Monotherapy

Is it enough if I just take estrogen?

Person doesn't want gender reassignment surgery. Also asks about supplements, gets lots of replies decrying supplements as snake oil.

If it's a sex hormone syndrome, I think the most important piece should be correcting your sex hormones.

Odds are good that other things are going on medically that supplements may help with. I say this as someone with a salt wasting condition. Just getting enough salt isn't enough to fix everything wrong after decades of sweating out too much salt. There are myriad knock on effects from that one chemical detail going sideways for years and years.

BUT:

There's many different potential sex hormone syndromes and they aren't being properly cataloged and IF we started TODAY trying to answer that question, answers are years away.

AND:

Addressing the central issue will do a lot of good even without knowing that other stuff.

You can start a health journal and read up on stuff and figure out what you as an individual have going on. Health is always individual anyway no matter how much general information for a specific thing is useful.

Last: 

IF it's possible to develop a diet or supplement based approach, it will likely involve multiple steps to artificially recreate the process by which specific hormones are made because it's a multi step process in the body if you have all the right parts and are generally healthy and things are working as they should.

Edited outtake from Raison D'etre:

...cholesterol is first converted into progesterone, which is then converted into androstenedione.

Androstenedione can be converted into testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, or estrogen.

Quick and Extremely Dirty Notes might have step one figured out: how to get more progesterone into your body. 

Some people may need to work on step zero: how to get more cholesterol into their body and that's talked about here.

TLDR: More B5 may help you create more cholesterol where you need it without messing yourself up. 

So IF this can be done and IF that actually increases progesterone, which it may not do, then the next step is figuring out how to turn that into Androstenedione and the step after that is figuring out how to turn that into either estrogen or testosterone.

The good news is the process is identical for both hormones up to that last step, so researching "how to create estrogen" also covers most of the process of "how to create testosterone." The question is what separates the two at that last step?

I have no idea. I'm just starting this journey of figuring out if it can be done at all.

Useful comment from the above link:

With pills, you need to make sure that it's bioisentical Estradiol, not Ethinylestradiol. Estradiol pills need to be taken sublingually, 3x per day, not orally, because swallowing Estradiol is bad for the liver and not very efficient.

Pills are very expensive, the cheapest option is injections, there is a list of sellers on HRT Café dot net. A vial costs 60$ and lasts around a year, together with syringes and alcohol swabs it's just around 5-6$ per month. When I started HRT, I didn't want to use needles, so I used homemade estrogel, but gel has to be applied twice a day, and injections just need to be done every 5 days (EV) or every 7-10 days (EEn).

As others have said, if your E2 level is high enough even at the lowest point, your body will block T automatically, with injections, this is easily possible. With gel, it's possible to apply it to scrotal skin instead of arms or legs, tis is much more efficient, so monotherapy should be possible, similar to monotherapy with injections.

Another useful comment:

You can just start slow and decide with time, but yes on E your T definitely go down

medical study

>In our sample of transgender women, lower estrogen doses than those usually prescribed for these subjects were able to adjust the testosterone and estradiol levels to the physiological female range, thus avoiding high estrogen doses and their multiple associated side effects.

Exercise first. Drop your bmi to like 20-21 while gaining some muscles, and then make a decision. Hrt will do you no good if your body is unhealthy, plus effects might be average or unsightly.

That seems extremely unlikely to me. If you have a sex hormone disorder, you need to address that to get healthier.

If you aren't really trans and there's some other thing going on, then this is not the solution and it's probably a tiny minority of cases. Establishing medical testing would help resolve that.