there have been so many lawsuits from men who have suffered heart attacks or other serious health problems from androgel and similar testosterone replacement products. this is not off-label bodybuilder steroid taking: they were prescribed this by their doctor and it was approved by the FDA (the American government agency that regulates new drugs). it’s bad news.
I’ve discussed this before but I know this thread gets a lot of new people, so: doctors prescribing HRT to trans people are doing so off label. this means it hasn’t gone through the drug approval process, which involves doing studies on efficacy and side effects.
off label prescribing is allowed in the US because when doctors are exercising discretion wisely, it can make a huge impact: for example, one of the early AIDS drugs, AZT, was an off label prescription of a cancer drug from the sixties. but it also means that troons won’t have recourse against the drug companies like middle aged men did against AbbVie: it’s not an approved use of their product and they’re not marketing it as such.
and it’s not like every drug troons take is as obviously connected to a previous inability to sell it like how the manufacturers of lupron got sued over selling it for precocious puberty. spironolactone, which MTFs use to suppress testosterone, is meant to treat high blood pressure. It’s available as a generic and costs less than a dollar a day in the US, so no drug company is getting rich off of it.
Even troons acknowledge this lack of research and its problems, as seen in
Out magazine. And of course it also says many trans women want to maintain erectile function...so much for dysphoria, eh?
edit: people who live in a first world country and are getting drugs prescribed to them by someone with an MD and picking them up in an orange bottle from a licensed pharmacist are going to assume those drugs are basically safe. even if they know it’s off label they’re going to assume it’s like getting abilify (an antipsychotic) for anxiety, which is relatively common. but there’s not a physical difference in the bodies of different types of crazy people.