[bryony]

I had noticed nothing on PM, actually my dysphoria got worse since I wanted to transition and I wanted more changes, faster.

That's surprising. I wonder if you took enough? PM is supposed to be bioidentical with Estriol. Of course, on HRT you would have been on strong anti-androgens also, I presume.

I think it really comes down to psychology and expectations, I don't think it's exclusively physical. Everyone is different and what you really want comes into play.

Definitely

Personally HRT has no difference for me other than possibly (could be just wishful thinking) a calming effect.

I don't think it is wishful thinking. If you look at Dr Vitale's writings, that is predicted. That's what I get, but it's more important to me because I was badly screwed up.

It's a myth that all people with GID have bad mental health and that some kind of hormone is a magic bullet.

I think there is a big political correctness debate about this. The big activist push is to say that GID is not mental illness, but I disagree. My take is that if I were not mentally ill, I would be happy in the body I was born with. To be a married male heterosexual with 2 kids who wished with all his heart that he looked like Kate Upton is to have bad mental health, in my opinion.

For one thing, it sets the stage for other symptoms that clearly are mental ill health... in my case: long term low-level depression (dysthymia); waking in the night with panic attacks; a constant preoccupation with my oncoming death; constantly catastrophising about the safety of my children now that they are grown, e.g. car crashes, mugging, rapes.

If you can agree (I hope) that the forgoing is symptomatic of mental illness, and PM gets rid of it, it's not a giant leap to say that my GID caused the mental illness, for which PM was a magic bullet.

I agree that not all GID need be considered mental illness, because society has redefined the options for the "classic" trans person; the one who, as a child, "knows" that they were born in the "wrong" gender, is attracted to people of the same birth sex, whose friends are of the opposite birth sex. Particularly if they start early, these people get the treatment they need and they can then live in their defined gender.

The situation is very different for people like me and doodlebug who had GID less severely and went a long way down the road of relationships and development according to their birth sex, only to discover in medium-late middle age that life becomes intolerable. That's the point where you can debate whether GID is a trigger to mental illness or is the mental illness - though in the end it comes down to the same thing for the sufferer, which is to take sufficient hormone to sort oneself out.

I do agree that hormone is not necessarily a "magic bullet". If the GID has some other cause than insufficient foetal androgen exposure, then it wont work. I only know that it works for my kind of GID, and several others here.

B.