It looks incredibly hard for young people right now to deal with societal misogyny. It's way worse than it was when I was young. We started muttering amongst ourselves with concern when we were buying toys for our friends' kids and they were all heavily gendered. Pink and frills for girls, dark bold colors for boys. We knew then that we'd gone backwards, that advertising agencies and corporations had discovered that if they massively gendered products and appealed to stereotypes they could manipulate little girls and boys into buying their products. There is a stage in childhood where you think in a very binary way about gender, and they played into that hard. It ingrained it into children and young people, that to be a boy you had to be a certain way, and vice versa. And guess what, all those kids are hitting adolescence and young adulthood now, and they are being captured by the social contagion of trans ideas.

Some of those people are genuinely trans, but a lot of them are victims of having been told their entire lives that you can't be a certain way if you're a girl, or you must be a certain way if you're a boy. It's nonsense. All the advances we made in gender equality in child rearing, in the 70s and 80s, just sort of vanished when we hit the 2000s. We could see this coming.

Edit: grammar.

I hope you win, for your own sake, and that it gives some kind of sense of accountability for those who were careless with you, and also restitution and knowing you're being heard. You can never get back what was taken, but whatever justice you can get from it, I hope you get it all.

I'm so sorry for how you're feeling. It must be really hard to be where you're at.

You are not a monster-woman, you are female to the core of your being, every cell in your body. Nothing can take that away from you. It's yours, it belongs to you. You're also incredible, whether you decide to be socially trans or detransition, you are an amazing person with a deep well of experience that other people cannot even fathom. What you have been through gives you insights and lived-knowledge that few people have, and that is worth so much. People should, and will, admire you and look up to you for what you have to say. What I am trying to learn for myself is that our experiences add to you, they do not take away. They are battle scars to be worn with pride.

I know it doesn't feel like that at the moment, but you have been through an incredibly hard road, and you are resilient beyond what you even yet understand of yourself. Be proud of yourself.

My friend recently told me about a form of PTSD which is colloquially known as "white coat anxiety", which is trauma induced by medical personnel that causes you to experience anxiety whenever you have to access medical services. I thought, "oh yeah, I definitely have that..."

I don't really know how to usefully input, except to say that if going to trans and lesbian subreddits is disrupting your stability, then don't go to them for a while and see if you continue to have those thoughts? Humans are influenced by others around them, and can even be influenced into doing and saying things they wouldn't have done on their own. It's when you get on your own that you begin to understand yourself. If you don't have those thoughts when you're away from those people, then consider that those thoughts are not coming from you, they are coming from outside influence, and simply stepping away from that community may help you feel more comfortable and be able to hear your own true internal voice more clearly. You may find that you don't need any of that stuff, and are happier without that noise.

I think it's a very common thing to not recognise the person in the mirror, and not feel like it's you. You look at the world out of your eyes, not into them. I can't recall a single moment in my life when I recognised the person looking back at me from a mirror. It was always a disorienting experience. Your self-image and your actual appearance almost never match up.

The important thing, to my mind, is that you are beginning to realise that the person that everybody else sees when they look at you is an awesome person, and even though you still struggle with your self-esteem, the more you realise that, the more you will get that you are an awesome person. It takes a while to digest stuff like that, so don't expect to get it all in one go, but just remind yourself from time to time that the you that you are catching sight of when you look in the mirror is the helpful, kind, caring person you aspired to be for so long, so you must be doing something right.

edit: grammar

she's not the only one, that's more or less my story too. Though mine's a little more complicated due to health reasons. Realising that it was society that was wrong about what constituted male and female, and I wasn't wrong for not fitting those stereotypes was a massive liberation for me.

I just want to say that I agree with everything you said. Reading it was like reading my own voice speaking to me. I had just that experience. My dysphoria at least in part comes from gender confusion because of being told "that's not for girls, it's for boys" regarding a lot of my interests. I spent so much time as a child playing with cars and toy guns and swords, and climbing and biking and always connected with boys more than girls. Girls are a complete mystery to me, they speak a social language I don't understand; but I'm fairly sure I'm autistic, and the reason I struggle to understand girls is because the complexity of their social behavior is beyond my comprehension. Boys are simple and straightforward, they say what they mean and what they feel. I suspect that my issues in many parts come simply from those two things; I liked 'boys' games and toys better than 'girly' stuff, and my autism found socialising with girls too challenging so I gravitated towards boys.

Neither of those things make me a boy. But they sure did make me very confused. If I hadn't had society telling me I didn't fit a stereotype, I wouldn't ever have considered transitioning.

I had to shave every 2 days even during normal puberty, so please don't think that it makes you any less of a woman. It might not have been the way your body would have turned out without HRT, but it's a normal level for many women anyway. Men are often extremely ignorant of how much effort society expects us as women to go through in order to present that smooth, perfect, doll-like image to the world. It's a completely false image, no woman is like that, and very few can get away with minimal effort without the real biological mammal features coming out. Mammals have hair all over their bodies, human females are no exception. The person who needs to adjust in this one is your guy friend. He has completely made up, unrealistic, expectations of what a real woman looks like. He will have to be disabused of them sooner or later, because he's never going to find a woman that lives up to that fictional expectation. If he wants a partner, he's going to have to learn to love her, hair and all.

I am sorry for the struggles you have been through with females in your life. Yeah, that's a profound observation, about it coming from others' trauma. I think that a lot of people's wounds come from people with wounds, if that makes sense. "hurt people hurt people" as they say. When the people around you are wounded, and so not functioning naturally, their walls and defences and prickly armor all impact how they interact with you. It's like dominoes, the mental bruises get passed on.