metapianycist:

arm yourselves with knowledge, friends (please boost widely)

so I’m going to talk about this post asserting that trans people on T need to drink orange juice because “testosterone weakens your immune system” and that trans people on estrogen need to drink milk because estrogen causes lowered calcium absorption.

this post has hundreds of thousands of notes.

it’s also totally wrong. and very likely caused a lot of people to needlessly worry about their health.

the first claim: that testosterone weakens the immune system.

in actuality, anabolic steroids (the type that testosterone is) do have immune suppressing effects. but we don’t know why, and (this is the important bit) a trans person taking testosterone would not have any more immune suppression than a cis man with typical endogenous testosterone levels without an immune disorder.

the second claim: that estrogen decreases calcium absorption.

false. this is completely false. estrogen actually increases calcium absorption. estrogen therapy is used in postmenopausal cis women to treat and prevent osteoporosis. it’s impossible to overstate just how awesome estrogen is for bone minerals. estrogen is extremely good for bone density y’all. if you’re a trans person on estrogen HRT, i hope this post has made you feel less worried about how estrogen is affecting your calcium absorption.

(side note: testosterone is comparable to estrogen in terms of supporting bone health.)

i hope I’ve been able to correct some misconceptions about testosterone and estrogen therapy for trans people! please don’t reblog unsourced medical claims—when you reblog unsourced medical claims, you run the risk of spreading misconceptions like these to hundreds of thousands of people.

(also, don’t send the OP hate for their mistake. no one chooses for their posts to go viral, and the OP very likely meant no harm by telling people to drink orange juice and milk.)