Finasteride Trip Report
A bold adventurer I, in the spirit of vanity and against my better judgement, I tried finasteride.
In the body, testosterone you take turns into other chemicals. One is DHT. DHT is associated with bottom growth, body hair growth, prostate growth but also head hair loss. It also plays a role in mood and increases libido. Finasteride blocks conversion into DHT. It's used to prevent hair loss in men and also block prostate growth in men for whom it is becoming a problem, and very popular with trans women for similar reasons and also as part of day to day T suppression. It's also fairly common for transmasc people who are self-aware about the risks of hair loss and ready to experiment with their bodies in a way cis men typically aren't, and I've recommended it in the past to people who wanted to go on T but without experiencing some factors which finasteride blocks. Incidentally, there's some evidence that the skene's gland grows on T - i.e. the analogous tissue to the prostate - so it's possible this characteristic of DHT is relevant to us.
The only thing more sensitive than my endocrine system is Graham Linehan. I expected it to be rocky, but having tried so many variants of T and without discovering the cause, I was also interested to find out what parts of my psyche respond to DHT.
I took, as recommended, one quarter of a 5mg pill daily, cut crudely with a sharp kitchen knife among the crumbs, and the experiment persisted for about two weeks.
I felt a constant low-grade sense of cosy melancholy. Not distress, not rage, not PMT instability, not sorrow or weepiness, not greater tendency to cry at a video with a sad-seeming dog. Of all the fine vintages of sadness, this felt familiar - almost a sense of home, like the bittersweet peace that comes after crying, for days and days and days without end. I didn't mind it, but the sadness seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, not a greater propensity to become tipped into a state of sadness by events, and it reminded me that in my twenties I got An Empty Bliss Beyond This World on vinyl and kept it playing for around six unbroken years, feeling I was within this safe crepuscular place, like I was already dead and I was the only person who didn't yet know it, drifting from room to room in a cosy strange unnameable sadness, in a half light, happy enough but far away. In many ways, I liked it. It was home for a long time. I would consider taking finasteride again recreationally just to have access to this inner state now and again.
I was still able to do things and go about my day. One of the most important impacts of testosterone for me is having an acceptable level of executive function. Before T, life was an unmanable mental blur and physical exhaustion preventing me doing much of anything at all. For me, this side effect does not seem linked to DHT levels.
Another essential T side effect to me is dreaming: pre-T, I had unstoppable trauma nightmares almost every night, the kind that lingers until lunchtime. I lost relationships for them, as in, I had partners no longer able to tolerate living with that level of inescapable daily distress. T switched this off immediately. Now I don't dream at all, and often I wake up in a state of total rested bliss. Finasteride did not bring back the nightmares or have any impact on my sleep.
In the past few years, I've felt around for the reassuring presence of my libido the same way one pats a pocket to check the keys are there on leaving the house; a quiet indicator that I am present in my body and well. To be always a little horny is a happiness - the drive to get out of doors, not even looking for something or knowing what I'd do with it on finding it, but as an organising structure for wanting to eat, wanting to dance and to be seen dancing, wanting to walk in public. Sometimes diffuse, a mellow afternoon draped like a veil over life, but often this shattering thing, vibrating off the hills and from the trees and sky, this overpowering presence of being a body around other bodies - and very rarely about sex. Going back to the Victorians, influential male neo-pagans described sexuality as the magical energy underlying all things, and I've always made the easy assumption this was an excuse to persuade hippy babes to take their clothes off, a structured naughtiness for bohemian couples too suburban to merely become swingers. Probably, this is also correct. But in new ways, I truly understood it, what perhaps these writers were experiencing, sensuality rolling off the mountainside, no clear instruction within it for who or what I am to seek intimacy with, just presence, a great warm horny connectedness, a cosmic love vibration.
I've had some other things going on in my life recently, so it's hard to parse what impact DHT was having on my overall libido in that sense and what was other kinds of up and down. I wish for everyone a hookup so life-changing to make you feel that finasteride is possibly, possibly worth it, even as it creates poor conditions for data collection.
But what I can tell you is that having sex on finasteride is very unpleasant. It's the bottom molecule, bottoming not as a preferred role but in the sense it occasionally seems meant as a desire to remain checked out and not especially present within one's sexuality, to take without understanding that taking as a form of giving in return.
My life work is staking my flag on the hillside that hormones do things, and that narratives of social transition are wholly insufficient for those who need to trans their sex, and for those stuck within a social mileu where everybody is trans but nobody is transitioning, basically quite dangerous - the have you tried yoga
of gender dysphoria. In such contexts, changing experiences of sexuality are understood as consequences of feeling more affirmed and confident in a general way, by actions such as wearing bow ties or changing pronouns. That hasn't been my experience - the overlaps and fluctuations between my T levels and my sense of self are so direct and obvious. Off T, I am too dysphoric to wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt - social transition has no meaning for me, the raw egg without the cake. On T, misgendering in and of itself is no threat or even a bother, an easy thing to pay no mind. Ultimately, what doesn't make sense to me about transition is that it's a medical disorder which communicates with your conscious self through aesthetic signifiers. What other condition does this? I can't be fussed about gender but I need testosterone to be healthy and somehow my bodymind lets me know about this through the medium of an early Oscar Wilde obsession and a campy appreciation for Princess Diana. Imagine if we could diagnose
anything else like that?
Sex without DHT is horrible. Let me expand: from birth, I have had no sense of smell, perhaps by nature or plausibly because a parent dropped me. But I didn't realise until I was in my 20s and first observed housemates knowing that the toast was done from another room, which to me was tantamount to magic. The human mind has a sensible capacity for well this is happening so it must be normal
to get us through the day; thats how people only come to understand their transness in their 40s or never.
Here I am in my fourth year on T in an experience of absolute revelation that sex can include being turned on by the other person's presence and their body and their pleasure. This, I presume, is the ordinary experience. It's topping as a mindset - not as an activity, although an essential precursor to an activity. On finasteride, I notice that I can enjoy someone directly doing something with my body with the direct mechanical output of arousal. I can't remember if I had the physical ability to get off, it didn't seem impossible. But I was so aware of being not all that fussed by it, a muted feeling in comparison to my new normal, and deriving from that disconnectedness - having a divine pair of boobs in your face and not feeling very much about it. I've felt more aroused by curtains. There was none of that sensory intermingling that bypasses your thoughts just by being nearby to somebody. None of that physicality of desire, the way that thighs are just great - couldn't tell you why - but they change the world, and you spend the next few days daydreaming so specifically about this or that part of the body. I don't think I could top in this state, even altruistically, without enjoying someone's enjoyment, or even their presence. I can take, I can have what I now know to be an adequate time if someone is directly servicing me, but the moment that stops, whatever sexuality was there stops too and I'm alone in a room with someone right beside.
This, I think, is the worst thing in the world. I appreciated this opportunity to develop compassion for my former self and all my former lovers, the poor bastards.
The only silver lining here is that this experience occurred with the most drug-curious, fascinated-with-the-brain person I've ever met - it's a very attractive, brave thing, quite unlike my own desire to be in the ordinary state of control - so I really hope that, without having intended it or knowing this was going to happen, my friend would have been an enthusiastic sex drug trip experimentation partner.
And I found it helpful, too, as a reassurance once more that T is right for me, that it's not all in my head, not cosmetic or imagined, a reassurance that my experiences in the past were real and not some kind of ethical or personal failing, and my experiences now are not a consequence of enlightenment or growth, or to the extent they are it's forms of growth only possible under conditions of absolute body autonomy. It's transsexual liberation that make social transitions and social genders possible.
The girls seem to have had some important community breakthroughs over the last year or two about progesterone - a hormone in cis women's natural cycles which to date, is rarely or never undestood by the medical establishment as something trans women may desire or benefit from or have a natural right to. Among other things, prog for women is a horny drug, restoring an experience of libido and sensuality which trans women have traditionally described losing with T-blockers, as a consequence of a medical system which doesn't see women's sexuality as real or significant, and believes some horrifying things about trans women's sexuality in particular. It's possible that if you're on finasteride, you might want to consider progesterone. Without conceding the idea of
How long does the DHT-blocking effects of finasteride persist? I can only judge subjectively. When I realised the drug was making me sad, I noticed I would cheer up later in the afternoon. I therefore attempted to take it straight before bedtime. As a rough timeline, taking it at 11pm on day 1 meant there was still enough in my system to have upsetting sex at 11pm on day 2, but I woke up feeling a little better - I'd say around 36 - 42 hours.
However, in the two weeks after taking it I came entirely to pieces. I'm a picky bitch about my hormones because unless it is just so, I am simply unstable. I'm not sure it's worth describing this, because my level of sensitivity is fairly unique - I don't think it was a property of DHT or finasteride, it was my normal symptoms of my hormones are in a state of change, a kind of frightening PMS. It was sufficiently bad to google how long finasteride cycles out of the body, and a cursory search suggested about two weeks - which lines up with when I began to stabilise again.
Usefully for me, taking finasteride ruled out DHT or DHT conversion as a factor in this kind of personal collapse. The evidence felt supportive of my current theory that it's a response to states of change, as described in this study, and the possibility that it's really any kind of change - the change itself - which is the issue.
the evidence we present shows a recurring pattern of hormonal sensitivity at predictable but different times across the lifespan of some women (i.e., menarche, the premenstrual phase, hormonal contraceptive use, pregnancy, the postpartum period, and menopause). These findings provide support for the hypothesis that there is a subgroup of women who are more susceptible to physical, psychological, and sexual symptoms related to hormonal shifts or abrupt hormonal fluctuations that occur throughout the reproductive lifespan. We propose that this pattern reflects a Hormonal Sensitivity Syndrome
Bear in mind also - finasteride blocks the conversion of T into DHT, but I don't know if that's an ongoing process or whether most conversion happens on shot day (for example) or at the end of a shot cycle towards trough time, cumulatively. So it's possible that having taken finasteride on shot day is more impactful for waiting out the side effects, having missed out on the way DHT usually builds up in the body. Folk hormone science is relying on these vague metaphors for how a body functions, imagining that chemicals amass and disperse in the same way as objects within a home; it may be bollocks.
And it is for all these reasons I can't definitively counsel you not to take finasteride, because only you know the trade offs in your own life and body, but also because I can feel the half-life of a hormone slam me into the ground to the minute, and the only thing I'm more of a niche wine-taster of a bore to hear hold court on the merits and flaws of different T esters is obscure disco genres that sound all the bloody same to you. I sense hormones shift within me the way the dog becomes unaccountably afraid at distant things only he perceives. I suspect for a lot of people, the finasteride experience is
Conclusion: I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.
Return