Part of my anxieties about potentially transition are because I didn’t feel like I was female from the time I was four — plus years of assuming I wasn’t seen as female — make it a lot easier for me than some other people to focus on how people are behaving towards me, not what they’re thinking.

But I’m working to internalize the advice in this essay: “How to Love Being a Non-Passing Trans Woman in 9 Affirming Steps” Albeit I’m still finding #2 a challenge.

However, it’s clear things are changing in significant and probably permanent ways. It’s just not clear how far the road I need to go.

With a number of months of partial-“real life experience” (i.e. full-time not the weekends, etc.) I think I have a reasonable idea what a post-transition life looks like — which the huge caveat that I don’t know what the workplace would be like. Sadly, I’m sure it would be very different given I work in Silicon Valley — because gender discrimination.

It is a balancing act between feeling like “I’m sick of this shit, I wanna be done with it” vs. knowing that a step-by-step approach is the best one. Realistically I’ve probably got another eight months of electrolysis so even if I wanted to strap myself to the Pink Rocket Sled, it’s not practical to do it before then.

Although I am interested in getting facial feminization surgery, what I want done is reasonably subtle enough that it’s not necessarily a point of no return. Most people don’t notice hair transplants anyway, and if they do, a number of men my age get them. Obviously a nose pretty noticeable, but I can chalk it up to other reasons. Getting a lip lift and raising the eyebrows/opening the eye orbits, does make a big difference in feminizing my face from what I can tell from playing around with the photos from Virtual FFS, albeit it’s still a subtle difference since my face is surprising androgynous to begin with. But definitely something to me mindful of.

Breast implants definitely would mean transitioning. So a key factor will be how dysphoric I feel about not having larger (height/weight-proportionate) breasts beyond what hormones might do.