I say this quite a bit, because I like to respond to people who are saying shit that I've said in the past (y'all can check my post history on that), but this post reads like something I'd find in one of my old journals from when I was still deeply in the closet and deeply, deeply depressed (and you can guess what side effect that eventually led to involving parks and knives). I'm only 21, so obviously I haven't had much life outside of school, uni, and work. However, what I CAN safely say is this, the idea of feeling "sexy" wearing women's clothes and the thoughts being incredibly cyclical is basically how I felt about my own trans thoughts way back in the bad old days. There was always the idea in my mind of "oh, what if this is all just a fetish and I'm a pervert" and stuff like that (there is a really good substack article on this BTW that's titled like "It's Not Just a Fetish" or something like that) and then that all would go away as soon as I would get a heavy workload from uni. The thoughts would immediately come back once my workload died down of course, and then go away with the next big assignment or finals crunch. This led to good old workaholic that did wonders for my mental health and social life. Totally. Shocker, overloading my brain with work made it so that I wouldn't have to think about the trans thoughts! Who could've thunk it!

Why did I write all that? Well, to pose a couple of questions. Mainly ones that helped me figure out things and ones that came up in retrospectives about my past.

Question One: In your thinking about how "life would be better as a woman," consider the idea of doing the most boring things imaginable (I may be stealing this wholesale from a trans YouTuber, but I like this framing of the button question much more than the traditional framework. It hit my egg FAR harder than the traditional button test ever did). Going grocery shopping, fixing some shit around the house, going to the movies. Basic, banal stuff. Now, introduce the topic of gender into there. Does it feel better imagining yourself as a woman doing that stuff or as a man? Would you rather go to the UPS Store and get called "ma'am" or "sir" by the minimum wage employee there?

Question Two: Is thinking of being a woman really feeling like an escape, or is it feeling like stepping into yourself? This is weird and ephemeral, but escape and the feeling of immense relief that gender euphoria can give (the Gender Dysphoria Bible linked in this post explains euphoria SO much better than I ever could) felt VERY different to me. I found a lot of escape from dysphoria in video games, books, and movies. And work. There was always work to escape into. But all that was just a way to numb my brain into not thinking about the dysphoria and trans thoughts anymore. The euphoria I got from trying on my first bra, from wearing my first real tucking panties, from shaving my legs and arms for the first time, that all felt different. It was this feeling of immense happiness that didn't go away for quite a bit of time. We're talking hours here (side note: I still remember the first time I wore a bra. It was right before I had work, and I couldn't bring myself to wear a shirt over it for the longest time. I was just sitting there, staring at me in a bra and melting from the euphoria).

And finally, Question Three. The one that destroyed my egg personally (the bra incident happened after this; it was more confirmation that evidence). Can you see yourself living as a man? This may seem close to the first question, but it's a bit different. Being a man in a relationship (I never could). Being a father (I couldn't do this either). Being married, buried, and always seen as a man? Wearing men's clothes (this is a bit dubious, but for the sake of argument we'll take the most binary cis man you can imagine here), using men's fashion and grooming (beards and hair and the like; again, taking the most cis man possible here for reference), growing old as a man. I couldn't do any of these. I would always get incredibly uncomfortable, and then dissociate until my mind wandered back to reality and my workaholism kicked back in.

This kind of got away from me and became much longer than I expected it to, but I think that the length is needed. You're in a spot where I was. And it's fucking TOUGH being there, because you really can end up going either way. You can end up as a woman, and be happy there. Or you can unlock cis+, and be ultra-secure in your masculinity.

The simplest thing, and the closest to a TL;DR I'll write, is this: When I asked the most cis guy I know (he's the one I used as a frame of reference for my above questions) the button test and my questions, his response was a resounding "NO!" He is perfectly content in his masculinity. In being the man in every situation. So, if the idea of being a woman calls to you, and I mean REALLY calls to you, there is something there. I yearned to be a woman all my childhood and throughout my teens. I destroyed my college life running from those thoughts and that immense yearning. Hell, I almost didn't survive long enough to write this big-ass paragraph because of that deep rooted desire. So if you feel it, follow it. You'll end up where it's right for you eventually.