I unfortunately live in a not very trans friendly state in the US (more like trans hostile tbh) so I’ve been doing my HRT pretty much solo/without seeing doctors. Been doing mono estradiol enanthate for about a year now following the manufacturer’s recommendations (0.15 mL every 7 days) and wanted to try getting on prog but i’m not sure what dosage i should be at. any recommendations?
Just wanted to say I do 5mg estradiol valerate once a week intramuscular and 100mg progesterone rectally every day. I found this had all the expected effects before getting my levels checked, and getting my levels checked showed I had estrogen levels on the high end of the expected range and my testosterone was sufficiently suppressed even being a little below the normal cis woman range. I’m really happy with my results so far and was pleasantly surprised that this dosage is what I was prescribed from the beginning. I went to planned parenthood, and while some of their recommendations are a little dated (they said subcutaneous injections and taking progesterone rectally weren’t recommended) I’m happy they at least had reasonable doses and didn’t make me jump through hoops to get it. If anything I think I might want to go up in dosage on the progesterone because I haven’t really had the increased libido people talk about.
not everyone gets increased libido from progesterone; I’ve tried 200 mg before, but I think it will probably result in supraphysiological levels, which isn’t necessarily helpful (100 mg taken rectally should get your levels decently high).
Have you tried cycling the progesterone and only taking it while estrogen is coming up and peaking, and then ceasing taking it when your estrogen is lowest? That’s usually what I do (mostly because I use the prog to sleep when my E is high enough to reduce how many hours I otherwise would sleep).
Also, I find my libido is most impacted by estrogen rather than prog, and while I do see a change to my libido from progesterone, it’s not as simple as progesterone causes increased libido - I notice for example as my estrogen wanes, it doesn’t matter if I took progesterone or not, my libido starts to tank.
Also, I find the libido increase is strongest only in the hour or two before bed after I administered the prog, and my experiences and changes in libido varied rather considerably, with sometimes increased libido during the day, but sometimes I don’t notice that at all.