Hi Lexie ...
You know what, I have a feeling that you might need a little bit of a guide to some of the things that the girls on here take for granted. Like, for example, how you might go about 'transitioning' from being a man in society's eyes to being and living as the woman you feel like inside. You're going to have to consider a process that involves a bunch of stuff you might not yet know about - and which is going to cost a whole lot of money unless you live in a country like the UK where the state medical system will pay. So here are a few practical things to think about, pretty much in the order you need to think about them ...
Note to other girls: I know that what follows is VERY over-simplified. But I figure Lexie has to start somewhere. So here goes ... !
1. Get a psychiatrist ... in order to have female hormones prescribed, let alone get your final surgery, you need the approval of a qualified psychiatrist (and probably a doctor as well). The fact is, gender-reassignment is a huge commitment and doctors will not assist you to achieve it unless they know you are a suitable case. And the way they make sure that you are (and also cover themselves against getting sued if you decide you didn't want to transition after all) is to have letters of support from qualified gender specialists.
2. Get rid of your facial hair. I don't know how heavy your beard is, but I'm guessing it's heavier than a natural-born girl! There are two main ways to remove hair: laser and electrolysis. You'll find a ton of stuff about both of them on here.
3. Take female hormones: that's what people here mean by HRT (which stands for hormone replacement therapy). You cannot transition without blocking your male hormones - principally testosterone - and effectively replacing them with female ones - principally estrogen and/or progesterone. The effects of these hormones are very powerful: your skin will soften ... your body hair (but not your facial hair) will become much much finer and less visible ... you will lose a great deal of your male muscles and strength ... your testicles will shrink and eventually become infertile ... your waist will (probably) grow smaller and you will (probably) grow breasts and start to put on fat as a woman does round your hips and thighs. After six months or so, many of these effects will be irreversible. The only safe way to take hormones is via prescription drugs. You need a doctor to give you a prescription. And he/she is very unlikely to do that without support from a psychiatrist/therapist, saying that you should receive this treatment.
4. Train your voice ... one of the biggest ways we identify a person's gender is through there voice. Women have higher voices and are much more varied in the way they pitch their voice. Briefly, when a man wants to emphasize a point, his voice gets louder. When a woman wants to emphasize a point, her voice gets higher (and louder, too, often enough!) ... You can get a lot of help with your voice online and on this site. But you have to work really hard on it i you want to be able to live as a woman. Speaking of which ...
5. Live as a woman. You cannot have SRS (sex reassignment surgery) unless you have lived as a woman for at least 12 months. This is what is known as RLE (real life experience) ... and it is exactly what it says. You get a female name. You change all your ID papers to reflect that you are now effectively female (different states and countries have different rules about your precise legal status as a man or woman at this point). You dress, act, present yourself, go to work, go to college, socialise, date, the whole works as a woman. This is a vital test to make sure that this is what you really want. As you will see from posts on this forum, people can and do have second thoughts about transitioning ... even when they have gone a very long way down the track and totally 'pass' as a woman (in other words, no one mistakes them for a man).
6. SRS ... if you decide that you do want to complete your transition to a female form, the final step is the surgery that replaces your penis and testicles with a vagina. Again, there is a ton of information and discussion about this ion the forum.
A few other terms you may see ...
BA = breast augmentation, or to put it simply, a boob-job. This will give you the breasts that nature and hormones cannot.
FFS = facial feminization surgery. There are many procedures that can remove some of the typical features of a male face - eg. heavy brow, jaw and chin - and replace them with more feminine features, such as a smoother forehead, more delicate nose and jaw, fuller cheekbones and higher, more arched brow. There are also procedures to make your mouth and lips more feminine and to reduce the size of your Adam's apple.
Oh ... and here's another set of letters ... MTF ... or male-to-female.
That's us, sweetie. Welcome to the club!
