A timeline of the Biden administration’s pro-LGBTQ+ actions: https://www.hrc.org/resources/president-bidens-pro-lgbtq-timeline

A platform may be empty words, but you can also look at what actions have been taken. It’s hard to feel satisfied by the Democrats, but to be fair they don’t have control of the House or Senate.

I inject estradiol valerate and found my appetite increased significantly pretty much immediately. I gained 15 - 20 lbs over 6 months, and now I’m back to the weight I was before I started transition.

Considering you are underweight, don’t underestimate the importance of fat in feminizing a figure. Even if just temporarily it might be good to see this as a time where you intentionally want to put on extra weight (assuming you are suppressing testosterone and maintaining estrogen dominance), because that will help develop breast growth (which are fat stores), and hips and butt (which are also fat stores). Even fat in the face seems to play a big role in feminizing it.

When starting estradiol for the first time it seems to increase appetite, I found this to be especially true in the first 3 - 6 months. Even if estrogen generally is associated with decreased appetite, it’s contextual how it impacts appetite, and in the case of estradiol initiating puberty it increases appetite (even without progesterone).

yeah, during COVID the mayor became famous for running attack ads against the health department, and as a result of his leadership the state legislature stripped the health department of their ability to implement any policies or directives

Well, your OP was about how resolvable your libido is now on HRT, but you didn’t really talk much about how resolvable it was before or what you think accounts for the difference.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like there are many barriers in place that complicate sex for you, and maybe as you have transitioned there has been a shifting nature to the libido that makes it harder to satisfy.

Where before maybe libido was more visual, impulsive, and dissociated from the rest of you and your needs, maybe the HRT has shifted the nature of the libido, from mere craving for sex in isolation to something more like desire for intimacy with all the emotional needs associated with it.

This shift in desire might lead to increased feelings of loneliness, and increased desire for a sexual partner more than pre-HRT. That shifting desire might then create much more distress because of how inaccessible the fulfillment of those needs feels to you, not just because of bodily dysphoria and the inability to embody the kind of sexual person you would want to be with someone else, but also because the libido is now more connected to you and your feelings than the were pre-HRT, so maybe it’s harder to be as indifferent or detached.

This is all highly speculative, though - I don’t really know you, I’m just trying to make sense of what you have told me.

preach

I wish someone IRL was there to give her a big hug

How does it compare to pre-HRT?

oh, yeah - I wish I could have ovaries, that would be amazing; I also wish I could have a uterus, but I guess in some ways it is convenient not to have one (no menstruating). I also like the control I have over hormones by injecting them, rather than ovaries that follow a fertility cycle that would be mostly irrelevant to my needs.

I am sorry for what you have been through, I hope you are able to prioritize your needs and take care of yourself 🧡

yeah, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of constant discharge either, but I think I would also just live with it if I felt I felt self-lubrication was a priority. For me the bigger reasons are about the surgery going well, the technique being well-practiced and established, etc.

You missed me with the full swap, though - do you mean you wish they could give you ovaries?

yeah, I agree with this fully - I thought sky’s photo was of a AFAB person, the estrogen is clearly working

and I also agree that cultivating self-love is a good solution here, though I think she has to feel motivated to do that first

yeah, I am opting for penile inversion as well, mostly because that’s what my surgeon is good at, and because it is more of a “tried and true” method with less risk and faster recovery than the other methods.

Though I also might have less motivation than some trans women to have a self-lubricating vagina, namely I’m not young and potentially in situations where I would want to be able to have penetrative sex on demand (not wanting to plan and bring lube, etc.).

My life is much more boring. :-)

sorry, yes - can’t believe I mixed these up, lol

The county mayor describes himself as a Rothbardian, and the government here sometimes feels openly hostile to people, but especially to bicyclists. I received a lot of harassment for cycling, it is not supported culturally, and is even viewed as though I am a political enemy of the people. Huge, lifted emotional-support trucks are pretty common here.

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One is penile inversion, which results in a dry vaginal canal. Others use penile inversion plus some moist tissue so that the vaginal canal isn’t dry.

I think you may have meant peritoneal pull-through (PPT) for the second (self-lubricating) option.

Well, those distances use a nearby highway, and there are no bike lanes anywhere (let alone sidewalks). As mentioned earlier, being suicidal means I did use a bicycle anyway, and after a couple years I had a brain injury, was hit by cars twice and ended up with permanent injuries. So… yeah, I don’t recommend cycling (if you feel like being alive and able-bodied, anyway).

What is also not mentioned is that the nearest supermarket is a shitty Walmart, the nearest park is very small and not really worth going to, and the bus is not a practical form of public transit here.

I have to drive 20 - 30 minutes to actually get to stores, parks, or other places I would actually go to. I think that’s pretty good relative to most people, I live in a centralized location and most places are equidistant. I used to live in a nearby more rural town and I had to drive 45 - 60 minutes to get most places, and that was much worse.

I live in a suburb in the U.S.

• To the nearest convenience store: 322m
• To the nearest chain supermarket: 2.4km
• To the bus stop: 2.6km
• To the nearest park: 5.5km
• To the nearest big supermarket: 6.1km
• To the nearest library: 7.7km
• To the nearest train station: N/A

Notes:

• The “convenience store” in my example is a gas station, technically you can buy lottery tickets, candy, cigarettes, beer, and a few things like that - but very limited inventory, it’s mostly for people buying gas. It’s also very unusual to have a gas station like this located basically in a suburban area, most places you would have to go much further to find one.
• no sidewalks or safe passage, you walk on a dangerous road with ditches on either side to get to the convenience store.
• the only public transit is a bus, it is used only by poor people, and it doesn’t cover the west half of the city (for example I was unable to use public transit to go to school)

I have run to the park before despite being far away, but I think most people would (rightfully) think I was suicidal for doing so. A lot of the way to the park requires walking on dangerous streets where people drive fast around blind curves and where there is little to no shoulders to squeeze by if there are cars, most of the way has no sidewalks, and I have to cross busy roads where drivers are going 80+kmh.

Owning a car here is considered a part of being an adult, people without a car are seen as childish or immature, and usually suspected of being drunks who have lost their license due to DUIs or felons who cannot have a driving license and aren’t allowed to leave the state. It is assumed everyone drives everywhere, alternatives are unthinkable to most people here.

The reason cats can’t be vegan is that they cannot produce an amino acid called taurine, which is something dogs and humans can produce (but which we also get sometimes from dietary sources).

Most dietary sources of taurine are meat. This is why dogs and humans “can be vegan” but cats “can’t”. However, vegan taurine is made and can be bought as a supplement, both for humans (if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet), but also in properly made vegan cat food.

It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild (where the only source of taurine is meat) and you can’t just start to feed them a vegan diet without taurine and expect the cat to be healthy and survive.

In fact, cats fed a proper vegan diet tend to have better health:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499249/

I think the question is really what you are feeding your “vegan” cat: if you have managed to find (or make) a properly fortified vegan cat food it is theoretically possible to feed your cat a vegan diet.

This all feels a bit like the “controversy” around feeding young children and babies a vegan diet: done poorly it can be catastrophic (pun not intended), but it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet when enough effort is put into ensuring nutritional needs are actually satisfied.

That said, I also know of two other vegan responses:

1. for some vegans, having pets is not vegan to begin with, so a “vegan cat” is a contradiction in terms even if you fed them a vegan diet, you still wouldn’t be an ethical vegan by owning a cat. This is admittedly a less commonly held view which centers ethical veganism on the rights of animals to have autonomy, which if plausible in some ways seems at least impractical in the case of domesticated animals. There are questions of the harm that might be caused by choosing to treat cats not as pets but as autonomy-rights-bearing “wild” animals, but those ethical vegans might rightly point out this doesn’t undo the cat’s rights and the practical questions should be handled separately.
2. most vegans I know IRL just feed cats a non-vegan diet, acknowledging it is safer and more reasonable for their cat than trying to figure out a way to feed them a vegan diet. Good vegan cat food isn’t that common or easy to find as far as I know, and I assume it would be outrageously expensive.

Usually the blood work will vary heavily depending on when you last took a dose. When I get blood work, I do it right before I am going to inject so that the blood levels are at the lowest they could be (the “trough”). With oral I would imagine your E blood levels will fluctuate significantly, so when you last took a pill will make a big difference in terms of what your blood labs show.

The problem with taking larger and larger oral doses is that it doesn’t absorb better and you are just potentially taxing your liver. At the very least I would try out sublingual route and see if that helps 🤷‍♀️

I wish you luck dear, it’s not easy figuring this stuff out (esp. with clueless doctors).