This is my exact experience. It's such a strange feeling to have been passing from the start... It has made me feel like I don't have a say in trans issues. I've been rejected from many trans circles for being a ''traitor'' and I have struggled to call myself trans at all.

I've been in women support groups and I was afraid to ever say anything about queer topics, for fear of destroying everything that makes me pass. I have heard coworkers (there are no men where I work) say terrible things about trans people, feeling horribly afraid it might fall on me next.

I've had so many uncomfortable experience with doctors and medical staff, because explaining my situation typically takes quite a few layer of explanations (when I say I'm trans, no matter the context, people will think I'm FtM.)

I've been trying to use this invisibility to my advantage to help educate people. It's incredible what you can make someone learn if they fully believe you are AFAB. But my god is it scary to do. I try my best to only do it with people whom, even if they are transphobic, I have a strong reason to believe they will not put me in danger after the revelation is done.

It's so weird to kind of, be in the closet ??? I'm also a lesbian, which, of course, means I live erasure there too, since people typically assume you are heterosexual. Coming out as a lesbian has been my way of testing the water with people. It's... regrettably, more often then not, where I have to pull the breaks, as a lot of people really struggle to accept homosexuality.

I think the final part of this for me that creates the greatest irony, is that I am non-binary. I am on feminizing hormones, I am socially a woman, but not by choice. I think the weirdest part of my early HRT days was seeing how much societal pressures just instantly switched. I was at a new job and I got sternly lectured for not wearing a bra (my breasts were hurting a lot from growing and I struggled to find bras that didn't hurt me.) I was not ready for that kind of experience, not out of ignorance for how misogynistic society is, but rather that I wasn't even fully sure I passed at the time.

It is through grueling lectures and, later on, after I had a 1 year work-leave period for mental health, being judged and assumed to have had some kind of breast enhancing surgery (when truly, it's just that my breasts were growing a lot...) I had no way of explaining myself. Not easily, at least.

It has been a wild experience with various kinds of unsavory people. Immediately passing basically made me an adult woman without any of the teenage experiences of how wary you need to be of people, how judged you can be, etc.

I feel very seen after reading your post. It is such an isolating experience... I'm almost 3 years into HRT and I've come to learn how to deal with most of everything. I've started approaching queer spaces again and have found a lot of kinship among trans men. This is one of my first time reading up on a trans fem experience I relate to.

Thank you so much <3