did your doctor tell you that finasteride/dutasteride is a testosterone blocker? it is not, you were lied to, they do virtually nothing to block testosterone.
I'm sorry that this is so common, if you're using Folx (or an equivalent) they all have some kind of "request a new provider" (say this phrase to the customer service representative) process. I know that starting with a new person is hard, but this is a huge red flag. I want you to have someone that doesn't make you read tumblr posts and evaluate the color of their flag.
the short explanation is that those drugs lower your levels of dihydrotestosterone. your doctor thinks that, since DHT is (genuinely true, deeply oversimplified) responsible for a lot of masculinization, blocking DHT will be enough.
the primary problem here is that your doctor is trying to alleviate your gender dysphoria, not help you more closely resemble the woman you want to be.
the secondary problem is that your doctor thinks medicine is a solved science. the longer explanation is that 5-alpha reductase inhibitors are poorly-understood despite the fact that they're the most common form of gender-affirming medication prescribed to cis people.
how much research do you think exists on their efficacy for trans women? yep.
your estrogen and testosterone levels matter. it's not as simple as "more E is good, less T is also good", but if your doctor made you feel like the numbers don't matter and you should let them worry about it? you need a new doctor.
I won't describe the different ways I've felt at different estrogen/testosterone levels, but I can. the difference is large. will your doctor let you find out for yourself?
if not: they work for you. you pay them. fire your doctor
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Really curious about your experience taking and deciding to take finasteride. I’m transmasc and I’ve got diffuse thinning from autoimmune/ autoimmune meds/ low dose testosterone, and would actually really love to have less body hair. I wonder how you balanced the possible side effects given that there’s a huge contingent saying anything from “I took it for 2 weeks and now have debilitating brain fog” to “I took it for a year and my dick shriveled up but I kept taking it and now my dick is stuck like this” etc.
long post
i'm not on T at the moment, the only hormone im taking is 5mg progestin/day for menstrual suppression, so idk how helpful my information will be. but here it is anyway
im taking 1mg a day finasteride, sometimes forgetting to take it, and i got mine from AllDayChemist. tthe effects i've noticed are first, that my nails are now growing annoyingly fast, but unfortunately they dont seem very strong so i have to cut or file them every couple days. this seems promising because as recently as a couple years ago i was still growing genetically long, strong nails just like my mom and my nail decline over the past couple years seems to suggest some sort of problem with them.
as for hair, i already have very long hair, and it's properly spiral curly, so determining exactly how much longer it has gotten in a period of time can be tricky, but i THINK it is also growing faster. when it's wet in the shower is when i can see where it is reaching relative to my back/hips, and it seems like it has grown back down to my tailbone very quickly since the last trim. I also see a lot of baby hairs around the observable areas on my hairline, and my widow's peak (which has always been very defined even when i was a kid, it's not a pattern baldness widow's peak) has a handful of what look like new hairs that are the appropriate length to have started growing since i started finasteride. also, and this is the biggest relief, when i brush my hair i am shedding a LOT less. like maybe 20-30% of the hair that i used to lose in my hairbrush is there now. i initially started this finasteride experiment because my shedding was getting so bad and i was noticing significant volume loss, so only seeing a fraction of the hairball size in my hairbrush as i used to is really great
naturally i neglected to take any "before" photos because im just not that organized, so my data sucks.
as for other effects.....i really havent noticed any at all. my brain fog is bad all day everyday at my baseline, so it's possible that anything finasteride is contributing is just being lost in the background noise. however, on the other hand, the obsessive self-monitoring of the sick person may also mean im in a good position to notice that kind of thing. i dont know.
i think my eyelashes are being affected positively. i forgot to take finasteride for about three days last week and noticed that i lost about six eyelashes that day, so i think they were finasteride lashes but who knows.
as for feminizing effects, like i said, i usually pluck my beard hairs (im fem-presenting rn) on about a monthly basis, and i have about four or five of them on my chin, and a peach fuzz mustache with five or six darker hairs that i shave or pluck sometimes too. since starting finasteride most of the beard hairs just havent grown in. i haven't noticed any breast tenderness or body feminization, i think i look about the same naked as i always do, so i dont think im getting any body fat redistribution either. i havent noticed any sexual effects either but i'm in a semi-asexual period at the moment anyway so im not sure how much i would notice finasteride changing that stuff anyway.
i think the online drug effects anecdotes are a valuable source of data, but that the data is generally low quality. the people reporting on what they think are side effects are extremely impressionable and also suck at noticing confounding factors, and stuff that's very personal and very psychological like erectile dysfunction are basically impossible to get good data for outside of a lab. it's one of the most vulnerable factors to placebo/nocebo effects, and erectile function declines with age anyway at about the same time people start taking finasteride, so i just dont think reddit posts are trustworthy on this topic. someone could easily have turned 35, started taking finasteride because they were losing enough hair for it to bother them (normal at that age), and then also started experiencing age-related erection decline at the same time for reasons unrelated to finasteride, and just done the human thing of associating the two unrelated events. on the other hand hormones are weird and theres every reason to expect an exogenous drug thats doing stuff to your "masculine" endogenous hormones could affect your penits. its not unrealistic at all.
drug companies bend over backwards to hide side effects that only come to light many years after a large general population is exposed to a drug. so i dont think you can discount this stuff either. i just tend to assume most of the reddit side effects are partially bad data and partially exaggerated, even as i take them seriously.
in conclusion hormones are truly weird and have unpredictable effects. i think it's probably not the case that trialing a low dose of finasteride for a few months would permanently damage you, but i cant state that with certainty because idk,. shit happens and there are edge cases for everything.
edit: i just remembered i used an epilator on my legs around the same time i started taking it. i dont have a lot of body hair normally so idk how good this data is, but i THINK my leg hair has been growing back less, and thinner, than it was before i yanked em all out. kind of hard to tell since epilators usually cause really bad ingrowns on me, i dont really have the right hair texture to be using one in the frist place. but this epilation growback SEEMS less hairy than it usually is.
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In non-politics related nonsense and news, I'm starting finasteride today!
Looking back at pre-T pictures earlier this year, I started realizing that my hairline has crept way north of where it used to be originally. Which, I don't really mind as much, actually I liked the change in shape of my hairline at first. The thing that really bothers me is the hair thinning I've had this year. I've always had super thick hair, and since I've started growing out part of my hair, I've been starting to miss it. Call me vain or whatever you like, but I'm not ready to go bald yet now that I can enjoy growing my hair out without being constantly misgendered because of it and without major dysphoria.
I carefully tried the rosemary oil thing with no luck, and it wasn't worth it because I was constantly scared of my cats getting exposed to it. Minoxidil was out as an option immediately because again, I have cats. So finasteride it is. I'm also going through a thyroid med dose adjustment in case that is causing the hair thinning (as it has definitely done in the past), so this should cover all the bases I guess.
Anyway, I was finally able to pick the finasteride up today. The prescription was sent to the wrong pharmacy originally, then after it was sent to the correct pharmacy I discovered that my insurance won't cover it and the listed price to pick up the prescription was $219.
So shout out big fucking time to the hero of the day, the pharmacist who did some kind of magic online and found a coupon for the medication. 90 day supply for only $18.
Hopefully it works without any scary side effects. I found a couple of random reddit threads from guys who started having periods again on fin and that sounds absolutely fuckin horrible, so wish me luck I guess.
The drug finasteride, already used to treat hair loss and enlarged prostates, could also help to cut the risk of heart disease.
The drug finasteride, already used to treat hair loss and enlarged prostates, could also help to cut the risk of heart disease.
In an analysis of data from both male humans and mice, the drug was shown to improve health and reduce levels of cholesterol.
Too much cholesterol in the body is well known to increase heart disease risk, as it encourages atherosclerosis: fatty deposits in blood vessels, blocking the flow of blood through the arteries. Eventually, that can lead to strokes or heart attacks.
