Would you notice if your smell changed?

Do you know what you smell like? Would you notice if your own smell changed? When trans people start HRT, for a lot of us, how we smell is one of the first things which changes. The article I’m sharing today is the first piece of published research to come out of a bigger project I’ve been working on since the middle of 2022. The larger project is investigating transness and smell – I wanted to know if people switched what deodorant and fragrance they wore when they came out and transitioned, how those things made them feel, if they used them strategically, if their relationship to smells generally changed, and if their own smell changed. I’ve been doing mini summaries on an Instagram page over here, too.

But back to how you smell. I’ve got to admit I was a bit nervous about including this question in the interview schedule, because asking someone about how their body smells felt like it might be a bit confronting. As it turned out though, a lot of the time people brought it up themselves. Essentially, what I found was that when I spoke with people who used HRT as part of their transition, they noticed how their own body smelled changed, and for a lot of people it was one of the earliest changes they noticed. This was the case for me, and before doing the research I knew anecdotally it was the case for friends, so when I was doing my initial read through of what other people had published on this, I was interested to find it barely rated a mention. I found one study which interviewed the partners of trans people, who noticed their partner’s smell changed, and one study with transfeminine people who mentioned body odour changes in passing, but gave no further detail about them.

The fact this is so minimally commented on or described in medical literature was reflected in what my participants told me. Either their changed smell was something which took them totally by surprise, or they only knew to expect it because other friends of theirs who’d used HRT told them about it. Frankie (he/they) said ‘I feel like no one talks about it, and so when it happened, I’m just like, am I losing it? [laughing] Do I smell different?’ while on the other hand, AJ (he/him) told me ‘it’s one of the things I was expecting, because people talk about that like, oh, boy smell’. Robin (he/him) mused

“maybe it’s just a weird observation because I’m the only one that has observed that. I don’t know, maybe it’s a relatable observation, I don’t know if other people can relate to it. But yeah, I feel like when I started taking testosterone there was a change there and I was like, that’s weird. Well, not weird. Different, unusual, unex­pected, because it’s not something that they warn you about.”  

The way Robin started describing the change in his smell as ‘weird’ and then corrected himself to the more neutral ‘different, unusual, unexpected’ descriptors was also really interesting to me. People’s reactions to their changed smell also varied – quite a lot of people didn’t have a definitively positive or negative reaction, instead just expressing curiosity or surprise or awe at the breadth of changes. Frankie added ‘hormones are amazing’ when relating to me their experience of the changes, and Nate (he/they) commented on how ‘powerful’ hormonal transition was before describing their experiences of the change. The reason that I find this especially interesting is – and apologies for a trans audience who will probably already know this background – there’s a narrative about trans people as being ‘born in the wrong body’ which gained a lot of popularity through the 90s and 00s because it is an easy framing to understand. However, it does situate our bodies as, well, wrong and in need of correction – it’s a deficit narrative. While this is a useful description of what transness feels like for some people, other people don’t relate to this framing or they want to problematise it – one of the people I interviewed explained ‘I describe my transition less as escaping from dysphoria, and one trying to find what makes me happiest’ (AJ). Part of why I found the cluster of discussion which viewed a change in smell as something which triggered curiosity so compelling is that I think it reflects something other people have written about, which is the framing of HRT changes as changes rather than corrections. I think particularly at a moment when our healthcare is being used as a political football, there is something quite striking and valuable in pointing to some of the changes HRT produces and going, isn’t this cool? Don’t you think it’s neat? Aren’t you awed by how many things your body can do and can be?

As I indicated earlier, there were other kinds of response too – some people found the change a bit alarming because they worried about smelling bad. Two people teased this out further and both reflected that part of it was that they had been so habituated to their own smell previously, that when it changed and they could suddenly smell themselves it made them anxious that their smell was correspondingly also noticeable to other people. Someone else said the experience brought back memories from high school when a classmate had been ostracised for how they smelled – in different ways several people linked the change in their smell to puberty. Many people had very positive reactions to their changing smell, though. Nate described the change as something which he found ‘very affirming’ and Hamish (he/him) described his feelings about his changed smell as ‘euphoric’. Other people told me they liked that their changed smell happened quite quickly since it was a noticeable change that reassured them hormones were having an effect. H (he/they) described their changed smell as ‘a little bit closer to me, like who I am and how I want to present in the world’.

I want to come back to my point here about how little has been written about changing smell during hormonal transition, and the question of how we understand and interpret transness on a sensory level. The people I interviewed often got more detailed information from their friends and communities than medical professionals, which isn’t unusual. For various reasons, it is also pretty common to get your information online, particularly in transition blogs/vlogs (are the kids still saying ‘vlog’? Don’t tell me) Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it is much easier to demonstrate visual and aural changes on video than it is to share your changing smell. I think therefore there is just more evidence of visual and aural changes and so these senses get privileged above others when we collectively create an understanding of what it means to be trans. Because these changes are easier to catalogue and quantify, I suspect that also leads to their being highlighted in more medicalised accounts of transness too. If a medical gaze cannot easily quantify and record a change, then is it important? This perspective values a medicalised account of transness over the embodied experiences of trans people themselves, and as I found, this change in smell is something people notice and they do attach meaning and significance to it. I think it is important.

If you’d like to read the full version of this article, I’ve been lucky to be able to publish this one open access so you can read it here, no paywall. I’ve loved working on this project and will hopefully have some more to share about it soon.