I am nowhere near done medically transitioning, but after some thought recently and looking back, I was realizing I made some mistakes and had some opinion shifts on various topics related to being trans in terms of our 'community', if you can put it that way. I'll list a few of them, but I am also curious if anybody else wanted to share theirs as well because it would be interesting to read them. My own concept of my gender also morphed and evolved.
-The first is opinions on therapy before transitioning. In the beginning, I was really gung-ho about informed consent in any situation no matter what, almost militantly, which I still am in a major way, but with one caveat I didn't have before:
in hindsight, even if you think you don't need it, therapy can really a good idea to figure out all of this and how you relate to it. We have to deal with so much socially in terms of other people's reactions to coming out, and many of us have years of being seen as the wrong gender and the issues that result from it. Therapy can go a long way towards untangling this. Of course, people have bad therapy experiences and some may really not benefit from it in the least, but I guess my opinion shift on this topic is that, hey maybe therapy isn't such a bad idea after all, and I am now hesitant to tell people they should go informed consent without question.
-"Medical condition vs identity" debate. The other day, I finally saw a video of someone who took T for a bit just to get a voice change alone. They didn't ID as trans, but they hated their female voice and maybe just weren't as binary-y as a typical cis person. They had a voice change, it was a male voice for sure, but otherwise the person appeared female, IDed as female as far as I know, and did not present themselves as male or even transgender.
My first reaction was to be angry and feel trivialized. This is in stark contrast to how I felt before, and honestly I was surprised at my knee jerk reaction. I shouldn't have felt this way, and I think gender queer people have their place in our community, and I still think medical condition and identity can and should co-exist, but I wanted to mention this because now I can finally see where the other side of the argument is coming from.
-'transsexual' vs 'transgender' - I'm a transsexual. There, I said it. The word used to make my skin crawl, but now I think it sums up how I feel about my brain. I take a medication for a medical condition. It was nowhere near as cut and dry for me in the beginning. I used to think people who drew a sharp line between transsexualism and other flavors were just insecure and in denial - but again, now I understand I was wrong.
-when to come out and ask for name change/pronouns. I got a new job at one point in the past year or so, and decided to be male at the start from it, even without being on T at the time. I thought I could be strong and handle it, but it was a disaster. I ended up leaving the job because of the social anxiety of it. I didn't have the courage, and this was and is very disappointing to me. In hindsight, I would have just waited to come out or not gotten a job until after I had been on T for awhile. I've been self employed for several years and work by myself most of the time, but I was going through some stuff and wanted the stability of going to work everyday. I messed up the chance I had to work at an awesome company because I rushed things. I would caution people not to make the same mistake. There is something to be said for waiting to get the right pronouns until you physically appear male if you are like me and have really bad social anxiety.
-Bottom surgery. I want a meta ASAP. I thought downstairs growth would gross me out and saw bottom surgery as not being worth it, but I did a 180 on all of this after starting hormones and seeing changes and realizing how I felt about my body.
-Also, in terms of other mistakes - on this forum, I was probably a bit combative about some of the above issues and other differences of opinion at various points, so I just want to apologize to anyone I argued with in a non constructive way or didn't fully consider their perspective.
