So just published her piece on asking trans people about changes to sex drive and sexual preferences on HRT/GAHT
I'll admit that I've been nerd-sniped, I have lots of thoughts on this: methodology, the results, and the discussion
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You can read the OG thread and her newsletter discussion about here.
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How do sexual interests in various things shift after taking HRT? I asked a bunch of trans people their experiences, and here's the average results.
(sample size was relatively low, 50 on testosterone and 222 on estrogen)
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I think it's interesting that she did the survey considering how little trans people AND hormones get looked at in general. I've written about this before (recently) and I discussed this with her then, too.
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Got deep into a research hole today after discussing med changes with my doc and let me tell you the state of research on GRT/GAHT/hormones and impact on a wide range of factors for trans people is...
...poor
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I do want to point out that while I appreciate any data for consideration, everyone should be VERY cautious about drawing generalizable conclusions from this for a number of reasons I'm going to discuss.
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This isn't me picking on Aella--this is pointing out that this type of data suffers from the same issues of noise as many studies of the same type and some unique ones in this particular case. So let me start with that, and then go onto discussion.
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This is similar to most other studies I've looked at about trans people and hormones in that her sample size is still pretty small (300 people of varied demographics, ~240 on Estrogen) and is also a self-reported anonymous internet survey.
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Like most surveys targeting hormones and trans people, recency is a factor: "I filtered down to people who had been using regularly, for over 3 months." But shifts here are likely to be tangled with novelty, which she does admit--ideally you'd look at years+ usage (good luck).
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If you think about this from the lens of transition, many places require 1-2 years on GAHT to even be a candidate for gender-affirming surgery and it's partially because there's a LOT of environmental and social shifting happening for people during that time period.
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If people responding are earlier in their transition (let's arbitrarily say ~3 years in) there's a bunch of social, personal, and emotional factors that can impact these responses which might be unrelated to GAHT.
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And just to put a bow on all of this you can't really say anything about any of this without tripping on gender as psych/social construct vs gender as a biologically-determined thing and getting into discussions of how much behavioral responses are bio vs socially-influenced
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Replying to
my sample might be too underpowered to detect it, but i'd expect to see correlations here between length of time on hrt and degree of change reported in various sexual interest.