Being trans shouldn't be such a big deal, because being different than others shouldn't be such a big deal, but the society I grew up was determined to treat anything but hegemonic gender as a threat, so here we are. But here I am, some weird glitches meant I had to figure out I was a lesbian and actualize that life in opposition to everything the world was telling me.
I suffered so many of the forms of anguish that my counterparts who “knew they were trans” from a young age did, yet perversely my skills of repression hide the big picture from my conscious mind until I was 40. In the end, I think we had similar experiences, shuffled around a bit in time. Different paths have surprising commonality.
I’m older than most out trans people. So many people who transitioned earlier were pressured towards invisibility. Others never made it. I hope I make a decent role model. I hope that you'll learn that this is a life affirming step that you can take, that facing adversity as yourself is better than facing adversity living as someone society expected you to be.
I’ve discovered that your ideal gender presentation isn’t the mere relief of your dysphoria, that is, there are a lot of ways that you might desire to be which aren't strictly equivalent to maximum relief of dysphoria, possibly you're going to have to take a lot of medical transition steps to be comfortable presenting as you actually want to. That's okay, and the confusing steps along the way are okay as well. (This one is for all the butch trans women, femme trans men, androgynous queers, etc.)
I had a lot more internalized misogyny and transmisogyny than I thought I had. You'll have to work through all of those feelings, as a bonus, you'll finally see the full value in far more of the people around you.
Life is hard, but if you do hard things, you'll get better at accomplishing other hard things. You'll learn the skills to make other big changes in your life.
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