do more random elective medical stuff
epistemic status: TMI
There’s a genre of post I’ve found quite helpful where people recommend various items (example). But like, why are they so helpful? We’re all adults here. We can search up “NYT wirecutter air purifier” or type “best battery bank” into Claude. I find value from these posts precisely because they help put new categories of action into consideration at all.
Well, I’d like to shill one particular kind of intervention which I think most people extremely under-invest in – elective medicine. My trans readers are likely more in the habit of debugging their own bodies, and yet still may not be aware of the full swath of possible interventions. To give a set of some things which have improved my life –
I’ve gotten facial feminization surgery and hair transplants, which have taken me from looking like a handsome boy to a relatively in-distribution woman.
I’ve gotten much laser hair removal and electrolysis.
I’m on hormone replacement therapy, naturally.
I’ve just gotten a procedure where they fucking microwave your armpits – clinical trials showed it yields an average of 82% reduction in sweat after two sessions, each taking about two hours.
In addition to hormone replacement therapy, I take amphetamines for ADHD and retatrutide for appetite management. I also take intranasal antihistamines during the spring.
I cannot emphasize the extent to which each of these interventions has removed an entire category of pain/limitation on my life. Setting aside the obvious gender-related ones, I no longer need to avoid the outdoors during springtime, no longer must exert nearly the same willpower to stay focused during long sessions of attention-heavy work. I no longer feel the urge to eat so much that I feel groggy and sluggish digesting in the aftermath. I still need to finish electrolysis and get my armpits microwaved once more, but together, these two interventions will shave off nearly half of my morning routine while improving aesthetics.
If you have the mental capacity to do so without getting brainworms, I encourage you to write down a list of things you don’t like about your body. Just babble, even if some things don’t seem fixable, like being the wrong height. Then, paste the whole list into your preferred language model and have it research to see which problems are fixable. A surprising fraction are.
You can get surgery to pin your ears back. Surgery to make them pointed like an elf’s ears. Surgery to fix your eyesight. You can get laser hair removal across your entire body. You can get your toenails narrowed so they don’t become ingrown with walking. You can prevent male-pattern baldness. There are like fifty things you can try to improve your sleep.
I suspect this is pretty privileged advice, all things considered. Most of these interventions are only attractive if you have disposable income to the tune of >$1000/month, or are otherwise sufficiently time-rich to haggle with your insurance company. That said, I’ve personally gotten more quality-of-life uplift from random medical things than nearly any other category of life change, barring perhaps friends/job/city changes.