Saying something unpopular here: I don’t think that picture looks like “a cis woman” tbh. The hormones have definitely worked (if you aren’t convinced I’d recommend comparing to a decent sized pre-HRT shot and really zoom in and compare details on facial features one at a time including things like preceived facial diameter, it’s many details but they add up!) and you almost definitely don’t want to drop the HRT unless your trying to physically detransition!

However, if we met on the street I’d immediately guess “trans-women” and looking at the picture I believe the reason for this unfortunately is facial bone structure, particularily the upper facial half: the forehead is rather steep and the brow ridge is on the more pronounced side as well. (Maybe also chin, but not a big deal really.) Unfortunately, this cannot be changed with surgery.

As others have pointed out this may not actually be the source of your problems, but if your disatisfied with your physical appearance, I think this may be the way to get remedy.

I see, just wanted to add after the last post, since it sounded like full DIY may probably too risky from your description: The physical changes will be visible at some point and things might end up badly once they put one and one together.

So if anything, that’d only leave puberty blockers: They’re more expensive than just injections, but they’d stop any further T-related changes from occurring and it’d take many years before anyone would notice that something is “off” and by that time you’d already have had legal agency for a while. (Naturally, you’d have to procure them illegally since you don’t have parenteral consent.)

(If you wish for physical changes toward a more feminine appearance getting your T down as soon as possible is unfortunatly pretty important for a good long-term result at your age.)

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Since someone else mentioned it in a different context recently: Would DIY be helpful here? Or too risky? Not what you want? You’d need to hide the supplies somewhere out of your parent’s reach, but the immediate and long-term benefits of starting early might be worth it.

If it helps, starting DIY is really fine. The endocrinologist really doesn’t do anything you can’t do yourself with a monthly injection and a bloodtest (and even that is mostly for your own peace of mind). There are benefits in being “in the system” of course, but a lot depends on which doctor you end up with and what they prescribe: In the best-case it won’t be worse than what you’d get DIY (medically speaking), so you still need to know a lot of things regardless of which route you take.

That can work. We’ve been doing something similar: It’s slow gains (~8kg/year) but it worked for us.

Changes were:

• Increase all meal sizes by ~50% - At least for us it meant every meal went from being “decently filling” to “very (but not overly!) filling”. Don’t repeatedly, find the lining where it still feels OK and don’t cross. There is a risk of loosing your body’s sense of appitite when crossing repeatedly which causes serious long-term problems (eating disorder).
• Use lots of unsaturated fats when cooking: Olive oil is great for this - It doesn’t add much subjective weight to cooked foods, has a lot of kJ/g and doesn’t cause any metabolic disorders if used in consumable quantities (unliked saturated acids or sugars).
• Bananas and peanut butter also rank high on the “decently healthy, high energy scale” and can be incorperated as/into daytime snaks (mini-meals).

All of this from some reading on the subject and self experimentation - I’m not a nutritionist, etc. 😊

For choosing the right foundation, the local drug store had little test bottles from which you can drop some color on the skin to try out in-store (as well as a mirror and some remover and paper towels), so we really didn’t need to talk there to anyone find a decent color. (This might not be a universal concept though.)

As a follow-up to this: If you just want to browse go one of the big chains with large stores (like H&M). You can spend hours there gwacking at bras (or whatever else you fancy) and try on as much as you like and no-one will care or even bat an eye over it. (Just don’t do it right before closing, the underpaid staff really hates staying overtime for you. 😅)

On the other hand, the smaller stores tend to offer a more interesting selection (you’ll find out fast enough if you happen to like theirs or not) and the staff can be helpful (or terrible, kinda a luck thing apparently) once you have an idea of what you like.

Can’t tell you if it’s actually any good unfortunately, but I know Untag (NL) has something like this. While we didn’t end up buying anything from them yet, their designs seem to be pretty well thought out in general: https://untag.com/collections/tucking-underwear

(Was considering ordering a swim skirt from them at one point – avoids the need to actively tuck – but as you noticed it’s not exactly cheap, so buying something that we might outgrow soon – we’re actively gaining weight – didn’t seem worth it with how often we would have ended up using it.)

Looked like a colored shopping bag in the thumbnail, but damn that’s awesome… 😀

Agreed! Our GP actually let’s us do blood tests whenever we ask for it, so we know that what we’re injecting actually contains what’s written on the packaging and that it yields the expected levels. We (mostly me) also spent a lot of time reading up and preparing before even starting the FHT… Just wanted to add a coma to your original statement, didn’t intend to make it sound contradicting. 😅

Even if doctors prescribe it where you live… Around here that still generally means oral estrodiol in low doses (WPATH SoC 8 if you want to know the details) which is known to cause unsatisfactory results due to unstable levels. When doses are increased it affects the liver in potentially negative ways. In also requires usage of an antiandrogen in humans with intact testosterone production, which all have known unpleasant sideeffects… (+ A lot of gatekeeping to even get the prescription in the first place.)

Compare that to doing a single DIY injection a month with no known negative side-effects if administrated carefully (other than feminization, duh) even Less safe than prescribed is a dubious claim, I think.

I wish you luck, I’m really so sorry to hear about the EU’s ridiculous transphobic policies.

Thanks! Although I wanted to note (even if it might be fine print to many) that it isn’t the EU or the public health insurance providers being transphobic: this really is on the state government refusing to regulate anything for who-knows-how-long. Other EU member states (ie: Denmark) apparently do this a lot better. (The health insurance providers could definitely be nicer about it too, but they do have a mandate to not just hand out money to anyone without legal basis.)

That helped, I think! There was this big blockade on how to even get started (see opening post) and having a list of concrete options to evaluate actually made this go from an abstract thing to something actionable. (In hindsight, I should have been able to find this myself, but I just never considered searching like that, even though I regularily do research on other topics.)

In any case, I’ve one booked one consultation with the trusted-but-expensive baseline for us so far. We’ll see how it goes.

In the mean time, while doing somewhat related health research I’ve also stumbled on the fact that, there might by local options available for the nasal surgery in the city we live in. Since it generally seems to recommended to split FFS into multiple parts, doing the nose part first with a local nasal surgeon* and having a more specialized FFS surgeon harmonize the remaining face abroad later on might be an interesting option.

If anyone has any specific recommendations those would still be appreciated!

* Their adverts are definitely aimed at cis-women, but looking at their published before-after pictures (they have some!) they might as well been trans as far their pre-surgury nose shapes are concerned, so I doubt there is any difference.