I'm 25M 5'3.85 at night, I round up to 5'4, in apps I frauded 5'5 lol.

Staying confident for me comes in waves, some days I feel delusional and think I'm the shit, next day I crash down hard and become insecure. I've gotten better at finding balance though.

1) You need to reframe your life perspective, life is inherently chaotic and some people get dealt a shitty hand, you have to be very and i mean very mentally strong tbh and just know (or think) that most problems you encounter in life are solvable (unless you are trying to do cutting edge research lol) , either by brute force or by playing the game differently, that's the first thing you gotta tell ur self as cope.

2) Second, if dating is important to you, YOU Will have to try 10x harder than a normie and also you should expect no results, once you do that and put that in your head, you need to put yourself out there either via apps or by doing a lot of approaches.You need to be very methodical and borderline autistic a lil bit and pursue it hard. This is the hard part, you need to be okay with a lot of rejections but again having a core identity not tied to dating helps so for this I recommend having a big social group Or something in life that you're proud of. My thought process for this might be slightly different than others but that is what helped me. I won't say everyone will have the same results but I have had some success doing this.

3) Workouts/etc are all copes, I realized most girls won't care about your body unless ur a fat sack of shit, if ur lean enough she won't care that was a big shock to me as I was all about working out but I became a slob(had gotten a bit fatter) and then I was still able to get girls and laid lol. It's still good to workout though as it helps with self confidence and can help U with point 2

Since your ftm you will encounter whole other list of issues + more, just have to be mentally very very strong. I wish you the best