Are We Different?

Have you seen the news that women are different from men?

I was watching the news this morning and they had a report on how Ambien affects men and women differently, that women actually need half the dose of men. What caught my attention was a comment made by the doctor they were interviewing, she said that women’s heart, lungs, and skin are different from men’s.

When I started to take cross gender hormones one of the changes that I noticed the most was not the loss of body hair or the redistribution of body fat or developing breasts but the look and feel of my skin.

There was a remarkable soften of my skin and a change in look of my skin. People started to think I was mush younger than I actually was and said that I had a glow about my face. I also felt the cold more; I joined the ranks of women who complained that the room was cold while all the men thought it was warm.

An article in the New York Times said,

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

That is interesting on many levels, particularly for us trans-people. How will we react to drugs? Our birth gender or our true gender? Or maybe we are somewhere in between?

Are the guinea pigs?

Unfortunately we are. No one knows the long term effect of cross gender hormones on us; they were never tested on trans-people so the doctors are learning about how drugs affect us at the same time as we are taking them. “Oh look, he fell right over… I guess we shouldn’t give that to them anymore.”

And it is not just the hormones, the article points out that other drugs such as anesthesia also behave differently in men and women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

So when doctors prescribe a drug what do they base the dosage on our birth gender or body weight? But maybe the drug is affected by hormones.

I remember when I was first starting to take hormones, my doctor told me all the side effects that might happen with taking cross gender hormones. He added that they don’t really know because for us it was an off label use of the drug, in other words it was never tested for how we were using it.