Coming up on two years of HRT. My smell hasn’t really changed but my god, my ability to smell has become stronger?? I’ve always been blessed/cursed with a very strong sense of smell (maybe an autism thing) but recently it’s been through the roof.
I’m convinced that’s a thing with how often I see girls talk about smells while I’m over her like uhhh I get none of that ever
I also have a good sense of smell, but I didn’t notice it getting better on HRT. I’m grateful because it really does suck when a smell becomes too much
I’m a queer cis woman who knew a lot about how HRT changes the body due to also being a nerdy biochemist, but even so, it blew me away to actually see how much stuff changes when I had a partner who started HRT when we were together.
It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature. It’d be real cool if we lived in a world where we could lean more into the insight we can collectively build if trans people are more actively included in research.
I say “lean more into”, because there are researchers out there who recognise the epistemic power to be found in respecting and valuing trans people. For instance, one of my favourite bits of research of the last few years was this 2022 study which used tissue donated by trans men undergoing phalloplasty surgery to show that previous estimates for the number of nerve fibres in the human clitoris was a severe underestimate.
Part of why I love it so much is the picture of the lead author in the press release I linked above. Behold, Blair Peters M.D., who looks exactly like the kind of person I’d expect to be leading research like this (affectionate tone). When I saw this, I checked their academic page to see if they had pronouns listed, and indeed they do.
Talking about this study is a wee bit of a tangent to my main comment, but I included it because it always makes me smile, and I hoped it would make you, the reader of this comment, smile too.
It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature.
Any examples?
Thank you, it made me smile
We need more Blair Peters in the world
🫥 telling everyone on the internet that you know what your mom’s towel smells like
Update: i misread the punchline.
But is it that weird to know what your mom’s towel smells like?
I mean, most people grow up in the same home as their mom, sharing the same bathroom, and probably sharing a towel hanger/bar, so it wouldn’t be that weird to know what it smells like, you would just sometimes encounter it as you grab your towel.
woah, she said her towel smells like her mom, not her moms towel
Whoops, I misread that!
I love the shame cube, that’s hilarious
Priceless…
I started HRT in November. Changes are taking a while to really come into their own, but I’m wondering if stuff like this is more evident than I realize because it’s taking place over a period of months.
It’s a ten year long process. Puberty just takes that long.
Some of my changes took years. Some i just didn’t notice for years.
Smell kinda happened overnight for me, but you mileage may vary
It’s funny hrt didn’t make me look anything like my mom (for both better and worse), but it did make me act more like her.
That honestly terrifies me more
I remember as a kid being existentially horrified at puberty. I mean, sure, I was trans without knowing it, but the idea of my mind changing to develop romantic and sexual attraction without my consent was terrifying. Looking back at the things I wrote as a teenager or twenty-something, I really was a different person.
We are always changing, forgetting, learning, being led by hormones and sensations, growing and decaying. Ultimately I don’t care as much about whether who I am 5 years from now is “me” in some existentially meaningful way as much as I care about her being happy and having lots of happy people around her. I will live on in her memory.
Though if you’re talking about your mom specifically rather than the existential horror of change, then yeah, mood. My mom sucks too, but she has never embraced change, and I’ve already learned to do better than her in so many areas. You can learn what she refused to learn, avoid the mistakes she refused to avoid. It takes work, but it’s worth it.
Yeah fortunately it’s been mostly in good ways
Honestly, I’m almost 4 years in and I’m just kind of embracing it these days. My Mom was beautiful, brilliant, impulsive, stubborn, and always went to bat for the folks she cared about. If I can manage to avoid her tendency towards substance abuse then I figure I’d be doing right by her memory.
Too real
