It's been a while since we've had a general discussions thread, and with the holiday season ramping up, I imagine a lot of us are feeling very stressed and worn out.
Spending time with family members is always a time, to say the least. Getting my family to respect my partner's they/them pronouns has been frustrating and exhausting. It enfuriates me that they can understand and respect my pronouns, but only because I'm binary gendered. Getting very sick of deconstructing the "them is multiple people" argument, as well as the "I'm still a lesbian even though my partner is transmasc non-binary" conversation. 😓
But aside from that, I'm actually excited about the holidays this year. And I hope everyone has something to look forward to, time with friends and family who love and accept us. We all deserve love, compassion, and acceptance, and to be able to enjoy a time of year that should be representative of all those things.
This space is 100% open and welcoming of venting, frustration, whatever you want to post here. And if you see cishet people disrupting you, disrupting the community, invalidating your feelings or opinions please report them and we will deal with them accordingly. I'm not handing out bans to every cis person who has an opinion on anything here, but this is not a space for cisgender people. If you're reading this and you're cisgender, you are welcome to post and contribute here. By all means, do so. But keep in mind that this space is not for you. You are a visitor in this community. How we feel, how we struggle, the experiences we as transfeminine people have come first every single time. I won't change that. And if you're going to participate here, you need to abide by that.
I just wanted to get that out of the way because occasionally we get an influx of people from other parts of the fediverse here and they are welcome but I continue to see cisgender experiences being used to invalidate transgender ones. And that's going to be a focus of mine going forward.
What are your thoughts on this time of year? What's been your experiences so far with family, the good and the bad? Let's all support each other through this. And what are your thoughts on how this community has been over the last few months? I'd love to hear it if anyone had any suggestions or thoughts on how our community has been operating.
My mother passed away from young aggressive breast cancer 2 years ago. I have done a fair bit of research to try and determine my relative risk of developing it.
Sadly, trying to determine relative breast cancer risk of trans fems is confusing, conflicting, and tiresome. The science has until relatively recently been heavily biased and made many assumptions about trans fem people. A lot of earlier studies state that there is essentially 0 risk of trans women developing it. They usually say it has something to do with the Y chromosome or with the prostate. This has always failed to take into account exactly how breast cancer develops, the factors that influence it, and the way that trans fem bodies are different from cis male ones.
More modern research shows that trans fems undergoing long-term HRT have a similar rate of breast cancer to AFAB people. If you have family history, there is a stronger risk of you developing it. This becomes even more relevant if your family history involves young onset, stage 4, and fatality associated with breast cancer. All those factors are significantly more relevant than most others. Current best medical practice is to treat transfems undergoing long-term HRT as having risks comparable to cis women of the same age range and family history risk factor.
I personally take progesterone and have for a couple years now. I don't intend to stop as of now either. The body of research showing harm isn't substantial enough and is usually based on how it affects people undergoing HRT in menopause. How it affects young trans fems is not established.
I am planning to do BRCA gene testing within the next year to get some assessment of my inherent breast cancer risk. If you have family history, you can ask your doctor to have the tests done on you as well. Those results will at least give you advance warning so you can do more screenings and plan accordingly if you do develop it.