Credits, original author is shave your eyebrows, from tumblr.

(shoutout to @TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone who often posts those shaveposts, i’m taking over that duty today :3)

  • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    43·
    20 hours ago

    (i would like to reassure the transfems who may not know that most modern estrogen, including almost certainly the one you’re taking or planning to take, is not distilled horse piss. it is created synthetically in a lab, and is bioidentical, i.e. it has the exact same effect on your body as natural estrogen that ovaries would make. yes, even diy is bioidentical and synthetic)

    • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      30·
      19 hours ago

      Yeh, this is correct. the first estrogens were made in the 1920s and back then they did make them from distilled horse piss - specifically from pregnant mares. A few miligrams got isolated from 4 tons (!) of sows in 1935.

      Estradiol (a form of estrogen and the main effective one, I think?) got partially synthesised by 1940 from cholesterol and then fully in 1948.

      For testosterone, in 1889 the first HRT extract from dog and guinea testes was self-administered by prof. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard. By 1927, prof. Fred C. Koch, who had access to a large amount of bovine testes, managed to get 20 mg from 18 kg of said testes. The Organon group in the Netherlands managed to isolate and synthesise it from cholesterol by 1935. Nowadays testosterone gets synthesised by microbially fermenting plant cholesterols from e.g. soybean oils.

      Modern gender-affirming healthcare and surgery as a thing has existed since the 1920s, but only by the 1950s do we have synthetic HRT. And a lot of it is much better nowadays than the earliest HRT. HRT and affirming surgeries have matured a lot, and that enables us to go forth and learn new things :3

      I am not sure who was the first person (of whom we know they were queer) to receive gender-affirming surgery or HRT. But a few good candidates are, with the year of their milestones:

      • Alan L. Hart (1917) - he was the first to undergo masculinising surgery.

      • Michael Dillon (1939) - he started masculinising back then.

      • Dora Richter (1922, 1931) - she was the first to undergo removal of testes and then vaginoplasty.

      • Christine Jorgensen (1953), she started feminising back then.

      • Lili Elbe (1931) - this is personal to me, but she was the first to get a uterus transplant. Sadly so far known also the only one. I want to be the second one!

      • I don’t know for my fellow enbies who was the first to get a differing HRT regimen or surgery, but please do tell!

      That said, I think Christine wasn’t the first. Personally I suspect Charlotte Charlaque, who was friends with Dora Richter and Toni Ebel, did undergo it, but that is judging on appearances. And we are experts at appearing as we want, even if we don’t have HRT; but HRT does help some of us a lot 🏳️‍🌈🌈✨

      And a lot of the work that was done, was thanks to the incredible passion and love of Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. He contributed enormously to the modern queer solidarity movement.

      Sidenote, but there’s an Estrogen Minecraft mod that allows you to make estrogen - and it does so through the horse piss method. There were plans to add T in there too, and you can double jump if you drink E (a nod to Celeste) + plus there are some Celeste blocks :3