I am still very early in this whole process, and there is still a lot of self doubt, so I am reading a lot of literature on “Am I trans” and dysphoria.
One concept that people often like to propose in these ressources is the button that makes you the opposite gender, and, crucially, also makes everyone else believe that you have been that way forever.
I don’t really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn’t wanna be cis, and I also don’t want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.
I felt this suuuuuuuper hard when I finally came to terms with myself after realizing I had spent years in denial. One of the reasons why I didn’t feel like I could be trans was that I felt like there was a lot of me I did like. That felt like it was in conflict with the narrative I grew up with, where you basically need to want to erase all traces of your past self to consider yourself trans. I spent quite a bit of time grappling with “what parts of me do I want to save” and I basically decided I would do whatever the fuck I wanted and not try to stress over being in some kind of binary. Honestly the only thing I have tension with now is my voice but I manage by flipping between a fem voice and masc voice in different contexts.