Measuring Your Transition

Measuring Your Transition
While undergoing a regimen of hormonal feminization, keeping a diary or log of physical progress and medication/hormone usage can be very helpful in making the most of your physical transition.
Taking Body Measurements
Over the years, we have tailored a variety of record keeping strategies for our patients. A basic strategy for recording measurements follows.
Body size measurements should be taken on approximately a monthly basis. For best results, use a cloth (tailor's) tape measure. Keep tape level and take measurements using the same areas depicted by the model shown below. Measurements should be taken standing straight with your body remaining relaxed, and drawing the tape until it is barely snug. Take measurements nude, or wearing a slip or nightwear made of a thin material. Keep in mind that maintaining consistency in the way that you take these measurements will assure your changing body is accurately represented in your measurements.

Measure under the armpits, above the area of the breasts. Measure around the widest part of the back, straight across the fullest part of the bust. (See below for important details on our breast measurement technique) Measure under the area of the breast. Measure your waist approximately one inch above the navel.  This is the female natural waistline, the smallest part of her waist. During successful hormonal feminization, this will become your natural waistline. Measure around the fullest part of your hips. Put your thumbs at your natural waist and rest your hands on your hips. The tips of your fingers should be the area at which to take the hip measurement. Measure at a point just above the pubic area and over the area of your buttocks. Measure the fullest area of your left upper thigh.

Use a cloth tape to measure the areas shown.

Recording Body Measurements with
the TransLog Database Application
One should have a place to record these body measurements along with weight and brief notations (optional) over the months and years of your transition. You may also wish to include a record of your hormone and anti-androgen usage together with these measurements in order to provide an even greater understanding of your progress during transition.
Based on the clinical information we normally collect, we have developed a freeware database application calledTransLog that records all of these necessary details of your physical transition.  You can learn more about TransLog as well as download it free from the TransLog Home.
Recording Body Measurements on Paper
The other choice for storing information still works remarkably well—taking notes on paper. Keep your information in a format that can be read at a glance, such as tabular format.  Creating a table (i.e., rows and columns) is a good way to keep your entries organized.

Our Breast Measurement Technique
We have tailored our measurement techniques based on the results of our hormone therapies—we have prescribed to literally hundreds of transgender women.  And while most measurements are taken no differently than for a genetic female, we have noticed that a crucial body measurement needs to be taken differently for the transgender woman.
The measurement area of concern is the breast.  Often the medical literature as well as physicians not familiar with transgender practice will suggest measuring the breast itself.  This technique calls for measuring each breast—taking a measurement of the breast along the horizontal and vertical axes.  While treating the breast as a hemisphere and taking measurements accordingly works well for the genetic female, it offers little for the transitioning female. Let's take a look at why:
For the genetic female, no de-virulizing takes place.  The muscles in the upper body do not diminish as they do in the transgender woman and breast growth is normally significant. So for the genetic female, taking a measurement of the breast, itself, is the most telling.  But, this traditional technique is not very useful for the transgendered woman.
For the transgender woman, breast growth occurs along with the diminishment of upper body muscle mass.  So the traditional technique which measures only the breast area does not take into account the competing forces of breast growth and decreasing upper body mass, and provides little in the way of useful information. 
For the most accurate and reliable means of measuring the breast area for the transgender woman, we recommend measuring the breasts and the surrounding upper body area as a single measurement, as shown above.  Our TransLog database application supports this method.
Look for the Differences
Often during transition, the breast area values (numbers) do not show much change.  At first glance, one may feel that not much change is happening.  Usually, more changes are occurring than you realize.  Keep in mind that your muscles are diminishing as fat is redistributing itself towards a normal female form. The change in breast size is seen by looking at the numeric differences between the chest, bust and rib cage measurements.  Additionally, the overall decrease in one's frame size (size decrease due to overall loss of muscle mass) is seen in these measurements.
The true degree of breast growth in the transgendered woman is often hidden by the fact that the chest wall diminishes as quickly as the breasts enlarge. Therefore, the overall breast measurement may stay the same even though it has enlarged by an inch or more because the chest wall has diminished by that amount.