this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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I'm all for a person educating themselves before making a decision to ingest some material, but the final decision MUST BE THEIRS, and not someone else's.
Yes, the decisions are often difficult, and I personally know I'm an idiot with a bias NOT to ingest something. But, I refuse to deny someone else their freedom based my judgements, or even the judgements of "experts". I think there are a LOT of good reason to, so I will almost universally defer to an expert, but I refuse to DEMAND everyone else make that same decision.
Citation needed. ESPECIALLY around HRT.
Elsewhere in this thread I talked about a couple patients I have actually treated. One was a woman in her 60's that got mystery doses of estrogen from implanted pellets that now has to take blood thinners for the rest of her life because she got a DVT and pulmonary embolism because of the excessive estrogen. She's also at much higher risk for uterine and breast cancer too. Another was a man in his 50's that had to get coronary stents and start a pile of medications to try to mitigate his heart and liver damage from taking the doses of testosterone recommended by body building influencers. I actually care about HIPAA, so I won't be giving you any more specific information about these cases.
It really isn't the trans folks I'm worried about when it comes to HRT, but if it's freely available to trans folks, that means it's also freely available to cis folks that are more likely to do it wrong and suffer severe consequences.
I am concerned for the population at large, and unfortunately, safety regulations have to account for the lowest common denominator unless you think that uneducated or gullible people deserve to suffer. Prescriptions are a way to make sure that people are getting the medications they need in the appropriate doses for the correct indications. There's enough trouble with people hurting themselves with the medications that are already OTC. I don't think more OTCs (HRT or otherwise) are a particularly good fix for the disaster that is American healthcare.
Data is not the plural of anecdote. As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, many countries have OTC HRT and do not have significantly higher morbidity or mortality rates associated with those materials. Your experiences, in the form you've shared them, are NOT citeable. So, we're still at "Citation Needed" stage.
I think that uneducated or gullible people deserve full bodily autonomy, even if that means bad results from their choices.
Certainly, educated and sophisticated people can also get bad results from their choices; I see no reason to deny them to anyone else.