How an estrogen megadose gave me empathy for men

A Trip report on the process of egg freezing

I went into my egg freezing with some anxiety. The whole thing—messing with my hormones, elective surgery, injecting myself with various drugs—was inherently scary, the kind of Frankenstein-medical adventurism I try to avoid. The first night I stared at the needles for an hour, wondering if I was making a mistake, doing something expensive and dangerous with no guarantees of even working.

But once I’d injected, things changed. I woke up the next morning with a flame in my chest that vaporized all fear. I knew, somehow unshakably, that everything would be fine.

I attributed my unusual calm to the massive estrogen megadose required by the process of egg freezing. At peak, my blood estradiol reached 7000pg/mL, where normal levels for an ovulating woman are 200 - 300pg/mL. This is pretty much as high as a fertile woman’s estrogen can go before her health is at risk. Upon noticing how immediately and dramatically the estrogen affected me, I realized this could be a valuable case study.

Egg freezing in a nutshell: for 10 days, I inject myself with hormones (FSH and analogs) that signal my body to release estrogen. My ovaries balloon, incubating 20+ eggs at once (one per cycle is normal). I also inject myself with drugs that keep progesterone low (by blocking LH), preventing ovulation long enough for the eggs to “cook,” until they’re extracted. I’ll be focusing on this 10 day period (pre-extraction) when my estrogen levels were high and rising and my progesterone was low. Some effects—like reduced appetite—might have been caused by estrogen, but could also be partly attributed to increased systemic inflammation, or the mechanical pressure of enlarged ovaries. Instead of exploring those, I’m focusing on the changes most likely caused by the megadose of estrogen alone.

I was particularly curious about how it would affect my sense of attraction, because there’s evidence that artificially stimulating your hormone levels alters your sexuality: trans men, even previously lesbian-identified ones, often talk about becoming more attracted to men when they start taking testosterone. A recent study backs this up, finding that while 3% of pre-testosterone trans men had cisgender male partners, over a quarter of trans men on testosterone did. As a Kinsey 5 (0=perfectly straight, 6=perfectly gay), I experience occasional attraction to men, but persistent attraction to beautiful women, and I find a lot of women beautiful. Going in, I wondered whether elevated estrogen levels might make me more straight.

My stats pre-egg freezing:

Age: 35

Regular cycle

AMH: 6.91 ng/mL (no PCOS)

FSH on cycle day 2: 7.1 mIU/mL

Estradiol (E2) on cycle day 2: 37.5 pg/mL (estradiol is the type of estrogen dominant in non-pregnant women of reproductive age; for the purposes of this piece, whenever I refer to ‘estrogen’ you can assume it’s estradiol)

My AMH suggests that my egg count is high for my age, and I’m not peri-menopausal; the picture here is of a woman of reproductive age with healthy/normal hormone levels. As mentioned, I’m gay-inclined (Kinsey 5), with no history of gender dysphoria.

Trip report

For the first few days of my egg freezing, nothing seemed to bother me. I’m usually an anxious person: I ruminate over problems at work, conflicts with friends, fears around my fertility/life plans/lack of partner/etc. I’ve trained myself to be constructive: my thought patterns are often about fixing my problems, not languishing in them. Still, I do spend a lot of time thinking about problems and challenges.

By day 3 my estrogen was hitting 2000pg/mL (about 10x standard ovulation levels), and I realized I hadn’t thought about my work problems in days. I gave them some cursory thought—but found it hard to focus for more than a couple minutes. My mind just didn’t stay there.

The place where anxiety lives had been replaced with an ocean of thick, calm joy. I could sink into it at any time, and bask. I felt instinctively uncomfortable doing this, since my circumstances hadn’t changed—the joy was clearly hormonally-driven, not earned. In retrospect, I wish I’d basked in the joy more, trained my brain to know the feeling and experience it as normal.

Instead of problems, my mind had started looping on something else. On the third day I went to a friend’s meditation event (we were meditating in different spots around the city), and noticed that whenever I got distracted, it was because I’d been thinking about sex. We did an open-eye meditation in Times Square, and I found my eyes drifting to billboards of women.

I consider my non-egg-freezing sex drive to be higher than that of the average woman. I experience spontaneous sexual attraction, can be attracted to women on the basis of looks alone, and I believe I’d enjoy hooking up with about a third of all women between the ages of 18 and 40. That being said, I know my sex drive is lower than that of the average man. I’d never found disembodied body parts to be attractive. My sexual fantasies always involved specific women—I couldn’t get aroused to the idea of an abstract female body. Truth be told, I’d looked down on men for their indiscriminateness; thought them pretty stupid for getting aroused at, say, a piece of fruit that looked like an ass.

But the estrogen changed things. I found myself thinking about different breast shapes and sizes, figuring out which I liked best. Visualizing sex acts. Glancing at women I saw on the streets, fantasizing about having sex with women I knew.

Oddly enough, high estrogen had given me something resembling a male-typical sexuality.

Or maybe not so odd. It turns out testosterone gets a lot of credit for work that’s really done by estrogen (or rather, is done jointly). A good amount of testosterone gets aromatized into estrogen in the male brain, driving cognitive sharpness and sex drive. Men with high testosterone, but a faulty mechanism for converting it to estrogen, tend to experience low libido, brain fog and moodiness. A parallel process happens in women: when cells in the ovaries produce estrogen, some androgens are released—indeed, during my stim cycle, my testosterone was likely elevated as well, though not to the same extent as estrogen (the clinic didn’t measure testosterone, but if I do another cycle I’d ask them to). That being said, testosterone does directly drive aggression and dominance, and on high estrogen, I didn’t experience any changes along those dimensions.

Things peaked on day 8, when my estrogen hit 7000pg/mL. I was driving with my friend in Manhattan, and at one point got distracted by a billboard of a beautiful woman—totally stopped listening to my friend, stared at the pretty woman, had to be all, “Huh? What did you say?” Under normal circumstances, the most visually interesting part of a woman is her face, followed closely by hair. On 7000pg/mL, I found myself staring at the billboard model’s calves, midriff, inner thighs. These were suddenly very interesting to me.

Turning my attention to the sidewalk, I found myself scanning crowds for women. I got a pleasure hit every time I saw a reasonably pretty woman walking along the street. Keeping in mind: normally, random strangers on the street are neutral stimuli. Occasionally someone interesting-looking will pop out, but usually people catch my eye once I get to know them. Now, I was reacting strongly on the basis of looks alone.

Rather than estrogen making me more straight, the opposite happened. The thought of heterosexual sex was repulsive. So were men in general—usually I find male faces neutral, but on estrogen they were hideous: rough and corrugated, like wrinkles in reality.

Here’s a quick guide to how I experienced all different kinds of people:

Young women: appealing to look at, followed them with my eyes, drinking in the details. The prettier the better.

Older women: neutral, sometimes slightly appealing

95% of men: hideous, awful to look at

The 5% of pretty, boyish men: slightly appealing, not as much as women. Despite this, I had no desire to be in any kind of receptive sexual situation with them.

I also suddenly had zero interest in stories about heterosexuals. Even anti-interest: boring, gross, I don’t want to hear that shit. It occurred to me that this was also more typically “male”: Studies suggest that both gay and straight men experience a disgust reaction to counter-orientation sex, while women’s responses are less category specific. In life, a lot of straight men seem disgusted by gay sex, and resent its greater cultural presence. Meanwhile, gay men create their own micro-societies where things can be gay, gay, gay, and they don’t have to think much about straight culture.

In my normal state, I’m interested in stories about all kinds of people, my curiosity driven by a variety of impulses, feelings and interests. But on estrogen, sex became the driving factor behind pretty much everything. In fiction: I wanted lesbian story arcs. In nonfiction: I found myself searching pickup artist videos, thinking how I might more effectively hit on women. On apps: in the weeks prior, I’d stopped Hingeing, under the (VERY REASONABLE) belief that an egg freezing cycle, which involves surgery, is probably not the best time to date. But on estrogen, that suddenly seemed not to matter. I logged onto the apps, changed my ‘looking for’ from ’Serious, open to casual,’ to ‘Casual, open to serious,’ and started swiping and messaging.

Another nice thing about estrogen: it made me prettier by way of looking younger. That week catching myself in the mirror was a shock (and a happy one): the estrogen seemed to reshape my face, making my eyes huge, and change the texture of my skin, suddenly moist/glowy/bouncy in a way that almost seemed to mirror somatically the happy, energized, almost manic state within me.

Me on 7000pg/mL of estrogen / back to normal 3 weeks later

I felt momentarily envious of trans women: cis/natal women can’t just supplement estrogen; it interacts with our ovaries and uterus in nested feedback loops, disrupting a delicate balance. Whereas trans women can just blast the stuff: live in that glowy state, mind sharp like a knife, faces getting prettier every day.

One of the only downsides was migraine risk. Towards the end of my stim cycle, I became a creature of the darkness, spending hours in my bedroom with the curtains drawn. I could feel the place where migraines might ooze out, a pressure in my left cheek, a danger in bright lights. I was careful, since I didn’t want to ‘teach’ my brain how to have a migraine, and I managed to avoid any.

My personality changed. I became more outgoing, laid-back, carefree. My roommate commented that my face was more expressive: my eyebrows jumping as I talked, my laughs louder. I found it easy to bask in a “don’t give a shit” attitude that enables charisma; I felt like I could flirt with anyone, with a total lack of self-consciousness. By the end of my injection cycle, with my estrogen in the 7000pg/mL range, anxiety was not an emotion I could access at all. I found myself enjoying every song, hitting the ‘love’ button over and over on Spotify.

I suspect that being in this state permanently would make me a worse writer. Not caring about men or straight people would obviously reduce my range. But there’s something more subtle: a relationship between ruminating, noticing subtleties, caring what people think of me, attending to their emotional fluctuations—all this feeds a granular cognitive empathy and insight into my environment that would be bulldozed in a long-term, high sex drive, “don’t give a shit” state.

I had female friends react with horror at the thought of an elevated sex drive for fear that it would drive ill-advised behavior with men. And incels tend to consider their high sex drives a curse, for different reasons. But I loved it! Sexual fantasies became an ever-available, easy pathway to feeling good, and I was cheerful about the prospect of sexual pursuit. In my normal state, I too often decide that “now’s not a good time to date” and shelve it for months at a time; a high-estrogen state would likely motivate me to make it a priority, and thus be a boon for my love life. If, instead, my seemingly-insurmountable problem was that no one wanted to date me, a high sex drive would seem like a curse, as it would if I were susceptible to crawling into bed with the near-endless supply of thirsty men of questionable quality and character.

I kept wondering how my libido in that state compared to that of an average male. I suspected that my sex drive at peak estrogen was above normal for a man, but not dramatically so. One study found that the median man experiences 19 sexual thoughts in a day, and the median woman experiences 10 (directly comparing estrogen-to-testosterone levels doesn’t work, since they function so differently). When my estrogen levels were 7000pg/mL, I had upwards of 30 sexual thoughts. My belief is that my sex drive was similar to that of a male with a moderately but not extremely above-median sex drive.

Discussion

Overall, the experience gave me more empathy for men. I’ve seen male friends make terrible decisions on the basis of sex-seeking. One got into a situationship with a woman he didn’t like, she got pregnant, and now he has a kid with a woman who annoys him. I’ve had male friends sleep with women they know have addiction/mental health problems, who end up causing them grief. To be fair, women also sleep with bad news bears, but are generally driven by feeling, habit, and self-narrativization, in addition to lust. Men seem more liable to initiate a connection on the basis of sex alone, even if every other dimension of the relationship should leave them running for the hills. I admit, I regarded this tendency with contempt.

Now I see my high horse was just bias. In my estrogen-frenzy I still had self-control, but the hormone inspired a motivation for sex as powerful as the longing for love. I wouldn’t have sexually assaulted someone, and men certainly have the free will to refrain from sexual crimes and other bad choices. But I had to admit, if a crazy, hot, bad-news woman had materialized that week, she would’ve been hard to resist. In the absence of testosterone I wasn’t experiencing male-pattern aggression, but I could see how throwing that into the mix of a very high sex drive would make for a dangerous combination.

This experience also helped me understand Aella’s ‘dominance-submissiveness gap’: her finding that there are more women desiring submission than men willing to be dominant. I’d never understood this, but now it made sense: dominance-submission relationships, on either side, are only legible if you’re centering the narrative dimension of sex. Women tend to start there automatically, while men tend to start with body-fixation. It would be impossible to be an effective dom if what’s going through your head is, “BREASTS, CALVES, LIPS, THIGHS, ASS.” If that’s where you’re at, domming or any kind of power play is unlikely to even occur to you. This is related to her concept of werewolving, the tendency of men to get lost in sex in a way that’s disconcerting to women: “It was as if their soul had left their body, like the perception and intelligence vanished, and they went from a competent, suited, Wall Street king to a sweaty, slightly pink body hungrily groping you, eyes half-lidded, breathing heavy “baby you like that?” directly in your ear.”

There are two main theories of why people become homosexual: the biological theory of homosexuality, and the psychological theory. Under the biological theory, homosexuality is caused by factors like gay genes and prenatal hormone levels, while under the psychological theory it’s caused by trauma and other life events. There’s surely some truth to both, but it’s not clear which carries the dominant explanatory power, or whether the balance is the same for men and women. Some red-pillers take the fact that testosterone often makes trans men more androphilic as evidence for an extreme version of the psychological theory: the idea being that lesbianism is a kind of false persona grafted onto a deeper, more authentic heterosexual drive, and that a hormone burst can force the deeper, “repressed” heterosexuality to the surface.

With all the caveats about anecdotes (yes, I get it, but case studies also have value), my experience supports the biological (as opposed to psychological) theory of homosexuality. High estrogen failed to unearth a deep, innate, heterosexuality and instead intensified my homosexual tendencies. How does this square with the trans men’s apparent testosterone—>androphilic tendency? It seems to me that increased levels of either testosterone or estrogen, and the attendant high sex drive, tend to polarize sexuality. Women are famously more bisexual than men, which makes a kind of sense, since our hormone profiles are bimodal: split between sharp, energetic estrogen, and moody, introspective progesterone. It makes sense intuitively that this could lend itself to more sexual ambiguity.

Our lower (or less directly hormone-fueled) sex drives don’t mean we feel less—on the contrary, women are also famous for our many feelings. Our subtler sex drives allow for a more complex range of emotions and drives to filter through, which could also lend themselves to greater sexual flexibility—thus the increased female tendency towards bisexuality. Men also seem to experience a kind of high sexual variability, but theirs tends to be an outgrowth of a powerful sexual impulse that builds upon itself in feedback loops (fetishes). Whereas women’s sexual flexibility tends to be a composite of sexual, mental, and emotional motivations. Overall, higher estrogen/testosterone seems to cause the sexual function to predominate, and polarize attraction towards extremes.