Curse. It's never done anything but hurt me, both because of having to suffer as I watched a body that I liked mutate into a body that I still hate because it was poisoned by testosterone, as well as years and years of mental self-abuse due to constantly feeling like I was broken or delusional or a freak for feeling that way in the first place.
13 years straight of telling yourself that your gender identity was defective does REALLY bad things to a person. I still have a hard time making friends, it's still impossible to love my body because of it, and I still fight mental demons telling me I'm an imposter or an intruder every single time I try to enter women's spaces.
Maybe I wouldn't have been this way if society wasn't so messed up about trans issues back in the late-90s in terms of only using trans women as the punchline to jokes, and always making them into "haha look at the freak" sideshow attractions or pushing the "always knew from birth" narrative and the false notion that a "sex change" was the only part of transition (which excluded me because since hormones were never mentioned, I believed wrongly for 13 years that my body was broken beyond repair due to testosterone, and that getting a "sex-change" wouldn't mean any muscle reduction or hair reduction or anything, or having actual boobs or actual feminine body shapes, it would just be my unchanged gigantic male body but with tissueless fake boobs and a vainga added on to them.) Maybe if I had known the truth back then I could have turned out differently. But as it is, 13 years of mental self-abuse due to believing that I was broken beyond repair, and therefore the desire made me nothing but a freak, I've turned into en emotional self-doubting mess, and I've lost the ability to simply BE without some aspect of my gender causing me distress.
I wouldn't wish being trans on anyone. Almost every single one of my MtF trans friends have the same mental self-abusive demons. It is SO damned hard to override all those years of rejection and self-hatred and develop confidence when your entire young life was full of them, either at your own hands, or the hands of your rejecting parents, or at the hands of homophobic peers.
I'm sure once being trans is de-stigmatized, and once young trans kids don't have to grow up being constantly told that they're defective, this nonsense will stop. Until then, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
