did you have any desires before 21? And if you did do you feel they were caused by something else and not significant?

I did have some desires when I was younger. I’m not sure how old I was because my memory is so hazy - maybe early puberty? I remember one vague instance of looking in the mirror and wishing I had a bigger butt and hips, and a slimmer waist. But even for memories like these, I’m not even totally sure they’re real (maybe I’m just hallucinating them). And I’m worried they were just driven by fetish. I had some borderline-sissy/agp thoughts and dreams early puberty, which heavily feeds into my shame and doubting about all of this just being a sissy fetish that I’m hiding from myself. If you want more information on this you can dm but I won’t put it here. I’m leaning toward this not being fetish-driven, well, because I’m not a sissy lol. I’ve seen sissy/drossdresser accounts on reddit and that’s just not me at all. But it’s still a worry that comes up, like maybe all of the troon thoughts are covertly motivated by fetish and my brain is like hiding the underlying reasons from me and giving itself dysphoria (idek).

do you feel that you are just mentally stronger and can just handle dysphoria better and therefore you don’t have this burning need to transition?

I think my brain is uniquely geared toward repressing. This is incredibly sad, but I’ve wasted the majority of my life kind of just distracting myself playing video games. I have probably 30 thousand hours of my childhood on various video games. I did virtually no introspection. I didn’t really think of myself as a person at all and didn’t question why I was so unhappy.

I guess as additional evidence for this, I’ve known that I was a bottom since like 12 years old at least, and somehow have repressed this all the way till now. I deeply repressed my attraction to guys (and still am tbf) and felt immense fear any time I had the thoughts. Like I literally remember having the thought when I was in middle school of “oh what the fuck, I think I really really like my guy friend.” And this made my face flush and I got incredibly scared and panicked, and then somehow didn’t have any thoughts like that ever again. They just disappeared from my mind.

Now I say all of this because, my environment is not the same. I’ve completely stopped playing video games and don’t watch any YouTube, and don’t consume any pornography. I’m also away from my high school friend group that would most likely kill me if they knew I was a tranny. So what I’m saying is, I have WAY fewer methods of escapism and repression than I did before. And because of that, I don’t think it will ever be possible to forget the can-of-worms that I’ve opened and just go back to not having troon thoughts at all. Maybe if I never had stopped my addictions to these escapist outlets I would’ve never questioned anything at all, and continued to live as a man until I John 50.

When I started questioning, I fell into an immense depression like I have never experienced before. I cried basically every night and wanted to kms very very badly, but estradiol seems to have calmed me, so I don’t have any plans for getting off estradiol

do you kinda freak out that you might be doing the wrong thing sometimes but don’t actually mind what it does overall?

Yes I freak out constantly that I’m doing the wrong thing. The main reason is that I don’t really feel like a woman. Like I said in the first comment, I feel like I’m some sort of fucked up male brain that happens to have body dysphoria, where I expect to have female sex characteristics even though I otherwise have a male brain. Because of this, the desire to change my sex characteristics far outweighs my desire to change my social behavior.

This makes me freak out because, what the fuck am I going to do when I can’t hide my breasts any more. I’ve never really been friends with women, so I don’t know how to act as a woman socially. And I don’t even know if I have a desire to act like a woman, socially. So while I like the effects of estradiol - breast growth, ED, smoother skin, reduced libido, and really do want to have the body of a woman - I feel like I’m constantly making a mistake because there’s a chance I won’t actually enjoy being a woman in practice (assuming I ever pass).