Why am I still not happy yet?

Disclaimer: This is a lot of text. If you aren't going to read it all, please just skip.

My life's story is what many of you would probably consider one of the best possible lives a trans person can have, perhaps even partially unrealistic. Some of you would perhaps even kill for the life I currently have.

I was assigned male at birth, but the feelings I can retroactively interpret as trans feelings go back as far as I remember until the age of 1. I started being envious of the girls in kindergarten, both of their bodies and of society's acceptance of their girly behavior. I myself was bullied regularly for my girly behavior. Very stereotypical stuff. Oh, and I was a lot into magical gender transformation stories. And I mean a looooot!

One day, I figured that I was transgender. I knew my family would be supportive so I came out to them immediately. It was surprisingly difficult to get them to believe me because "there were no signs" and *insert more entries from that non-believing parents bingo game* but they believe me now. My family is supportive, my friends are supportive, my extended family is supportive (and I have a big family), my bullies aren't part of my life anymore, my neighbors are supportive, my grandma is so demented that she doesn't even remember me as her grandson, and everybody else I see regularly is supportive, as well! My extended family didn't even ask any inappropriate questions! The only thing I had to explain to them was that I don't want to be referred to as male when talking about my pre-transition past because they genuinely didn't know this but they immediately stopped after I told them. I have yet to meet a single transphobe in person. (My brother is friends with a transphobe but he's also friends with another trans woman so 🤷‍♀️)

I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I got access to hormones only half a year after I cracked, the reason being that my therapist greenlit me on our 3rd meeting. Now I am 3 years on HRT and I look and sound so female that noone at my current job even knows that I'm AMAB! I also get complimented on my look regularly. My brother once told me that I'm wearing too much makeup when I wasn't wearing any makeup and that I use too much perfume when I wasn't wearing any perfume. A pre-everything trans woman at my transgender support group even told me that seeing me gives her hope. My life's story has been described as inspiring.

Not only that, I also changed my name on ALL of my official documents, including my library card and my elementary school certificates. (Which took several years and I had to pay my lawyer hundreds to get her to urge my school to do it.) I also know a lot about transgender topics, such as the history of transgender people in all kinds of real and fictional cultures, ALL transphobic arguments and how to disprove them, the role of trans people in all religions you've probably ever heard of and how to validate trans people in there, including the custom ones, the names of all kinds of genders and attractions and their flags, and a lot of inside jokes from the queer community and the alt-right community. I mainly use my knowledge to help other trans people.

I have every reason to be happy. And don't get me wrong: I don't regret my transition. I don't consider myself cisgender or non-binary. I kinda feel...well...the opposite! My desire to be female is still there! It feels like I haven't reached my goal yet! In fact, I think my desire has become stronger? Other trans people have reported that the hormones got rid of a mental fog they didn't know they had and that they are more productive than ever before. This hasn't happened to me. I still get sick all the time. Other trans women have reported that they stopped being a fan of those magical gender transformation stories because they didn't need them anymore. But I still read those stories! I heard that some autistic trans people have lost some of their autistic traits but mine have increased, although that could just be because I now have enough of suppressing them. I did become more emotional tho. My mother used to describe my behavior as robotic. But otherwise, I feel kinda...stuck! As if other trans people are moving from their AGAB to their target gender but my journey has been paused somehow! Although it does have the advantage of me still feeling awed by my feminization changes. But why am I feeling this way? I have thought about this and made a list of hypotheses about what the reason could be:

1. I have always been very miserable and unhappy. My friend says that this started when I wasn't in elementary school anymore. That was the worst time of my life, when I was bullied so much. So I believed that the reason for my unhappiness is simply my horrible life at school. After school, I still felt miserable because I was going to die one day. But then I got over it. Then I felt miserable because I was born a boy. So I transitioned. Then I felt miserable because...nothing! It's like all those reasons were never really the true reason for my unhappiness but rather a scapegoat that my subconsciousness blamed because it didn't know either where it comes from! So I figured, if I'm so miserable despite having such a great life, maybe I have depressions? So my therapist recommended me antidepressants but they didn't do anything. No improvement, no side effects, nothing. Someone in my transgender support group told me their antidepressants were switched 3 times before they got ones that work, but I am now on my 4th or 5th kind of antidepressant and still nothing. Maybe I don't have depressions after all but 2 of my current therapists still think that depression is a possibility so 🤷‍♀️?
2. I am simply not feminine enough. Everything masculine about me makes me dysphoric, so I have not only lasered my facial hair away but also my armpit hair and my leg hair. I have not only taken voice therapy but also singing classes. And I want to break Rapunzel's record if you know what I mean. But I still have height dysphoria because I am the tallest in my family and I have voice dysphoria because I can still feel my voicecrack. My dysphoria is 100% regret that I didn't prevent my male puberty and now I have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life. I still see my masculine face in the mirror and on photos. I still hear my masculine voice on recordings. I still feel under my long hair that my head is the shape of a head with short hair. Touching my breasts makes me dysphoric because they aren't big enough and I'm scared that they never will. I recently saw a trans woman with D-cups and thought: "That would still be too small for me!" I also have a lot of anxiety that I might become fat one day and I've been thinking about wearing corsets for that exact reason! I wanna look like a cute innocent little anime girl! I don't just wanna look and sound female, I wanna look and sound and behave so girly that even transphobes who find out that I'm trans will be like: "There's no way that's a boy." I wanna be so cute that everybody instantly falls in love with me and can't stand the thought of me getting hurt and immediately hates everyone who does, including themselves! I want people who wouldn't hit a girl to refuse to hit me! I told my hairdresser I wanna look cute! I told my voice trainer I wanna sound cute! I told my therapist I wanna behave cute! And I will always be miserable because I have moved the goalposts infinitely far away! No, seriously, I still have old chat messages from the beginning of my transition saying things like: "I don't care about curves! I just wanna pass! Everything else is secondary!" If I was a trans man, I think I would've shaved my head bald by now. And if I was non-binary or genderfluid, I think I would feel even worse.
3. Perhaps that is an overinterpretation and I merely try to get as far away from my AGAB as possible because I have the subconscious fear that I might lose it all again? After all, I spent the majority of my life as a bullied male pupil, urged by his mother to keep his hair short to prevent even more bullying. What are the chances that all of this is just over forever? The Emperor's New School is a show about Kuzco, who has to finish school to become emperor. However, the show takes place after he had already been emperor! And this is not a plothole: Some episodes explicitly reference how he'd already been emperor before, yet there is no explanation as to how he had become emperor before finishing school! Likewise, I still get nightmares that the last 11 years of my life had just been a temporary break from school, like a semester abroad or something, and that I have to go back to school where I'm just a bullied, short-haired...boy! I'd always had nightmares about school but I'd thought they would end after I finish school. Why have those nightmares still not ended yet?!
4. Or maybe it's Impostor Syndrome? I spent my whole life trying to suppress any feminine movements and it's hard to unsuppress it all. I still feel out of place in female-only groups. I still hesitate before I describe myself in feminine terms. I react to both my deadname and my chosen name, which feels very weird because my coworker has my deadname and doesn't know that I'm trans. I even still feel like I have to suppress my male crushes because of internalized homophobia! Like the exact opposite of how ContraPoints feels!
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! is about a card game where you summon monsters that battle one another. Many episodes have Yugi's opponents summon increasingly powerful monsters and Yugi then has to figure out how to defeat them. But one monster is different: Exodia, the most powerful monster in the game. Exodia is so powerful that even the official rulebook says that if you summon her, you win the game immediately. So when Yugi was "confronted" with Exodia, the episode wasn't about defeating Exodia, as that would have been impossible. Instead, it was about preventing Exodia from being summoned! This is how I feel about transphobia. The other trans people in my support group often talk about transphobic family members who disowned them and transphobic coworkers who constantly misgender them and even transphobic doctors who purposely botched their surgeries and I'm just sitting here wondering if I live in a different plane of reality or something. But I am still afraid of transphobia. And, because I have never personally met a transphobe before, transphobia now feels to me like a sinister, omnipresent force that could manifest anytime, anywhere. Despite knowing how to debunk practically every transphobic argument ever made, I have no idea how I would do if I ever met a transphobe in person because it has never happened before. And that makes my fear of transphobia actually worse. I am also concerned about society's current move to the right. What if I ever get personally affected by transphobic laws? Will I have to flee my own country? And, if so, where would I even go?
6. My family has always treated me genderneutrally. My school, however, has not. Since kindergarten, my educational environment has made it unmistakably clear that boys and girls are treated differently and that the same behavior will be rewarded or punished depending on whether it came from a boy or a girl. You probably already know that I didn't want those gender roles. But now that I live as female full-time, I want those gender roles now! I want to be treated as female now! But my workplace is now genderneutral as fuck and my family still treats me as genderneutral as always. Apart from using my new name and pronouns, it seems like absolutely nothing has changed. I feel like my family doesn't see me as a gal or as a guy but instead as an autist.
7. I think I still have a lot of internalized sexism inside of me. Throughout the majority of my life, my environment always beat into me again and again and again that girls are pretty, women are innocent, women need to be protected, men are untrustworthy, and so on and so forth. I mean, have you ever seen an adult tell a little boy that he looks pretty? Ever? But the most horrible thing would probably be when I learned that I would have to enroll in the military one day, as punishment for the unforgivable crime of having been born male. The thought of this horrified me all my life. The law of my countries still states that men may be forced to carry a weapon whereas women may not. So, dear transmascs, please don't be offended when I say that all these gender roles have now scarred me with the seemingly permanent feeling of being unworthy of love unless I am female. I know that this is not true. But I personally just can't see myself ever being content in a male body. I just can't. I think I might be love-starved. Perhaps even touch-starved. I mean, I know that my family loves me. I know that they will always be there for me in emergency situations. But the love doesn't feel unconditional. My family constantly complains about me doing the fewest household chores and I feel like they might throw me out or something if I don't do a well-enough job. Once, just once in my life, I would like for my mom to hug me and tell me that everything is alright, and then hum me a lullaby. Don't get me wrong: I don't feel bad for having missed out on a female childhood. Even if I had been born cis-female, I still would've had my Asperger's, which is even more difficult to hide than my transness. And my Asperger's is the reason why I was bullied all the time, and also why my mom spent my entire childhood telling me I'm behaving inappropriately. Did you know that children who get bullied tend to develop trust issues that make them more likely to get bullied again, even if they switch schools? So even if I was reborn in a cis-female body with my current memories, I could never have a happy childhood ever again. What I'm yearning for is logically impossible.
8. When it comes to magical gender transformation stories, I'm a bit of a self-taught expert. Although the amount of trans men and women is relatively equal, magical gender transformation stories are almost exclusively male-to-female. TV Tropes calls this the First Law of Gender Bending. Even if a guy and a gal switch bodies, I noticed that stories tend to focus on the experience of the MtF. I personally never searched for MtF stories explicitly but I still know only a few stories that focus on the FtM experience and almost none where the transformed ends up in an androgynous intersex body or whatever. The next trend I noticed is that almost all transformations like this happen without the MtFs' consent. And even when it does, the MtFs often weren't aware that this would lead to a gender transformation or thought that it would last significantly shorter or they had to give consent due to factors outside their control or they simply didn't think it through. I'm pretty sure the reason for the popularity of stories like this is that many trans women have to hide their gender identity from the world and the thought of having their stigmatized needs met without requiring them to take responsibility serves as an outlet to express parts of themselves they couldn't express elsewhere. Another thing is that gender transformation stories are usually either instant or only take a few seconds/minutes or you simply wake up with the transformation already done. And the transformed always ends up perfectly passing with no side effects apart from the obvious. Even slow transformation stories usually take place over the course of only a few months. And they always go from "I'm a dude!" to "Has my body become girlier?" to "My body has definitely become girlier." to "Why is everyone calling me a lady?" to "I'm a lady!" There's never any androgynous phase that confuses others or yields contradicting responses! Another thing that those stories always get wrong is the complete lack of paperwork. Sometimes, this is justified if the universe is also different or if the transformed is a little child after the transformation or if the story takes place in the Middle Ages before beurocracy was that omnipresent or if it's a bodyswap, but if any adult just switched sexes and decided they wanna stay transformed and somehow knew that the transformation was permanent, they would still have to fill out a lot of paperwork, even if they don't need any hormones or surgeries or therapy, and then they would be legally classified as transgender. Or perhaps intersex? Anyway, I would really like to see a gender transformation story that explores this. One thing those stories get surprisingly right is that everyone is always assumed to have been born the gender they currently look like, even though gender transformations exist in that universe. People who don't know I'm trans always assume I'm cis-female, like that time when I talked about losing weight and a stranger asked me if I have ever been pregnant before, or when I talked about my name and my coworker immediately assumed that my name had been decided by my parents, or when I went to a urologist who asked me about my womb. Why is everyone always assumed to be cis, even though we all know trans people exist? I mean, I like it when it happens to me personally but many other trans people are not so lucky. Another thing that frequently happens in gender transformation stories is that the transformed will just happen to get into situations where they are forced or urged to behave in ways stereotypical to the gender role they were transformed into or otherwise constantly get confronted with gender role differences. TV Tropes calls this the Third Law of Gender-Bending. Another trend I noticed is that, usually, only the transformed and a few select others are aware of the transformation and they usually go to great lengths to keep it that way, almost always successfully. It's basically an unwritten rule that they start a new identity and pretend to be a different person. Even people who know the old self will always be like: "Who are you? You look like someone I know. Are you a relative?" Never: "Are you who I think you are but with a different gender now?" Unlike in real life, openly transformed celebrities are almost always nonexistent, and the only exceptions come when it would have been impossible for them to hide it anyway. Another trend that seems to only appear in newer stories is that sometimes, the transformation affects the psychee, as well, in extreme cases going so far as to make them forget their former lives. At first, I wondered if I was even the same person if both my body and my mind were different and if I could even identify as my future self if that ever happened to me, but I eventually just said yes because I figured the stories are more enjoyable this way. And I think this helped me look forward to the hormones when I found out that the hormones can physically change my brain and alter the way I think. The story that had by far the strongest effect on me so far is a manga called Onii-Chan Is Done For, also known as Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!. Any trans person can tell you that this is clearly a transfem fantasy. And it's so unrealistic that even the manga itself makes fun of how unrealistic it is. But it makes up for it by making you really care about its characters, at least if you are transgender yourself. In addition to having all the clichés of a stereotypical male-to-female transformation story, Onimai goes even further by also making the MtF younger, resulting in a second, female childhood. In accordance with the Third Law of Gender-Bending, the manga focuses on the gender differences, but it also focuses on the age differences, one of them being that Mahiro went from being Mihari's older brother to her younger sister, which makes an especially huge difference if you consider that Japanese culture pressures the older sibling to always take care of the younger sibling, even if they're twins whose births are only minutes apart (not the case here), so you can imagine how the atmosphere changed after Mihari suddenly started being a lot taller than Mahiro. But the parts of the story that had the strongest effects on me >!managed to go even further: In chapter 8, Mahiro gets temporary amnesia and forgets ever having lived as male. In chapter 35.5, Mahiro and Mihari temporarily switch bodies, thereby putting Mahiro into a cis-female body. And then there's The Oyama Project, a fanfic where Mahiro switches bodies with a Mahiro from a parallel universe that was born as Mihari’s little sister. Also, an honorable mention goes to chapter 65, where the girls in Mahiro's class not only successfully force the boys to wear French maid outfits, they dress them up in a way that actually make them pass as female so that even their own classmates no longer recognize them!!! And then the boys can't help but act feminine without knowing why!!!!! Any of those story arcs would've had even more potential, had they been permanent. Like, what do you even call this? A transfem fantasy inside another transfem fantasy? That makes the MtF even more MtF? Like a superheroix who was born with superpowers but then gets even more superpowers in a ridiculously exaggerated superheroix fantasy?!< Anyway, as you can see, fictional gender transformations are a lot different than transitioning is in real life. In gender transformation stories, the transformed notice changes happening all the time. In real life, the changes are so slow that you need to take photos to even notice any change. Fictional gender transformations are always successful and the transformed always end up passing and become at least as attractive as they were before while I have constant anxiety that how I transformed so far is all I'll ever get. I also miss the feeling of being in an unfamiliar body that is oh-so-often described in those stories in great detail. I also cannot look at myself like I look at all those MtFs because I don't see myself in third person. In addition to all of that, I have read many, many, many gender transformation stories whereas I only transitioned once and living my life takes a lot longer than reading one of those stories. An innocent virgin is not the same as a dirty little female dog. A traditional housewife is not the same as an emancipated feminist. A gamer girl is not the same as a dumb blonde bimbo. A Muslim hijab is not the same as a Christian headscarf. I cannot live like everyone I ever had gender envy of. I need to find my personal style. But how could I decide between all those styles when every single one of them gives me gender envy because they are all female stereotypes? It's not like I have someone like Mihari to choose my outfits for me. And, of course, the gender transformation stories are always exciting adventures whereas my life is...okay, it's not boring but there are these frustrating moments where I'm scared of the unknown future and feel like I can't do anything about it. So.....what if I'm subconsciously disappointed that my transition didn't go like in those stories and that's why I'm still waiting for something to happen? Although, I also had some "What's happening to me?" moments...
9. John David Card once said: "That same type of avowed progressive will claim to believe that trans women are real women but just flat-out won't consider dating or even hooking up with one." I have never been catcalled or objectified or sexually harrassed before and I have also never been the victim of unironic misogyny. Other women tell me I should be glad about this, but even though I haven't even figured out yet if I want to start a family or not, let alone if I want children or not, this makes me really dysphoric because it makes me feel like strangers only treat me as female out of decency without really seeing me as a real woman. Even though people have already told me that they thought I was cis-female before I had told them I'm trans.
10. One of the things that surprised me the most when I transitioned was that some of the people who didn't know me from before told me that I'd already looked kinda feminine on my pre-transition photos. My aunt told me my voice had already been unusually high, even after my voice had cracked. My grandma thought she was looking at my girlfriend after I showed her a picture of me crossdressing before I had started hormones! My singing teacher even said that she wouldn't have been able to gender me after I showed her a recording of my pre-transition voice! Why had noone told me that before? Did they think I would not like it because I am a boy? Is our conception of gender really this circular? I am lucky to never have been tricked by society into trying to behave masculine. Sure, I always suppressed my feminine desires but I never forced myself into anything masculine either. Because I never wanted to be masculine. I just wanted to not get bullied. Maybe this is the reason why my body had always been kinda feminine. Maybe not. I'm not sure how this all works. My singing teacher told me that I move in a feminine way. I heard that trans people often find themselves looking more like their AGAB than they actually look because they associate their own appearance with their AGAB due to having been raised as such. It would explain why noone ever called my look feminine and why my mother genuinely thought that I couldn't be stealth because I don't pass yet! But if I have really always been so feminine, wouldn't that mean that I will never pass for myself because there isn't enough room for me to get far enough away from my former look? My voice therapist even discouraged me from training my voice to go even higher because it would sound ridiculous!
11. I just have mood swings. Estrogen makes trans women more emotional, after all. But more emotions also means more bad emotions so I will never get rid of my bad emotions now! Like this graph but with "KIDS" being replaced with "ESTROGEN"! I thought these mood swings would be temporary but they haven't disappeared yet so I guess they aren't going to.
12. Perhaps it's something completely different. My mother always told me I only pay attention to the negative stuff. She frequently tried to get me to understand that I have a very successful life and that I can be proud of myself and I am perfectly aware that she's absolutely right but I still feel miserable. Sometimes, I go outside and lay in the sun and then my negative thoughts disappear but they're never gone for long. Perhaps it's stress? I always had a lot of ideas in my mind. As a little child girl, I drew so much that my brother told me I use up more paper in a week than he does in a year. Then I got my first computer and all my computers and smartphones have had disk space problems since then. I thought about starting a diary but I never got around to it. One day, I started writing down my ideas and now my documents documenting my ideas are longer than the King James Bible! I checked! But the ideas still keep coming! My therapist told me my head is so full of thoughts that she is honestly surprised that I can stay awake for more than 2 hours a day! (I told her my father complained about me sleeping more than others but she was like: "DON'T LISTEN TO HIM! SLEEP AS MUCH AS YOU NEED!" I don't drink coffee btw.) Linus Pauling once said: "To get good ideas, you have to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones." I'm pretty sure I did just that without even trying. So far, I have invented a labyrinth computer game that can be played without a monitor or speakers, a homework managing program that looks like a computer game because it's designed to be used by pupils with no experience in calendar softwate, a physical board game designed to introduce those unfamiliar to computer games to the jump'n'run genre, a database containing comebacks to every transphobic argument ever made, a technique for visualizing any boring arbitrary concept in a colorful immersive way, a new logical language that can liberate you from biases and lets you think things that are impossible to think in any other language, a new programming language that sacrifices spatio-temporal efficiency to be easy to learn and easy to use for rapid prototyping, several ways to make preexisting games more immersive and more accessible to the disabled and LGBT people and even plural people, and a new morality system that is more logically consistent and more practically useful than any other morality system I know. It's also harder to explain, which is why I'm planning to write an illustrated book about it. But I'm bad at drawing. I'm good at programming tho, which is why I'm also planning to make a program that makes the illustrations for me. It's easier than drawing it all directly, but it also takes a lot longer. I'm planning to publish all of this and all I want in return is for people to care about my works so that part of me can survive a little longer when I inevitably die. And that doesn't even include all the books I'm planning to read, all the games I'm planning to play, and all the videos I'm planning to watch. I calculated that if I were to finish all I have planned, I would witness the Heat Death of the Universe several times over. And the reason why I do all these things is because my ideas just won't let off until I do! My father tells me I tend to obsess over stuff. So my gender might simply be one of those things I had to do because it just wouldn't let off since childhood. But even though I spend 100% of my free time doing those things, I always underestimate how long it takes me! Even during vacations, many days have me work on something since morning, only to then find out it's time to go to bed and I couldn't finish what I had planned for the day and it's so frustrating! I've already given up on my ideas for maps, mods, and packs for Minecraft because Microsoft keeps updating the game so quickly that I could never keep up maintaining my maps, mods, and packs, just to keep them compatible. I miss being able to just enjoy a day with my friends and/or family without being frustrated that I cannot work on my projects. It's like I am a slave of myself. But I have to keep working on my projects because if I don't, nobody will! So, what does any of that have to do with gender? Well, I noticed that whenever I feel bad, I also get gender dysphoria for whatever reason, making it difficult to tell where my pain even comes from. If you've ever studied split-brain patients you know that the subconscious is surprisingly good at finding excuses and making them seem rational but I hadn't known just how good!

So, which is it? What is the reason why I'm still so unhappy? And what can I do about it? Is there even something I can do about it? You can keep your "Stop whining, you have it better than all of us," to yourself. I already know that all too well. I just fear that I'm doomed to be unhappy forever, no matter what happens. And if I can never be happy, I wanna at least dedicate my life to making others happy.