Study Confirms the Obvious: All Trans People More Likely to Get Cardiovascular Problems from Hormones

Happy Birthday, Jazz Jennings.

We already knew, but it's nice to see a study confirm that they don't magically switch to the opposite sex's risk profile without consequence. I’ve been shouting about the risks of fantasy-affirming “healthcare” for years now, ever since I sent viral for saying that men and women have different heart attack symptoms for a reason and refused to back down when the horde of the Gen Z flies on the cursed clock app began to bleat “terf” hundreds of times. As a trans identifying person in my early 20s, I was told the utter falsehood that the only difference between men and women was that men had testosterone and women did not. Therefore, adding testosterone to a female might increase her risk, but it would only make her equivalent to a man, and vice versa.

The reality is that the heart is a structure that has to accommodate various pressures and viscosities. It is a structure made of a connective tissue matrix which is responsive to hormones but also has developmental windows it passes through, and once it has grown, it is not infinitely malleable. This means that the walls of the heart, the valves, and the openings for arteries and veins are the size, shape, thickness, and flexibility they are due to historical hormonal experiences, starting early in development, in utero. Hormones added in adolescence or adulthood are the equivalent of applying a flame to crème brûlée. You are not going to perfuse the adult structure in the same way as you can perfuse a microscopic embryonic heart, and this means that different layers have differential exposures. So when you change the hormones, this will never be equivalent to having had the hormonal exposures early in development. Nothing in life is free.

In addition to hormones, there are differences in genetics between men and women which are entirely hormone-independent. There are genes on the Y chromosome that govern bodily proportions and overall growth independent of sex hormones and in tandem with sex hormones if they are present and if the male is sensitive to such hormones. This does not just affect the arms and legs, but affects the overall size and proportions of different areas of the internal organs. So when you apply male hormones to a smaller female heart, with female relative proportions, you are taking an organ that’s a complex web of connective tissue and muscle, which has already reached a significant fraction or full adult size, and you are changing the size and shape of it differentially while also asking it to push a fluid internally which is thicker than the blood of a female not taking anabolic steroids. You are increasing the size of the heart muscle in multiple ways - directly through muscle building drugs, and indirectly through thicker blood - and you are affecting the flexibility of the valves at the same time. It is a recipe for cardiomegaly. It is a rush order for clots. It is tempting fate.

Now, a major study has confirmed what can be reasoned out from understanding these simple first principles: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch . Links go to an article about the study as well as the study itself. Females and males have spent millions and millions of years evolving genetic responses to compensate for the harmful effects of both the presence and the relative absence of testosterone. We are not men without testosterone. Men are not women with testosterone. We are two fundamentally distinct categories with multiple differences working synergistically. If you pull out the wrong block from this biological jenga tower, things fall apart.

The study concluded that trans identifying men (male to males on estrogen) have approximately 95% increased risk of developing heart disease, which is equivalent to doubling their risk. They also had a 73% increased risk compared to women. Trans identified women, meanwhile, had double the risk risk relative to men and 63% increased risk relative to women not taking these heart-damaging drugs. In real terms, this risk ratio for trans-identifying men is the equivalent of 1.5% of men getting cardiovascular disease compared with 3% of trans identified men. This may not sound like much, but the average age of the trans identifying men in this study, which had an n=approximately 29,000 (of which about 10% were trans), was goddamn 22 for females and 26 for males. Because of course, they’re doing this to very young people. What’s the rate going to be when they’ve been on these drugs for 5 or 6 decades like Jazz Jennings was signed up for by Jeanette, via starting hormones in middle school? He’s going to get to find out.

It’s Jazz’s birthday, by the way. He was born on October 6, 2000. His brother, default Sander, posted this video timelapse photo merge. You can see the light go out in his eyes when he had the botched vaginoplasty that has condemned him to pain, dilation, and permanent reliance on pharmaceuticals.

Happy birthday, Jazz, if you’re by some miracle reading this. I wish you many more. Sincerely.