u/Hirouli23

Everyone refers to me by solely my legal name and she/her pronouns irl and it's kinda lame, though I'm not willing to do much about it because that'd be embarrassing and would warrant coming out to my social circle... Though there's this name (Joel + this weird last name) that I kept hearing in my head over and over after 2 times I've greened out on cannabis recently. It also sounds close to my legal name so it isn't a crazy change. It's like my subconscious brain's tryna tell me something.

Maybe I'd get to that when I masculinize enough so it'll come smoother to people. I already have them calling me Joel as a "joke."

I'd hear it as Joe-él, Hispanic pronunciation whilst still preserving the J as in Joshua, though the Spanish J (H) seems good too. Willing to try it out he/they, no particular order. She/her is tolerated too. Thank you.

Hello. I feel it was sabotaging myself to sort of titrate 10-15mg from typical dosages (every few weeks or so) to find what'll "work better" for me without any access to blood tests whatsoever. I've been on T Cypionate 250mg/ml for the past 3 months, almost 4 months now.

Just yesterday, as it was my shot day and is the start of my 17th dose, I decided to move up to 75mg after 6 weeks of 65mg. Thing is I feel I could be dosing too high and I'll ride out the dose for now to see if it really was a bad idea.

Before those past 6 weeks of 65mg, I was on 50mg for 10 weeks. Perhaps I'm rushing too much in this...

Furthermore, my menstrual cycle has already stopped since a month on shots with the 50mg/week dose. So chances are I shouldn't even have increased my dosage much if that "low dose" was adequate enough to stop such a process.

And I don't even recall much of a difference within my body symptoms at all between 50mg/week and 65mg/week. In general I'm not very aware of any changes. The reason why I decided to even change my dosage is I don't feel a huge increase in sweat, odor, appetite, libido, mood, energy as people reported online, which I still didn't get a difference in even after. I also read of people who think the former is inadequate for masculinizing and I was afraid of not utilizing my testosterone as well as others would for whatever reason. (I was also feeling impatient 🤦‍♂️)

To be honest, I'm not a binary man and don't care for "maximizing" masculinization. I do want to maintain and gain some sort of masculinity or androgyny without feminizing further from natal second puberty, yes. But that isn't the same as full on going to male levels and looking to intentionally masculinize as much as possible.

I feel as though I should go back to 50mg/week (titrating down to it) considering my slightly mixed sex goal and realizing that I never felt and will never feel hella roided and hungry and crazy only from testosterone, but I'm also wondering if I should just commit to the 75mg for now to see if I report any actual big physiological changes. Overall I feel like I wasted some of my testosterone in the vial simply out of shame and confusion for what's "enough" for me to "react."

How would you go about this between choosing 50mg or 75mg of a weekly dose if you don't see much of a difference in reactions either way?

I'm not out in any capacity to my parents, only out to my sister. Even then I never discussed name and pronoun change because I'm too embarrassed to humor such ideas when I'm still so early into HRT and general physical transition.

Two months ago I've wondered about a new name out of annoyance of realizing my extremely feminine legal name would fit me less and feel more alienating as I further masculinize. Not that I'm particularly attached to it, but I tried looking for shorter/similar variants for it but none of them would stick. Guess I'm fine with dropping the legal name later at that point.

There were a few moments I liked it when I was called Edi by a cousin, however I realized the full legal Hispanic variants of those (Edgar/Eduardo) sounds terrible. But I'm still willing to try out Edi/Wardo as just nicknames.

In the past week I thought of Mateo as my main name; it's a name I once gave a character of mine I drew. I've been feeling a bit of a fuzz and a belonging to it at the thought of using it. I really wanna try all this stuff out, even for just a post online.