Post #2979130

2026-05-27 16:28 UTC

(i would like to reassure the transfems who may not know that most modern estrogen is not distilled horse piss. it is created synthetically in a lab, and is bioidentical, i.e. it has the exact same effect on your body as natural estrogen that ovaries would make. yes, even diy is bioidentical and synthetic)

Replies (1)

@birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-05-27 17:06

Yeh, this is correct. the first HRT estrogens were made in the 1920s and back then they did make them from distilled horse piss - specifically from pregnant mares. A few miligrams got isolated from 4 tons (!) of sows in 1935. Estradiol got partially synthesised by 1940 from cholesterol and then fully in 1948. For testosterone, in 1889 the first HRT extract from dog and guinea testes was self-administered by prof. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard. By 1927, prof. Fred C. Koch, who had access to a large amount of bovine testes, managed to get 20 mg from 18 kg of said testes. The Organon group in the Netherlands managed to isolate and synthesise it from cholesterol by 1935. Nowadays testosterone gets synthesised by microbially fermenting plant cholesterols from e.g. soybean oils. Modern gender-affirming healthcare as a thing has existed since the 1920s, but only by the 1940/1950s do we have synthetic HRT. And a lot of it is much better nowadays than the earliest HRT! Sidenote, but there’s an Estrogen Minecraft mod that allows you to make estrogen - and it does so through the horse piss method. There were plans to add T in there too, and you can double jump if you drink E (a nod to Celeste) + plus there are some Celeste blocks :3

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