April 22, 2022 • 43 mins
Garrison talks about DIY HRT, and we continue our discussion with by Dr. Victoria Grieve on gender affirming hormonal therapy.
https://twitter.com/VixenVVitch
Victoria.grieve@pitt.edu
https://diyhrt.github.io/
https://hrt.cafe/
https://diytrans.wiki/Main_Page
https://www.them.us/story/informed-consent-hrt-map-trans-healthcare
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about
things falling apart and sometimes how we can put things
back together. I'm Garrison Davis, aspiring Rebus, and this is
part two of my little two part series talking about
trans hormone replacement therapy. Last episode, we discussed what HRT is,
it's various benefits as gender affirming treatment, and the informed
(00:28):
consent model of receiving hormones. Before we continue on with
my discussion with Dr Grieve, I would like to talk
a bit more about informed consent. So the informed consent
option can be great for many many people as it
attempts to bypass some of the red tape around receiving
gender reforming healthcare. For its form of consent, all you
(00:49):
gotta do is set up an appointment, signed the forms,
maybe get some blood work done, and then pick up
your hormones. Right. You don't need to live as trans
for like two years or have letters from therapyest s.
It's it is. It is just up to you, so
it is it is really convenient if you can get
that option. Some places even let you do it via
telemedicine appointments, so you can just sit at home holding
(01:11):
your little, I kea shark and then get your hormones,
which does sound very very nice. Planned Parenthood offers informed
consent trans health care in many states, and in the
show notes I will link a Google map of the
informed consent clinics from across the country. Depending on your insurance,
you can get hormones for a little to no extra cost.
This way it can be really convenient. The biggest asterisk
(01:34):
for informed consent is that since it's based on you know,
informed consent, it often is just for humans age eighteen
and older, or sometimes teens a few years younger, but
only if their parents or guardians signed the forms. Obviously,
this is not ideal for a sixteen year old with
(01:54):
transphobic parents, who would really be helped by receiving like
hormone blockers or something right. Another potential drawback is that
the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list. I
started off with the informed consent model because it was
the easiest, but by the time I needed more blood
work done and my prescription refilled, setting up more appointments
(02:15):
that Planned Parenthood became kind of a nightmare. I was
continuously having appointments being canceled on me last minute. And
just getting pushed back months and months into the future. Eventually,
I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor
instead of just continuing on with informed consent. Now, this
is obviously a regional issue, right I. I don't know
what it's like in Florida, for example, but the COVID
(02:37):
andeen pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure
here in the States, and scheduling some appointments in these
clinics can be still quite challenging. And as you know,
a big theme of this show is that maybe we
shouldn't assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete,
permanent fixtures. The term the crumbles that we used to
(02:59):
describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on,
was initially coined in reference to our medical system by
a friend of the show who works in the medical field.
Listen to the first five episodes of The Daily Show
talking about climate change for more on that. But a
part of the Criminal's idea is trying to learn how
to become less reliant on the systems that we take
(03:22):
for granted, right, trying to solve for the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness before it's too late. On that note, back
to my discussion with Dr Victoria Luna Brendan Grieve, Assistant
professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. For
places that are getting uh, you know, all of these
anti trends bills criminalizing all of this stuff for miners,
(03:44):
and then you know, eventually maybe even you know, my
big fear is that, you know, first off, they're gonna
criminalize it for minors, and they're gonna say the brains
not fully developed, your twenty five, and they're gonna criminalize
it until you're twenty five, and they're just gonna criminalize
it for everyone after that. Um So, for all of
these places that are making access to healthcare is so
much harder, what what is what is one to do?
(04:06):
Like if these if there's these kids and then even
adults who are like just find it so much harder
to get stuff. Like I know there's the informed clinics,
but there there's like there's like a few in Texas,
but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore, right,
Like it's really unclear. Yeah, well, I'll tell you some
of that fear is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania
just two days ago. HB. I think it was HBO
(04:30):
passed by the House in don in Harrisburg that prevents
it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through
the college level, not just high school in grade school,
it's all the way up through you know, secondary education. Uh.
And even though our governors like has failed to vito it,
(04:51):
like who even knows what's going to happen, but they're
already taking taking aim at this higher level kind of thing.
And there's a lot of president for that. What my goodness.
If there's a long and storied history of d I
Y hormone therapy and it's easier for the trans feminine
individuals because testosterone is actually a scheduled to control I
(05:15):
think it might be a three I think it's scheduled
three steroid. I'll write a little thing about it and
I'll say in the episode. And it's such a funny
reason too, because it's just you can use it to
dope for endurance based like like cycling and running, because
it will increase your red blood cell account that's a like.
(05:36):
And so it's a controlled substance because people can use
it to dope for for exit, for for sports. So
it's that's a little bit harder to get ahold of
in like a meaningful way. But there are a lot
of different Allegedly, there are a lot of different places
online that you can acquire estrogen or estra dial relatively easily.
Now I'm gonna actually pause the discussion with me and
(05:59):
Dr Grieve to talk a little bit about d I
y h r T or for those anti acronym people
out there, do it yourself hormone replacement therapy. Again, I'm
not a medical doctor. Unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology,
I cannot offer you any expertise, but I can talk
about d I y h r T as it's existed
(06:20):
for trans people for the past two decades. Because an
unfortunate truth is, although it's gotten much easier to get
gender affirm and care and hormones the past few years,
even in states that aren't facing this wave of anti
trans health care bills, the medical establishment hasn't been the
most trans friendly place in general. A recent Center for
(06:41):
American Progress report found that nearly half of transgender people
and six of transgender people of color reported having experienced
mistreatment at the hands of a medical provider, including refusal
of care and verbal or physical abuse just in the
year before the survey, which took place in June of
twenty so this is this is still very much an
(07:02):
ongoing issue. One in two trans people reported that their
access to gender affirming healthcare was curtailed significantly during the pandemic,
and nearly one in two transgender adults have had insurance
providers denying them coverage for gender affirming care, and very
often doctors don't even know how to properly treat transgender patients,
(07:23):
and often it's up to the patients to educate the
doctors on trans healthcare issues. The Center for American Progress
survey from last year found that one in three trans
people report having to teach their doctors about trans people
to get them appropriate care, and reported having been asked
innovasive or unnecessary questions about being trans which were not
(07:45):
related to the reasons for them visiting the doctor. The
report cited a twenty eight team brief from the Kaiser
Family Foundation that found that more than half of medical
school curriculums lack information about unique health issues the LGBTQ
community faces, and doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care,
so obviously that leaves a lot to be desired for
(08:06):
people wanting to receive transgender health care. Between medical mistreatment,
insurance complications, and doctor ignorance, many trans folks have taken
it upon themselves to get the drug necessary for hormone
replacement therapy because the alternative is often just having to
face not being able to receive the health care that,
in many cases makes it possible to live. The Center
(08:28):
for American Progress survey found that twenty eight percent of
trans folks report having postponed or not gotten necessary medical
care for fear of discrimination. Taking your endochronology and hormone
treatment into your own hands has a lengthy history and
used to be much more common in the days before
informed consent. In a survey of trans people in Washington,
(08:51):
d C. Circus two thousand, over half of the respondents
so that they had used non prescribed hormones also known
as d I y h RT. So information on how
to go about d I yng your HRT spread via
online forms and websites in the early two thousands, and
after some trial and error, the information is kind of
(09:13):
consolidated into a few main information hubs that being the
d I y h r T Wiki, HRT dot Cafe
and d I y HRT dot get hub dot io. Now, obviously,
when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources, you
need to be extremely careful and cautious about what foreign
chemicals you're putting into your body, including and trying to
(09:35):
only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources, doing drug testing if
you can, and doing your own blood testing before and
after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels.
It is possible to order blood tests via online and
send it through a lab that you have to ship
your blood too, but often it's just easier to do
it by going through the medical system. Now, one massive
(09:57):
caveat with d y h r T is although it's
more straightforward to acquire extra dial and antiandrogen's like spiro
from online sources, getting to stosterone for masculinization therapy is
much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug.
Here in the States, it is a Schedule three substance,
so technically buying it without a prescription would be a
(10:18):
felony um So for this reason, most d I O
y h r T stuff focuses on feminizing hormones since
that is less legally complicated. Now, obviously you know steroids exist,
so it is possible to get them, but I will
not be giving out guides on how to do that
here on the pod, but you know you can you
can look into it if you so desire for feminizing hormones.
(10:41):
The main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical
extra dial. It can come in a few forms pills,
which are not difficult to acquire, and assuming you get
the dose right, it's pretty easy because it's just a
process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue,
and that's kind of it right. Dosed is its own thing,
which you can figure out if you do reading, but
(11:03):
the actual taking of it is pretty straightforward. Transdermal estrogen
or transdermal estra dial is kind of the new hot thing. Uh.
Usually this has you taking weekly estra dial patches which
you just switch out every week um or you can
also do daily gels, which you just rub out your body,
although unfortunately for dosing gels it can be more tricky
(11:25):
if you go d I Y because it's hard to
know what concentration just the jela is. If you're just
rubbing a sav on yourself. It's not already prepackaged, but
the patches are pretty good. And lastly, the classic method
is injectable estradial at various concentrations in the form of
some oil solution. This can usually be the cheapest option
(11:46):
if you can figure out how to buy estradial, and
needles and syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just
over the counter in most countries without a prescription. For
feminizing hormones, some people also take antiandrogen's a k a.
Testosterone lockers like spiral lactone, which can be acquired online
and are almost always taken orally in the form of
(12:06):
a pill. Now, when getting these drugs online, there are
two main categories of purchase. There's pharmaceutical grade and home brewed.
Pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies
that are licensed and subject to regulation. They should be
of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy,
and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites
(12:29):
based in countries that allow for the legal exportation of
certain medications. These will almost always carry less inherent risk
versus receiving and taking home brewed hormones, which leads us
to the second version that you can buy, which is homebrewed.
This refers to HRT produced by individuals by sourcing raw
extradial or whatever other chemicals you're taking in the form
(12:51):
of a powder and then compounding the medication themselves. They
do not synthesize or current from scratch these hormones, but
they do use the powdered vers of them, and they
get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize
it into their own extra dial or whatever arther drug
you're taking. You know, in the antiandrogen list. There's there's
(13:12):
too many, too many to name now. While this this
concept does sound scary and it can obviously go wrong
if someone's not synthesizing it correctly. Uh, there are a
couple of well respected members of the community that have
been known to produce high quality and safe HRT medications.
But before anyone decides to take drugs that you get
on the internet, please, please, please please do lots of
(13:32):
reading beforehand on on dosage effects, side effects, and be
very cautious with your drug sourcing. Right, you should know
who you're buying it from. You don't want to just
buy from whatever it's get your website. You should make
sure that what you're doing is other people are backing
up on this decision and make sure that it's there.
You can cross reference information here because there's a lot
(13:54):
of information out their online and not all of it
is good information, obviously, but really try to cross reference
information on any drug sources, on hormone dosage, on any
possible drug interactions. If you're taking multiple drugs or you
already have prescriptions now I should I should note that
supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even
extend out to d Y A h r T. There's
(14:15):
no true escape. There's no true other. One of the
main pharmaceutical grade online sites to source HRT from is
currently out of estradial pills, so there there is there
is no true escape sometimes, but to learn more about
d I Y h RT, you should check out d
I Y HRT dot get hub, dot io or HRT
(14:37):
dot cafe and the d I Y trans dot wiki
and keep in mind not everything you read on those
sources is necessarily good advice or up to date with
the current information on how these drugs work. Recently, I
was reading a guide I found via one of those
sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying
the powdered version of it than synthesizing it myself to
(14:59):
level up my alchemy stat um, and I found the
guy that I was reading contained quite a bit of
outdated misinformation about progester around. So don't take everything you
read as gospel, but those resources are at least a
good place to start. Anyway, Now back to the interview,
the problem that you might run into with the I
(15:20):
y NG is you might not be able to get
the bioequivalent estradial in some form. You might have to
settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an ethanol ESTRADIALE,
which is like hormonal birth control, which because they are synthetics,
they actually have a much rougher time on your body.
And that's where a lot of the side effects quote
(15:42):
unquote like come from. Like all of the worry about
like blood clots and things from taking estrogens comes from
conjugated estrogens. Est Yeah, the actual study, uh that a
lot of that is citing goes all the way back
and it was studying the rate of plotting in cis
gender women taking hormonal birth control, and it's just like, Okay,
(16:06):
so this is the wrong population with the wrong medication. Yeah,
that seems like not a great scientific study, right, what
do we do? I mean, it might be great to
talk about for the rate of yeah, right for trans women,
or doesn't really right? It doesn't it doesn't really help
(16:26):
so much. Um. And what I think is also pretty
wild too. I mentioned the progesteran thing earlier. A lot
of that controversy comes from the fact that the original
studies on whether or not it could be beneficial. We're
done with medroxy progesterone, a synthetic progesterone that has a
really nasty side effect profile in a lot of different ways.
And now that we have micronized progesterone, where the evidence
(16:48):
suggested not only is it safe, it actually makes estrogen safer.
And now they're like, no, we can't give that. That's
just that's just crazy talk. I will say, I have
heard from people with more experienced hormones and be that
progesterone does make you way too hoardy. Um. The heads
up for for side effects ASHTAG can confirm. But um, well,
(17:13):
but but progesterone can have a lot of other really
beneficial side effects. It can really increase the fat deposition
to various places. It can help with your mood, it
can help with your sleep. It actually reduced the period
symptoms that I was having because I because there's a surprise,
people on estrogen can also have periods. Uh. And because
your body again knows what it's doing, it's going to
modulate it through the E one, E two, E three pathway,
(17:36):
like throughout the month in a sixical fashion, and you
can get bloating and cramps. And I had really bad
morning sickness like for for three days every twenty eight
days for months, until eventually I started micronized progesterone and
those symptoms alleviated, Which makes a kind of sense if
you know that progesterone only birth control reduces periods. So
(17:57):
like there's a there's there's a lot of precedent, a
lot of makes a out of like sense that it
would work. God, I it's I need to tell you
have have you ever heard of the Powers method of
(18:21):
no Oh Garrison. I am so excited to introduce you
to this person. Like doctor Powers is a fascinating grifter
in the trans health care space because He is a
he's a physician who like has has made it his
duty to to to make sure that trans people, especially
(18:43):
trans women. He actually doesn't like really have anything to
say about trans men because the the therapy is so
like easy to to to do that. He has a
wild postulation as to like better ways to give hormone,
and he he has things worths like we don't need antiandrogens.
You just give really high levels of injectable estrogen, which, like,
(19:07):
I mean that'll probably work because for some people, but yeah, yeah,
but but also estrogen is like really safe and so
like you can give it to an unbelievably high level,
it's not really going to speed things up exactly, Like
it will maybe a little bit, but not that much.
And any of the side effects you might experience, which
(19:27):
could also come from the the excipients, the non active
elements of it, like you can be allergic to those
if you ever really high dose can be a real problem. Um.
But the big thing for him is he pushes that
micronized progesterone is not only necessary and good especially for
breast size, you should also stick the oral capsules in
your butt. Oh I were we are we are officially
(19:50):
boothing estrogen. Now, yes, yes, okay, well I'm I'm switching
back to pills. This sounds very exciting. Well so well,
oh my gosh. So the idea is his line is
um that you know that the oral capsules you only
get a tiny fraction of the total progesterone, and you
(20:10):
get a lot more if you stick it up You
get the whole dose if you stick it up your butt, which,
like if you know literally anything about pharmacology is both
right and entirely insane because anything that you take orally,
there's a bioavailable like level of it. Like so oral uh,
micronized progesterone has a bioequivalence of I think like two
(20:31):
or three percent, which is why when you take like
a hundred milligram capsule, you get like a certain blood level.
If you take it rectally, it's like a twelve. It's
still not the whole thing, which is why the the
micronized progesterone rectal suppositories are twenty five milligrams to give
you the same exposure, so it's four times the systemic absorption,
(20:54):
which means that if you are boofing a micronized progesterone capsule,
you are geting three to four times the dose that
you should be getting. And uh, the I pulled because
I get into fights with people all the time about this.
I pulled the original FDA filing for Mike and Ice progesterone,
(21:16):
and they suggested that three hundred milligrams is basically getting
to what like a cis gender person's maximum progesterone levels
would be, meaning that if you're boofing one or two,
as some of his regimens suggests, like, you might be
essentially overdosing on progesterone for no reason, like there's no
real reason to do that, and it is just crazy.
(21:38):
When what I started this call today, I did. I
did not think we would get boofing progesterone. It is
a weird, like a weirdly large part of my Twitter
interactions have been fighting people to stop boofing progesterone. UM,
so I wanted to Unfortunately just exposed this idea to
millions of more people. Know I'm saying talk do it
(22:01):
well and so, but you know, you know, you know
that's not how that works. I do know that's not
how that works. But I mean, I I tell you,
if if your your friend Robert Evans for here, I
could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this doctor
powers guy. Um so he sounds fascinating. He has a subreddit,
like all good physicians do. I love the doctor has
(22:23):
a subreddit, and my my favorite post other than recently,
he's been pushing this like miracle hair tonic that he made,
which is like, come on, buddy, like like now, and
it's just obvious. He calls it, yep, yep, the verbon
he might call it. He might even call it an elixir,
which is very funny, but all from a magical hand
(22:45):
tonic exactly. It's so funny because one of the components
of it, I think is finasteride. Like I I looked
at the and I'm like, yes, that is something for
bald for male pattern baldness. It will probably work. Congratulations,
you just remade rogaine. Uh. But the the single post
that I feel like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality. Um is,
(23:07):
There's this big post that went around through like cis
gender like kind of like centrist spaces that every trans
person I saw was just like, excuse me, what the fuck?
Where this guy was secretly micro dosing injectable estrogen that
he prescribes himself, which sounds kind of illegal. Not gonna lie, uh,
and messed up the dose by a thousand percent, by
(23:29):
a thought, by a times thousand yeah, yea yeah, And um,
like I can give you the link. I I can.
I know exactly where it is. I can give you
the link if you wanted to read this. It is
buck Wild. But the thing is, he goes on to
describe this like acute dysphoric episode that he had from
one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen, a thing that is
(23:50):
not physiologically possible and in completely insane. That and he
but he was like, but I understand the pain the
trans women go through because I fucked up a dose
where I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face
look younger. So I understand your pain and have so
much empathy for for the trans women's that I am
(24:12):
trying to save. And it is so frustrating to me
how many people give him like credence, give him credit,
um because he he has he has claims like apply
progesterone cream to the the the smaller breast to even
them out, And it's like, Okay, my dude, have you
ever met like people with breasts. One is larger than
(24:33):
the other. That's how breasts work. It's like, well, what's
your evidence for that? Well, I had two people who
did it and they said it worked. Okay, cool. Do
you have those those reports? No? No, no, they got
burned up in a house fire, and it's very sad
and I can't give you that. Yes. So, so he
worked in a clinic that a friend of mine actually
(24:54):
moved to after they got rid of him because he
made all these wildly anecdotal claims and whenever anybody challenged,
and then his house burned out, which is actually very
sad because his cats died in it, and he didn't
deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures and this
man is insane and cats never do anything wrong. Cats
are a perfect, magical beings. I love yours so much
(25:19):
as they keep crossing in front of the screen. They're perfect. Um.
But so, whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of
his claims, he goes, well, I had all of that data,
but it burned up in my house. And then he
like makes it a sob story about like how like
like horrible this was, which like I'm sure it was
really bad, Like I'm sure it was like really really bad.
(25:41):
But even his um like power point presentations that he
has that he like goes through to like really like
talk about the powers method and make it sound like
really really good, has a like fire safety section specifically
so he can garner this like sympathy so people will
not quest in his claims that have no evidence behind them.
(26:04):
And so it's just such a fantastic examinated to me,
Like it's just so weird seeing like a space that
has historically been denigrated in the evidence. You know, you
had that whole episode on the Hirshfeld Institute, and you
know we see all this like anti anti trans uh
like propaganda and legislation going on right now that there's
(26:24):
a lot of like empty space in the medical record
and in the evidence record for what to do in
these situations. There's a lot of confusion from the guidelines
in these other societies like I was talking about, and insteps.
This guy who sees an opportunity to be like, uh
like popular like powerful individual in this space to give
(26:47):
people hope that he can cash in on uh And
since the medications and since the hormone therapy is so safe,
he doesn't actually hurt that many people, And it's it
is so wilde being this juxtaposition of individuals being like, well,
this is unsafe experimental nonsense, and seeing this guy flagrantly
overdosing people on hormones with no ill effects because they're
(27:10):
that safe. Uh, that is that is pretty funny. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's funny in that like laughing until you're
crying kind of way. Yes, Yes, What is the way
(27:34):
that people can try to combat all the medical disinformation
around HRT specifically because we do specifically let's you see
this a lot and to save the children rhetoric, we
see this a lot for just anti tran stuff in
general of and like, yeah, just in terms of someone
who has to deal with this stuff on a professional level,
(27:56):
like when when we're just faced with all of this
just complainely just like wrong stuff being treated as absolute
fact when your experience, what's kind of the best ways
to go about that? In people? Oh my goodness. Um,
it kind of depends on the audience. When I'm talking
to other other health care practitioners, I UM, I can.
(28:19):
I I have historically because I do a lot of
like teaching and advocacy in this area. To other health
care practitioners and UM holding sessions like volunteering for to
to hold sessions of like to educate on this and
say like, these are the kind of regimens that are
commonly used in clinics. This is why these are things
to look out for and to stress the importance of
(28:42):
believing the patient and UM the importance of you don't
want to gate keep because if if which they're not
that dangerous, but if there is to be a problem,
you would rather have that patient want to work with
you to solve it. Is like such a big part
of it, like even just understanding that from that level
(29:03):
that you're not like delivering this kind of like life
saving medication to them as this like Lord on High.
It's this idea that like, no, you should be working
with this person and if you're not familiar with it,
you need to do your fucking research. And I will
give you the resources for that. I will. I will
walk you through those resources. And that's that's awfully convincing
(29:24):
for the majority of healthcare individuals at any level, because
I've done I've done talks for students and nursing programs
and physical therapy programs all the way up to like
actively practicing physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, and it's basically the same.
You just you make the argument, you show the evidence,
You give them the evidence, and you walk them through,
(29:44):
uh like kind of and and then and then have
a robust question and answer period where they will ask
you those questions and you can explain why they are wrong.
Having that kind of dedicated space can be really beneficial,
but not scalable in a way that's necessarily helpful. Like
I've made a positive impact on my city, but that
doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself are not a
(30:06):
health care practitioner and want to like explain this kind
of stuff. And I mentioned earlier that on Twitter, I've
spent a lot of time like arguing that people shouldn't
be boofing their progesterone. But I've had to stop because
it's exhausting every single person like coming back. It's like
the same conversations over and over again. And there's no
(30:27):
good way to like have a central location that just
has all that information that anybody is gonna believe because
of the way the internetworks. Um, So I guess my
answer is I'm not sure, Like there's so much misinformation
out there, and so much of it is so wrong
(30:48):
and not in alignment with reality that looking at it
at all, it falls to pieces and and the idea
of the majority of people too. I guess I could
say if a person is coming to you and asking
legitimate questions and they don't really know, like they're just
like parroting stuff that they heard, they they're much easier
(31:10):
to convince because you can show like, oh, like we
have a long history of doing this, like look at
the you know, I tell my students about how like
nineteen fifty two was the first like recognized hormonal mediated
transition in the United States, Like she was like a
movie star. Um and and you know, I talked about
a lot of the history to be like this isn't new,
(31:31):
this is something like we have been here forever. Um
My my favorite story. Do you know about the story
about the Scifian priestesses. Yes, I actually do, but I
would love for you to explain it. But oh my god,
I found out about that a few months ago and
I was like, oh my god, it makes me so happy.
So so to to explain very briefly, I think it's
it's an old Um. I think it was like Herodotus.
(31:53):
It's like an old like Crestian like author that we
have information, author, philosopher, whatever, historian. But they talk about
in one of the texts the Scythian priestesses, who essentially
distill the poison of woman. They call it in one
of the texts, which I think is just such a
great term from um uh, pregnant mayor urine, which interestingly enough,
(32:16):
we actually still make today conjugated estrogens. The brand name
is premarin because it comes from pregnant mayor urine. Like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's literally a thing that we still do today.
That is hilarious. It's beautiful, it's so good. Um. And
So they were priestesses. They were like, you know, people
(32:37):
would come to them to seek out their wisdom and
they're like the like spiritual thing. And it was a
it was like a bunch of trans women who like
got high, told stories and probably sucked each other. And
that sounds like a policule to me. But like the Cillian,
the Scythians were like a nomadic group of people who
would travel all around kind of what is now the
Middle East. Um and yeah, it's I mean, I do
(33:00):
love the idea of trans people having like specific like
more esoteric insight almost naturally because they've had to deal
with ideas of ontology, and ideas as ontology is just
like the nature of being um and so having people
with that having to deal with like the nature of
reality from a much a younger age because their whole
perception of reality and self is obviously so different because
(33:23):
of their experience of being what is now called trans um.
So it makes a lot of sense that a lot
of these people would have been like basically different forms
of Shabin's mediums. We'll just have like esoteric insight because
they've been thinking about these types of like reality altering
topics for so much longer because it's so much more
personally affecting to them. Um. But yes, what I specifically
(33:46):
read about the cythy and priestesses and like, oh my,
they're just like doing the thing, just doing the thing.
It turns out we've been doing this forever. My favorite
account is one of the reasons they commanded respect of
the like masculine leaders that would come to get information
was because they were all terrified that they would inflict
the poison of women, which of them it does spread
(34:06):
by the way it is, it's highly contagiousous. But it's
just the idea that like there was like some of
the respect was from like this fear of being force
femed is hilarious, from like this early BC, the primordial
fear of the primordial fear. I was gonna say, Garrison,
you mentioning like ontology. My original degree was in psychology
(34:27):
and philosophy, So like, let's go, baby, we can go
deep on some of this stuff. Sure, I'm sure, I'm
sure we couldn't talk about mysticism and magic and gender
for a long long time. Oh my god, there'll be
a whole another podcast. Are big areas of interest. But
I but I, but I super agree with you because
I've been thinking about this and I've ended up having
conversations with a lot of my peers in pharmacy and
(34:49):
in the university. Because people might not recognize this, but
pharmacy is actually one of the more conservative spaces in healthcare. Uh.
Like my my school had a dress code for this
students until two years ago when I fought hard enough
to get it removed, like it was wild. Um, like
the Code of Conduct committee tried to get me, tried
to prevent me from getting my ears pierced. Like, yeah,
(35:11):
it's a wild space for me to exist in. Um
it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional, like the some like yeah,
I got stories that I'd love to tell if you
wanted to hear them. But the thing that I think
is really interesting is when you look at me in
comparison to my my colleagues who are predominantly like Christian,
(35:33):
predominantly like traditionalist, predominantly capitalist, and I roll in as
this like anti capitalist, like anarchists, trans woman, who's Polly,
who's pan sexual, who's a pagan? All the p's And
it's like, well, once I question gender, I started realizing
all of culture and society is bullshit, and now I
(35:54):
can tell you the truth come to me. For the
truth of reality, No even make sense in terms of
like you know, why why did two trans women make
the matrix? You're like, yeah, no, it's like it's it is.
It is the same thing as your Your entire nature
and basis of reality was severely questioned. So so you're
trying to trying to understand these feelings. And for you know,
(36:17):
mid modern days, we have like stuff like simulation theory,
we have the matrix. UM, and then you know, but
before before then, you know it would have been taken
out in like spiritualism and religion and you know, the
different levels of reality on like the whole like mystic
side of things as opposed to like the more sci
fi side of things. Um, but yeah, like it's it's
all the same stuff. Like you're, you're, you're, you're playing
(36:39):
with the same things. Um, yeah, it is. It is
just a funny, a funny trend that once you, once
you notice it, you'll you'll start seeing it in in
like different places. Yeah. So we are still mystics who
understand the true reality of the world and will force
from you if you don't give us respect. I just
don't see what the problem I believe that that was
(37:00):
to take away from matrix resurrections. Oh yeah, I mean, well,
of is there is there anything else you would want
to you would want to add? Oh my goodness, Um,
I don't know. Fight for trans people. One of the
things that I end up always having to talk to
my students about in colleagues and things is what ally means,
(37:24):
because I've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like,
oh yeah, it's l g B t Q. I A
because a standard for ally, and I'm like, oh, I
will knife you, like like, it doesn't stand for ally,
it stands for a sexual or very romantic of all
of all of the other a's. Yes, but it's the
(37:46):
it's this thing where people think being an ally is
just being like like okay with a person existing the
kind of like well if it makes you happy, which
is like okay, motherfucker, that's not like that is so
belittling of the experience. Um, that's not ally ship. To
be an ally, you have to leverage your privilege by
not being a member of that community to protect people
(38:08):
in that community. You can be tolerant, but not an ally.
And that's sort of where the old saying comes from
that if that's what being an ally is to you,
we don't need allies, we need accomplices. And Um. With
the current legislative push against trans people, I mean like
literally what I do is like a felony in three
(38:29):
states now are almost a felony in three states, and
it's going to be a growing number of states. Yeah,
and and and it's just so unbelievably depressing. And there
aren't enough I mean, there's a lot of trans and
non binary and and every kind of expression you could want.
People in this country way more than than a lot
of surveys suspected. Um. But we're not enough to necessarily
(38:53):
fight this in a way that isn't going to end
up with increasing violence. I mean, the the FBI is
statistics of random violence against in like hate crime specifically
has been rising against LGBT people, especially trans people in
the last couple of years, and I'm sure it's only
going to get more in the next few years, still
with all of the with the wave of stuff happening
(39:16):
in the past few months. Yeah, So if you're if
you're not, if you're assist person and you want to
be an ally, you gotta fight for us. And if
you're a trans person, if you don't have other reasons
why you can't maybe arm yourself in some way at
this point, if you if you feel mentally capable, it's
not a bad idea to learn how to do things.
(39:38):
It's not a not a bad idea to get stop
the bleed training, not a bad idea to get you know,
emergency first aid training, right all of all of all
of the things. Because things are things are happening, and
they're going to keep happening. Uh, one might say it
could happen here. Wow, I know we really we really
(40:00):
put this together, just pulled it back, just just really
encapsulated it. So yeah, I think that does it for
us today. UM, do do you have Do you have
any uh plugables that you would like to plug? Yeah? Sure,
so if you wanted to talk to me more, you can.
I'm on Twitter for now, assuming that elon must doesn't
(40:20):
make it entirely unlivable at Vixen, which but the w
S two vs. I don't post a hole up you can.
You can find me there. You can also just straight
up email me if you had questions. My like work
email for that purpose is just Victoria dot grieve at
pit dot e d U I'd have I'd be happy
to answer any questions that people have. Uh. And it's
(40:41):
a robust university firewall, so if I get hey that
that's fine. It won't get through. Um the and then
outside of like my classes and stuff. The only other
thing I wanted to plug because you brought it up.
I am a frequent guest on a podcast that a
friend of mine hosts called School of Movies, and we
actually did Matrix two three and four UM and I
(41:03):
was on those episodes and talked a lot about the
trans narrative therein we also did an episode on Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert that I'm really troubed because that's great.
I was that was lucky enough to watch Prisiliquity of
the Desert a few a few months ago UM with
some queer friends of mine and with Hugo Weaving in
in both of those he is he is. It is
pretty It is pretty fun watching Hugo Weaving go from
(41:24):
Agents Smith to his character and Priscilo Queen of the Desert.
It's beautiful. It's a beautiful metamorphosis. It is. It is
very good. But yeah, thank you so much for coming
on to talk anytime. Thank you for listening to my
little two parter on hormone replacement therapy. If you want
(41:46):
to start reading more on the d I Y and
mutual aid side of things, check out d I Y
HRT dot, get hub dot io HRT dot Cafe and
d I Y trans dot Luckie as a jumping off point.
But obviously you don't everything to read on the internet
as gospel. I do think it's worth learning how to
make your own drugs possibly and learning how to source
(42:07):
your nestrogen from places that are not just a doctor,
because who knows what other states will start criminalizing getting
drugs for doctor right it's it is. There seems to
be a trend of making HRT illegal via the medical system.
So this is something definitely to look into because it
seems more and more people will face restrictions in this vein.
(42:29):
So yeah, that's kind of a big reason for why
I wanted to talk about this today on the pod.
Big extra special thanks to Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve
for coming on to talk with me about gender affirming
hormonal treatment. You can check her out or ask her
questions on her Twitter, which can be found at vixen
which with two vs for the w in which, or
(42:52):
you can email her queries at Victoria dot Grieve at
pit dot e d U. And that does it for
us today, everybody. You can follow the show at Happened
Here pod and cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram,
and you can look at my late night gender hostile
tweets at Hungry bow Tie. See you on the other side.
(43:17):
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could
happen here, Updated monthly at cool zone media dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about
things falling apart and sometimes how we can put things
back together. I'm Garrison Davis, aspiring Rebus, and this is
part two of my little two part series talking about
trans hormone replacement therapy. Last episode, we discussed what HRT is,
it's various benefits as gender affirming treatment, and the informed
(00:28):
consent model of receiving hormones. Before we continue on with
my discussion with Dr Grieve, I would like to talk
a bit more about informed consent. So the informed consent
option can be great for many many people as it
attempts to bypass some of the red tape around receiving
gender reforming healthcare. For its form of consent, all you
(00:49):
gotta do is set up an appointment, signed the forms,
maybe get some blood work done, and then pick up
your hormones. Right. You don't need to live as trans
for like two years or have letters from therapyest s.
It's it is. It is just up to you, so
it is it is really convenient if you can get
that option. Some places even let you do it via
telemedicine appointments, so you can just sit at home holding
(01:11):
your little, I kea shark and then get your hormones,
which does sound very very nice. Planned Parenthood offers informed
consent trans health care in many states, and in the
show notes I will link a Google map of the
informed consent clinics from across the country. Depending on your insurance,
you can get hormones for a little to no extra cost.
This way it can be really convenient. The biggest asterisk
(01:34):
for informed consent is that since it's based on you know,
informed consent, it often is just for humans age eighteen
and older, or sometimes teens a few years younger, but
only if their parents or guardians signed the forms. Obviously,
this is not ideal for a sixteen year old with
(01:54):
transphobic parents, who would really be helped by receiving like
hormone blockers or something right. Another potential drawback is that
the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list. I
started off with the informed consent model because it was
the easiest, but by the time I needed more blood
work done and my prescription refilled, setting up more appointments
(02:15):
that Planned Parenthood became kind of a nightmare. I was
continuously having appointments being canceled on me last minute. And
just getting pushed back months and months into the future. Eventually,
I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor
instead of just continuing on with informed consent. Now, this
is obviously a regional issue, right I. I don't know
what it's like in Florida, for example, but the COVID
(02:37):
andeen pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure
here in the States, and scheduling some appointments in these
clinics can be still quite challenging. And as you know,
a big theme of this show is that maybe we
shouldn't assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete,
permanent fixtures. The term the crumbles that we used to
(02:59):
describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on,
was initially coined in reference to our medical system by
a friend of the show who works in the medical field.
Listen to the first five episodes of The Daily Show
talking about climate change for more on that. But a
part of the Criminal's idea is trying to learn how
to become less reliant on the systems that we take
(03:22):
for granted, right, trying to solve for the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness before it's too late. On that note, back
to my discussion with Dr Victoria Luna Brendan Grieve, Assistant
professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. For
places that are getting uh, you know, all of these
anti trends bills criminalizing all of this stuff for miners,
(03:44):
and then you know, eventually maybe even you know, my
big fear is that, you know, first off, they're gonna
criminalize it for minors, and they're gonna say the brains
not fully developed, your twenty five, and they're gonna criminalize
it until you're twenty five, and they're just gonna criminalize
it for everyone after that. Um So, for all of
these places that are making access to healthcare is so
much harder, what what is what is one to do?
(04:06):
Like if these if there's these kids and then even
adults who are like just find it so much harder
to get stuff. Like I know there's the informed clinics,
but there there's like there's like a few in Texas,
but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore, right,
Like it's really unclear. Yeah, well, I'll tell you some
of that fear is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania
just two days ago. HB. I think it was HBO
(04:30):
passed by the House in don in Harrisburg that prevents
it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through
the college level, not just high school in grade school,
it's all the way up through you know, secondary education. Uh.
And even though our governors like has failed to vito it,
(04:51):
like who even knows what's going to happen, but they're
already taking taking aim at this higher level kind of thing.
And there's a lot of president for that. What my goodness.
If there's a long and storied history of d I
Y hormone therapy and it's easier for the trans feminine
individuals because testosterone is actually a scheduled to control I
(05:15):
think it might be a three I think it's scheduled
three steroid. I'll write a little thing about it and
I'll say in the episode. And it's such a funny
reason too, because it's just you can use it to
dope for endurance based like like cycling and running, because
it will increase your red blood cell account that's a like.
(05:36):
And so it's a controlled substance because people can use
it to dope for for exit, for for sports. So
it's that's a little bit harder to get ahold of
in like a meaningful way. But there are a lot
of different Allegedly, there are a lot of different places
online that you can acquire estrogen or estra dial relatively easily.
Now I'm gonna actually pause the discussion with me and
(05:59):
Dr Grieve to talk a little bit about d I
y h r T or for those anti acronym people
out there, do it yourself hormone replacement therapy. Again, I'm
not a medical doctor. Unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology,
I cannot offer you any expertise, but I can talk
about d I y h r T as it's existed
(06:20):
for trans people for the past two decades. Because an
unfortunate truth is, although it's gotten much easier to get
gender affirm and care and hormones the past few years,
even in states that aren't facing this wave of anti
trans health care bills, the medical establishment hasn't been the
most trans friendly place in general. A recent Center for
(06:41):
American Progress report found that nearly half of transgender people
and six of transgender people of color reported having experienced
mistreatment at the hands of a medical provider, including refusal
of care and verbal or physical abuse just in the
year before the survey, which took place in June of
twenty so this is this is still very much an
(07:02):
ongoing issue. One in two trans people reported that their
access to gender affirming healthcare was curtailed significantly during the pandemic,
and nearly one in two transgender adults have had insurance
providers denying them coverage for gender affirming care, and very
often doctors don't even know how to properly treat transgender patients,
(07:23):
and often it's up to the patients to educate the
doctors on trans healthcare issues. The Center for American Progress
survey from last year found that one in three trans
people report having to teach their doctors about trans people
to get them appropriate care, and reported having been asked
innovasive or unnecessary questions about being trans which were not
(07:45):
related to the reasons for them visiting the doctor. The
report cited a twenty eight team brief from the Kaiser
Family Foundation that found that more than half of medical
school curriculums lack information about unique health issues the LGBTQ
community faces, and doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care,
so obviously that leaves a lot to be desired for
(08:06):
people wanting to receive transgender health care. Between medical mistreatment,
insurance complications, and doctor ignorance, many trans folks have taken
it upon themselves to get the drug necessary for hormone
replacement therapy because the alternative is often just having to
face not being able to receive the health care that,
in many cases makes it possible to live. The Center
(08:28):
for American Progress survey found that twenty eight percent of
trans folks report having postponed or not gotten necessary medical
care for fear of discrimination. Taking your endochronology and hormone
treatment into your own hands has a lengthy history and
used to be much more common in the days before
informed consent. In a survey of trans people in Washington,
(08:51):
d C. Circus two thousand, over half of the respondents
so that they had used non prescribed hormones also known
as d I y h RT. So information on how
to go about d I yng your HRT spread via
online forms and websites in the early two thousands, and
after some trial and error, the information is kind of
(09:13):
consolidated into a few main information hubs that being the
d I y h r T Wiki, HRT dot Cafe
and d I y HRT dot get hub dot io. Now, obviously,
when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources, you
need to be extremely careful and cautious about what foreign
chemicals you're putting into your body, including and trying to
(09:35):
only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources, doing drug testing if
you can, and doing your own blood testing before and
after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels.
It is possible to order blood tests via online and
send it through a lab that you have to ship
your blood too, but often it's just easier to do
it by going through the medical system. Now, one massive
(09:57):
caveat with d y h r T is although it's
more straightforward to acquire extra dial and antiandrogen's like spiro
from online sources, getting to stosterone for masculinization therapy is
much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug.
Here in the States, it is a Schedule three substance,
so technically buying it without a prescription would be a
(10:18):
felony um So for this reason, most d I O
y h r T stuff focuses on feminizing hormones since
that is less legally complicated. Now, obviously you know steroids exist,
so it is possible to get them, but I will
not be giving out guides on how to do that
here on the pod, but you know you can you
can look into it if you so desire for feminizing hormones.
(10:41):
The main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical
extra dial. It can come in a few forms pills,
which are not difficult to acquire, and assuming you get
the dose right, it's pretty easy because it's just a
process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue,
and that's kind of it right. Dosed is its own thing,
which you can figure out if you do reading, but
(11:03):
the actual taking of it is pretty straightforward. Transdermal estrogen
or transdermal estra dial is kind of the new hot thing. Uh.
Usually this has you taking weekly estra dial patches which
you just switch out every week um or you can
also do daily gels, which you just rub out your body,
although unfortunately for dosing gels it can be more tricky
(11:25):
if you go d I Y because it's hard to
know what concentration just the jela is. If you're just
rubbing a sav on yourself. It's not already prepackaged, but
the patches are pretty good. And lastly, the classic method
is injectable estradial at various concentrations in the form of
some oil solution. This can usually be the cheapest option
(11:46):
if you can figure out how to buy estradial, and
needles and syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just
over the counter in most countries without a prescription. For
feminizing hormones, some people also take antiandrogen's a k a.
Testosterone lockers like spiral lactone, which can be acquired online
and are almost always taken orally in the form of
(12:06):
a pill. Now, when getting these drugs online, there are
two main categories of purchase. There's pharmaceutical grade and home brewed.
Pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies
that are licensed and subject to regulation. They should be
of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy,
and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites
(12:29):
based in countries that allow for the legal exportation of
certain medications. These will almost always carry less inherent risk
versus receiving and taking home brewed hormones, which leads us
to the second version that you can buy, which is homebrewed.
This refers to HRT produced by individuals by sourcing raw
extradial or whatever other chemicals you're taking in the form
(12:51):
of a powder and then compounding the medication themselves. They
do not synthesize or current from scratch these hormones, but
they do use the powdered vers of them, and they
get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize
it into their own extra dial or whatever arther drug
you're taking. You know, in the antiandrogen list. There's there's
(13:12):
too many, too many to name now. While this this
concept does sound scary and it can obviously go wrong
if someone's not synthesizing it correctly. Uh, there are a
couple of well respected members of the community that have
been known to produce high quality and safe HRT medications.
But before anyone decides to take drugs that you get
on the internet, please, please, please please do lots of
(13:32):
reading beforehand on on dosage effects, side effects, and be
very cautious with your drug sourcing. Right, you should know
who you're buying it from. You don't want to just
buy from whatever it's get your website. You should make
sure that what you're doing is other people are backing
up on this decision and make sure that it's there.
You can cross reference information here because there's a lot
(13:54):
of information out their online and not all of it
is good information, obviously, but really try to cross reference
information on any drug sources, on hormone dosage, on any
possible drug interactions. If you're taking multiple drugs or you
already have prescriptions now I should I should note that
supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even
extend out to d Y A h r T. There's
(14:15):
no true escape. There's no true other. One of the
main pharmaceutical grade online sites to source HRT from is
currently out of estradial pills, so there there is there
is no true escape sometimes, but to learn more about
d I Y h RT, you should check out d
I Y HRT dot get hub, dot io or HRT
(14:37):
dot cafe and the d I Y trans dot wiki
and keep in mind not everything you read on those
sources is necessarily good advice or up to date with
the current information on how these drugs work. Recently, I
was reading a guide I found via one of those
sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying
the powdered version of it than synthesizing it myself to
(14:59):
level up my alchemy stat um, and I found the
guy that I was reading contained quite a bit of
outdated misinformation about progester around. So don't take everything you
read as gospel, but those resources are at least a
good place to start. Anyway, Now back to the interview,
the problem that you might run into with the I
(15:20):
y NG is you might not be able to get
the bioequivalent estradial in some form. You might have to
settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an ethanol ESTRADIALE,
which is like hormonal birth control, which because they are synthetics,
they actually have a much rougher time on your body.
And that's where a lot of the side effects quote
(15:42):
unquote like come from. Like all of the worry about
like blood clots and things from taking estrogens comes from
conjugated estrogens. Est Yeah, the actual study, uh that a
lot of that is citing goes all the way back
and it was studying the rate of plotting in cis
gender women taking hormonal birth control, and it's just like, Okay,
(16:06):
so this is the wrong population with the wrong medication. Yeah,
that seems like not a great scientific study, right, what
do we do? I mean, it might be great to
talk about for the rate of yeah, right for trans women,
or doesn't really right? It doesn't it doesn't really help
(16:26):
so much. Um. And what I think is also pretty
wild too. I mentioned the progesteran thing earlier. A lot
of that controversy comes from the fact that the original
studies on whether or not it could be beneficial. We're
done with medroxy progesterone, a synthetic progesterone that has a
really nasty side effect profile in a lot of different ways.
And now that we have micronized progesterone, where the evidence
(16:48):
suggested not only is it safe, it actually makes estrogen safer.
And now they're like, no, we can't give that. That's
just that's just crazy talk. I will say, I have
heard from people with more experienced hormones and be that
progesterone does make you way too hoardy. Um. The heads
up for for side effects ASHTAG can confirm. But um, well,
(17:13):
but but progesterone can have a lot of other really
beneficial side effects. It can really increase the fat deposition
to various places. It can help with your mood, it
can help with your sleep. It actually reduced the period
symptoms that I was having because I because there's a surprise,
people on estrogen can also have periods. Uh. And because
your body again knows what it's doing, it's going to
modulate it through the E one, E two, E three pathway,
(17:36):
like throughout the month in a sixical fashion, and you
can get bloating and cramps. And I had really bad
morning sickness like for for three days every twenty eight
days for months, until eventually I started micronized progesterone and
those symptoms alleviated, Which makes a kind of sense if
you know that progesterone only birth control reduces periods. So
(17:57):
like there's a there's there's a lot of precedent, a
lot of makes a out of like sense that it
would work. God, I it's I need to tell you
have have you ever heard of the Powers method of
(18:21):
no Oh Garrison. I am so excited to introduce you
to this person. Like doctor Powers is a fascinating grifter
in the trans health care space because He is a
he's a physician who like has has made it his
duty to to to make sure that trans people, especially
(18:43):
trans women. He actually doesn't like really have anything to
say about trans men because the the therapy is so
like easy to to to do that. He has a
wild postulation as to like better ways to give hormone,
and he he has things worths like we don't need antiandrogens.
You just give really high levels of injectable estrogen, which, like,
(19:07):
I mean that'll probably work because for some people, but yeah, yeah,
but but also estrogen is like really safe and so
like you can give it to an unbelievably high level,
it's not really going to speed things up exactly, Like
it will maybe a little bit, but not that much.
And any of the side effects you might experience, which
(19:27):
could also come from the the excipients, the non active
elements of it, like you can be allergic to those
if you ever really high dose can be a real problem. Um.
But the big thing for him is he pushes that
micronized progesterone is not only necessary and good especially for
breast size, you should also stick the oral capsules in
your butt. Oh I were we are we are officially
(19:50):
boothing estrogen. Now, yes, yes, okay, well I'm I'm switching
back to pills. This sounds very exciting. Well so well,
oh my gosh. So the idea is his line is
um that you know that the oral capsules you only
get a tiny fraction of the total progesterone, and you
(20:10):
get a lot more if you stick it up You
get the whole dose if you stick it up your butt, which,
like if you know literally anything about pharmacology is both
right and entirely insane because anything that you take orally,
there's a bioavailable like level of it. Like so oral uh,
micronized progesterone has a bioequivalence of I think like two
(20:31):
or three percent, which is why when you take like
a hundred milligram capsule, you get like a certain blood level.
If you take it rectally, it's like a twelve. It's
still not the whole thing, which is why the the
micronized progesterone rectal suppositories are twenty five milligrams to give
you the same exposure, so it's four times the systemic absorption,
(20:54):
which means that if you are boofing a micronized progesterone capsule,
you are geting three to four times the dose that
you should be getting. And uh, the I pulled because
I get into fights with people all the time about this.
I pulled the original FDA filing for Mike and Ice progesterone,
(21:16):
and they suggested that three hundred milligrams is basically getting
to what like a cis gender person's maximum progesterone levels
would be, meaning that if you're boofing one or two,
as some of his regimens suggests, like, you might be
essentially overdosing on progesterone for no reason, like there's no
real reason to do that, and it is just crazy.
(21:38):
When what I started this call today, I did. I
did not think we would get boofing progesterone. It is
a weird, like a weirdly large part of my Twitter
interactions have been fighting people to stop boofing progesterone. UM,
so I wanted to Unfortunately just exposed this idea to
millions of more people. Know I'm saying talk do it
(22:01):
well and so, but you know, you know, you know
that's not how that works. I do know that's not
how that works. But I mean, I I tell you,
if if your your friend Robert Evans for here, I
could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this doctor
powers guy. Um so he sounds fascinating. He has a subreddit,
like all good physicians do. I love the doctor has
(22:23):
a subreddit, and my my favorite post other than recently,
he's been pushing this like miracle hair tonic that he made,
which is like, come on, buddy, like like now, and
it's just obvious. He calls it, yep, yep, the verbon
he might call it. He might even call it an elixir,
which is very funny, but all from a magical hand
(22:45):
tonic exactly. It's so funny because one of the components
of it, I think is finasteride. Like I I looked
at the and I'm like, yes, that is something for
bald for male pattern baldness. It will probably work. Congratulations,
you just remade rogaine. Uh. But the the single post
that I feel like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality. Um is,
(23:07):
There's this big post that went around through like cis
gender like kind of like centrist spaces that every trans
person I saw was just like, excuse me, what the fuck?
Where this guy was secretly micro dosing injectable estrogen that
he prescribes himself, which sounds kind of illegal. Not gonna lie, uh,
and messed up the dose by a thousand percent, by
(23:29):
a thought, by a times thousand yeah, yea yeah, And um,
like I can give you the link. I I can.
I know exactly where it is. I can give you
the link if you wanted to read this. It is
buck Wild. But the thing is, he goes on to
describe this like acute dysphoric episode that he had from
one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen, a thing that is
(23:50):
not physiologically possible and in completely insane. That and he
but he was like, but I understand the pain the
trans women go through because I fucked up a dose
where I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face
look younger. So I understand your pain and have so
much empathy for for the trans women's that I am
(24:12):
trying to save. And it is so frustrating to me
how many people give him like credence, give him credit,
um because he he has he has claims like apply
progesterone cream to the the the smaller breast to even
them out, And it's like, Okay, my dude, have you
ever met like people with breasts. One is larger than
(24:33):
the other. That's how breasts work. It's like, well, what's
your evidence for that? Well, I had two people who
did it and they said it worked. Okay, cool. Do
you have those those reports? No? No, no, they got
burned up in a house fire, and it's very sad
and I can't give you that. Yes. So, so he
worked in a clinic that a friend of mine actually
(24:54):
moved to after they got rid of him because he
made all these wildly anecdotal claims and whenever anybody challenged,
and then his house burned out, which is actually very
sad because his cats died in it, and he didn't
deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures and this
man is insane and cats never do anything wrong. Cats
are a perfect, magical beings. I love yours so much
(25:19):
as they keep crossing in front of the screen. They're perfect. Um.
But so, whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of
his claims, he goes, well, I had all of that data,
but it burned up in my house. And then he
like makes it a sob story about like how like
like horrible this was, which like I'm sure it was
really bad, Like I'm sure it was like really really bad.
(25:41):
But even his um like power point presentations that he
has that he like goes through to like really like
talk about the powers method and make it sound like
really really good, has a like fire safety section specifically
so he can garner this like sympathy so people will
not quest in his claims that have no evidence behind them.
(26:04):
And so it's just such a fantastic examinated to me,
Like it's just so weird seeing like a space that
has historically been denigrated in the evidence. You know, you
had that whole episode on the Hirshfeld Institute, and you
know we see all this like anti anti trans uh
like propaganda and legislation going on right now that there's
(26:24):
a lot of like empty space in the medical record
and in the evidence record for what to do in
these situations. There's a lot of confusion from the guidelines
in these other societies like I was talking about, and insteps.
This guy who sees an opportunity to be like, uh
like popular like powerful individual in this space to give
(26:47):
people hope that he can cash in on uh And
since the medications and since the hormone therapy is so safe,
he doesn't actually hurt that many people, And it's it
is so wilde being this juxtaposition of individuals being like, well,
this is unsafe experimental nonsense, and seeing this guy flagrantly
overdosing people on hormones with no ill effects because they're
(27:10):
that safe. Uh, that is that is pretty funny. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's funny in that like laughing until you're
crying kind of way. Yes, Yes, What is the way
(27:34):
that people can try to combat all the medical disinformation
around HRT specifically because we do specifically let's you see
this a lot and to save the children rhetoric, we
see this a lot for just anti tran stuff in
general of and like, yeah, just in terms of someone
who has to deal with this stuff on a professional level,
(27:56):
like when when we're just faced with all of this
just complainely just like wrong stuff being treated as absolute
fact when your experience, what's kind of the best ways
to go about that? In people? Oh my goodness. Um,
it kind of depends on the audience. When I'm talking
to other other health care practitioners, I UM, I can.
(28:19):
I I have historically because I do a lot of
like teaching and advocacy in this area. To other health
care practitioners and UM holding sessions like volunteering for to
to hold sessions of like to educate on this and
say like, these are the kind of regimens that are
commonly used in clinics. This is why these are things
to look out for and to stress the importance of
(28:42):
believing the patient and UM the importance of you don't
want to gate keep because if if which they're not
that dangerous, but if there is to be a problem,
you would rather have that patient want to work with
you to solve it. Is like such a big part
of it, like even just understanding that from that level
(29:03):
that you're not like delivering this kind of like life
saving medication to them as this like Lord on High.
It's this idea that like, no, you should be working
with this person and if you're not familiar with it,
you need to do your fucking research. And I will
give you the resources for that. I will. I will
walk you through those resources. And that's that's awfully convincing
(29:24):
for the majority of healthcare individuals at any level, because
I've done I've done talks for students and nursing programs
and physical therapy programs all the way up to like
actively practicing physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, and it's basically the same.
You just you make the argument, you show the evidence,
You give them the evidence, and you walk them through,
(29:44):
uh like kind of and and then and then have
a robust question and answer period where they will ask
you those questions and you can explain why they are wrong.
Having that kind of dedicated space can be really beneficial,
but not scalable in a way that's necessarily helpful. Like
I've made a positive impact on my city, but that
doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself are not a
(30:06):
health care practitioner and want to like explain this kind
of stuff. And I mentioned earlier that on Twitter, I've
spent a lot of time like arguing that people shouldn't
be boofing their progesterone. But I've had to stop because
it's exhausting every single person like coming back. It's like
the same conversations over and over again. And there's no
(30:27):
good way to like have a central location that just
has all that information that anybody is gonna believe because
of the way the internetworks. Um, So I guess my
answer is I'm not sure, Like there's so much misinformation
out there, and so much of it is so wrong
(30:48):
and not in alignment with reality that looking at it
at all, it falls to pieces and and the idea
of the majority of people too. I guess I could
say if a person is coming to you and asking
legitimate questions and they don't really know, like they're just
like parroting stuff that they heard, they they're much easier
(31:10):
to convince because you can show like, oh, like we
have a long history of doing this, like look at
the you know, I tell my students about how like
nineteen fifty two was the first like recognized hormonal mediated
transition in the United States, Like she was like a
movie star. Um and and you know, I talked about
a lot of the history to be like this isn't new,
(31:31):
this is something like we have been here forever. Um
My my favorite story. Do you know about the story
about the Scifian priestesses. Yes, I actually do, but I
would love for you to explain it. But oh my god,
I found out about that a few months ago and
I was like, oh my god, it makes me so happy.
So so to to explain very briefly, I think it's
it's an old Um. I think it was like Herodotus.
(31:53):
It's like an old like Crestian like author that we
have information, author, philosopher, whatever, historian. But they talk about
in one of the texts the Scythian priestesses, who essentially
distill the poison of woman. They call it in one
of the texts, which I think is just such a
great term from um uh, pregnant mayor urine, which interestingly enough,
(32:16):
we actually still make today conjugated estrogens. The brand name
is premarin because it comes from pregnant mayor urine. Like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's literally a thing that we still do today.
That is hilarious. It's beautiful, it's so good. Um. And
So they were priestesses. They were like, you know, people
(32:37):
would come to them to seek out their wisdom and
they're like the like spiritual thing. And it was a
it was like a bunch of trans women who like
got high, told stories and probably sucked each other. And
that sounds like a policule to me. But like the Cillian,
the Scythians were like a nomadic group of people who
would travel all around kind of what is now the
Middle East. Um and yeah, it's I mean, I do
(33:00):
love the idea of trans people having like specific like
more esoteric insight almost naturally because they've had to deal
with ideas of ontology, and ideas as ontology is just
like the nature of being um and so having people
with that having to deal with like the nature of
reality from a much a younger age because their whole
perception of reality and self is obviously so different because
(33:23):
of their experience of being what is now called trans um.
So it makes a lot of sense that a lot
of these people would have been like basically different forms
of Shabin's mediums. We'll just have like esoteric insight because
they've been thinking about these types of like reality altering
topics for so much longer because it's so much more
personally affecting to them. Um. But yes, what I specifically
(33:46):
read about the cythy and priestesses and like, oh my,
they're just like doing the thing, just doing the thing.
It turns out we've been doing this forever. My favorite
account is one of the reasons they commanded respect of
the like masculine leaders that would come to get information
was because they were all terrified that they would inflict
the poison of women, which of them it does spread
(34:06):
by the way it is, it's highly contagiousous. But it's
just the idea that like there was like some of
the respect was from like this fear of being force
femed is hilarious, from like this early BC, the primordial
fear of the primordial fear. I was gonna say, Garrison,
you mentioning like ontology. My original degree was in psychology
(34:27):
and philosophy, So like, let's go, baby, we can go
deep on some of this stuff. Sure, I'm sure, I'm
sure we couldn't talk about mysticism and magic and gender
for a long long time. Oh my god, there'll be
a whole another podcast. Are big areas of interest. But
I but I, but I super agree with you because
I've been thinking about this and I've ended up having
conversations with a lot of my peers in pharmacy and
(34:49):
in the university. Because people might not recognize this, but
pharmacy is actually one of the more conservative spaces in healthcare. Uh.
Like my my school had a dress code for this
students until two years ago when I fought hard enough
to get it removed, like it was wild. Um, like
the Code of Conduct committee tried to get me, tried
to prevent me from getting my ears pierced. Like, yeah,
(35:11):
it's a wild space for me to exist in. Um
it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional, like the some like yeah,
I got stories that I'd love to tell if you
wanted to hear them. But the thing that I think
is really interesting is when you look at me in
comparison to my my colleagues who are predominantly like Christian,
(35:33):
predominantly like traditionalist, predominantly capitalist, and I roll in as
this like anti capitalist, like anarchists, trans woman, who's Polly,
who's pan sexual, who's a pagan? All the p's And
it's like, well, once I question gender, I started realizing
all of culture and society is bullshit, and now I
(35:54):
can tell you the truth come to me. For the
truth of reality, No even make sense in terms of
like you know, why why did two trans women make
the matrix? You're like, yeah, no, it's like it's it is.
It is the same thing as your Your entire nature
and basis of reality was severely questioned. So so you're
trying to trying to understand these feelings. And for you know,
(36:17):
mid modern days, we have like stuff like simulation theory,
we have the matrix. UM, and then you know, but
before before then, you know it would have been taken
out in like spiritualism and religion and you know, the
different levels of reality on like the whole like mystic
side of things as opposed to like the more sci
fi side of things. Um, but yeah, like it's it's
all the same stuff. Like you're, you're, you're, you're playing
(36:39):
with the same things. Um, yeah, it is. It is
just a funny, a funny trend that once you, once
you notice it, you'll you'll start seeing it in in
like different places. Yeah. So we are still mystics who
understand the true reality of the world and will force
from you if you don't give us respect. I just
don't see what the problem I believe that that was
(37:00):
to take away from matrix resurrections. Oh yeah, I mean, well,
of is there is there anything else you would want
to you would want to add? Oh my goodness, Um,
I don't know. Fight for trans people. One of the
things that I end up always having to talk to
my students about in colleagues and things is what ally means,
(37:24):
because I've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like,
oh yeah, it's l g B t Q. I A
because a standard for ally, and I'm like, oh, I
will knife you, like like, it doesn't stand for ally,
it stands for a sexual or very romantic of all
of all of the other a's. Yes, but it's the
(37:46):
it's this thing where people think being an ally is
just being like like okay with a person existing the
kind of like well if it makes you happy, which
is like okay, motherfucker, that's not like that is so
belittling of the experience. Um, that's not ally ship. To
be an ally, you have to leverage your privilege by
not being a member of that community to protect people
(38:08):
in that community. You can be tolerant, but not an ally.
And that's sort of where the old saying comes from
that if that's what being an ally is to you,
we don't need allies, we need accomplices. And Um. With
the current legislative push against trans people, I mean like
literally what I do is like a felony in three
(38:29):
states now are almost a felony in three states, and
it's going to be a growing number of states. Yeah,
and and and it's just so unbelievably depressing. And there
aren't enough I mean, there's a lot of trans and
non binary and and every kind of expression you could want.
People in this country way more than than a lot
of surveys suspected. Um. But we're not enough to necessarily
(38:53):
fight this in a way that isn't going to end
up with increasing violence. I mean, the the FBI is
statistics of random violence against in like hate crime specifically
has been rising against LGBT people, especially trans people in
the last couple of years, and I'm sure it's only
going to get more in the next few years, still
with all of the with the wave of stuff happening
(39:16):
in the past few months. Yeah, So if you're if
you're not, if you're assist person and you want to
be an ally, you gotta fight for us. And if
you're a trans person, if you don't have other reasons
why you can't maybe arm yourself in some way at
this point, if you if you feel mentally capable, it's
not a bad idea to learn how to do things.
(39:38):
It's not a not a bad idea to get stop
the bleed training, not a bad idea to get you know,
emergency first aid training, right all of all of all
of the things. Because things are things are happening, and
they're going to keep happening. Uh, one might say it
could happen here. Wow, I know we really we really
(40:00):
put this together, just pulled it back, just just really
encapsulated it. So yeah, I think that does it for
us today. UM, do do you have Do you have
any uh plugables that you would like to plug? Yeah? Sure,
so if you wanted to talk to me more, you can.
I'm on Twitter for now, assuming that elon must doesn't
(40:20):
make it entirely unlivable at Vixen, which but the w
S two vs. I don't post a hole up you can.
You can find me there. You can also just straight
up email me if you had questions. My like work
email for that purpose is just Victoria dot grieve at
pit dot e d U I'd have I'd be happy
to answer any questions that people have. Uh. And it's
(40:41):
a robust university firewall, so if I get hey that
that's fine. It won't get through. Um the and then
outside of like my classes and stuff. The only other
thing I wanted to plug because you brought it up.
I am a frequent guest on a podcast that a
friend of mine hosts called School of Movies, and we
actually did Matrix two three and four UM and I
(41:03):
was on those episodes and talked a lot about the
trans narrative therein we also did an episode on Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert that I'm really troubed because that's great.
I was that was lucky enough to watch Prisiliquity of
the Desert a few a few months ago UM with
some queer friends of mine and with Hugo Weaving in
in both of those he is he is. It is
pretty It is pretty fun watching Hugo Weaving go from
(41:24):
Agents Smith to his character and Priscilo Queen of the Desert.
It's beautiful. It's a beautiful metamorphosis. It is. It is
very good. But yeah, thank you so much for coming
on to talk anytime. Thank you for listening to my
little two parter on hormone replacement therapy. If you want
(41:46):
to start reading more on the d I Y and
mutual aid side of things, check out d I Y
HRT dot, get hub dot io HRT dot Cafe and
d I Y trans dot Luckie as a jumping off point.
But obviously you don't everything to read on the internet
as gospel. I do think it's worth learning how to
make your own drugs possibly and learning how to source
(42:07):
your nestrogen from places that are not just a doctor,
because who knows what other states will start criminalizing getting
drugs for doctor right it's it is. There seems to
be a trend of making HRT illegal via the medical system.
So this is something definitely to look into because it
seems more and more people will face restrictions in this vein.
(42:29):
So yeah, that's kind of a big reason for why
I wanted to talk about this today on the pod.
Big extra special thanks to Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve
for coming on to talk with me about gender affirming
hormonal treatment. You can check her out or ask her
questions on her Twitter, which can be found at vixen
which with two vs for the w in which, or
(42:52):
you can email her queries at Victoria dot Grieve at
pit dot e d U. And that does it for
us today, everybody. You can follow the show at Happened
Here pod and cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram,
and you can look at my late night gender hostile
tweets at Hungry bow Tie. See you on the other side.
(43:17):
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could
happen here, Updated monthly at cool zone media dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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