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[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

women who are entering menopause can take estradiol to make their lives a bit easier.

This just goes to show how little you know about the experience of older women (female humans, I mean). Since the big study was published in 2002 showing that estrogen replacement for menopausal women leads to higher rates of diseases like cancer, it's actually been pretty difficult for most women in peri-menopause or full menopause to get prescriptions for estrogens. In the first 10-15 years after 2002, it was pretty much impossible for older women in and after menopause to get prescription estradiol from a qualified, competent gynecologist, endocrinologist or other specialist in women's health care.

Also, one of the consequences of the study results published in 2002 was that the particular HRT formulations devised expressly for young and middle-aged women who had the ovaries removed or experienced ovarian failure prior to age 50 were taken off the market and went out of production. One good example is Estratest, a pill form of HRT that in the US used to be commonly prescribed to younger & MA women who had oophorectomy or disease that caused premature ovarian failure before reaching the age of natural menopause. Estratest tried to match and replace the natural hormones produced by the ovaries of younger and MA women by adding a small dose of testosterone to the estradiol that it mostly consisted of. Estratest was a godsend to millions of the women who used to take it, and many suffered horribly when it and all similar formulations were suddenly denied us and then yanked from the market.

Even today, when doctors have finally begun to ease up and stop being so completely withholding of estradiol scrips for female people, women (female ones, that is) with menopausal symptoms are usually made to go through a number of hoops and forced to try every other remedy under the sun before HCPs finally relent and prescribe Big Pharma estradiol, particularly in higher-dose forms administered orally, by patch or by injection. Moreover, women in their 40s and 50s who can get these scrips for peri- and full menopause symptoms are usually only allowed to stay on HRT at very low doses for very short periods of time. Only males who claim to have female gender identities are given prescription estradiol at high doses on demand - and since 2002, only they/you are allowed to stay on high dose Big Pharma estradiol for life.

Older women long past menopause who could benefit from estrogen therapy in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond to counteract health issues that are common in senior citizen-age women like chronic UTIs, vaginal pain and itching due to atrophy and osteoporosis are routinely denied HRT. If older women manage to get a prescription, it's typically only for very low-dose creams - and again for a very short time. If you don't believe me, I suggest you visit some care homes for the elderly and ask the old women there about their own "lived experience."

If you paid any attention whatsoever to the experiences that female human beings go through, and have gone through over the past 100 years, you'd know that in recent decades it's actually become much, much easier for males to get estradiol prescriptions for reasons of "gender affirmation" and "transition" than it is for actual women "of a certain age" to get scrips for estradiol because of genuine physical issues related to menopause. These days, a 72-year-old male like Caitlyn Jenner will be given high dose oral or injection estradiol for "gender transition" and "gender affirmation" just by asking. But a 72-year-old female who seeks estradiol for physical problems that commonly occur due to lack of estrogen in elderly women long past menopause like painful urination, urethral inflammation and bleeding, frequent UTIs and urinary incontinence will be told that those are just ordinary problems of female aging that she'll just have to learn to live with.