I swear, every person in every transition timeline EVER looks so much happier than before. And it’s just so wholesome, omg 😭💜
Funnily enough, I’d also say most people look much younger 😆

  • DaPorkchop_ [they/she/it] ( DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml ) 
    23·
    1 month ago

    Ironically, I hardly have any pre-transition photos where I’m not smiling. When taking photos people always tell you to smile, so I always did, whether I was feeling it or not. I have more non-smiling photos from the past 8 months than the entire rest of my photo library combined because now I’ve started to just take random selfies sometimes and don’t always feel the need to force a fake smile on.

    Also YES nobody talks about the looking younger part, I don’t think my face looks all that much different but it 100% looks dramatically younger and it’s absolutely crazy. I’ve de-aged by multiple years, on multiple occasions in the past months I’ve been introduced to strangers alongside my brother (4 years younger than me) and they’ve assumed I’m the younger brother. Feels really weird, but I don’t dislike it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Nulliza ( Nulliza@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
      9·
      1 month ago

      I havent come out as trans at work yet but the looks i got the day i shaved my beard was wild. I instantly lost atleast 3 years and looked way more feminine with just that. I believe people are suspicious but I just pretend like nothing 😅

      • DaPorkchop_ [they/she/it] ( DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml ) 
        2·
        1 month ago

        I guess that’s good 😄

        It sounds good to me :D

        […] the wrong hormones in one’s body make them (temporarily) age way faster…

        Quite possible, but my analysis would be more like this:

        1. A lot of traits which we (in the West, anyway) associate with “youth” are the opposite of what testosterone causes, (e.g. smooth+soft+clear skin, full cheeks), and conversely a lot of things which testosterone emphasizes are associated with aging into adulthood (e.g. visible facial hair, more prominent brow- or jawline, etc.). Since most of the facial changes caused by estrogen are the opposite of that, they’re more strongly connected to the concept of “youth”, and therefore the changes brought about by feminizing HRT (in particular: after having gone through male puberty) causes people to “regress” along the spectrum and be perceived as younger.
          There’s probably something to be said about how this ties in to become yet another tool used by the patriarchy to infantilize women; I’m not getting into that now :P
        2. Testosterone accelerates your metabolism, which literally causes you to age faster, whether it’s the “right” hormone or not.

        My very limited sample size of only one transmasc I’ve known since before he started HRT tells me that this is at least somewhat true, because he definitely seemed to get quite a bit older in not that long of a time frame.

        I won’t stand for this 😭

        I appreciate the sentiment, but when I’m going around dressed like this I can’t exactly blame people for assuming I’m a dude (and normally don’t mind all that much, gender is weird like that sometimes). At this point, unless I’m clearly dressed fem I look sorta androgynous at best, and my hair is clearly doing most of the heavy lifting (pretty obvious because every morning, until I’ve gone through my routine of adding a metric fuckton of curling cream to force it to stay down, it tends to levitate and my face looks a lot less fem than it otherwise does).

        That said I am absolutely not denying that there’ve been changes, compared to photos from like two years ago (and even this past January or Feburary) I look WAY more fem now :)