This is a bit long, apologies.

I had at a young age deliberately surrounded myself with communities of other women as a way to combat my dysphoria, but within say the past decade or so my communities of other women have become communities where women are the minority. I revisited the idea then that maybe my dysphoria was because I'm trans, and I spent the past year trying to be A Dude within those communities (but not outside of them, because I wasn't sure how much I wanted to commit to upending my life over this) and I realized...I hated it. Because everyone already knew me and so their affirming me by using pronouns and 'bro' and 'dude' just felt like they were humoring me in asking them to lie. Even though they were all trans and I know they were trying to validate me. I did not feel validated. I felt lied to.

And I also was very uncomfortable with the way these spaces started talking about how they were very very gender diverse because look! Men write fanfiction too! And anytime I would try to have a discussion about how, you know, most of the women here are cis and most of the men are trans and none of the non-binary people are AMAB people would get upset at me and say I was invalidating their genders when all I wanted was to have a conversation about how we were still congregating by AGAB and if there was something I was missing about why that was happening.

And also I realized that in years past there were occasionally dudes! And I never considered one way or the other if they were cis or trans, but now anytime there was a guy my default assumption was that they were trans and that any weird artsy woman I met I assumed would eventually tell me she wasn't a woman and this made me feel really...bad. This ultimately made me think long and hard about my own gender issues and looking back I realized that I actually felt upset and betrayed every time one of the women I knew said "actually I'm nonbinary" or "I'm transmasc" because every single one of my communities started out mostly ladies and then switched to women being a minority not because more men joined but because everyone was trans or nonbinary. it was the digital art community. It was the fanfic community. It was the RP community. It was even the cool feminists writers I most looked up to. And I thought back to how awful that made me feel, how much it felt like I was being left behind to be the only person stuck in the inferior gender. How it confirmed to me that being a woman was something everyone would escape from if they could.

And then also the spaces I was in had initially loved female characters but it had gotten to a point where slash dominated. I write slash, but I don't want to only write slash. However, I realized that I had less dysphoria when the characters I wrote had a more even gender split. And most of the gay transmasc people I knew were everything I had always disliked about the slash community. and in retrospect I also had some feelings of "so now the people who are most creepy and fetishy about gay men have more legitimacy writing gay romances than I do wtf is that"

So forcing myself to confront all of those feelings made me realize that I was reacting to the communities I was in and their values and that I needed to get myself out instead of being in spaces that reinforced my internalized misogyny.

I'll let the detrans men speak to the gender and detransitioning aspects of your concerns, but I want to ask why you feel that you have to go back to being Matthew? Why can't you continue to be Madison? It's a gender neutral name, after all. Look at the list of men named Madison on this wikipedia page if you need some reassurance that you can remain Madison and still be male.

Hey, I'm sorry you feel dead inside. I'm not sure that 'not fitting' with women is a meaningful statement, honestly, given how many people women as a group encompasses. I've never met anyone who felt like they fit in, even the women I talk to who seem on first inspection to be the epitome of suburban white feminine housewifery. Every single one of them, if I can get her into a conversation on that topic, admits to feeling like she's not quite getting things right and that other people are somehow fitting in better than she is.

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That said, when you say you don't fit in is it important to you that you show the appropriate signs of being Part Of X Group? Or is the real problem that you're lonely and you hope that by being part of a group you'll solve that problem? Because you don't have to have a noticeable group affiliation in order to not feel lonely. Making friends is hard, and I'm not downplaying that, but it's still easier than trying to contort yourself to fit into a group and still feeling miserable because you're not able to give off all the correct group signals.

Anyway, the kinds of things that helped me work through my feelings when I was in a similar place to you (and things I still go back to at times):

1. Period tracker. Specifically one that will allow you to write in how you feel each day of the month. If I feel particularly depressed I make sure to note that, so that I can see how my cycle changes my mood which lets me be very aware of which days of the month my self-loathing is gonna pop up so that when it happens I can remind myself that my hormone fluctuations are impacting my perspective
2. Value card sorting (like this)
3. I get out a notebook and I write a list of traits I wish that I had (more extroverted and less neurotic are the top of the list lol) and then I think about people I admire (including creators who don't know I exist) and then make a list of the things I admire about them
4. Years ago I wrote down a list of skills I wanted to learn. I was indiscriminate about this. Then I sorted them into different priority groupings and made a nice new list with specific steps to take for each item in my highest priority grouping (and also a list of specific household chores) And now whenever I start to feel awful about myself I look at that list and take action because doing the thing takes my mind off naval gazing and then also makes me proud of having actually accomplished something, and in the long term I've improved so much at things I had fantasized about being able to do but procrastinated on before I implemented this strategy.

I don't know if any of that might be helpful to you, but I hope it will be!

It's somewhat relatable to me, I'm less happy about the boobs and curves, but that's more because I don't like being viewed sexually and not because I inherently dislike them, if that makes sense. I actually opted not to transition in the end, because transitioning would destroy the parts of my life that I like and I saw no guarantee that I would be happier on the other side and felt pretty strongly that mostly transitioning would end up being a negative for me for a few reasons including:
As is normal for those of us who are Autistic or ADHD I have terrible executive function, which means that I find appointments a huge disruptor for my life. I accomplish nothing on days I have appointments and as such I try to have as few of them as possible. Transitioning would require me to have more of them.

No matter how many different ways I try to ensure I don't forget to take my meds I still sometimes forget to take them. I tried birth control for a few months and as a result messed up my period tracker due to forgetting to take pills sometimes. So I figured that I don't need to have more meds to try and keep track of.

I know myself and I know that if I was transitioning I would spend all my time hung up on whether or not I was passing and also hating that I would never be a cis man. It's easier for me to shove aside dysphoria when I'm not actively trying to get other people to view me as a man. I know some people are the opposite, though, so I'm not anti-transition.

If I could magically become a cis man? Yeah, that's something I would be tempted to go for, but putting in all that effort and going through surgery and taking hormones for something that only kind of sort of resembles what I actually want? not worth it for me.

I think that "A phase" is a dismissive way to word it, and also that neither your parents nor anyone here can tell you the answer to your question for sure. I will say though that if you have a low self-esteem or any mental or developmental disorders or trauma that you should prioritize those first as in my experience any of the above can be mistaken for gender related dysphoria - this is not saying gender dysphoria isn't real and it's only ever trauma and mental illness, but it's better to confirm nothing else is going on.

Another thing to consider is this. I never took steps to medically transition because I knew in a very conscious way that it would make me feel worse. I'm prone to ruminating and fixating and I knew that the fact I would never be a cis man would drive me over the edge - that I would obsess over passing and gender to an extent that would overwhelm the entire rest of my life. Going by he/him online to people who didn't know me already felt great! But then I got some friends to call me he/him and realized it didn't feel affirming at all because they...already knew me. So it didn't feel real, it felt like playing pretend. And most of the people I would interact with would be people who already know me...I have zero interest in entirely rebuilding my life just to feel validated as a man, you know? So it's actually healthier for me to not even go there and to ignore gender to the best of my ability, even though if I could press a button and be a cis dude...yeah that would be tempting. It also wouldn't actually solve my underlying problem, which is that I hate myself.

Some people are able to navigate the world as a trans person without obsessing over the fact that they'll never be seen as a cis person of the gender they transitioned to and more power to them, but I know it would be unhealthy for me and you should think about whether or not you would be able to do this healthily, too.

Being a teenager is really hard, and being a teenage girl is downright traumatic in and of itself, especially if you add in Autism or ADHD or OCD etc etc. I have never known anyone who went through female puberty who didn't hate it and hate how her body was changing. It's an unfortunate reality for all of us, so you can take some comfort in the fact that you're in good company.

So again to reiterate I'm not saying that you're not trans, because that's not something I can know. But if you work on improving your mental health then you should have a clearer answer for yourself (and for your parents).

Ha, older adult solidarity. When I was in school the only knowledge I had of trans people were jokes about trans women on TV. It never even occurred to me as an option - I did spend a not insubstantial amount of time wishing I was born a guy or wondering if I could pull off enough of an androgynous look to be mistaken for one but my mom would have had a fit if I'd tried. So it wasn't until I was already an adult and out of school entirely that I learned about trans issues and my primary thought about that was "if I was a teenager today I would be trans" and then I more or less ignored that thought because I was trying so hard to learn to love my gender so it wasn't until almost my entire social circle became not women those issues came back to the fore.

Despite definite internal misogyny I never got into the not like the other girls rhetoric in school, but I think maybe that was because I was the only (diagnosed) autistic student mainstreamed with the rest of the student body and so I didn't need to try to be not like the other girls...if I was better at masking I might have gravitated more towards that position, idk. But when it changed from not like the other girls to not like the other girls but make it activism it became harder for me to maintain my progress on the internalized misogyny front.

ah well, it's nice to know I'm not alone in the frustration around the whole thing. This is something I don't feel like I can talk about to most people, which is pretty lonely. (but I'm also lucky, I realize, since I didn't actually transition in the first place. You and everyone else who realized after you'd started transitioning are pretty amazing, 'cause that sunk cost fallacy is no joke.)

Hahaha, I definitely tend towards "finding myself" but last year I was tearfully telling my husband that I don't KNOW WHO I AM and I need to find my authentic self and he looks at me and says "You know yourself, you just don't like yourself. You should stop trying to find yourself and start trying to like yourself more." and I had to grudgingly concede this was probably the correct answer.

I wish I could recommend the book I mentioned to more people, but the author is controversial for, unfortunately, good reasons lol. The book itself isn't research based, anyway, it's anecdotal - but much of the info resonated with me despite that.

That said, there's so much research in the area of autism and sexuality, so for anyone else reading this thread who might be curious and who wants more than just the word of people on reddit:

Gender Identity in Autism: Sex Differences in Social Affiliation with Gender Groups

**"**High rates of gender variance have been reported in autistic people, with higher variance in autistic females than males. The social component of gender identity may be affected, with autistic females experiencing lower identification with and feeling less positively about their gender groups than controls. We measured gender identification, gender self-esteem, and aspects of gender expression (masculinity and femininity) in autistic natal males and females, and controls (N = 486). We found that autistic people had lower gender identification and gender self-esteem than controls, and autistic natal females had lower gender identification than autistic natal males and natal female controls. In conclusion, autistic people, particularly natal females, had lower social identification with and more negative feelings about a gender group."

Gender identity, sexual orientation and adverse sexual experiences in autistic females

"Autistic females also present with greater variability in their sexual orientation. This has been evidenced by higher rates of bisexual and lesbian sexual orientations, as well as lower rates of heterosexuality in autistic females when compared to both autistic males [4, 6, 20], and non-autistic females [21]. Within this study, the term non-heterosexual/homosexual sexual orientation is used to describe identification with lesbian or bisexual sexual orientation."

The sexual health, orientation, and activity of autistic adolescents and adults

"Our results replicate previous findings regarding sexual orientation among autistic adolescents and adults, showing far greater likelihood of identifying as asexual or ‘other’ sexual orientation compared to nonautistic individuals. We also found that autistic individuals were less likely to identify as heterosexual than others. There were significant interactions of sex and diagnosis for bisexuality and homosexuality (and sex-specific values have been reported below). These results indicate that autistic males are uniquely more likely to identify as bisexual compared to nonautistic males (whereas there was no significant difference between female groups); conversely, autistic females are uniquely more likely to identify as homosexual compared to sex-matched peers (whereas there was no significant difference between male groups)."

And this recent study hurt my feelings but I'm gonna post it here anyway

Deep learning identifies robust gender differences in functional brain organization and their dissociable links to clinical symptoms in autism

"stDNN achieved consistently high classification accuracy in distinguishing between females and males with ASD. Notably, stDNN trained to distinguish between females and males with ASD could not distinguish between neurotypical females and males"

related to the last point - there's a book back from when Asperger's was still a diagnosis according to the DSM called "Asperger's In Love" and while some of it is a bit...outdated...there are two points that are brought up in the book that I think are relevant to this discussion.

One thing the author noted was that the men she talked, when they discussed what they liked about their spouses/girlfriends, almost never mentioned anything sexual, which was very different from allistic men, and that sexual intimacy was overall a lower priority for them. (Most of the men preferred masturbation, because it was a solo activity). The women were split between repulsed by sex and being sexually adventurous. Anyway, I know that having a lower sex drive has given me a difficult time wrt "am I attracted to this person or not??!!!" and I wonder if having a more muted interest in sex might not lead to some of us conflating less obvious attraction with a desire to be someone.

The other interesting thing is that she mentioned that all of the Autistic women she talked to were obsessed with finding their authentic selves (this was less of an issue for the men she talked with) and went to great lengths to find themselves. Some of her anecdotes made me think more they were trying to find a community they felt at home in, but I think the observation was still interesting.