I grew big breasts on HRT by doing this 👈 😮 (it might be all placebo tho)

A crop of my shirt that reads: "Sorry for having great tits and correct opinions about everything." It is voluminous with the titular great tits worn without a bra.

I started HRT at 34; I'm now just 41. This is how my breasts look after 6½ years of transition:

Description for the visually impaired and those who don't want to look at partial nudity: My breasts are now big and bottom-heavy, looking quite impressive from the front, voluminous enough that they could easily hold a santoku knife under the fold. The areolas are huge and salient, while the nipples proper are pointy but not that big. The volume is still a bit low relative to the circumference, an aspect more visible in profile; but there's enough mass to have a satisfying pear curve on the bottom line. Squishing a breast reveals enough volume that I can't hold it in one hand; it looks like trying to compress a water balloon.

I’ve achieved this size by 1) taking ownership of my own transition with self-medication rather than trusting the cistem, and 2) jumping at every sketchy, possibly dangerous, and probably ineffective breast growth method I ever heard of. The caveat, however, is that I am Brazilian and curvy, from a Latina family; both my mother and my daughter have bigger breasts than me. So it can be that I merely lucked out, and none of my experiments did anything. Or maybe something helped, or was strictly necessary (after all, I know many trans women with a family history of large breasts, who still don't grow much under standard HRT doses). With a sample size of 1 and without controls, it is impossible to know. But in any case I wanted to document this in case anyone else wants to try stuff, and also to rub it in the face of my first endocrinologist who kept us at under 100 pg/mL E2 while telling all his patients that trans women never grow large breasts. Gee, I wonder why your patients don't 🤔

I will do the opposite of recipe blogs here, and first list the ingredients I used to make my boobs, and only then ramble about my life story and the meaning of these babies for me.

Stuff I did to try to grow breasts

In order of the confidence I have in the available evidence, rather than chronological order of attempts. Content warning : Discussion of body weight/fat issues.

  1. Actually decent HRT (high confidence):

    • Good androgen blocking (i.e. not spiro). I started with cypro, 5mg every 2 days, then had an orchiectomy. Note that cypro is not just a gonadal suppressor but acts systemically on other sources of androgens and it's a progestin to boot; this might have affected things (or not).
      • Warning : Cyproterone acetate has some risks; research it well if you want to DIY, and monitor your liver function. You only need it in very small doses; do not trust doctors who want to prescribe you more than 2mg/day. I wouldn't recommend taking it more than 2–4 years. If you're not physically active, find some form of exercise to offset the possible added risk of thrombosis. Or just use bicalutamide, which is a good blocker and safe.
    • Higher E2 than the cistem will give you. Ideally: Get a lab that measures free E2%, increase dose until it drops; that's your optimum dose. Alternatives in decreasing preference: Increase dose until SHBG starts spiking, use the highest dose that doesn't trigger SHBG; if you can't do that, aim for 600 to 900pg/mL; if you can't do labs at all, get injectables from the gray market and do the recommended dose and frequency.
    • Use non-liver routes for E2. Order of preference: injections > spray > gel > sublingual. For transdermal, use scrotal skin and high doses at, regularly, every 12h. 6× Lenzetto twice a day (3 per application, on scrotum) gives me over 600pg/mL.
    • Sometimes oral E2 too, to spike E1 every once in a while. (I know 1 trans girl whose body transitions well on E1 alone; a minimal 2mg E2 pill somehow explodes her E1 way above recommended levels, a 4mg E2 pill gets her sick. She feminises with serum E2 lower than the average masculine level. Bodies are different.)
    • Progesterone. I cycle it along with E2 levels, but I don't think the cycling changed anything compared to just taking it every day. Probably.
    • In general shake things up periodically. Vary doses, method of administration, and hormone combos every so often or whenever you feel stalled.

  2. Body fat (high confidence):

    • Be thicc. Either do the yoyo method (diet to very low body fat then plump up again, to redistribute fat under estrogen), or try to get more fat if you're low on it, or just have weight and wait. Breasts are made of fat and to grow breasts you need to add fat.
    • Make sure your HRT is on point to also get curves as you add fat.

  3. Possible IGF-1 supplements (low confidence):

    • Zinc, magnesium, selenium, acetyl L-carnitine.
    • Vitamin D, lots.
    • High quantities of plant-based protein in your regular diet.
    • Weight lifting, HIIT.

  4. Herbal feminisation (low confidence)

    • Pueraria mirifica. Source the real thing directly from Thai vendors (look for Kwao Krua “Kao” (“white”, kǎao, กวาวเครือขาว)). This is the single most powerful phytoestrogen that I have tried.
    • High-dose spearmint pills.
    • High-dose licorice for short periods (this can fuck up your liver, take breaks.)
    • I started growing breasts on the above 3 combo alone, before I could access blockers or estradiol. At 6 months of herbs they were already budded.
    • Of interest: red clover, hops, flaxseed.
    • Milk thistle, specifically isosylibin-B, does something with androgen receptors that makes it a topic of study for prostate cancer (high confidence). It might do something that helps with feminisation (low confidence). Don't use silymarin compounds that don't have the isosylibins, look for “full spectrum” or grow your own.
    • Phytoestrogens are “weak” receptor activators. OTOH I suspect weak estrogens might have roles we don't yet know. There are documented cases of accidental gynaecomastia from plants in the literature, but they're rare. Taking herbs along with synthetic hormones might either complement meds and improve your transition; compete with them and hinder your transition; or do absolutely nothing and waste your money. Nobody really knows.
    • It's better to put effort into procuring DIY estrogens than fiddling with herbs, and cheaper, too. Herbs might be a good skill to have as an imperfect substitute in case of supply chain collapse, assuming you can grow your own rather than depending on buying pills (but stockpiling raw chemicals and learning to homebrew is a more efficient approach).

  5. Local aromatase triggers (low confidence)

    • Generally submit breasts to lots of stimulation, handling, sucking etc. You know what to do. (Brava-type suction devices seem to have a good record for this, but they're very costly.)
    • Boob growth oil: 2.5% lavender essential oil, 2.5% tea tree essential oil, flaxseed or almond as carrier. Do a patch test first. If you get no allergies after a full bottle, you can double the essentials. This might or might not do anything for growth but it will be good skincare at the very least (if you aren't allergic). There's, afaik, 5 documented cases of gynecomastia or prepubertal breast tissue growth on lavender or tea tree skincare; the association with aromatase is just a hunch from me.

What my timeline was like

Details are fuzzy from memory but:

These 2 years saw the larger part of growth, already gaving me B cups or higher. By this time I had a cleavage and breasts readily read as “female”. Then there was the orchiectomy, and after that my regime regularly became a 4-week “lunar” cycle:

As mentioned before, every so often I shake up things a bit. I am not particularly recommending cycling as I'm not sure there's much evidence for it; it's just a routine that fit me well. Sometimes I try a “steady” regimen too, and I can't say I've noticed any big differences in how that affects my bodily changes compared to cycling.

On trans breasts and what they mean for me

Back in my denial phase (which lasted 23 years…), I found out at some point that everyone has inherent breasts, and that you only have to give them the right hormones to let them come out. And I used to daydream like, “dang what a shame I'm not trans! I bet my breasts would be awesome and look great on me. I wish I was trans, then I could take hormones and be a girl with a feminine body. Oh well, life sucks, I will bury myself in fucking computer programming I guess.”

It turns out growing boobs is a bit more complex than that, and most trans women have trouble getting sizeable ones. I have no idea how much of my success is due to my self-experimentation vs. genetics vs. other, unknown factors in my lifestyle. (Aromatase cycle from inflammation from Brazilian levels of sugar consumption? Implausibly high amounts of lesbian sex? Pombagira spirit possession?).

But even though I was fortunate for an old transitioner, my breasts also had a common transfem difficulty; there's something lacking in volume and shape. On bust circumference alone I would be 90D, even more in a good day (and since cup sizes are proportional to band sizes and 90cm is a lot of band, that would indeed be massive). But my breasts are lower volume than the typical, i.e. somewhat tubular/conical, so I usually downsize bras to 90C to squish them and get some roundedness, or else the cups don't really fill up, which feels depressing. The volume issue has improved significantly after year #5 on HRT, but it still feels like they're not as round as cis women in my family. [edit: After writing this I tried fitting a few bras and it turns out that, as of year 6, I'm actually better off at 90D now. Yay!]

I don't know what's the missing piece for trans women to have fuller breasts; I suspect growth hormones, since teenagers have a lot, adults have little, and trans girls who transition early seem to not have this problem. But I noticed that no matter what estrogen regime I tried, I never got the layer of subcutaneous fat that cis girls normally have over the ribs and on arms; this must be related to conical breasts, and it could be something lacking in the estrogenic or progestinic supplementation itself; in this case I suspect it's something to do with in-tissue generation of hormones, or with the “weak” estrogens (E1, E3, maybe E4 too—cf. breasts filling up on pregnancy), or with factors that control the density of receptors, or some of the “other” hormones nobody pays attention to, which must have roles not yet known. Science on even cis female health is severely underresearched, let alone trans.

In any case I got big enough breasts that cis doctors now regularly think I'm lying when I say I never had implants. I don't know what witchcraft gave pretransition me that intuition that I would have great breasts and feel alive and myself if I took hormones, but it was spot on. And these are more than aesthetics for me; I mean the aesthetics are awesome, big boob antifa gf is 100% my gender, but they're also powerful misgendering deflectors. I'm tall, I transitioned too late to have a girly face, and I can't afford surgeries. So in early transition, I felt compelled to perform more femininity for the cis than I would in a reasonable world. These days I have a much more practical, butchier presentation than before; I don't worry about maintaining a hyperfem voice anymore, I only do makeup in special occasions, I can now wear “unisex” shoes without feeling bad, etc. This isn't just because of breasts—these six years gave me a lot of body feminisation and, just as importantly, a lot of confidence—but damn if the breasts don't help. As long as I find a way to have some cleavage showing, I'll be gendered woman.

If that sounds like something you'd benefit from, but hormonal growth isn't working for you or you can't wait, I want to encourage you with all my heart to get some implants; there's nothing bad about it, even cis people do surgery all the time to adjust their breasts to their needs. For everyone else, I'm leaving my ADHD-ass, not exactly scientific approach here as one more data point that breast growth is indeed possible for us.

A photo of me in a pink summer dress that's generous with showing cleavage and legs. The collar is white and like that of a dress shirt.