Look Vanna.
Let me put this real simple for you. There are those who want feminine perfection and there are those of us who just want to be female, whether we are feminine or not. I'm in the latter camp.
I had SRS when I was still young, but I never had anything else, not FFS, not BA. I didn't even have counseling, but that is another story. I have no doubts or regrets, but I am a long way away from being a stereotypical little woman.
My aim was never to become uber femme, just to be of female sex. I never looked at myself with the critical eye that you describe being disturbed by either. I too like my shoulders, and I like my face.
I regard myself as fairly gender neutral when it comes to all the guff about psychology. Just because you don't want to be an extreme doesn't mean that you necessarily want to be male either.
One can be an androgynous male or an androgynous female. To anyone who lacks understanding these two options may seem very close. They may even look identical. Yet the idea of being first option fills me with unspeakable horror, whilst the second I am happy to admit to and own to some degree.
In other words whether you should have SRS or not depends NOT on how you want to present, but how you feel about your genitals. Nothing else matters in that decision.
If you are comfortable with them then don't go cutting them about. If you aren't then really even if you chose to end up dressing and presenting in a masculine style post surgery you will be happier with them done.
Heck for a while post surgery I went for the uber butch lesbian look. I had a buzz cut and I wore male style suits. I looked the part perfectly, and evidently other people were very happy with my presentation because I got consistently read as a lesbian (and even sometime abused as a dyke). Despite my origins I was thankfully seldom if ever read as male.
I still am a person who periodically reinvents myself. My masculine feminine balance is in a constant state of movement and that is how I like things. One day I can be uber butch, another quite femme, mostly I am somewhere in between. The only thing I won't alter is my physical sex. That was always meant to be female.
As regards HRT if you have been on it for some time (one to two years) you may have testicular atrophy. If that is the case, then I am afraid that you will need to take some form of HRT for the rest of your life. You could of course take testosterone, but if you like the effects of estrogen then there is nothing to stop you continuing with that. Either way what you should not imagine is that you can just take nothing, because there is a good chance that if your testes have atrophied then you may develop osteoprorosis.
My concern in what I read from you is this. You seem to have realised, as many of us do, that you don't want to be this barbie like image of female perfection that some people in this community seek, but you seem to think that it is not permissible to merely want to be an androgynous female.
Basically you need to address these two issues separately.
The first is how masculine or feminine do you want to be?
The second is do you want to be genitally male or female?
The answers are emphatically NOT linked, despite the fact that the idiot doctors who treat us often want to use the answer to the first to try and determine the answer to the second.
Oh and to all those who thought that I and a few others were pushing SRS - I hope you can now see that that is not the case. I am merely trying to make Vanna think this through more carefully and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I hope you will find your answer, but please think this through carefully. It's not as black and white as you may suppose.
