Are you talking about the time he screwed up his estradiol cream dose (which he uses as a cosmetic) and accidentally over-dosed himself with estrogen and experienced gender dysphoria?

phytoestrogens in foods like soy beans don’t function like estradiol, it’s basically a myth that soy has any feminizing hormonal effects

here’s a quick overview: https://extension.unh.edu/blog/2021/05/why-are-some-people-so-afraid-soy

On 23 January, Turing’s house in Wilmslow was burgled. Murray told Turing that he and the burglar were acquainted, and Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, he acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were criminal offences in the United Kingdom at that time,[167] and both men were charged with “gross indecency” under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885.

Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation. His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido, known as “chemical castration”.[172] He accepted the option of injections of what was then called stilboestrol (now known as diethylstilbestrol or DES), a synthetic oestrogen; this feminization of his body was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form.[173] In a letter, Turing wrote that “no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing#Homosexuality_and_indecency_conviction

yeah, EEn is a great ester for long term monotherapy, but it’s not ideal for a short term monotherapy trial for diagnostic purposes - valerate (EV) would be better, it has a half life of 3.5 days and will increase your blood estrogen level much more quickly, and thus shut down testosterone production more quickly, allowing you to see how it feels much sooner. I could tell within a few days of my first EV injection.

Though some trans women never experience changes to mood, a minority experience worse mood, and most do experience benefits to mood - usually alleviating depression, anxiety, and intrusive suicidal ideation symptoms. My depression was lifted fairly quickly, basically in direct relation to testosterone suppression, so within the first week of EV injections I saw some improved mood and then much worse mood as testosterone production came back and I saw physiological signs like involuntary erections return.

But the first 3 - 4 months on EV were highly unstable and variable, with relief from symptoms like anxiety not happening until after three months and mood benefits being made clear through longer term patterns. The biggest mental benefit for me didn’t come until I was post-op and my body no longer produced testosterone, until then I experienced ups and downs with my mood.

I have a trans girl friend IRL who will probably never get an orchi because she likes her current hormone levels and doesn’t want her T to get too low - so there is a lot of variance.

You don’t have to have mental or mood changes to be trans or to continue on HRT: if it’s not causing depression for you and you feel fine, and the changes to the body are desirable to you, that’s reason enough for most people. I wouldn’t take your experience with EEn as confirmation you shouldn’t be in HRT or aren’t trans.

Skin will get softer on estrogen, hair usually gets thinner and lighter, eye color can change, fat distribution will gradually change from depositing fat at the neck, shoulders, back, and belly to the thighs, hips, and boobs.

Obviously breast growth is the main side effect that can’t be reversed (it’s not just fat distribution, breast buds will grow that won’t go away) and it’s helpful to have a rough sense of whether having breasts is OK for you or not. (Even so it’s still technically reversible-ish with surgery.)

Let me know if you have any questions or just want someone to chat with about this. 🫶

thanks, I don’t know why it was worth clarifying that, but it was a kind of impulse for me to do so anyway, lol - sorry about that, but also thank you 🫶

sorry, this doesn’t clarify anything - I don’t know what you mean.

Do you mean what is the alternative to democratic centralism as a method of democracy, or do you mean how, under democratic centralism, does decision making work when the vote doesn’t back the single candidate / option?

EDIT: you might be interested in some of the decision making systems used in anarchist and left libertarian contexts, e.g. occupy movement hand signals and Loomio which came out of the Occupy movement. The Zapatistas movement also has some decision making process that is worth looking into - the way delegates from the movement would return to rural areas to discuss in town halls. Bookchin’s idea of libertarian munincipalism and using limited-sized town halls as a method for communal decision making through discussion and establishing consensus also seems related.

There is an idea that with voluntary, cooperative decision-making, discussion and consensus precedes a vote, so that by the time the vote happens it is merely a formal confirmation of the consensus that was previously formed through discussion. If it gets to a vote and fails, it’s an indication that the cooperative consensus-forming process that should precede the vote did not happen, or something crucial has changed in the time between when consensus was informally established and when the vote was held.

I have a “security blanket” too, but it’s a pillow I was given as a small child.

I’ve also felt ashamed for sleeping with it, it feels like it makes me infantile or not grown up, so I put it in a closet for many years. The past year or two, though, I’ve realized the comfort is more important to me than feeling ashamed, so I sleep with the pillow every night, usually I hug the pillow and sleep with it against me. It’s one of the few such comforts, and nothing else comforts me like it - even other pillows or plushes I have tried.

is it ok to ask why you were taking estrogen monotherapy? Also, enanthate (EEn) as an ester is common with trans DIY HRT, but I’ve never heard of a pharmacy in the US having it (seems like valerate and cypionate are the two esters available).

I raise this because my question was for cis men, but it sounds like you were self administering estrogen likely for reasons that make you not a cis man 😅 (EDIT: based on your comments in femboy and trans communities, I’m pretty sure you’re not the target demographic for my question, regardless of how you happen to identify currently).

2 months is not long given EEn’s half life, it’s possible your body continued to experiencd testosterone dominance for most of that time, I would guess the second month was more likely when you would experience loss of involuntary night-time erections, etc.

Did you get blood work to check your estrogen and testosterone blood levels during this time?

ah, that explains the other comment that mentions the ideal solution is instead of having a choice between two candidates is to not have a choice between candidates but instead only a single candidate that you vote for or not … this reminds me of Maoist democratic centralism, and I guess that’s exactly what is getting expressed?

I know I never responded to your prior comment to me (I really appreciated that you spent the time challenging me in such a productive and helpful manner, thank you so much), but I suspect this is going to the same place - in the end, I need somewhere to start to better understand Marxist-Leninism as you see it …

Maybe it would be helpful for me to list the influences on me and what I have read:

• Marx: A Very Short Introduction (those small Oxford introduction books, this one was written by Peter Singer - I could be wrong but I fully expect you to hate this book because of its Marxist Humanist sympathies, and Peter Singer’s naked sympathy for liberalism),
• parts of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (particularly the bits on alienation from labor),
• the Communist Manifesto,
• “On Authority” by Engels
• October by China Miéville,
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
• “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism” by Noam Chomsky
• Politics of History by Howard Zinn
• parts of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America by John Charles Chasteen
• Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano

Being raised as a centrist liberal in the U.S. set me up to have certain biases and misinformation, I was basically taught communism was just like fascism - both being equated with mass murder. Very horseshoe theory.

I guess as an adult I went through a radicalization process that started by reading history & politics, and I learned liberalism is basically capitalism and I realized all the values that I felt were “liberal” were in conflict with capital … I landed with sympathy for libertarian forms of socialism - Kropotkin, Proudhon, Bookchin, etc. but this was more as an articulation of the ideal state of society, which I also learned overlaps with Marx’s concept of communism - the anarchists and communists are aligned on what the ideal state of things are (or at least theoretically, sometimes I talk to self-described Marxists who believe communism will be an authoritarian utopia where there is a unified state, so in practice I find it hard to know what a “communist” believes without some questioning).

Reading China Miéville helped me understand that at least at the time of the Russian Revolution, Lenin & the Bolsheviks represented a populist, working-class position to the left of the more status quo defending stageist mensheviks … Obviously I find Lenin’s attack of left communism disturbing, but I also suspend judgement to some extent since discussions on how pragmatic and what is genuinely pragmatic in politics to be something difficult for me to ascertain even now (you see this every election cycle with people begging you to vote for the lesser evil, and the Democrats insisting on being pragmatic by capitulating to positions further and further right; it’s interesting at least that political pragmatism always seems to be justifying suspension of principles and values in favor of authoritarian or right-wing measures, but I also see sometimes it really works that way. To come full circle, democratic centralism was Lenin’s way to generate unity so as to maintain power and not have division weaken the state against enemies.

The arguments I see generally go that capitalist / imperialist nations are trying to undermine communism (obviously true), so the socialist states must take extreme authoritarian measures to ensure the survival of the state and the revolution (plausible), and communism won’t come around until the imperialist states have been defeated and conditions permit the withering of the state. This feels a bit too much like a soteriological framework, communism becomes like waiting on Christ’s return - I would prefer my politics to be invested in direct outcomes more than having faith for a future utopia that will likely never come. I don’t have well formed ideas on solutions to these contradictions, but it seems obvious centralizing power and authority comes with huge risks of corruption and abuse of that power, and works against the goals and the populist, democratic spirit of Marxism and communism. As Terry Eagleton put it “State socialism for Marx would have been a contradiction in terms. Socialism was democratic or it was nothing … Marx disagreed with parliamentary democracy because it wasn’t democratic enough. It did not extend in a popular grassroots decentralized way into society as a whole and it certainly didn’t extend into the economy. He was not a utopian thinker … and he spent much time criticizing that whole vein of political thought.”

All this to say, I hope by exposing my influences you could direct me to a reasonable place to continue my education, if you feel inclined.

I am familiar with socialist democracy, I just couldn’t tell if that’s what was meant by “people’s democracy”

no, and it’s a treatment for prostate cancer in cis men, actually!

as already mentioned, the growth of breast buds and a lifelong application of estrogen does increase risks of breast cancer, but estrogen doesn’t directly cause cancer, and cis men usually don’t continue to take estrogen for the rest of their lives, it’s usually a short term treatment (in the case of Alan Turing it was a state punishment for being a homosexual, but these days it’s just a treatment for prostate cancer).

I like the way some autistic people are so honest and transparent, it’s easier to know what they mean and I don’t have to guess whether they were being nice and telling a white lie, or if they were being honest … I would call that trait genuine, though I don’t think it’s what most people mean.

for what kind of assignment, are we talking undergrad or grad school papers?

what is the difference between “people’s democracy” and liberal democracy? probably for most people in the West, democracy only means liberal democracy…

why not use a VPN?

yes, now we’re getting somewhere - instead of defending bigoted preferences as a permissible, let’s talk about what to do about the problematic situation

I agree that shame is not the only or most effective method of creating change, but I do think it can play a role and be helpful at times. Some people should feel ashamed for their bigotry, and should feel motivated to change.

But I agree it’s not always the right response, and sometimes shame gets in the way of change - often conversations aren’t even possible around taboo topics because the shame shuts down any willingness to have conversation or be honest (with oneself or others).

The first step is identifying and acknowledging the bigotry, and we often don’t get there when the response to that is so hostile.

I do think it is going to be hard to normalize and increase representation, for example the way female penises are assumed to be - even in contexts like porn where people might be exposed to a trans woman’s genitals, they are usually portrayed as male genitals (large, erect, capable of ejaculation, etc.).

Let alone intersex conditions and all the diversity of genitals that occur … Most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that humans aren’t able to be cleanly classified into two sexes, as male or female, and that sex is more complicated than that, is beyond our social concepts.

if you are really interested in this, I suggest reading Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, particularly relevant to your question is the last chapter “The Future of Queer/Trans Activism”, which describes what the author calls subersivism:

Subversivism is the practice of extolling certain gender and sexual expressions and identities simply because they are unconventional or nonconforming. In the parlance of subversivism, these atypical genders and sexualities are “good” because they “transgress” or “subvert” oppressive binary gender norms.

There is a lot to say, so checkout that chapter, it covers a lot of territory.

what? I just really prefer the way light skin looks!! 🙄

it’s rape, tbh