hormones

Anonymous asked: What medicine do you use to breastfeed someone else’s baby?! I tried to combo breastfeed and formula feed my own baby, and my milk supply dried up, and now he gets only formula. I’m wondering if there’s the same medical intervention would help me start breastfeeding him again.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

I took hormonal birth control (Zovia 1/35; I think the progesterone/estrogen balance is important but it doesn’t have to be this specific birth control) to imitate pregnancy progesterone levels, and domperidone (20mg, four times a day) for six months, then went off the hormonal birth control and started pumping every four hours for two weeks. By the end of those two weeks I was producing about 4oz a pumping session, and gradually grew that to about 7. 

I did this in consultation with a lactation consultant and I recommend that if you can afford it/access it, but hormonal birth control has well-understood relatively limited risks and domperidone is a safe medication you can order online at inhousepharmacy so I can imagine doing it yourself being the right choice for some people who don’t have meaningful access to a lactation consultant. 

Sam did this too and got some milk but lower milk supply than me, so results definitely vary, and of course the most important thing for thriving kids is parents who are not stressed and miserable, not whether they’re fed breastmilk or formula. I hope it works for you if you end up deciding to try it but I am sure your baby will be totally fine either way.

Tags:

#I have less than no desire to do this myself #but I’m very glad to hear it’s an option for people who want that #lactation #fertility cw #medical cw #proud citizen of The Future #the more you know

Anonymous asked: Body mod: Unaging preteen girl.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

moonlit-tulip:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).

*

Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.

Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.

(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)

((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))

—

†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.

it’s pretty nuts that some people are almost the same size they were when they were 13 for their whole life

I was probably only like 2/3rds of a person when I turned 13! kind of short and very lacking in upper body strength

(for completeness, note also the existence of this branch)

It’s pretty great! One of the nice things about estrogen is that the physical effects are often very front-loaded: you get them out of the way when you’re about 10 – 12 and then have, like, 20 years of looking pretty much the same. I love how stable my appearance has been for the most recent half of my life: even with prosopagnosia I can look in a mirror and get a visceral sense of “yep, that’s me!”, because I have *so much experience* with this face that general object recognition is enough for that.

(I didn’t feel a visceral sense of recognition in the mirror until I was at least 17, maybe 18! Before then I’d never had the same face for long enough to really deeply get to know it!)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #morphological freedom ask meme #amnesia cw #aging cw #hormones #prosopagnosia

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

Random TMI Body-Development Stuff

Since being consistently on HRT since the start of the year, I’ve gone from “perky, sensitive nipples on a flat chest” to “actually has breasts and feels slightly awkward walking around with no bra”, and the process seems to be accelerating somewhat.

Also, they hurt ALL THE TIME. Like, even giving people hugs is painful. Luckily, the skill points I recently invested in masochism have been extremely useful here, so this hasn’t been a problem in the slightest. Dull aches are the easiest to mentally reinterpret, so I’ve experienced zero unpleasantness throughout this.

Overall, the sudden boob growth seems good? I’m mostly indifferent to whether I have breasts directly (I’d find it slightly more convenient not to, I think), but I expect it to be good for getting people to read me as female, especially with my top off. (Though I’ve found that breasts have only a small effect on how people read you, and flat chest + eyeliner passes better than prominent falsies + no eyeliner.) Also, like, straight guys like breasts, I’ve been informed.

The other thing having actual flesh-boobs might be useful for is someday being able to nurse children, which would be super convenient. And this seems like it might actually be possible, because for the past few days I’ve actually been lactating any time pressure is placed on my chest. So, proof of concept that lactation is possible.

The only problem is, I seem to be lactating mostly water? Like, y’know how the milk-producing glands are modified sweat glands? I seem to still have roughly-normal sweat glands there instead, so I think I’m producing very dilute sweat, or something.

So, if anyone knows about the biology of transition: What should I expect to happen there? Will they just naturally develop further into actually producing milk, or should I modify my HRT in some way to encourage that? And where might I learn more about this?

Tagging @testblogdontupvote, @lethriloth, and @cptsdcarlosdevil as people who might maybe know more about how trans biology works. But also, like, all contributions appreciated.

Tags:

#signal boost #I personally do not know the answer to this question #(I have never lactated and I produce all my hormones internally) #but maybe some of you know the answer? #nsfw text? #gender

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

My hormones are everywhere as usual. I feel nice right now though and crying for a few hours felt nice too. Before I tried spiro or estradiol or progesterone or dhea, I used to become so distressed when I saw girls cry because it would happen fairly often, and among the people who I talked with, people would brag about how much they cried during a given movie or when reading a book or buying dental floss that reminded them of their estranged half sister.

I was really quite concerned because I though they must be experiencing a massive amount of agony every two weeks or so.

It turns out that a lot of crying in E モ—ド were important physical componants of useful emotional processing. Like dumping a river through your head to clean your brain.

I was really quite concerned because I though they must be experiencing a massive amount of agony every two weeks or so.

[not-consciously-endorsed typical minding]

Crying is painful, an unalloyed bad useful only as a form of self-harm. Ideally, crying should occur as rarely as possible. If you’re crying more often than about once a month, keep a close eye on your mental health; if it’s more often than ~weekly, whatever situation is causing it is terrible for your sanity and you need to escape it ASAP.

[/not-consciously-endorsed typical minding]

Asexuality has never made me question my hormonal profile, but people talking about cathartic crying (and specifically estrogen making crying cathartic) does. Either I just have an unusual (non-)reaction to E on the crying front, or something’s out of whack. (my guess would be the former; I’d expect additional symptoms if something was out of whack, and I haven’t noticed anything else)

(some context notes re: my expected hormonal profile: cis woman, early-mid twenties, not on any hormone-affecting drugs)

Personally, if negative!crying is wrong, I don’t want to be right. I mean, I guess cathartically-crying!me would, by definition, not be miserable about it (even if that’s hard to grok), but if nothing else it would remove one of the easiest-to-spot gauges of mental health I have.

Tags:

#I hate when people see me crying and give me that ”let it all out” shit #I hate it when I’m trying to stop crying because they’re trying to talk me out of doing what’s best for me #and I hate it when I’m not trying to stop because it’s a double standard #would you say the same if I were biting myself or clawing or whacking against hard objects? #I’m deliberately making myself miserable because I feel like I deserve it #and if you’re going to respond your response should acknowledge that #self harm cw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #hormones