I'm at the tail end of ten weeks drinking the transwoman cocktail - estradiol martini and testosterone blocker chaser. I have noticed changes in the way I think and feel, and they are different than what I expected. As an adult, I expected minimal physical changes and even fewer emotional and psychological changes. I know myself pretty well at this point in my life, and my interests and attitudes have been stable for a long time. I think I expected I deepening of some feelings, but not really any big changes. How I feel now was unpredicted, but it has been welcome.
The biggest change physically is how I sit in my body. For most of my life I have lived in my head, only inhabiting my body in controlled ways, such as lifting weights. My body was something unenjoyable, and I resented it. Starting about three weeks ago, I felt space starting to open up inside my body. It felt like I was becoming hollow, and that I could drop into my body and actually fill it out and occupy it. Being in my head was my normal life, and it's only retrospectively that I can see how scrunched up I was, and how little space I had to operate in myself. That has been liberating.
My interests have also changed, which strikes me as very odd. I liked literature, but not writing. When I did write, I liked working on the grammar, but not the style. Musically I was attracted to structure melodies and disliked heavy emotion and riffing. These tastes have been stable for decades, but now I find myself relishing the sound and style of words. Words spoken or written have become a source of pleasure and interest in very different way than before. And musically I am discovering the blues and rock and roll in a way that I never could have appreciated before.
My relationships, both to myself and others, has become focused on the particular. I liked philosophy, and I wanted to understand the structures and ideas underlying human experience. I was attracted to the general and the trend. I still like philosophy, but I am now interested in the particular and the concrete. The everyday world of our lives, its texture and the relationships embedded within this texture, are becoming more important to me than general ideas and principles. I guess I was focused on the trunks and big branches of life, but now I like looking at the leaves.
I wish I could say there have been more physical changes, but these have been minimal. Ten weeks, however, is not that much time for hormones to change epithelial, fat, and muscle structure. Surprisingly, to me at least, it's enough time to have a dramatic affect on neural structures underlying interest and personality.