I read about a female run cycle tracking app in Invisible Women and got a subscription. If you pay for it, you can read articles and they have a LGBTQIA section (nothing about gays, asexual or "intersex" people so far. It's more LTQ) and there are a couple of articles about how menstruation/menstrual cycles relate to female people with non-feminine gender identities.
Plenty of cognitive dissonance, as I'm sure you're familiar with. "Our bodies don't define us, it's dehumanising to reduce us to parts etc periods != woman but it's sexist to call a woman with a uterus anything but uterus-haver." And some confusion about the word "female". I'm not going to wade in to all of that. They'll only come up with new words in a few weeks, right?
Three articles made me despair though. Two are about the health effects of high doses of testosterone and binders. And wouldn't you bloody know, "there's no research". It's all "listen to your doctor, don't go rogue" but also "no one knows what will happen to your body if you do what your doctor says" (paraphrasing)
What a fucking shock, right? It's almost as if the medical research system sees them as women, and therefore not worthy of being studied properly.
For this to be anything other than scandalous is beyond me.
We already know that testosterone fuses organs together and causes cancer, that's a known known. We already know that binders cause damage to the skin and breast tissue, that's also a known known. But no one is doing research into how to modify female bodies safely to relieve dysphoria. Are you fucking kidding me?
The third article was a heartbreaking insight into the dysphoria around menstruation. And if you had published my diary from when I was in late adolescence (which all but one of the contributors were), it would have said the same things. A couple of them say that it's only menstruation that they have dysphoria about, the rest of the time they can get on with their lives and not think very much about their sexed bodies. (That's how I recovered from dysphoria: not thinking very much about it until I aged out of being sexually objectified.)
A theme that ran through was that their periods were especially uncomfortable or heavy. And yet again, no one is researching into how to make periods less distressing. The only option on the table is hysterectomy and high doses of androgens.
One of two talked about the issues of dealing with menstruation in men's toilets (no bins, no privacy to clean out moon cups, can't use the ladies' because of their gender presentation), and it underlines how lopsided this toilet issue has been. Female facilities are made unisex but male ones don't get menstrual bins or private sinks. It's almost as if society is only catering for one class of people? That can't be right though because a cisheteronormative society would favour men, surely?
They're adults and they have every right to explore the treatments for dysphoria out there. Why aren't the treatments evidence informed? Why aren't any of them "sorting out menstruation so it's not such a dumpster fire every month"?