lore-friendly transitioning methods

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

So taking a different approach than 'what options would literally exist in-universe', I do want to say that, in my experience knowing and meeting plenty of people who write or play trans characters in roleplaying or fanworks, most of them actually do just go for the medicinal option. They parallel actual real-life hormone therapy rather than picking a fantastical approach.

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As someone who isn't trans, I didn't think about that since I see a lot of posts on social media have people wishing they could magically change themselves to be who they want to be. But honestly, I think this is still a viable option. Science has advanced far enough in Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han that master alchemists can extract and/or manufacture individual nutrients for use in medicine and food. It's entirely possible that some alchemist has developed a process to produce hormones for HRT in case someone needs it.

Please stop arguing with the bigots. I know you think this is fun and helpful but all you're doing is making what should be an inclusive and trans-friendly thread extremely hostile by continuing to give him space and egg him on.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

As someone who isn't trans, I didn't think about that since I see a lot of posts on social media have people wishing they could magically change themselves to be who they want to be. But honestly, I think this is still a viable option. Science has advanced far enough in Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han that master alchemists can extract and/or manufacture individual nutrients for use in medicine and food. It's entirely possible that some alchemist has developed a process to produce hormones for HRT in case someone needs it.

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Oh, yeah. I've said several times in this thread, what we would know as HRT actually existed pre-discovery of hormones, and all the information we have from Alchemist and Culinarian quests suggest that food, nutrition and biology all works the way you expect it to. Plausible hormone therapy would exist in FFXIV's world, even if they might not understand the mechanism in specifics.

And yeah, this is getting deep into trans experiences, desires and what we both like and want to see in media, and it's gonna be a wide and varied thing that I can't speak to in complete accuracy because we aren't one single experience. But while a lot of us would've probably loved to be able to do the 'drink a potion and wake up our preferred gender', and while that is what a lot of us have had to reach for in terms of media representation especially in fantasy and sci-fi... the truth is that it is different from the reality we know, and we do like that reality. Divorced from the politics of access and public treatment, hormone therapy and surgery kinda rock.

'Drink the insta-gender-change potion' is a recipe for instant gratification and satisfaction for us as the real people we are, because the long road is often a hard one... but if you're sitting down and going 'I am going to write very specifically a trans character within this story and setting', you probably understand that for a lot of those people, depicting the long road is kind of the point. If you were going to write a trans character that skipped that entire journey with some kind of magic, why not just make them cis? Plenty of people have found satisfying alternative answers to that question, but for the most part, the most interesting approach is to depict the journey in the way that they know. Because even in contexts of pure cathartic fantasy, sometimes the fantasy isn't that you got to avoid the bad things; it's that you get to overcome them.