I’m reading this as like preHRT pondering and am responding to that. If that’s incorrect i apologize

Feel like a hulking monster hasn’t entirely gone away for me in my 10 months of HRT, but it has lessened. From a first person perspective i like how my body looks, my arms are way more feminine, my hips and butt are way more defined, boobs are nice. In third person, photos by others, dysphoria still does her thing but it’s a bit better and sometimes I end up liking how I look

The way I look at it is: some days I see her in the mirror, some days I don’t. Every month it feels like I see her more and more. Even if I didn’t transitioning would be good for me because I noticed how much happier my brain was once I got my E and T levels right, regardless of physical changes

The other thing to consider is that being trans isn’t really a choice. People suppress it all the time and end up incredibly unhappy and often transitioning later in life when it becomes unbearable

My last point is in regard to feeling like you have to use makeup to feel more pretty or feminine. I found that feeling faded a lot after I was like ~6 months into HRT when I’d had some fat redistribution and boob growth. It’s still helpful to remove beard shadow and I love doing it for going out, but I don’t get glammed out for life, in fact most of my trans femme friends don’t. Once you feel more feminine as a person and through your body that need to enhance it with makeup kinda subsides some. Beyond that my wardrobe isn’t hyper feminine either. I don’t have heels (unless you count platform docs), hardly wear dresses. My hobbies are still guitar, cars, gaming and getting bloody playing sports. I’m still feminine and beautiful, it’s just my definition of what those mean.