Your mileage may vary, but in my personal experience, estrogen gave me better mental clarity, more energy, and lifted depression and anxiety to an extent I didn’t realize I had been suffering with my whole life (or more accurately since the start of puberty); that was happening within the first few months with depression lifting the fastest and anxiety lifting much later … so based on my experience and the research that has confirmed the immense clinical benefits of medical transition, I highly recommended anyone who thinks they might be a trans woman to try injecting estrogen and seeing if it helps them as much as it helped me.

Transitioning is rough and stressful, and hormone fluctuations and figuring out the right dose is part of that stress, but overall transitioning made me a healthier, more balanced, and more productive person … I’m not sure those changes will happen within two weeks, especially not with oral estrogen.

I don’t know that your experiences with oral estrogen will be, as I mentioned they don’t result in consistently elevated or stable estrogen blood levels, and I have never personally taken oral estrogen to compare.

Girls I know IRL who take oral estrogen have a variety of experiences, but anecdotally most of them have slower feminization and worse mood than girls I know who inject or use patches. I know one girl who does sublingual and had decent feminization. All of this is anecdotal and not generalizable, but what we know about oral estrogen was enough for me to avoid it, though I obviously would take it if there were no alternative. Taking 3 - 5 doses evenly spread out through the day might help achieve somewhat more consistent levels, but this is logistically challenging and needless when there are other options.

It should be mentioned I overcame severe needle phobia to inject estrogen, that’s how significantly better that route of administration is. Also, injecting with very small and short needles (think insulin needles) into fat was the only way it was feasible for me, I am not sure I would have been able to inject IM with a longer or thicker needle.

To be honest, something about trying to take HRT for just a day, or just two weeks feels off to me - it takes time for the body and brain to adjust from testosterone dominance to estrogen dominance. You can’t really squeeze that into tight timelines. Even after 3 months major changes are happening and I saw significant mood improvements at 4 - 6 months that weren’t present before then (namely a dramatic reduction in intrusive generalized anxiety).

It’s fine to try HRT on a trial basis, but I would just take it for 2 - 3 months and see how you feel. If it’s working well for you, just continue; otherwise, that’s when you would want to stop to avoid permanent breast growth that won’t go away.

Trying to glean something out of a single day of HRT, or squeezing it into a two week period (which plausibly might give you some sense of whether it’s right for you) just feels a bit misguided … It takes a while to figure out a dose that works; to be honest I never figured the perfect dose, my biochemical dysphoria didn’t go away until I was post-op a whole year later.

My advice is to start HRT and take it as long as you can up to the point of permanent changes, then make a judgement call on whether to continue or revert back. Usually it’s clear for most people whether they want to continue early on, within a week or two.

This is made more complicated by the fact that spironolactone can cause depression and can be a bad time, so opting for anti-androgens and oral estrogen makes it less likely you will feel great. Others have a great time on oral estrogen and spiro (thinking of Mia Violet in particular), though that is unusual. Still, maybe you will get the information you need anyway. (Though, being real - cis men wouldn’t usually consider taking estrogen voluntarily, which is probably part of why regret rates are so low - cis people just don’t tend to think transitioning seems like a good idea. Estrogen only made clear that I liked being on estrogen, it didn’t cure my denial or imposter syndrome.)