Acne: Teens, Puberty, Immune Function

This Reddit discussion has (or had, whenever the heck I linked it) statements that indicate T (testosterone) makes acne worse and E (estrogen) typically makes it better.

I was born with a genetic disorder that wasn't identified until my mid thirties and I was molested as a kid, which introduces infection to an underdeveloped immune system. My genetic disorder predisposes me to being extremely thin and I was my entire childhood until I began taking hormonal birth control pills at age seventeen.

At that point, I gained fifty pounds in a year, going from something like 127 pounds at 5'9" tall -- bag of bones -- to around 180 pounds. And for the first several months I was on hormonal birth control pills, I developed something my mother described as carbuncles.

I've never heard that word used by anyone else. My mother was a German immigrant who didn't learn English until after she met my father and she pronounced the initial K on words like knees and knuckles until I was something like ten years old.

On the other hand, my mother wanted to be a physician and delivered babies in her teens and never stopped reading medical stuff. She read in bed at night every night and a lot of what she read was medical stuff.

If you've never heard that word and you think I'm making stuff up, it comes from my mother. A quick search on the Internet spits back an AI generated definition that carbuncles are clusters of boils.

That's not what I had. I had like large, multi-headed pimples that would cause my ear to swell shut and take weeks to fully resolve, sometimes involving bloody pus when I would manage to open them and drain them.

Now I have a long, long history of ear infections going back to at least my toddlerhood. My genetic disorder promotes respiratory issues and I'm primarily a sinus sufferer, not someone who gets a lot of lung infections though I've had a few serious lung infections.

EENTs exist because the eyes, ears, nose and throat are all interconnected and in my experience my ear infections are directly related to and frequently caused by my sinus problems.

So I believe hormone birth control pills boosted my immune system and helped clear out a backlog of infection in my ears.

My long, strange healing journey since getting a better name for my problem than hypochondriac or whiny bitch or lazy or liar suggests to me that acne in teens is exactly the same thing I experienced at seventeen on hormonal birth control pills: The body begins producing hormones, it boosts the immune system and kills a backlog of infection.

There are things you can do to help support that and I'm writing about it here because this is my HRT sandbox where I talk about hormonal stuff.

If you have a sex hormone syndrome -- which is what I believe trans people have -- or any dysfunction of your hormones, I believe you have a compromised immune system.

So if you are a parent and your kid is saying "I think I'm trans," normal human beings turn food into hormones all day everyday. 

I think I have figured out how you can intentionally tweak that to adjust your hormones intentionally by choice. That's outlined here.

I can't prove that works for progesterone, testosterone or estrogen but the parts about adrenal support and thyroid support are based on firsthand experience managing my serious medical condition.

I REPEATEDLY link on this site to a piece called Skeptics on a different health site I wrote. I highly recommend you read up on health topics pertinent to your needs, start a food and symptom journal and track what dietary changes do to you medically and mentally.

Trans individuals are frequently suicidal. If serving bacon or eggs at breakfast with honey or papaya or pineapple causes your teen to be less inclined to kill themselves, I don't see why you would object to such an approach.

If you can get blood draws showing numbers, coolios! High fives! You go!

I mostly haven't had access to such. But I can tell you my stamina is better, I get sick less easily, my fingernails are healthier than they've ever been, etc.

So I strongly encourage you to be conservative and risk averse, check it for yourself and try to get informed.

But your teen is producing hormones from food already. All you're doing is trying to tweak it so they are less crazy and less crazy making.

And it requires no prescription, no doctor's visit, no gatekeeping, no sorting out if your kid is "really" a boy or a girl or whatever.

And no needles or illegal substances.

So I think this is the most conservative path possible that is likely to meet a standard of first, do no harm. Address their mental and physical health with food and let them figure out what that means for their identity and if they want surgery or not after they are a legal adult.

And for now, I suggest you interpret "I think I am a girl" as "I think I need less testosterone and more estrogen" and "I think I'm a boy" to mean "I think I need more testosterone and less estrogen." Because ovaries produce both. They just produce more estrogen than testosterone.