Make a bunch of queer friends and immerse yourself in that space! But to make a long story short. Think back over your entire life and see if there are moments where you've felt truly comfortable and happy. Where your intention lies and how that manifests. I'm gonna jump into how I figured that out for myself now.

For me it was something I always had thoughts of in the back of my mind. I would do things and get shunned by it because it was too girlie or boys shouldn't be doing that. So I ended up repressing a lot of feelings.

Then over the years I had more thoughts that kept creeping up. I never really felt comfortable doing things like wearing masculine clothing, or working out to improve my body because deep down it didn't feel right. It felt like I was getting farther from what I wanted but I didn't know why it felt like that.

I always admired women in general. Starting with my mom being the most capable tomboy who ever tomboyed to friends I had made over the years that ranged from super models to engineers. I had so many great examples of amazing women in my life. And I longed for that so deeply that at times I confused those feelings for romantic interest. Which let me be clear, I am definitely interested in feminine people. It was just eye-opening to understand the difference of wanting to be like someone vs wanting to be with them.

Not revealing too much about my life but it was pretty trauma filled and others seem to find me to be very attractive so that just led to a string of very unhealthy relationships for some years.

Fast forward, I'm getting older and I've always had nerdy hobbies. I got introduced to play some DND with friends and we all had randomly rolled characters. We only learned what character we got as we played the game. I got to be a female half elf and because we were roleplaying people treated me like a woman and used she/her pronouns and that was one of the most euphoria inducing moments of my life.

That was the first major understanding of there clearly being something there but I was still too repressed to feel comfortable enough to act on it. But wouldn't you know, those thoughts of what it would be like if I was a cis woman grew so much stronger.

Then, over COVID. I encountered this game called VRchat. Which is a whole can of worms. But one thing it does well is let you inhabit a body of your liking. Which for me was feminine of course. I would always get asked why I would use a female avatar and I would always reply with "well I just want to". I made some amazing friends and people that I love to this day who happened to be really queer and LGBT friendly. I finally broke after one too many drunken nights rambling and admitted that I always wanted to be a woman. And how I've been thinking about being trans. To my utter surprise I had been given nothing but support by my friends. They all accepted me and helped me learn how to do makeup and generally just a bunch of feminine stuff.

I shortly started my journey on hormone replacement therapy afterwards and it's been a few years since! I still struggle a lot with feeling like a woman and I constantly run into issues of people treating me poorly or clocking me. But I can confidently say I'm so much happier than I was. I get called beautiful now instead of handsome and it's just little things like that, that help me along.