#yeah we're tagging her for literary reasons what do you want

[pluralsword]

TLDR on our HRT journey (nearly 4 years now), very glad that we may be ending the chapter of our body’s life similar to how Phase 1 Arcee felt about her body lmao and moving on to feeling more euphoric with our organic frame (it is what is, we love it even though even our oldest headmate/our body desires metal, guess making shapes EVA foam will help compensate someday on occasions that would feel safe to do so):

Okay so, four days in on finasteride with estradiol (having given finasteride enough time to bond with our body tissue, takes four to five days) after switching out of spironolactone with estradiol (which we were on four almost four years) and personally;

finasteride is fucking fantastic so far:

- feel much more cogent/less brain fog (we’re told this is due to being more hydrated)

- it’s easier to plan doing things and then to do them

- body feels less unhinged/off-kilter

- sensation actually feels better/more intense, it’s easier to appreciate and immerse in touch and thus we don’t crave intimate relief as often, all of which has helped with our health a lot

Hopefully whatever “masculinizing” traits might resurface due to finasteride interfering with dihydrotestosterone instead of testosterone like spiro does won‘t be a bother, but from what we’ve seen/read/heard from folks a lot of people’s experience of it is okay. Finasteride is apparently recommended for folks who tend to get/are sensitive to side effects from medications (we definitely are).

For us personally, pre-HRT testosterone was no fun, it left us rather angsty and having difficulty with feeling a sense of composure, apart from the dysphoria, so spiro with estradiol was a remarkable improvement in all regards. Just with various psychological experiences piling up in the last three years on top of stuff from the rest of our life, spiro no longer felt tenable, so we had to switch to something else, and weren’t willing to take gender stuff by needle for personal reasons. Interestingly; a trans man we used to work with said that estrogen before HRT also left him feeling off-kilter in the head, and that taking HRT helped clear things up. This is just an experience some gender expansive folks have we suppose. :3

So yeah, here’s to the future! Whatever happens to our psyche for other reasons aside, we’ll probably be writing and doing art more consistently. We have some more thoughts about spiro and Arcee in regards to canon below:

To some degree though (this is going to be a very unhinged artist take, but more than anything it’s us processing what we went through), we’re glad we did spiro because of the effects it had we wanted that will carry over, and also because it did give our non-Arcee headmates and bodily experience personal insight into how much of a pain the aft sensory side effects and brain fog especially from something that was supposed to give euphoria is.

Given- we knew what many of the side effects could be going in, our gender affirmation providers did their best to inform us and we are deeply appreciative of how they’ve helped out all these years including by being supportive of our xenogender stuff and plurality when we finally felt comfortable talking about it. And, we know that having contracted the original strain of Covid in early 2020 could have left us with long covid which also can cause brain issues, and then there’s all the additional baggage of our psyche from how our brain is wired and living in the world, which we’ve done our best to compensate for with other medications, learning wisdom techniques from dialectical behavioral therapy and philosophy and various orgs and studies and contacts and experiences in life, seeing a therapist as needed, and so on.

So, it’s not as if it was just spiro, just as for IDW1 Arcee, it wasn’t just her surgery; it was also everything else going on in her life that was so hard, and she eventually found a way to reconstruct her life and be happy, just as we continue to attempt to do, appreciating happiness when it does come our way. This is all to say that there’s always hope; even if spiro had been the only thing in the world at the time, we would have clawed onwards, we wouldn’t be as happy but we would still try, for all the love we are lucky to have and make.