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So the only countries near by are Sweden, Finland and Russia. One of those things is not like the others so we’re left with Finland and Sweden. If I don’t have the money for another vial (and it’s a fair assumption at the moment things are pretty tight) I definitely don’t have the possibility of flying down to Stockholm to fetch it.
As far as a social life goes, I don’t have one. And as far as I’m aware there isn’t such a thing as an LGBTQ+ centre (at least I’ve never heard of one) and the closest dedicated gay club is a couple of thousand km away. There are monthly events for trans people, but mostly at inconvenient times when you have young kids. Also an annoying fact of life in Norway is that the entire country’s social life is administered on Facebook. I would rather be alone forever than get a Facebook account.
This is the first vial I’ve ordered, so as long as it arrives at some point before summer it’s ok (infuriating but ok). I am not sure I’m going to get the effects I want from it, so I don’t want to go ordering a bunch from all the different providers and playing games with international shipping. The plan is that if it doesn’t make me feel better I won’t be ordering more anyway and if it does then I’ll pick up a larger quantity of raw estradiol enanthate and brew my own, because I can take back a lifetime supply in one trip. It’s just easier than trying to get the preprepared vials sent here. If I get good enough I might consider supplying Norway.
I don’t have any advice for you, but I just wanted to say I’m sorry for the situation you’re currently in - but I think it will improve.
In terms of homebrewing, I was wondering since you have expertise if you have resources you could point beginner homebrewers to, even just basics would be helpful. Esp. any kinds of videos demonstrating things like how to use a syringe filter, or how to sterilize a glove box, etc.
It would be nice if the DIY community had more put-together resources & community standards for homebrewing.
This hangs a lot on what may or may not be the most relevant factor for whether to take estrogen. You probably already have enough evidence that estrogen is a good idea, and while it’s still useful to have direct experiences and confirmation of this, it’s not like taking estrogen is a guaranteed immediate and obviously good thing for many of us - you may or may not see the changes you want in a timeline you want to see them, but I’m not sure it makes sense to discard taking estrogen on that basis.
There are girls I’ve talked to on Lemmy who started estrogen but because they didn’t have an immediately ground-shattering experience on it, they gave up taking it and went back to repressing. This was obviously not the best course of action from a clinical perspective and they still struggle with dysphoria and could have been on estrogen in the meantime and improving their life, but instead the misinterpreted their experience as confirmation they weren’t trans enough and went back to repressing. Even worse, the ester they took was enanthate, which can take over a month to really increase estrogen levels to the levels that valerate can achieve within days to weeks.
All this to say, I wanted to throw up a “warning” flag at the way you talk about trialing estrogen in such stark terms, and gently encourage you to consider taking a more relaxed and open approach to this - I especially struggled to feel normal until I had surgery that removed my testes, and that whole time I continued to suffer from what I assume was “biochemical dysphoria”. Sometimes it’s about making incremental changes in the right direction, and if we demand too much from our transition it can lead us to dark places.
I understand what you are saying, I understand that enanthate takes a while to achieve stable levels so my plan is to give it 2-3 months so I can see if its something that would help. My dysphoria is almost entirely biochemical so my thought is that my symptoms are either actually due to dysphoria in which case I should see some improvement in my mood after a few months or my symptoms are something entirely different in which case I would expect it to make me feel significantly worse after a few months. But I don’t want to go ordering multiple vials only to be stuck with them and noone to give them to, because as previously stated, I’m completely friendless at the moment.
As far as experience home-brewing I don’t have any yet, just a lot of general lab experience. I’ve skimmed the instructions on one of the DIY websites and it all seems pretty simple. If I end up actually going through with home-brewing I’ll make a step by step video and upload it somewhere. That information will become very important in the next few years. I certainly wouldn’t go selling vials unless I was extremely comfortable with the procedure and had third party testing and proper equipment (proper laminar flow fume cabinet, autoclave etc instead of oven extractor fan and instant pot).