Skip Navigation
17 comments

  • This community is supportive of DIY, and I dont have any problem with this being asked here. I would advise any responders to send supplier links via DMs. Progesterone and estrogen aren't controlled substances, so I'm not really that concerned about people inquiring here.

  • been on e for a several months now

    It kind of blows my mind that folks are starting progesterone so early now. The old lore was to wait at least two to three years due to fear of stunted growth.

    • Current lore is wait 6-18 months (usually 12), or when you reach like tanner stage 3. There's also a lot of anecdotal evidence that starting prog whenever is perfectly fine and doesn't halt breast growth at all. Research exploring this is very much lacking per what I know.

      • It might have messed it up for us, it did accelerate our breast growth, but ours are relatively small and triangular compared to the perfectly round and big ones we have seen other trans femmes have online so it's kind of dysphoria inducing. We started about a year in.

        Either that or our genes are bad. Which would not make sense since biologically related folks have perfectly fine ones, but who knows.

    • im not familiar with elder lore. what do you mean by stunted growth?

      im doing all this sans a doctor and i couldn't find much information on prog. a friend who's already fully transitioned suggested it (they took it for a while until their prescription ended)

      • Behold the elder-lore, once sung 'round internet campfire tales of yore! /j

        Transfeminine Science has a thorough discussion of the concerns:

        These suggestions include progestogens having known antiestrogenic effects in the breasts, animal studies finding stunted mammary development with high doses of progestogens, clinical publications cautioning against premature introduction of progestogens in female puberty induction due to concerns about possibly stunted breast growth, clinical use of progestogens to treat macromastia in cisgender females, poor breast development with estrogen therapy in cisgender girls with a disorder of sexual development that results in high progesterone exposure, and breast development with estrogen and CPA (a very strong progestogen) typically being poor in transfeminine people.

        Folks very much are starting earlier now! A recent paper noted that, "[m]ost patients who started progesterone began after 1-6 months on a standard GAHT regimen (59.3%)." But only two women were doing rectal administration in that study, which is what everyone online says works best.

        My first year of hrt was all diy. I added progesterone after a bit more than eighteen months of slowly increasing estrogen, with the advice of a doctor, around seven years ago. At the time my dose of e was 6mg/day buccal, and p was 100mg/day oral for the first six months, then the other way. Maybe a year after that, a different doctor increased p to 200mg and eventually started me on injections around four and a half years ago. It's been more than eight and half years now since I started hrt. The younger woman I was when beginning would be thrilled with where the girls have ended up, but I'd still like them a bit bigger.

  • I assume this is for DIY? I'm not sure it's a good idea to be sourcing in a thread like this, tbh - that can lead to trouble (though it's up to the mods, I know a lot of communities ban sourcing discussion).

17 comments