One recurring theme I've heard from people going from majority testosterone to majority estrogen is a feeling like a continuous 'buzzing' sensation in their head had finally stopped; this is something I personally experience, and there's a certain degree of relaxed serenity that comes with it for me. (This said, experiences vary a lot, and many who have had both primary hormones prefer the feeling of testosterone.)
I personally think that it's a beautiful opportunity to get to experience life through both sets of hormones; it's offered a lot of interesting perspective on my personal notions of 'self', and allowed me to develop empathy for different experiences others experience in their bodies.
This is super interesting! Do you know what they prefer about testosterone?
> One recurring theme I've heard from people going from majority testosterone to majority estrogen is a feeling like a continuous 'buzzing' sensation in their head had finally stopped
This is also fascinating. As a cis man is there a buzzing constantly that I don’t even notice, that none of the women in my life have?
I get a somewhat similar sensation with enough caffeine now, but the experience of testosterone in my experience is a lot more of a head-rush than caffeine is for present me.
It's kind of neat, because at the end of HRT cycles as the levels shift, it lets me experience varying proportions of one versus the other--it honestly surprised me a lot to experience for the first time how much hormones play into what it's like to be in my head day-to-day.
Ooh, and re: the last question, it's possible that that's something that not everyone experiences--I will say though that that's probably the best way I have to describe what I felt, even though I wouldn't say I actively noticed a buzzing sensation before I started HRT (when my doses are late though, it's definitely something I pick up on).
Chocolate (dark vs milk) and coffee drinks (heavy on milk and sugar versus light on them, or black) follow similar patterns in perception (and actual observed preferences, IME)
Of course, how much of that is nature versus socialization is another matter… but also, the kind of risk-taking and one-upsmanship behavior that might drive men to be more willing to acquire tastes for things that aren’t initially appealing and to so-expand their palates may itself be hormonal, so even one plausible “nurture” cause for this might actually be “nature” one step removed.
But either way, and even if data doesn’t bear any of that out (pretty sure it would, though), the perception that all that’s generally true is certainly common.
TL;DR: Group stereotypes, at least on their face, tend to be quite accurate. It's the implications people draw from or apply to them that can be problematic.
It's somewhat ingrained in (traditional) Japanese culture that women prefer sweet foods and men prefer spicy foods. Young boys enjoying sweets is seen as "funny" since they don't "know" it's a feminine thing yet (not necessarily in a "you can't do that" way, but more in a "cute that he hasn't picked up on it yet" way).
Men have better night vision, are more aware of motion, and are better at tracking location and judging distances.
If I'm not mistaken, red/green color blindness is more common in men because it's caused my a mutation on the X chromosome (which men tend to have fewer of). I would guess a similar thing about tetrachromacy.
So those are probably unrelated to color-perception changes due to exogenous estrogen.
Edit: I’m aware there’s evidence for differences in color discrimination and taste preferences between the sexes. But seeing the differences described from a first person perspective of someone used to being a male is fascinating. It’s a common cliche that women laugh much more than men, for example — and here’s someone saying that being on estrogen made funny things seem much funnier. I wonder what the experience is like for FtM who take testosterone?