• Accept yourself in your head. Think to yourself in the third person using feminine pronouns until it's instinctive.
• Figure out what name you want to go by. Names are powerful. I find that by renaming myself, it gives my decision weight. It might also take time before the new name feels right to you, like it's yours. Starting sooner than later is good.
• Buy and wear feminine clothing (if you can do so without outing yourself if you're not out yet to others). Sure, it's just superficial, but it's really helping me to dress in appropriate clothing, even if just at home at first.
• Find a trained therapist in these things and make an appointment.
• If you can afford it, start looking into facial hair removal sooner rather than later. It's a slow process that people say gets harder after starting HRT.
• Look into how you can start training your voice to be more feminine. Pitch isn't the key, according to the online resources I've read so far. Inflection and resonance are. Even if you eventually decide on vocal surgery to change your vocal range, that will only change the natural pitch of your voice into a normal female range. It won't make it feminine, not if you haven't worked out feminine inflection and resonance. Basically, men subconsciously inflect and project via volume changes and keep their pitch flat, while women inflect via pitch changes and add force to their voice by resonating it. Or something. I'm bad at this stuff so far.

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Quote from: Ny on April 16, 2015, 11:12:43 AM
I just started myself last week. It's really scary, and I have really supportive friends. I have no idea if I could have found the strength to do this without them. I so admire the people here who took that first step on their own without support from the people in their lives.

It seems to me like these things are a good way to start:

• Accept yourself in your head. Think to yourself in the third person using feminine pronouns until it's instinctive.
• Figure out what name you want to go by. Names are powerful. I find that by renaming myself, it gives my decision weight. It might also take time before the new name feels right to you, like it's yours. Starting sooner than later is good.
• Buy and wear feminine clothing (if you can do so without outing yourself if you're not out yet to others). Sure, it's just superficial, but it's really helping me to dress in appropriate clothing, even if just at home at first.
• Find a trained therapist in these things and make an appointment.
• If you can afford it, start looking into facial hair removal sooner rather than later. It's a slow process that people say gets harder after starting HRT.
• Look into how you can start training your voice to be more feminine. Pitch isn't the key, according to the online resources I've read so far. Inflection and resonance are. Even if you eventually decide on vocal surgery to change your vocal range, that will only change the natural pitch of your voice into a normal female range. It won't make it feminine, not if you haven't worked out feminine inflection and resonance. Basically, men subconsciously inflect and project via volume changes and keep their pitch flat, while women inflect via pitch changes and add force to their voice by resonating it. Or something. I'm bad at this stuff so far.

The first and last of those are the ones I'm finding the hardest... Accepting that it's okay for me to be a woman is very difficult for me, having spent the last ~fifteen years of my life telling myself that it wasn't, that I was male, and that's just how it was going to be.