Trying hard to trust the process, and while I have seen other expected changes in skin, hair, and mood, I am getting anxious that nothing is happening under my shirt. I had some minor sensitivity within the first two weeks, but never anything painful.
This Friday will be 6 weeks on HRT. 2mg Est, 4mg Prog, 200mg Spiro daily.
Edit: thanks for talking me off the cliff everyone, I’m much less anxious now 😅
I had breast soreness pretty quickly. Increased sensitivity could be right (that’s how it was for me at first), but at some point it did become painful enough that I had to change how I slept, etc.
My advice: switch to injections (I recommend subcutaneous as you can use very small needles that can be painless).
As others have said, oral is a poor way to get estrogen - 80+% is eliminated by the liver, and the rest spikes blood levels and eliminates relatively quickly, creating vicious ups and downs without providing sufficient and consistent estrogen blood levels to estrogenize the body by. Anecdotally the people I know IRL who do pills have slower and less feminization than those who inject.
(I actually started hormones at the same time as an IRL friend, and a year later my friend still passes as a boy and boymodes full-time, and I … wouldn’t be able to pass as a boy anymore. The main difference is that they take oral and I inject.)
Highly recommend reading: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/
How about spray/gel?
still better than oral, and if you’re on an anti-androgen or post-op it could work really well.
Not as effective as injections at getting your estrogen blood levels up consistently though, so it’s not practical for monotherapy, for example.