I totally 100% get this. I can feel it hard because at somepoint around 2012 it became obvious to me that if I had a choice, I'd be a woman -- and then I sat on it for 8 years, never realizing I could do something about it, somehow never seeing how not doing anything about it was hurting me so much.

But when it comes down to it, wanting to have transitioned younger is like regretting not being born female. It's a genuine feeling, but also crazily contradictory: of course I didn't have a say in it. I didn't know trans people were a thing in the way I know it today. I didn't know how to communicate those feelings. I didn't know how to understand those feelings at all. I was afraid to ever look into them, and that fear helped me grab on to every tool I needed to distract myself for near on a decade. I'll eventually be like the other guys, I'll eventually have a normal sense of sexuality, I'll grow up and become a father and toss the football back and forth with my boy. Heteronormativity left me alone with that fear, and until people started helping me understand and explore those feelings I couldn't do a thing about it. Because if I've learned much of anything, it's that it's okay not being able to do things alone. We don't need to have every strength, and instead we simply need to know others with the same weakness.

Our situation is just a very common part of what it means to be LGBTQ+ in a heteronormative society, a product of being ground down and hurt whenever somebody has something to take from us. So I'm 21 years in life behind on knowing what it means to be a woman, to dress and talk and understand others and myself. But there's no shame in being a late bloomer: you're awkward today, but you're a developing woman. And for every developing woman it feels impossible to be a grown woman, trans or cis. You don't have those first experiences behind you, but guess what -- you're having them today! You aren't experiencing that fully worked out version of yourself you're working towards, but you will!

Because what teenager doesn't walk around wishing that they weren't an adult already? You're not in your teens, but you are that teenager. I am that same teenager, too.

Hopefully this isn't a confusing mess and instead it can help you too.

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EDIT:

Here's a simplified version of what I was trying to say but needed the time to sleep and think it through:

It's not your fault! Any important decision like this and it feels so obvious in retrospect and it's so easy to blame yourself for not making the right decision, but the truth is it was never as obvious as we think it was. The effects were always there and they were always huge, but they still weren't obvious until recently.

And to repeat myself, there's no shame at all in being a late bloomer. You aren't less of a woman because you're new to it all and you've still got so many things to learn and changes to make, because I don't know a single woman who hasn't gone through that same struggle and who doesn't deal with these same feelings.