taedryn

So, I have a bone to pick (so to speak). There's this idea running around that in trans women, breast growth stops around the 2 year mark. That idea is completely incorrect. (Note that, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to refer to "cis girls" and "cis women" a lot, but what I really mean is "anyone who went through an estrogen-primary puberty and had roughly normal breast development" which is a lot to type out every time. And by "trans women" what I mean is "anyone who went through a testosterone-primary puberty without notable breast growth, and starts taking exogenous estrogen which stimulates breast growth." Also too much to type out every time.) This completely incorrect idea is based (as far as I can tell) on a study by Meyer et al. in 1986: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3013122/ It says, right there in the abstract: Maximum breast growth required 2 years of [hormone] therapy. I'm not going to pay $40 to read someone's out-of-date opinions on a cohort of 60 "transsexuals" and equine estrogen (aka premarin, aka the stuff we stopped using years ago), so I won't try to prove to you that this is true, but I have heard and fully believe that this study was funded for, yes, two years' time. That is, they ran the study for two years, then stopped. Then they published their results. And, sure enough, they saw the maximum breast growth after 2 years. Because that was the end of their study. Now, unfortunately, a bunch of doctors who have "done their research" on trans medicine think that breast growth "plateaus" at 2 years (it says that in the study, too). They tell their transfemme patients this, resulting in a panicked frenzy when, at 2 years, said misinformed patient is freaking out over having barely any breast growth, much less what they were hoping for. If you look up Puberty on Wikipedia, it includes this sentence: On average, females begin puberty at age 10½ and complete puberty at ages 15–17 Now, I kinda hate math in this sort of message, but I'm gonna hit you with a bit of math here. 15 - 10.5 = 4.5 17 - 10.5 = 6.5 That is, on average, Wikipedia's authors think puberty lasts at least 4.5 years in cis girls, and can, again on average, last 6.5 years. There's no mention of outliers, but the phrase "on average" should tell you a lot (no one is actually average). Now, let us turn our sights on the Wikipedia article titled Breast Development. It has this gem for us: [Breast development] occurs across several phases, including prenatal development, puberty, and pregnancy. At menopause, breast development ceases and the breasts atrophy. (Emphasis mine) Hmm, how long is it between the onset of puberty and the start of menopause for most women? What's that, typically 35-45 years? Thanks, Wikipedia article on Menopause! Now, obviously trans women aren't going around getting pregnant (if you are, let a girl know, I know a couple thousand trans women whose attention just got riveted). So that's not a useful factor for us. But, like, let's look at the numbers again. Onset of puberty is around 10 1/2 years of age in cis girls. Puberty is considered "done" around 16 years, roughly. Pregnancy changes things, typically between 18 and 30, for most people who get pregnant (I'm guessing, don't @ me). Menopause typically starts in the 45 to 55 range. During that entire time, breast development is happening. If you compare cis women who are 16, and those who are, let's say, 22, you will typically see substantial differences in their bodies, without factoring pregnancy in. The colloquial term is "filling out." Their bodies change, and one of the things that fills out is typically their breasts. But wait, I hear you shouting loudly at your computer monitor, 22 years old? That's [I count on my fingers] almost 12 years! Yes, that's right. 12 or so years of development gives cis women adult looking breasts. Gee, I wonder if trans women, who are undergoing exactly the same puberty process as cis women, just later in life, might have a similar timing? Like, I don't know how else to say it, my lovely transfemmes. At 2 years, your breast development is just getting started. Don't let Meyer et al, from 1986 -- under-funded science from fully forty years ago -- tell you how your body works. Don't let under-informed doctors tell you how your body works. Yeah, 10-12 years is a long time. Even four and a half years seems pretty long. Of course, you can get surgical augmentation any time you like, it's your body, that's the whole point. Wear the push-up bra. Use those cutlets (silicone breast forms, if you don't already know the term). Cis women certainly do. You should too, if you want to. But it's going to take a while for your breasts to fully develop, and you might be really happy with the result, if you can be patient and run the marathon without trying to sprint through it. My main point is, don't panic about some mythical yet oft-repeated 2 year number. It's absolute garbage.

@realtegan@wandering.shop Yeaahhhhh. Trans medicine is frequently pretty gnarly, since it's desperately underfunded compared to female medicine (and I'm sure I don't need to tell you how underfunded female medicine is). 😅

I'm not possibly creating Yet Another Goddamn Online Account to leave a comment, but of course this Ars story had to mention that the shooter was trans, a detail which is completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/lawsuit-demands-openai-pay-for-new-school-after-chatgpt-used-in-shooting If the shooter were Black or Jewish or any other category of person, they would be rightly excoriated for bringing race into a story which has nothing to do with race. I found one (1) comment asking why the shooter's gender was mentioned when it wasn't relevant, and one telling them it's because trans people are apparently "making what's in their pants a political cudgel" before I gave up on the comments. If you have an account there, maybe drop a comment asking why the shooter was identified as trans (and then misgendered on top of it).

Mastodon (and fedi) instance sign-up idea: Allow instances to use an arbitrary external system to qualify new account requests. The idea is, the current account application process on Mastodon is essentially unworkable, in the age of AI, and the coming age of agentic AI. It's far too easy to bury admins/mods under a barrage of almost-real-looking applications if there's any new-account moderation. This used to be the reasonable balance point between "open registration" and "invite-only," but it is getting difficult to manage now. So, perhaps we should offer admins the ability to say, "Go to this webpage, and when that page decides you're cool, it'll call into a URL and either create or recommend the requested account." It would be a setting in the Mastodon settings, which describes a URL to call when a new account is requested. It would offer a properly-authenticated URL for the external site to call back with the new account information. That external site could do anything to validate that a new user meets the instance's requirements. Maybe it's a Captcha. Maybe it's a short questionnaire. Maybe it's a back-and-forth communication with the new user. Maybe it's a brain teaser that's relatively easy for a human, but difficult for AI. Maybe it's something no one has thought of yet. Maybe it's a combination of these things, or a random selection of them. It's up to the admins to create a selection process that fits their server. It provides an option, and it doesn't depend on the Mastodon development process and timeline to address a rapidly-evolving situation. Fedi is full of excellent, eager software developers, and I guarantee that it wouldn't take very long until there was a pretty cool suite of software available to validate new user applications, which could be installed alongside the Mastodon software package. It's not going to be trivial to implement, but it's going to be so much simpler and quicker than asking the core Mastodon development team (or any other fedi software team) to implement such a validation system that actually meets any of the needs of the instances which would want to use it. This is a system that would allow every instance to have a properly tailored sign-up process. It would be relatively easy to add, with a simple API contract. It shouldn't be required, merely offered as an option alongside open sign-up, moderated sign-up, and invite-only sign-up. It would simplify the lives of many admins by making it harder to create crap accounts, and be adaptable as the threat model evolves. It would result in fewer moderator actions. It would lower stress. Seems like a win, to me.

@valpackett@social.treehouse.systems Yeah, I had a similar situation, though I asked for it. I was pretty hesitant when I started HRT, and started with a low dose. I wanted to make sure I wasn't making a mistake. Because of some silly timing things, I didn't get to a full dose until 8 months in. Still, it's worked out well for me so far ☺️