Starting with PMS... I've never experienced something I would classify as "shark week" where the misery is conveniently inflicted on bystanders; I get to deal with all of it inside the isolation of my own head. One evening I'll just be completely unable to concentrate, wandering around the house trying to find some task that I can attach myself to (I'm a task-oriented person, so having something to focus on is essential to my mental comfort) and being completely unable to do so. Two days later, I'll spend an evening in an anxiety attack that doesn't even have a specific "problem" that I can try to distance myself from... it's completely generalized and detached from the logical portions of my brain. Two days after that, I'll spend an evening feeling suicidal; again, there's no trigger involved, it's completely independent of what's going on around me. I lived with that monthly cycle for close to a decade before I finally figured out what was causing the seemingly random mood swings and got my psychiatrist to prescribe birth control pills which finally put a stop to it.
Endometriosis... Ever had a bad flu bug that flushed your digestive system out in BOTH DIRECTIONS simultaneously? How'd you like to experience that every month? I have. Oh, and on top of that the typical experience included pain so intense that I was too weak to walk for the worst half hour or so of it (gradually tapering up to and down from that before and after). I've got a handful of memorable stories from that, with the rest having been similarly bad but not unique enough to be worth retelling. For a few months, I attempted to not have anything in my stomach by not eating anything after my period started... I'd still end up vomiting the still-identifiable contents of the previous day's lunch. There was the time at my dad's house (I was living in his garage at the time) that I made it into the bathroom to do my puking, got about half of it in the toilet and the other half smeared all over the toilet and surrounding floor, and afterwards managed to muster just enough energy to literally CRAWL to _Dad's_ bed (only one room away, no way in hell I was going to try for my own) and then it took me THREE TRIES to raise my voice loud enough to get Dad's attention (another one room away) so he knew to go clean up the mess I'd made. And the time where it hit at school, during surveying class... I made an exit from class to the restroom in the middle of the instructor's direction on what we were to do for our lab assignment, sat in the restroom by myself for a while feeling progressively worse, finally texted my BF (also an engineering student at the same school) a request to have the department secretary come check on me... well, he was concerned enough that he came in himself; a bit later when I was feeling good enough to stand up, he walked back to the classroom with me (just to get my stuff, my condition was still nowhere near good enough to go practice field surveying) and then gave me a ride to his place so I could rest there.
Something else beyond that which has evaded medical definition... So that monthly puking my guts up stopped when I got on birth control. For a few years. Then it gradually came back, during the placebo week of the birth control pills, despite not having ANY associated bleeding. My wonderful (LDS bishop, but not mine) gynecologist commented "wow, your body really doesn't like its own estrogen" and directed me to switch to taking the birth control continuously (skip the placebo week and just start on the next pack in order to completely eliminate the hormone cycle).
The hormones still escape their bounds... last fall I had an incident where due to my health insurance getting cranky over the non-freshness of my prescriptions at the same time that my gynecologist was on vacation, I was without the birth control for a day and a half. In the aftermath of that, I was having frequent mood swings for a week which took about a month to completely go away again, and it was MONTHS before my body stopped producing menstrual fluid and cramping at times when it wasn't supposed to. And I still have occasional rounds of the pain that I've been told is endometriosis, typically as penance for having slept in and therefor having taken my meds a few hours later than usual the day before.
And on top of all of that, realize that my identity is neuter... not surprisingly, I'm not at all thrilled with the extra curves that being on birth control for such a long time has created. If I'd known about that side effect back at the beginning, I just might have tried testosterone instead of synthetic estrogen... and as it is, I'm seriously considering testing out that switch.
So have I sufficiently illustrated one example of why somebody might want to take hormones without wanting to transition?
