If you’re having doubts at all, I would really strongly (but kindly) urge you to at the very least postpone the surgery to give yourself some more time to think & some breathing room. I was in a similar position, where I had felt like I desperately needed the mastectomy & couldn’t cope without it, only to have a massive panic attack the morning of and realise I couldn’t go through with it, I was having too many doubts. And sure, it was a bit scary having to cancel, and I lost the money I’d spent on consultations etc (private in the UK) - right after cancelling I really regretted cancelling & felt like a “coward” for not going through with it. But now I’m so, SO glad I didn’t. Like you, I didn’t think I could cope with living as a woman - it took a long time, a lot of baby steps (I started slowly with “I don’t have to call myself a woman, I can just accept that I’m female, I don’t have to call myself anything else”), but it got easier and I’m so glad now. I still don’t feel super comfortable in my skin all the time, idk if anyone does! But at the very least, I’m relieved I didn’t have surgery. Some of the effects of T have lasted, but I don’t really mind those. I would definitely mind having had parts of my body removed. If there’s one thing to bear in mind, it’s that you could always book the surgery again another time - you won’t be able to get your breasts back.

You're right - I think that was a big part of it, especially earlier on in my transition. I never wanted to be particularly effeminate but I did want to be on the androgynous side and I was envious of men's ability to "get away with" breaking gender roles more than women. I think I was also jealous of the society/culture gay men seemed to have which I couldn't find as a young gay girl and felt kind of... excluded from? I had a few gay male friends as a teenager but no lesbian friends, and I think I was pretty envious that they had that common ground couldn't be part of, something like that.

And yeah, that's true. Hopefully it'll fade in time.

As you've probably already gleaned from the other comments, everyone's experiences are different here. I wore a binder on and off when I was 14-15, stopped for a couple of years, went back to wearing one whenever I was around other people from about 18-22. Sagging, different shape, lower hanging, all of that, yep. I also lost a lot of weight as well as experiencing fat redistribution from testosterone. I stopped binding altogether about a year and a half ago and now either wear no bra or a soft sports bra, and they have definitely recovered a lot. Still a slightly different shape I think, maybe a bit less firm, but much fuller and much more like they used to be. I have also gained a bit of weight back, which probably made a bit of difference.

Like u/shadowthehedgehoe said - eating well is really important and exercises might help if you feel like trying that. I've also read that simply not wearing a bra can strengthen the muscles/tissue or something(?) as your breasts don't become reliant on a bra to support them... or something like that, haha. Might be nonsense, Self-acceptance is important too, though! Breasts are always going to change over time. As long as they're healthy they're perfectly good imo :)

yeah, i've heard many people talk about their sexual preferences changing on HRT. i'm not so sure how much of it was hormonal vs psychological for me personally though - i went back and forth between lesbian and bisexual before i decided to transition, then once i started to transition and live as a man i was almost exclusively attracted to men (generally cis men or passing trans men). just before deciding to stop transitioning i realised my feelings for women (physical and emotional attraction) were much much stronger and i was really only finding men attractive out of "habit" (like, actors i'd found attractive for a long time i still did, but not with the same sort of... passion, and rarely any new men seemed attractive at all). now i would say i'm technically bisexual but with a strong preference for women, but i'm not really sure what causes the changes.

Yeah, I've heard that there could be a hormonal element in play when people find their sexual attraction changing, too. It sounds like it would be a really interesting thing to study, if anyone ever bothered to do that, haha.

Being a gay trans man was certainly way more complicated, lol, and totally unsustainable, but at the time it wasn't I wanted to be a trans man, I just wanted to be a gay man. Similarly, it's not really anything to do with body types that sets off the dysphoria. It's not that I particularly want to look like a man anymore (I also get the "ugh I look like a man/transwoman" dysphoria sometimes too), it's a more abstract feeling that just being a man in a romantic relationship with another man would somehow be ""better"" than being a lesbian. Which, of course, is absolutely not true, it's just a weird dysphoria spiral I find myself going down sometimes. Shrug.

Oh yeah I totally understand, and I'm really not immersed in that whole fandom world at all anymore - reddit is the only social media I use, and not very often. I completely agree that it's not an accurate portrayal of gay men at all. I don't want to make it seem like my whole desire to be a man was set off by fanfic as that definitely was not the case - I was only heavily into fanfic about 10 years ago, and the dysphoria was/is set off by actual gay couples, or those presented in literature by actual gay men, much more strongly. Definitely do agree with what you're saying, though.

I've definitely heard of autoandrophilia and have wondered about it, but the thing is there isn't really any sexual element. I'm pretty well repulsed by male sexual anatomy, I don't fantasise about having gay sex with a man or anything like that. When I was trans-identified (and single, lol) I would fantasise about romantic relationships, but that was really my limit. I don't know, I suppose there could be different levels to it. Interesting to thin about, anyway, and I'm glad you seem to be doing better :)

That's a good point, and thanks for pointing it out - I suppose it's not literally no reason, more that things that might not have made me anxious before are making me extra anxious now, or when before, if there was something I couldn't immediately deal with, I might be able to put it to the side for when I could deal with it, now I'll just keep being anxious about it. Or keep being anxious about situations that are over.

I've always had anxiety problems but they've got a lot worse, I suppose. I'll try that tracing back thing, thank you.

Similar to a few other commenters here, I went through various phases as a teenager of trying out different labels, most consistently bi, then settling with lesbian for a good couple of years before I transitioned. While transitioning, I also had the experience of thinking the "being gay" itself was the important part of my identity, and that I only "thought" I was a lesbian because I was "repressing my trans identity" but still knew I was gay so was misdirecting those feelings. Or something like that. Now I realise it was kind of the other way around? It's a bit messy. Regardless:

1. It definitely intensified it.. I was obsessed with male bodies and felt uncomfortable looking at female bodies. My sex drive was through the roof & I dealt with it very unhealthily. I thought about having sex with men constantly but I was still low-key repulsed by male genitals & didn't enjoy seeing or directly interacting with them.

2. At the time I believed it made it clear to me that I had been wrong about being a lesbian, and my desire towards men did seem very intense, but looking back it felt like an actual shift internally. I think I still experienced attraction towards women, but I was so wildly uncomfortable with women and with the idea of experiencing attraction towards them as a man (I didn't want to be a predator, basically, and generally found the idea of being straight kind of repulsive lol) that I shut down any thoughts I had about them.

3. Both, and I have always been a lot more attracted to female genitals whether on a woman or a trans man. For example I might fantasise about giving oral to a trans man with female genitals but the idea of doing so to male genitals makes me actually nauseous. I also was never able to form an emotional bond with a male the way I was able to do with women and occasionally with trans men.

4. My orientation actually changed before I quit T - I had been reluctantly accepting that I was bisexual for a while as I started to relax my grip on my ftm identity and become more open to the idea of possibly being nonbinary or something. For a while I considered myself "gay both ways". The real change happened when I met my now-girlfriend and could not possibly deny my attraction to her, but I couldn't stand the thought of being with her "as a man". That led me to do some serious soul-searching as to exactly what the issue was, which ended up with realising I wasn't trans and needed to stop T. Since being off it & accepting that I'm female my attraction to males completely plummeted - I still sometimes question whether I'm bisexual but thinking about being with a man in any capacity is repulsive to me.

5. I think dysphoria was a huge factor, since it made me want to avoid women & female bodies as much as possible - I even steered clear of media with lesbian characters because it would make me question my ftm identity in a way that was distressing for me. There was also some internalised lesbophobia that had me subconsciously believing that being a gay man would be a better, easier, happier life than being a lesbian - since the concept of "being gay" was still important to me, I was clinging to that. I couldn't fathom the idea of living as a straight man, it was & still is unconscionable to me lol.

6. I'm about 90% sure I'm not actually bisexual, so I use lesbian/homosexual female.

I'd also like to add it's kind of reassuring to read that other people have been through this same experience. Not that I'm glad other people have been through the trauma of transitioning/detransitioning, but it made it harder for me trying to reconcile with being a same-sex attracted woman when I had been through a period of about two years being very strongly attracted almost exclusively to men. Looking back now I can't relate to that version of myself at all, and often I can hardly stand being around men let alone tolerate the idea of being sexually intimate with them. So yeah, thanks OP for raising the topic :)