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Rolaran's avatar

Something you linked earlier in the year (the Gender Dysphoria Bible I think it was called?) was the first time I'd seen "feeling like your body is a mechsuit you operate rather than a part of you" listed as a symptom of gender dysphoria, after spending more than half my life referring to my body as "this janky meat chassis". To be fair to everyone involved who failed to catch this earlier (including me), I've been chronically ill since I was a teenager, so the answer to "starting around puberty, did you feel like your body was wrong" was "yes, obviously, that's when I experienced my *first* organ failure". So it's understandable that it took a while before I ran across something that made me think "there is that, but also other things going on."

I've been identifying as agender for a few months now, I've done some social transitioning (nothing medical at this point) and been very happy with the results, several of which fit exactly you describe here. But I think I have the advantage of knowing that my body has other issues that transitioning won't do a thing about, so my scope was properly limited. So what you say about managing your expectations makes all kinds of sense. And I guess I wanted to say thanks for pointing me in a direction I hadn't thought to look.

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BlackHumor's avatar

This is very unintuitive to me. I would expect HRT to have a huge impact on quality of life. QoL is subjective, it's not a matter of how many problems are solved for you or how "objectively" better your life gets. So, like, I would expect it to be about equivalent to curing a chronic pain condition.

(And the one RCT in that systematic review agreed with me. Though its sample size was tiny, it found improvements of, like, 5 points on a 10 point scale.)

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