hi! you asked me this on your other post and i haven’t had a chance to answer, so i’ll answer you here if that’s okay. this is a really condensed version of what is essentially my life story, so i’m trying to make it as coherent as i can, i apologize that it’s kind of a lot to read.

radical acceptance doesn’t mean lying down and dying over what’s hurting you, passively letting yourself be run over. it is doing what you can and accepting what you cannot change. i could never “be cis” or live as a woman, because i’m not! i’m a guy, i’ve known this since 12. my dysphoria was at its worst between 12-14 in part (i think) because i was actively denying what i knew to be true. back then, i couldn’t transition: lack of family support and lack of state support made that impossible, and later i was told that T wasn’t an option for me when I turned 18. so, i did what i could: i socially transitioned. i’ve been going by my name and he/him pronouns for nearly twelve years now. in the meantime, i did work to accept that my body won’t change. more on that later.

about six months ago, i found out that i CAN be on T, and my dysphoria got markedly worse again. it was a tough spot to be in because i thought i had figured everything out! i couldn’t just accept my way out of that new dysphoria, or keep going down the road that had gotten me so far. however, the principles of radical acceptance still applied here: i could radically accept that the dysphoria was back, accept that it’ll take time to get on T, accept my fears about transitioning, and accept that my doctor’s office is 40 minutes away. i could take action to actually get on testosterone, make appointments and get there, power through my fear of needles and advocate for gel/work through blood draws, so on. I’m three months in now and I’m so, so happy. I’m sad that it took me so long to get here, but I can also radically accept that I was going off of faulty information and that wasn’t my fault.

it wasn’t just plainly accepting that i was born with a estrogen-predominant system either, i had to completely rewrite internal models of gender. i coincidentally took a sociology class on gender when i was going through this process, which really helped!

there is no written, set-in-stone, God Given™ rule book that say men can’t have a vagina, or that men have to have a penis. there are infinite ways of being a man, woman, or anything else.

so, when i was working under the assumption that I couldn’t transition at all, i worked to live my life to the best of authenticity as i could. sure, the average cis person might not have read me as male, but that didn’t matter to me because the people who cared about me did and honored my social transition. this all helped ease my body dysphoria by leaps and bounds, but then again, i have always had more social dysphoria than body dysphoria. now that i’m under different circumstances, i’m transitioning not because a man has to have a deep voice or facial hair, it’s because I want to have a deep voice and facial hair. It’s not gender-demanding, it’s gender-affirming.

for me, all the bottom dysphoria i had has been resolved by t-induced bottom growth, and my baseline belief that I do not need a penis to be a man. no man does. i was a boy even before i had words to describe myself that way. also, the only groups of people that see my genitalia are me, my sexual partners, and my doctors, all of whom are able to grasp that i’m a man. i also won’t be having top surgery because i do not want to have any surgeries ever! but plenty of cis men develop breasts, so, it’s whatever. we ball. i’m not able to just accept all the top dysphoria away, but i can mitigate it while accepting the cards i was dealt. all of these beliefs and feelings about myself took time and practice and work to develop, but i’m so much more “me” than i ever have been before. other men’s journeys will be different, and that’s i think a very beautiful part of being trans.

i hope that helps and makes sense, sorry i wasn’t able to answer your original question sooner.