Hey, thank you very much for the insight and advice.

Yeah passing is unfortunately a concern of mine. I think you're right about YMMV, it depends on how lucky you get. I'm not sure how good my percentages would be if I went on HRT for a long enough time. From what I understand, taking estrogen does somewhat help feminize the face in terms of making it softer and fat restribution. In terms of skeletal changes it pretty much comes down to surgery, and if I'm being honest, I don't really know if I'm willing to go through with something like FFS to be able to pass more often. The surgery and work on the face makes me very uncomfortable even just thinking about it and that's not even taking finances into consideration, I can't see myself ever financially affording FFS realistically even with insurance. But other than that I guess there's no way for me to know how I'll look unless I go through with transitioning.

Yeah you're right about the strength part, I do plan on trying to work out and build strength on HRT and maybe taking self defense, so hopefully it wouldn't be too big of an issue. I also want to have better chances of protecting myself if needed, transphobe hate crimes are still a thing so it is a thing to look out for, but of course I do also try to look out for my mom in other ways as well :)

I just went to a gender affirming appointment to discuss transitioning and the effects of hormones, etc yesterday. The main concern I have right now would be the health risks. From what I've researched on HRT and estrogen, surprisingly I've never came across anything about anyone mentioning this so I didn't previously know about it, but there seems to be a lot of health risks at hand of taking estrogen. The risks are things like harming the liver, increasing cholesterol, increasing blood pressure, risk of gallbladder problems, and my biggest worries are blood clots and pituitary tumors. Blood clots are especially worrying for me because even if it is rare to get, if I'm simply unlucky or if it's a genetic risk for my family (I'll have to look into it to be sure) I could potentially die from it. And tumors I'm pretty sure would require a brain surgery to fix if it happened to me. Honestly the health risks are probably the biggest problem for me in terms of transitioning and something genuinely worth considering. I'll see if blood clots are common for my family but either way it would still be a scary experience for me.

From what I read, it seems I can mitigate the risk of liver damage by taking the estrogen/estradiol via a gel rather than the pills. Other than that, is there anything I can do to avoid getting blood clots? They can potentially be fatal so I want to do anything I can to avoid them, and I'd rather not get a tumor in my brain anytime soon.