Last month, when Kristen Stewart said she wants to do the “gayest fucking thing” and “grow a little moustache”, the response, at least in some corners of trans social media, was unambiguous. “Wishing Kristen Stewart a very start low dose testosterone today,” responded one trans meme account.
As many trans and non-binary people know, it’s totally possible to grow a gay little moustache – and it has been for at least a century. Magnus Hirschfeld began offering oestrogen and testosterone to trans people after founding Berlin’s Institute for Sexology in 1919, and Michael Dillon, often named as the first trans man to medically transition, began taking testosterone pills in 1938. Ever since, trans people who could access hormones have been happily growing moustaches – though for most of that time, doctors prescribed a high dose of testosterone so their patients would physically transition into a gender presentation that would be definitively read as male.
But this is no longer the case. Microdosing hormones – taking a lower dose, which means physical changes may be slower – is growing in popularity. In detailed one non-binary person’s experiences microdosing T (testosterone) and an News explored why some non-binary people microdose.
