Testosterone Therapy for Transgender Patients May Be Safer Than Thought

US News ^ | 11/28/23 | Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporter

[DallasBiff]

TUESDAY, Nov. 28, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Transgender people transitioning to male (transmasculine) identity typically take testosterone therapy as part of the process.

There have been worries that the treatment might spur erythrocytosis, an abnormally high concentration of red blood cells in blood that could prove dangerous

But new research should help allay those fears: The largest study on the subject to date finds no significant risk.

“Providers should feel more comfortable prescribing testosterone when it is indicated. Patients and the families of patients should feel reassured regarding at least this one source of anxiety about treatment," said study senior author Dr. Joshua Safer. He's executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City.

[Paal Gulli]

"... There have been worries that the treatment might spur erythrocytosis, an abnormally high concentration of red blood cells in blood that could prove dangerous...."

Erythrocytosis (better known as polycythemia) is dangerous primarily when it's pathological because pathological polycythemia usually is accompanied by a high platelet count, and it's the high platelet count that's dangerous because of the risk of thrombosis.

Except when you have too many red blood cells because of medications like EPO or anabolic steroids, there's no accompanying rise in platelets and hence little health risk.

There have been athletes with abnormally high red blood cell counts for genetic reasons who suffered no ill effect from it. Finn Eero Mäntyranta came from a family in which congenital polycythemia was common. His natural hematocrit was over 60, 20% higher that the World Anti-Doping Agency allows without laboratory proof that it isn't drug-aided. Mäntyranta won three Olympic gold medals and two world championships in cross-country skiing, and lived to be 76.

And there have been patients hospitalized with heart attacks who were accidentally administered more than 9x the recommended dose of EPO ... and suffered NO ill effects, despite their already compromised health.

In short, there seems to be precious little actual evidence that anyone has ever been injured by too many red blood cells, much less killed. Michele Ferrari, Lance Pharmstrong's dope doctor, was pilloried for claiming that EPO (which stimulates red blood cell production) is no more dangerous than orange juice. Except he seems to have been right:

Dr. Ferrari Was Right, a chapter from Spitting in the Soup

...The EPO-kills story “was useful for the anti-doping campaign, ... So it didn’t matter if the evidence was good enough or not because it was conducive” to the anti-doping missionaries’ goal of imposing a new purity on sports....
...López feels that anti-doping campaigners are acting in good faith, rather than willful hypocrisy. “I don’t think that they lied on purpose, ... But what they did was create a truth out of circumstantial and scattered evidence. And they believed in their own creation.” ...

https://www.roadbikereview.com/threads/dr-ferrari-was-right-a-chapter-from-spitting-in-the-soup.380936/

[TNoldman]

Gender is determined by what you have between your legs - not by what you have between your ears!

[BipolarBob]

I believe doctors are sometimes afflicted with tunnel vision.

That's been my observation as well. And you can't reason with them. They don't want facts from experts. They are stuck following whatever guidelines the AMA gives regardless of validity. I can give example after example. There has been a proposal for AI to take over some duties of a GP. I was against this when i first heard about it but after some incidents, I've changed my mind.

[daniel1212]

From a piecemeal collection of Negative effects of homosexual relations

And "in 2019, among transgender adults and adolescents, the largest percentage (93%) of diagnoses of HIV infections was for transgender MTF. And  in 2019, diagnoses of HIV infection among adolescent and young adult males (85%) and females (12%) accounted for approximately 97% of HIV diagnoses  (Table 8b") (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html; https://web.archive.org/web/20210707083722/https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/hiv-surveillance/vol-32/content/special-focus-profiles.html)

In a Danish study of  "6,657,456 Danish-born individuals who were at least 15 years old and lived in Denmark from January 1980 through December 2021," in  which  "3,759 (52.5% assigned male at birth) were identified as transgender at a median age of 22," "there were 92 suicide attempts, 12 suicides, and 245 suicide-unrelated deaths among this group."  "Among over 6.6 million individuals, standardized suicide attempt rates per 100,000 person-years were 498 for those who were transgender compared with 71 per 100,000 person-years for those who were not transgender."

"Transgender individuals also had higher rates of mortality not related to suicide (aIRR 1.9, 95% CI 1.6-2.2) and higher rates of all-cause mortality (aIRR 2.0, 95% CI 1.7-2.4) compared with non-transgender individuals." (https://www.medpagetoday.com/)

"Transgender women [worldwide] are 49 times more likely to have HIV than other adults of reproductive age." (https://www.who.int/hiv/topics/transgender/en/)

Transgender women have a higher risk of venous thromboembolism, stroke and meningioma compared to cisgender men and cisgender women. Compared to cisgender men, transgender women have a higher risk of breast cancer and transgender women > 50 years old have a higher risk of fractures.

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32757514/)

LGBTQ and transgender persons  medically serious attempts at suicide are 4 times more likely among LGBTQ youth than other young people. (https://save.org/about-suicide/suicide-facts/)  

LGBQ young people are more than twice as likely to feel suicidal, and over four times as  likely to attempt suicide, compared to heterosexual youth (Kann 2016)

In a 2016-2017 survey from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, 28 percent of LGBTQ youth — including 40 percent of  transgender youth — said they felt depressed most or all of the time during the previous 30 days, compared to only 12 percent of non-LGBTQ youth (HRC Foundation 2017: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LGBTQ_MentalHealth_OnePager.pdf)

A large study also found that  of 10,270 transgender patients identified, approximately 58% of transgender patients had at least one DSM-5 diagnosis compared with 13.6% of cisgender patients, indicating  transgenders had  about 4.5 times higher rate of psychiatric illness than straight persons. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830528/)

 

Psychiatric disorders were more prevalent among homosexually active people compared with heterosexually active people. Homosexual men had a higher 12-month prevalence of mood disorders and anxiety disorders than heterosexual men. Homosexual women had a higher 12-month prevalence of substance use disorders than heterosexual women. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/481699)

The suicide attempt rate among transgender persons ranges from 32% to 50% across  surveyed countries. Fifty percent of transgender persons in Australia have attempted suicide at least once in their lives.[12] In England, 48% of the transgender young people had attempted suicide at least once in their lives.[13] The prevalence of suicide remains high among transgender persons irrespective of disclosing their transgender status to others and undergoing sex reassignment surgery.[8]  (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178031)

 "41% of trans adults said they had attempted suicide, in one study. The same study found that 61% of trans people who were victims of physical assault had attempted suicide." (https://save.org/about-suicide/suicide-facts/) 

 

(Note that compassion toward such is to be shown,  while the high  suicide rate among LGBTQ persons is blamed on societal rejection, yet  in the West it is actually those who oppose homosexual relations that face the most widespread persecution, and minorities such as evangelical Christians face great persecution worldwide without being suicidal.) 

In 2017 almost 35% of high school students who identified as transgender reported attempting suicide in the last 12 months (versus 9.% of straights), and almost 44% considered attempting it.  Transgender students were much more likely to have ever had engaged in sexual relations than were cisgender (straight) females (43.1% versus 33.2%), and with more persons,   while almost 15% reported their first act was before age 13 years vs. 1.5% for straights. 

Approximately 41% of transgender people attempt suicide at least once in their lives compared to the rate of 5% in the general population. [122] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/article/risk-factors-for-suicide-in-the-transgender-community/3AE67FF7615DDB5452A9672F9DF11714 March 2020 

Almost 23% of transgender  students reported they had experienced sexual dating violence, with approx. 26% reporting it has being physical.  In addition, 70% reported  lifetime alcohol, use,  Ecstasy 31.6% cocaine 27.2%, heroin  26.1%, methamphetamines  24.9%, and prescription opioid misuse 35.9%    respectively.  https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6803a3.htm?s_cid=mm6803a3_w&_ga=2.187304552.190159804.1675607478-738421497.1675607478

God made man and women distinctively different yet uniquely compatible and complementary, and only joined them together in marriage - as the Lord Jesus Himself specified (Mt. 19:4–6) - and Scripture only condemns homosexual relations wherever they are manifestly dealt with.

And homosexual relations have been tragically primarily responsible for approx. 80% of new HIV cases among men and over 700,000 American deaths, though such is not even the decisive reason why homosexual relations are wrong.

Yet there is still room at the cross for all who will come to God in repentance and faith, and trust in the Divine Son of God sent by the Father, the risen Lord Jesus, to save them on His account, by His sinless shed blood, and thus be baptized and live for Him. Acts 10:36-47

[daniel1212]

Which is a composite image I am sure, unless the head was shrunk.

[ransomnote]

Excellent post.

From the videos I’ve watched, several have admitted that they are now asexual, have no libido, and are basically numb in the groin, genital region, saying specifically, ‘I can’t feel anything at all.”

The Male to Female trans hoped to escape being rejected for being a gay male by becoming a female. That’s the propaganda many are told - that they would be genuinely female and have the acceptance and status of a ‘real woman’ and they believed it.

But these men were shocked by all the pain, complications etc. They report that they still feel like men, and never become a woman. Same with female to male - they report feeling isolated because to them, it seemed that no emotional support was shared among men as it was among women.

There are trans icons who insist they have fantastic sex lives but the detrans population doesn’t believe them. The trans men have a ‘wound’ in place of female genitals and they have to work to keep the wound from healing closed - many report that it closed within a few months of $70,000 surgery despite their painful, diligent efforts to do everything to maintain it. Some are told they have to perform this painful maintenance procedure even if the wound closes, and do so for the rest of their lives.

It’s like the mentally ill are being preyed upon by sadistic sociopaths who build up their expectations artifically and then simply stop taking their phone calls when the pain/disappointment set in.

If the uterus can become necrotic and die within 5 years of taking Testosterone, it’s unlikely IMHO that the Trans women remain capable of bearing children.

I think the suicide rate is exacerbated by 1)constant pain and medical complications 2) the need for corrective surgery they can’t afford so using the bathroom becomes a challenge 3) the loss of all interest in sex 4) no sensation in portions of the body 5)being ‘stuck’ with irreversible, physically damaging, socially ostracizing partial gender - stuck between both genders and accepted as neither 6)loss of child bearing capacity for both men and women.

One trans enumerated these and concluded he didn’t get any enjoyment out of life and was unsure of the medical challenges ahead. He can’t take synthetic testosterone (allergic) and dare not resume estrogen.

Most trans report being given hormones after one doctors visit, that their doctors knew they had unaddressed trauma/mental illness, that their doctors all made them feel special and if the drugs/surgery were the answer for all their problems, the doctors acted as if they were gratified to be the one to bring the patient peace/happiness, that the patient was ‘special’etc., and when the complications/medicalproblems set in, their doctor ‘friend’won’t talk to them and if they somehow get them on the phone, the doctor blames them for complications and not maintaining properly.

Oh, and several admit their doctors engaged in sexually inappropriate attention to them.....!

[lepton]

Even this still affects in a negative way, but only 1% badly.

[Svartalfiar]

Arnold Schwartzenegger took massive amounts of testosterone to define his physique and he's still living and smoking cigars at 76.

And Arnie is a man, his body expects to have high levels of testosterone. I bet if he took estrogen instead, his physique would be very differently defined, and who knows if he'd still be around today. The issue isn't people that are lacking, it's people that are already 'normal' but take a bunch to try to become something they're not.

Your body has trace amounts of cyanide, toxins, dangerous chemicals/elements in it, but that doesn't mean getting a lot more of them are good for you!

[BipolarBob]

Your body has trace amounts of cyanide, toxins, dangerous chemicals/elements in it, but that doesn't mean getting a lot more of them are good for you!

Well now you tell me.