Thank you for sharing this! I don’t see this type of discussion often and it’s important information.

I have a similar background, I was measuring at ~40nmol/L (~1150ng/dL), and it was probably higher than that when I was younger. I knew from early childhood that I wasn’t cis, but by my mid-teens I was struggling with a lot of internal dissonance between my internal ethos and identity and how my hormonal state affected by emotions and cognition. There were also physiological issues from excessive T that I needed medical intervention to address. I struggled through that for years, but when I finally started HRT I very quickly found an enormous relief and much calmer and happier state of being.

Our cases are good examples of how more of the wrong hormonal profile doesn’t make you cis. It might just make someone’s problems worse and create new problems along the way.

Totally. Gender can be pretty neat when you’re not being oppressed by it and have the freedom to pursue your own identity

I grew up in NC and there are a lot of things to like about that region. But this is one of the big reasons I’d never live there again as an adult. The disenfranchisement is unacceptable, and sadly almost all my my highschool cohort has left the state for better conditions elsewhere, as well. Sometimes I lament not staying to contribute to pushing back against this stuff, but ultimately I have to prioritize my family’s well being, so we now live in a much less cynical state.

I agree that socialization is a big part of this tendency, as other commenters are saying. However, having experienced living with a testosterone dominant body and an estrogen dominant body, I’ve found that it was much harder for me to process other people’s emotions on T. While I would care about people and what they were expressing, I often would feel overloaded by strong emotions. On E I don’t notice that as much, and have a lot more patience and capacity to emotionally engage with others.

I’m sure this stuff varies a lot from person to person, and there isn’t one single factor that determines how men and women would typically behave. But in my own life there’s a pretty big hormonal component to this