If you notice positive mental changes from estrogen being in your system, and masculinizing more would realistically make you even worse off mentally (plausible reality for dysphorics), then it’s basically just palliative care past a certain point. Whether or not that’s actually “transitioning” is for you to decide I suppose (I think it is), and if keeping your endocrine system estrogen-dominant is transitioning, I’d say you have reason to keep doing that. Any surgeries you may wanna get too, if you can muscle them into reality somehow.

There isn’t any inherent reason for doing all the social stuff unless you ever put together the means to surgerymaxx, and if that’s what you’re talking about, well, the truth is there really isn’t any point to it until you get whatever you need to pass and/or feel less dysphoric out of the way. There isn’t any point in ever trying to control your narrative beyond modifying what people see, unless it’s strictly around close confidants who truly get it. Outside of our own internal worlds and the worlds of those who we can trust to understand, we are simply whatever people perceive us to be, sadly, so if you have wiggle room to slot into one or the other, and making that change would make you better off in life and/or make you feel more seen, there’s point in making those efforts fucking obvs… but past a certain point of honery it becomes less about “transition” and more about harm-reduction… and harm-reduction is still valuable. Not getting worse is valuable. If you can’t have good you can at least have better, better than where you were before, better than whatever the hell you would’ve been if you kept masculinizing. It can be easy to take for granted just how radically masculinizing staying on testosterone could’ve really been and could continue to be, even if you already feel and look like a neverpasser with the hormone purged from your system so it seems pointless… but it’s not pointless. The reality is it can always get so much worse, SO MUCH WORSE. And while you’re here, you may as well put things into savings for a number of reasons. Maybe one day you actually put together enough money for FFS, maybe rib remodeling, body sculpting, SRS whatever, whatever might make you feel just a bit less shitty about yourself, who knows? It’s hard to know what the future holds for you or how you may come to cope with the shit hand dealt to you in the future. All we really know is that when you’re feeling as crippled as you’re likely feeling now, that the best you can do for a future version of yourself that is more equipped to cope with all this is to provide her with the least-fucked-up template to work with and to hang-on. The least-fucked-up template might still be a neverpasser one, but fuck… it can always be so much worse… so much worse…

I’m not trying to instill a delusional and sneedy sense of hopium or whatever… you just need to acknowledge that HRT repping forever is an option… hell, even surgery+HRT repping is an option… and I simply have seen far too much to believe that closing pandoras box is ever an option, so we shouldn’t pretend like that’s a real option. The point of continuing is to feel less bad, not to become the real you, I guess…