The way I saw it at that time and still do, though now it is not necessarily linked to gender stuff or hormones is that you are dropping the shields you put up around you as a protection against society or other people that may hurt you. These may be a male pseudo-role or other roles that we think we have to play as workers, employees, parents, men, women, students,... they allow us to stay in that role and "perform". If these drop because we think they are too rigid and we do something to strengthen that dissipation of these shields, our delicate inner selves are emerging. At this point we are quite vulnerable but also are more alive, certainly more emotional. We allow ourselves to express our feelings more directly. I like that feeling but found that it never stays for too long as there are always roles we have to play and there is always things that can hurt us, so we do need some shields - in RLE it is against those who hurt us by misgendering us, surgery of course is a physical cause of pain, going back to work demands of us to be a worker again and immune against the strain of having to get up early and do boing things. But once we have seen this inner selves, we can find it again later - ideally at will - sometimes it needs more digging again. But this is the source of our true selves and the part of us that cried to remove at least the walls of a male pseudopersona which was just too constricting and too inflexible to grow within it.
