. The Swedish study of death records (Cecelia Djehne, et al, Karolinska Institut, 2011) found that women who "transitioned" were 40 times more likely to have killed themselves than age and income matched females. That means for every one "non-transitioned" Swedish woman who committed suicide, there were 40 suicides of women who had undergone the regime of testosterone and surgeries. For the men, it was 18 times higher suicide rate. This included huge cohorts of data. The study his hard to read exactly because of this language you use. The captured language prevents the facts coming out to the public appropriately. Note that all Scandinavian countries outside of very captured Iceland have reversed these "transition practices" for children. It has been more than 3 years since these policy reversals and we do not hear of waves of suicides by "trans youth."