Got my approval for HRT this past week.
The world has changed a lot since my first attempt at hormones; back then I was a teenager stealing Premarin from my mother. that didn’t last long as she quickly realized she was running out a couple of weeks sooner than she should have. And injecting yourself when you really have no clue what you are doing is not a smart thing to do. I’m lucky in many ways that I stopped.
Over the next several years I would attempt to find a doctor to prescribe for me, but back in the 70s it was a much different situation and I didn’t have the funds to seek out a psychiatrist (not that there were any within reasonable distance of me who would treat trans*folk to begin with; the nearest I found was a few hundred miles away.)
And so one day I wound up in a Navy recruiter’s office and joined the Navy.
Flash forward  few more decades and changes have been taking place, and the Veteran’s Administration has set policies that allow for treatment of gender dysphoria, hence my ability to finally begin hormone therapy at the young age of 59.
It’s a funny world in which we live.