if i'm removing my testicles largely out of concern for my liver, shouldn't i be switching to injections?

my primary concern about the injections was always that they were carcinogenic, and i'm not sure that recent studies uphold this concern, but you have to understand the difference between the way this works.

if i start getting injections, what happens is they give me enough estrogen for a month all at once, and it slowly gets metabolized and excreted. so, i have a maximum estrogen level a short time after the injection, and then decreasing levels for weeks. functionally speaking, what that means is that the actual experience i'd be undergoing is near constant estrogen withdrawal, which is kind of missing the point. i haven't seen anybody make the link, but i wonder if the high suicide rate in mtf trans people could in some way be tied to these injections, as withdrawal is...well, it's the hormonal reaction associated with menstruation, but literally on steroids. again, the thought process is that the actual experience of having injections is a short "high" followed by weeks of withdrawal. you would also expect to see bursts of physical effects, followed by decreases; for example, you might see a brief and rapid increase in breast growth (often cited as the reason people want injections), but this would be followed by decline, and then another spurt, and you'd kind of have to get used to that every month - which i suspect would be very difficult.

injections of modern estrogens, do, however, come without the stress on the liver, which has side effects of blood clots from coagulation factors. but, i should point out that these risk factors were mostly tied to what is called conjugated estrogen, that is estrogen that the human liver has difficulty metabolizing. what i and most people take is a middle risk factor - not as dangerous as the old horse estrogen that they used to take in the 60s and 70s, but not free of the risk factor the way that the injections are (as they bypass the liver).

if you take them orally, it's a different game - rather than load yourself up with an absurd amount of estrogen and then wait for it to metabolize, what you do is take small amounts constantly, to maintain a constant hormone level. that actually means that i don't have a cycle at all, i'm just on estrogen all of the time, similar to women taking birth control pills, which, let's be honest, is really a modern woman, isn't it? the difference is that i'm taking something like 150-200x as much as estrogen as women on the strongest pills are. well, i'm on 8 mg/day, now - you do the math. and, the more you take, the worse off it is on your liver...

removing my testicles will increase the efficacy of the estrace because it won't be fighting with what's left of the testosterone anymore, and fwiw my testosterone test came back at 0.4 - clinically acceptable, but just barely. it was lower than that last year. it's still in the range of "chemically castrated", but at the very upper end of it. it's just tolerance, like anything else, and you would expect to have to increase your dosage over time. i want it closer to 0.1, but i don't want to increase my dosage, because the cyproterate is legitimately hard on your liver. when i get the testicles out, that should fall back to negligible levels again.

i don't expect to actually cut my estrogen, but taking the testicles out should remove the need for another dose increase for quite a while.