this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Transfem
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Damn, jealous. Informed consent only VERY recently became/is going to become a thing here.
I still had to go through 3.5 years of gatekeeping... between 2020 (realisation), 2022 (deciding to actually go for it) and 2025.
I listened to your voice and for me it just passes. I can see why you feel like it is masculine - due to a sort of lower timbre, but to me it sounds 'crispier', femme.
Thank you so much for the tips on voice, I will use them tonight :3
that said, I recently went to a new endo, and at first he told me he wasn't going to prescribe me estrogen until I have established care with a therapist because "you doubled your risk of suicide by choosing to transition" (which ... is factually false, besides being problematic for other reasons)
this was someone explicitly listed as an informed consent provider, but he pretended like he wouldn't give me estrogen ... despite the fact that I fully pass as a woman and I'm post-op ... my body doesn't produce sex hormones, I rely on this for my literal physical health - my bones and joints will deteriorate without sex hormones.
Anyway, awful man - there are a lot of awful providers who prey on their vulnerable trans patients. Now I have to travel a few hours to a clinic in the hopes it might be more affirming. I'm in a blue state now and while doctors here are quicker to identify as an ally, they seem even more unwilling to help you with trans healthcare. There's no real reason my PCP who provides women's health services to cis women couldn't provide them for me, but she turned me down anyway - I think they don't realize that trans women really are biological women and she doesn't need some kind of special education to provide me with the same care she provides cis women :-/
So yeah, the transphobia is just articulated differently here.
Re voice, thanks for the feedback - my pitch tends to stay pretty low (that's one of the things I'm trying to work on - habituating a slightly higher pitch) and I think gives that impression of a lower timber (and also makes it too easy to slip into a heavier weight, too). I think this is why my voice sometimes is interpreted as older or more "mature". I don't necessarily mind sounding older - but I just don't hear it that way, it just sounds like a gay man to me.
If you ever want feedback on your voice, feel free to send me voice clips (my DMs on Lemmy are open, or if you're on Matrix, I'm there too if you want)!
I def can send some voice to you, will send them in DM!
I guess I can see why he thinks he's informed consent if the reason he wants patients to have therapy isn't to prove they are trans but instead to ensure they are getting help with all of the stresses on being trans in a transphobic society? And just using E as the carrot to motivate people to get care they probably should get regardless.
Regardless, glad where I went was truly a IC clinic and didn't do any sort of gatekeeping. Still haven't seen therapist. I don't think such gatekeeping would have gotten me to see one either.
Wild that you had that happen despite the obvious need of it. Wonder if he'd have given you T without therapy....
it's gatekeeping whether he rationalizes it as therapy to prove authenticity vs therapy to reduce risk - the point is that it's not informed consent, and it doesn't matter because I had already been through thorough gatekeeping already - I had over a year of therapy just for gender dysphoria, I had two psychiatric evaluations to get access to gender-affirming surgery (an insurance requirement) ... it would obviously be horrible to withhold necessary medical care to try to motivate a patient to get unnecessary but helpful care. We wouldn't deny a diabetic insulin because we think they would benefit from therapy, and we might think a doctor who does that should have their license revoked.
The irony is that I took myself to a therapist before I socially transitioned, basically as soon as my egg cracked I scheduled a therapy appointment with a gender-informed therapist.
I didn't end up getting a therapist, at the end of the session he revealed that I had "earned" my estrogen prescription ... He was also really creepy and spent a lot of time touching his stethoscope to my breasts, but at an angle where it wouldn't help him actually listen to anything - really bizarre (no doctor has ever done this or "used" a stethoscope that way), and after he seemed to finish the exam, he then he went back to my breasts again.
There was a lot that happened in that session. I wouldn't be surprised if he sexually preyed on his patients, and it seemed like some of his behavior was similar to sexual grooming I have witnessed in the past (like guilting me into sitting closer to him, and telling me he was treating me nice because I was being nice to him, etc.).
Yeah. Was thinking medical malpractice already describes people who try to deny people access to HRT because reading:
WTF? I don't think I've had a doctor touch my breasts with a stethoscope (granted, I've only had one visit since having them where that would have been a concern). I wonder how often doctors take advantage of their positions to be able to do things like this...
He's been doing this since the 1990s, imagine being one of his first patients, how few alternatives there were then ... he also mentioned he doesn't let his patients administer their own HRT, he requires they come into the office and pull down their pants for him to inject the shots into their butt ... I'm just thinking he's already so creepy and there are so many red flags - how likely is it that he isn't exploiting that? I left that office literally shaking, and I was emotionally wrecked for days after that. It's like I had stepped several decades into the past.
And I've always had doctors place their stethoscope on my chest, and it wasn't the location that was weird per se, he placed the stethoscope between the breasts like normal, but obviously it still touches them and what was weird was the way he did it multiple times and without seeming to actually use the stethoscope in a way that would imply he was using it to listen - i.e. it was cocked at an angle where it wasn't flush against my clothes or skin, just open to the air.
Before he started the exam, he announced that there is a physical exam but he won't require me to remove clothes - I've never had a doctor say it that way, and it felt like another "groomer" moment where I felt like he was trying to make me more comfortable so he could slowly introduce more and more inappropriate behavior without protest.