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traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns @hexbear.net
RION [she/her] @hexbear.net

Hair loss really fucking me up

Just realized the other day that it's gotten a lot worse. Not bald, but thinned on the crown to the point where the skin is very visible compared to the rest of my head. Then I took a picture this morning when my hair was still wet from the shower and it looked really awful even beyond the crown...

If I were a guy I could probably make peace with it, but I feel like I'm gonna need all the help I can get to appear feminine and this is so obviously not helping.

I'm getting blood work tomorrow to evaluate how my HRT is going which may shed some light on the situation particularly with T levels, but idk if they'll test for DHT. I ran out of finasteride like a week ago and stupidly didn't refill my prescription until just now, but the extent of my hair loss suggests it's not just from that. Might see if dutasteride will take me where I need to go, plus maybe some microneedling

Basically shit sucks and I hate it

12 comments

  • i'm almost 50 transfemme and just started HRT last year so i have residual testosterone effects at my hair line and crown. i super sympathize, hair issues (too much here, too little there) are my only real source of dysphoria.

    here's what i have to offer:

    it looks worse in photos than irl, i have verified this with mirrors and from people i trust. The camera is HARSH. A little mirror on the back wall of my bathroom so i can see the back and top of my head in the big mirror helps a lot.

    It looks worst when wet, and not great when oily or limp.

    things that really helped me:

    growing it out, the longer it gets the less noticeable it is.

    volumizing shampoo really helps.

    my hair stylist dyed my hair blonde and it reduced the contrast between the pink scalp and brown hair a LOT. My bald spot has gotten smaller but even when it was pretty big (to me) this helped significantly for me.

    i learned that femme hair brushing is different than masc, you brush forwards a lot farther forward on your skull as a femme, and this means there's more hair to brush backwards and over your spot.

    Combined this leads to thick fluffy hair going backwards and not contrasting, and thick fluffy hair going forwards to cover the jagged hairline

    puffy headbands: i wear these a lot, every day just about. In addition to keeping the brushed hair in the right place they add volume at the top of your head, when seen straight on the thinner hair up top can make your hair look less full on the top but the puffy headband does a little optical trick and it looks like it's the headband squashing your hair and not like you have less. They are also really feminizing and i like matching them to my outfits.

    With all of these combined i end up loving my hair and silhouette. The only thing i'm not super keen on is swimming but 🤷🏼‍♀️ can't win em all and fuck the haters swim dresses are so nice i do it anyway.

    also: idk how much this actually helps but i also take folic acid and biotin supplements and try very hard to get my daily rda of protein. might just be making my pee expensive idk. I also got one of those silicone shampoo head stimulator things and use it when showering to stimulate the scalp and i use a rosemary hair mask once a week instead of conditioner. I'm really pulling out all the stops cuz i'm so old.

    here's a pic my wife made (of a hair model) to explain the brushing thing to my girlfriend and I, we were both brushing forward from a couple inches behind the red line as that is how we had always learned to style our masc hair. my hair is straight but I put the headbands about where the vertical red line is and the hair is all brushed backwards from there covering the spot. You may already know all this but it might help other girls!

  • This will not be the most helpful comment but hopefully it can calm the bad thoughts a little. My partner (amab, nb, femme) is experiencing something similar to what you describe and somehow the way their hair looks in photos is so much "worse" than how it actually looks irl. "Your hair only looks that thin in photos," is not particularly comforting when they're spiraling from seeing a picture of themself, but it's still true. I can see why they spiral, I can see what they're seeing in the photos, but it doesn't match up to what I'm seeing on the person standing in front of me. I'm not lying to make them feel better.

    So I'm sorry you're dealing with this, I see how rough it has been on my partner and it's just really shitty. Your post immediately made me think of them, so I'd advise not to trust the photos too much. Ten bucks says the photos aren't showing you what the people around you are actually seeing. I hope you're able to get this dealt with soon and without too much trouble.

    • this is really true for me, I have a lil bald spot and people i trust assure me that it doesn't look like it does in the photos i have taken.

    • Thank you for the kind words. I am lucky (in this case) to be very tall so it's not as visible, but I'm scared that it's just not gonna end and I'll end up in a much worse position when I'm older, even though logically I know it should much improve when my hormones are sorted...

  • I've used rice water before. It made a minor but noticable difference, I definitely grew back some hair I had lost. I didn't stick with it for that long though so maybe longer use would have been more effective.

12 comments