Update: Bigger Is Better shuts down as their sizes become most popular with plus sized women. “I just wanted big bahonk-a-honks.” Gimblegork announced through tears. “I never expected that it would help underserved women.”

Amy Hamburg, a local transgender woman over 6 years into hormone therapy, noted how the bras were uncomfortable, but looked decent for the size. “There was a lack of sexy bras in my size, but these actually fit well enough to wear until my girlfriend threw them on the ground!”

Samara Murphy, a women’s fashion historian, noted how leaked company prototypes revealed why the company had to close its doors. “They originally tried smaller band sizes, but decided the market wasn’t large enough for the desired cup volume. Apparently, Mr. Gimblegork didn’t understand how sizing worked until it was already too late.”

I also only transitioned because my back was against the wall. I was lucky to have the intensive mental healthcare needed to recover from such a place, but I couldn’t have done it if I never came out. It did automatically fix some problems I could never deal with before, but more than anything, it made my problems solvable. The biggest thing transition gave me was the ability to love myself.

In my personal experience, the number one challenge with treatment resistant depression is self hatred. The shame of being worthless and despicable. If you view yourself as inherently bad rather than as a person who did a bad thing, it’s much harder or even impossible to make progress. It becomes self fulfilling, with wins not sticking and losses piling up. That is often what holds people back from recovery; the enemy of living a good life.

The treatment is a arduous process of being greatful for everything good and not defining yourself as inherently bad. You can amend the wrongs rather than letting them define you. You are a good person deserving of love, so it’d be a shame to not love yourself. This is less about stroking your ego and more about cherishing yourself for all that you’re worth.

Most people go through life without getting all the joy they can out of all the good. All things in life, from the good to the bad, are only here for a brief moment. Whether you’re sad or happy, always remember: This too shall pass. The sun will fade and the final eclipse will shadow the earth, so make sure to not let self hatred of any kind destroy those moments.

You will need to fight off self hatred for the rest of your life. You can’t put down your weapons or “fix” it once and for all. It will be tiring, but worth it.

Your use of words like “misinterpret” instead of “interpret” and “illusion” instead of “perception” makes me think your issue is normative rather than descriptive. It isn’t about whether you are trans, but whether you should be trans. Getting from is to ought in this way exists in the realm of ethics, not epistemology.

It’s important to understand how we can get from is to ought within the neurological view I talked about earlier. The first thing to understand is how and why our brain forms the connections that it does.

One important mechanism for our brains making connections is Hebbian learning: neurons that fire together wire together. If concepts occur in tandem with one another more frequently, like feminine and submissive, then they become implicitly associated with one another, allowing you to more easily bring up one idea when thinking about the other. This is how decades of popular culture depicting certain ethnic or racial groups as criminals can cause implicit bias to form without the person ever believing in it explicitly.

However, the brain can also modulate connection forming with far fewer similtaneous exposures. Think of frightening experiences causing a sudden phobia of whatever the person was experiencing at the time. If you get scared around a fluffy animal enough times, you might become scared of the animal without the scary thing itself. This is caused by “reward” or “reinforcement” mechanisms encouraging stronger associations to form in certain circumstances. The brain evolved to make connections form more strongly when the stimulus is more salient.

It may not be obvious, but this gives insight into how and why we want. We want because it helps us survive, from wanting to get away from that which is bad for survival and seeking that which is good for it. A lot of these wants like hunger or the desire to breathe are buried deep in our brains, as if we don’t satisfy them, we die. You can’t force yourself to suffocate by holding your breath, as you will fall unconscious and your brain will automatically start breathing. We want certain things and sometimes cannot change that. Even if we manage to hold off on eating till we die, we’ll be hungry till the end.

You may be asking why I’m focusing on wants rather than trying to answer an ethical question, but I’m doing this because I realized ethics has always been about what we want. We bridge the is/ought canyon by wondering where else our sense of what “should be” can originate. We evolved to want survival, so we think we should survive. We want pleasure, so we think we ought to have it. We want companionship, money, life, liberty, and happiness. We need no better justification than wanting it finding a way to exist with other people and their wants.

…

Finally circling back to your inability to fully accept that you ought to be a woman, you need to accept that your wanting it is enough. You clearly want to be a woman more than anything else, and other people being bigoted is all the stands against it on the side of other people’s wants. You deserve the same thing you think we all do.

If you like epistemology, then I have some thoughts that might help.

At a neurological level, our brain seems to store information in terms of essence. To simplify and generalize the raw information our sensory organs capture, multiple stages of compression break it into something we can efficiently work with. For vision, your brain breaks info into elements like lines movement, color. From there, it tries to place the subject and the context, identifying what it sees and where it is separately.

The fun part of this system is that it does a lot of generation. The raw image you receive from your eyes looks like shit. It’s mostly light and dark, with a small section of 8k full color and a blind spot right under it. We perceive reality like a movie by constantly moving that 8k part to get as much info as possible. Our brain fills in any missing details with what it thinks should be there.

We understand the world by simulating it in our minds. Like an AI generation model, it builds a version of reality using the interconnected schemas we piece together over our lifetime. Our memories and past experiences are saved as generative prompts of what happened, not what actually happened. Every single time you remember something, you’re not accessing a detailed file, but generating it from scratch using key details and connections.

The end result of using fallible essences to build our reality is that we often struggle when they reveal their inaccuracy. When ideas are central to our being, understandings indispensable to our entire view of the world, we try everything possible to preserve it.

Realizing you are trans feels like a Matrix level reversal of reality because it truly is. There is no reality we exist in other than the one our mind builds. Having such a core paradigm overturned feels like the world was turned on its head and pulled inside out. It’s hard to let go of that old reality emotionally, as without it you free fall through uncertainty.

It’s hard, but rejecting solipsism will get you to the most likely epistemological truth: We will never escape this cave. We can never perceive anything but shadows of what’s out there. Even our most well tested and fundamental theories of science rely on shadows that tell an incomplete story. If we found an understanding of everything, it would still be a shadow. The most generalizable shadow, but still only a representation of the true form.

…

There’s always a chance you’re wrong about your identity, but with the abandonment of certainty comes the rejection of deduction. You can’t prove that you have the “transfem essence” because no essence can be proven for reality.

Medical disorders? Tools fundamentally relative to place and time. Taxonomic definitions? Created for convenience. Quantum particles? They ain’t truly particles, just quantized bits! We made it ALL the fuck up.

You probably can’t find that certainty. It’s most likely impossible. The best we can do is choose the most likely option and move on. You’ve started your transition. Being cis isn’t the null; being trans is.

Oh ffs, why do I not learn this till the day after?

She might need to learn what she’s missing out on. Self love feels so euphoric that it becomes addicting. Once I fought back against the assumption that I was a piece of shit, I realized I could be so much happier than I ever thought possible. Coming out was necessary, but it wasn’t enough.

Do you take an anti androgen? If you’re doing mono, you can aim higher than your current levels into the 250-300 pg/ml range. Your 90 reading after 7 days is well above male ranges and well within the female mean, as cis women often have lows below 50. Your only concern as a transfem would be your t levels.

E levels above 200 will suppress your t properly on their own, but if you’re not taking an anti androgen(usually in daily pill form), then you would want higher than 200 on average. If you aim closer to 300 on average, your low will still properly suppress testosterone without needing another medication.

Oh Sky, you look fine and have looked fine for some time. Not looking good enough is something all women have to deal with. Even if you were an actual model, you’d probably feel the same way you do now. It really is an act of accepting reality and striving for better rather than bemoaning reality and thinking that you suck.

Look in the mirror right now and identify 1 thing you like about your appearance. Every day for the next week, write down a different thing, no matter how small or insignificant you think it is. Don’t qualify or include any critiques in this list; only write about the good things. In a week, make a post here listing the 7 compliments, and any other thoughts you might have. I’ll be waiting.

I could give you several compliments, but that won’t hit the same as if you gave them yourself. Your brain will just write anything I say off as me lying to make you feel better. The activity probably sounds like some corny bullshit about “just looking on the bright side,” but the whole goal of it is to make you see both the dark and the light.

You’re only seeing the negatives, but that isn’t more accurate by virtue of making you feel bad. You don’t have an accurate view of reality right now. You sound no different than someone that tries to pretend that they’re perfect.

Even the lighter smells change. I smell like how I remember my mom smelling. The stinkier elements aren’t as different as the less smelly ones.

Boobs grow in mysterious ways, stopping and starting throughout life. Another thing to consider is putting on a bit of weight, even temporarily. It might help fill things out a bit.

You replied to the wrong comment. Fuck the person who said that. DIY is less ideal than having professional guidance, but when the professionals provide such a terrible standard of care, it’s absolutely safer to go DIY for many. The evidence is clear. Gender affirming care is both an impressively effective treatment, and the only effective treatment for disorderly dysphoria.

My life drastically improved before I started hormones when I simply came out, but having my HRT delayed was a burden that could only be alleviated by getting estrogen. It wore on me greatly, and the cost and headache of DIY were the only thing that made me stick with the broken ass system for over a year. I honestly would have gone DIY if I knew from the start how long it would take.

It wasn’t about being a valid woman, but not feeling like my entire body was gangrene to my identity. I was a woman without it, but there was no substitute for me.

It sounds like you want the effects of HRT, so even if you aren’t this gender or that, it sounds like HRT is for you. Taking HRT does require frequent tests and careful instruction, but if your country’s system has shit doctors and shit standards, you’re gonna be safer going outside that system anyhow.

Euphoria from having a high pain tolerance!

Things like baggy pants and flaired skirts/dresses can hide a lack of hips or waist. Also, making sure your waistline is above your pelvis is essential. Even if you have a gut, it helps a ton. If you want to wear a baggy top, wear tighter pants/leggings and have the top be longer as well.

A lot depends on the safety of the country and what your next steps will be. If you want to transition fully, at some point you need to tell her that it isn’t a debate or conversation; you’re going to transition and she can either get on board or not. Prepare to live independently in case she refuses to accept you. The key is making it absolutely clear that there is no possibility of her convincing you to “live normally.”

If your country is especially dangerous and unsupportive, you’ll probably need to “stealth” as a cis woman in order to transition. You’ll need to choose either side of the binary, regardless of how you identify, and go all in to convincing strangers that you aren’t queer. You’ll need to gender conform and only deviate around known allies. In that situation, it’ll be important to to find local queer people and move out. In order to keep your sanity, you’ll need safe spaces, and living with someone transphobic will be miserable.

You can hope that you’re mom will accept reality, but it wouldn’t be safe to rely on that. If you want to transition and your family doesn’t support you, the best case scenario is you move on. Leave the door open for them coming back into your life, but only if they agree to accept unconditionally. Otherwise, you’ll hurt each other trying to create incompatible futures.

I recently started HRT in America, which took me 15 months to get. The first mistake I made was trying to get it through insurance, with them sending me the wrong info, offices that refused to set up an appointment and never called back, and doctors who retired before I could meet with them. That delayed things a year, when I finally went out of network with Planned Parenthood, and barely paid more than with insurance co-pays and parking fees.

The second issue I ran into was having my treatment put on hold for liver problems. I needed approval from my primary, but despite knowing the referrals take months, they demanded I go see a specialist. It didn’t matter that I showed research that said estradiol was a potential treatment for my issues or that they had no liability excuses to delay my care. At my 3 month follow-up, I managed to convince Planned Parenthood to approve my treatment, meaning my insurance did nothing but harm.

I live in one of the bluest states with fewer insurance issues than almost any other, yet this shit still fucked me. I’m not even lower class, yet that didn’t matter. Our healthcare system is that fucked. The saving grace is that we have somewhat affordable informed consent, but good luck if you have to deal with the insurance system. It’s less a trans healthcare issue and more of a problem with the whole system; rigged for the billionaires and hell for everyone else.

I love how even his bullshit story was already damming to anyone who sees children as people. What a pathetic deadbeat narcissist.

Girl, you do not see what everyone else sees. Your “dysphoria” is worse than ever because you feel like you don’t live up to the brain worms beauty standards that all women have forced down our throats. You can be a bombshell and still not get loved or snuggled. Being ultra pretty won’t bring that, but appreciating yourself will.

The biggest thing standing in the way of you getting the love you need is how unhappy you are. When I was a young adult, I thought I could never find a relationship because I was ugly as hell. Looking back at my boy appearance, I looked fine. Plenty of dudes who looked like that found the relationships that seemed so impossible at the time.

The reason I couldn’t get one was because I hated myself. I had no confidence in how I carried myself as I thought I was the ugliest person on earth. Now that I’ve started to transition, I’m feeling so much better about my appearance. I still see problems that really bug me, especially my fat distribution and unsymmetrical face, but I know I’ll never think I look perfect. I’ll never see no problems, even if I improve those things.

The secret to feeling better about yourself is appreciating what things you can feel better about. You have cute hair, sweet eyes, fully lips, and adorable cheeks. You look like a woman, a sad woman, but not a man. People perceiving you as a man might have more to do with how they know you from the past than who you are now. Unless they see you in a dress with the most fem makeup imaginable, their perception of you just won’t update. You’re both overlaying a ghost on you rather than seeing the truth.

If I had to presume something that bothers you about your appearance, I’d guess it’s having a bigger nose, which makes me really sad. So many women have noses like yours, it’s just a beauty standard thing rather than a gendered thing. If you dislike how they look right now, try smiling. Everyone looks better when they smile or laugh, as they seem more approachable and friendly.

You’re a pretty girl who I’d be more than willing to cuddle, holding and soothing, telling you that you’re safe from the imaginary man you see in the mirror.