the last bullet point is a particular sticking point because a lot of general practitioners or non-endocrinologists straight up do not fully understand hormones on the level that is required to intuitively understand why HRT changes your whole body. Many people, sadly including doctors, think that perisex-AFAB and perisex-AMAB are simply Two Different Types Of Human Body and not actually essentially the same type of body running on different firmware (which is the developmental biological reality).
When they deal with hormones, they're mostly only dealing with those used to treat a deficiency or imbalance, like insulin for diabetes, or HRT for cis people who have low/absent hormones for other reasons. As a result, they only understand the effects of those hormones in the context they're used to seeing them - T allows a cis man with low testosterone as a result of previous treatment for testicular cancer to have "normal" levels and for their bodies to do the things that Men's Bodies™ are "supposed" to do. They see it as replacing a missing piece.
But when you give T to someone who was AFAB whose body is not Supposed To™ produce it, that model doesn't work. They don't see trans/intersex-affirming hormones as "missing" the way they see hormones for dyadic-cis patients (due to this model being inherently dyadic/cis-normative). So when those hormones activate DNA that the vast majority of people have regardless of AGAB, and it causes vocal cord changes and hair growth and fat distribution changes and muscle hypertrophy, and that occurs in someone who is not "supposed" to have those features because they don't have That Type Of Body, that freaks the doctors out, because that's not how they're taught that medicine works.
They are not taught to operate in the model of maximizing patient autonomy or even to simply prioritize understanding basic biology, they are taught To Cure Disease. If they don't see your condition as a cureable disease - or they don't see it as one that's their job to cure, because they think you ought to be seeing a psychiatrist instead - they will not understand how your medicine works. This is the fundamental problem with how the modern healthcare system operates. To them, hormone replacement therapy exists to replace something missing, not to add this "new" functionality that they don't normally associate with a given sex assignment (even though it's not new, because it was in our DNA the whole time). Only doctors who are actually familiar with the entire developmental and pubertal process (so endocrinologists plus particularly knowledgeable pediatricians) usually understand that sex hormones function on that level.
This is a takeaway you should hang onto when you think of doctors in general, btw. A lot of them are not trying first and foremost to improve the patient's well-being or improve their autonomy, they are trying To Cure Disease.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
yousharknotpass
areudirty
kianamaiart
romaincrisis
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
