one of the kids greeted me with “what are you wearing?!” and later declared she’s gonna call me a lady, bc i looked like a lady. no discussions needed.

🥹🥹🥹

I find opiates kinda boring tbh, and while they can be euphoric (sorta mixed for me) they can also make me feel sorta ill, so I don't really like to take them.

When I was depressed, though, that was a dangerous drug because I had so little "happiness" and it felt like a special treat - so I could see it being very dangerous if I didn't have other sources of happiness / mental well-being.

So glad you got that corner room and you had a good experience, that is such great luck and so heart-warming.

Also probably worth mentioning that recreational drug use of heroin is probably dosing more than the hospital is giving, if I had to guess - so stronger euphoria, but also stronger depressant effects, etc., so I'm not sure how accurate your hospital experience was to what recreational users are experiencing.

I keep having a strong desire to pierce my nipples, but I'm currently just suppressing those desires - how was your experience?

Makes sense re visibility; I also get the sense that piercings also lead people to see the nipple in a more sexualized way, which also tips the balance.

I don't tend to wear baggy clothes now, so that might also be part of why I always wear a bra 😁

I feel this is such a stereotypical German interaction, lol

it only gets easier from here 😁

also, just a soft suggestion: I know trans girls IRL who change their name all the time, trying out a new name from time to time to see what fits them. You don't have to have the perfect name yet to not use your deadname, anything will do in the meantime, and you can always say you're trying out a name to see how it feels. Especially in LGBT+ friendly spaces that can be well understood and accepted.

congrats on making such a huge step! 🥳

you're so pretty it hurts 💔

maybe do a spin cycle class at home, hooked up to a generator?

just an example: if you look like a man because you have estrogen insensitivity, buying and taking extra estrogen won't help at all and you're wasting money and taking needless risks.

Cis people have more diversity in their bodies and the way they look than most people realize, and cis women are confronted for being "trans" in womens' restrooms all the time, way more frequently than trans women are, because there are way more cis women who don't look like the perfect ideal of feminine beauty than there are trans women.

I'm not denying your suffering or distress, but I am saying that it's entirely possible nothing is medically wrong with you and you are well within the natural diversity of human bodies.

Spironolactone is a pretty weak anti-androgen and will also cause lots of side-effects, some of which can be life-threatening. You should absolutely be monitored by a doctor when taking spiro, it's not an exaggeration to say you are taking your life into your own hands. Spiro is not a typical part of a DIY regimen for trans women (for lots of reasons, but the medical risks are one of them).

The protocols and treatments designed over a century now for trans women are rooted in empirical evidence and studies that evaluate the risk / benefit of HRT and other interventions like surgeries, and they absolutely do not apply the same to cis women - in fact, the empirical evidence we have about body dysmorphia in cis women is exactly the opposite of the findings for trans women (i.e. for cis women interventions like surgery generally don't generally improve outcomes or reduce distress or symptoms, and meanwhile they increase risk significantly; there isn't even a protocol for HRT in non-menopausal cis women because there is absolutely zero reason for it, HRT is only needed when your body doesn't produce enough of its own hormones - and we have no evidence your body isn't producing enough estrogen let alone that it's producing so much testosterone that you need an anti-androgen).

It's a pseudo-science myth perpetuated by influencers and grifters that "more estrogen = more feminine". The informed consent paperwork I signed to take HRT as a trans woman specifically says that taking more estrogen increases risks and does not increase feminization. And worse, unlike a trans woman whose body does not produce female levels of estrogen, your body likely already produces estrogen in more than sufficient amounts for your body's functioning; it's very unlikely you need more estrogen, and taking extra estrogen like this can increase your risk of breast cancer as well as disrupt your monthly menstrual & hormonal cycles.

Your body will also seek to maintain homeostasis and will likely reduce the amount of estrogen it produces in response to taking exogenous estrogen (the same as taking any other hormone your body naturally produces - e.g. if you took melatonin every night, eventually your body will just produce less melatonin and rely on the exogenous melatonin, you essentially form a "tolerance" over time that brings you back to where you started), so again you're wasting money and risking your health for no added benefit.

Hi!

Trans person here.

The answer to your question is no, there is no medical reason for the sex marker on the driver's license. (Nor would it make sense to carry a medical card with your assigned sex marker on it.)

Assigned sex at birth is rarely relevant in medical contexts, and in fact is probably misleading (causing doctors to inappropriately treat the patient based on their assigned sex rather than their actual biological characteristics).

A trans woman is truly more like a cis woman than a cis man when it comes to medical needs, e.g. she will need mammograms like cis women, and (assuming here that trans women are on estrogen) they metabolize drugs like cis women and almost all of their biology is not different from a cis woman who lacks a uterus and ovaries.

A study from Oct 2025 found that within 12 months of taking HRT, trans people have a heart mass that matches their gender:

The troponin threshold to predict cardiovascular events is lower for women due to the greater cardiac mass typically seen in men.

Since estradiol and testosterone were not thought to directly impact cardiac mass, researchers expected that troponin would remain similar to individuals’ assigned gender at birth.

However, they found the opposite to be true.

The clinical research team found that troponin levels shifted towards the affirmed gender after 12 months of hormone therapy.

Troponin decreased in transgender women to a level not statistically different from cisgender women, but which was 78% lower than in cisgender men.

Another recent study published in Oct 2025 found that on the molecular level hormones change the protein biomarkers in cells:

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/study-finds-trans-womens-blood-proteins

“For transgender women, we found gender affirming hormone therapy alters the levels of many protein biomarkers,” Novakovic said, noting that this could impact risk assessments for things like autoimmune disease and heart conditions. Usually, these assessments factor in any number of variables, including sex as well as lifestyle or genetic components.

“Feminizing GAHT [gender-affirming hormone therapy] skews the plasma proteome toward a cis-female profile,” the study concluded. It should be noted that people of any sex or gender can exhibit a vast and evolving spectrum of these biomarkers—there is no “one size fits all” model for biodiversity.

The more evidence that is collected the more we realize that biological sex is not fixed but instead the human body is plastic and the sex really does change, so it's not really an exaggeration to say that trans women are biologically female in most medically relevant contexts.

The only exceptions I can think of are due to organs developing a certain way, e.g. trans men with a uterus still might technically have a rare chance of becoming pregnant or developing cervical cancers.

On the flip side, in rare cases, a trans woman (esp. one who transitions late and has a family history of prostate cancer) might develop a prostate cancer (fun fact: cis women have an organ similar to a prostate called the Skene's gland that, like the prostate, produces ejaculate; it's not a male-only organ), so that is one difference - trans women might need prostate exams that cis women wouldn't need.

But for almost all medical contexts, trans people should be treated as their gender and not their assigned sex at birth. For trans folks who have been on HRT for >6 - 12 months, it is genuinely a risk to their health to view them as their assigned sex at birth.

EDIT: for what it's worth, my doctor basically told me not to out myself to other doctors and this advice is not uncommonly given; he said the only thing I need to figure out in the future is possibly getting prostate exams when I'm much older - but even that is not clearly indicated given the treatment for prostate cancer is anti-androgens and estrogen, which I'll have been on for decades before the screening would start for prostate cancers; the needs vary, a woman who transitions later in life and has a family history of prostate cancer will have a different need for prostate cancer screening than a trans woman who transitioned before puberty and has no family history of prostate cancers, for example.

congrats girl, but you need to wear a bra.

If you can see your nipples through the shirt, you might need a bra with more padding. Bralettes sometimes come with removeable foam pads, those are the ones that work really well.

welcome to girlhood :-)

oh, we're really going to blame the consumer on this one?

get your grindset on, girl 😤

(but srsly, buy & wear sunscreen 😱)