I've never really thought about it one way or the other in the shower.  But I agree with Jamie.  It makes me wonder about myself reading what it's like for others.

Don't despair Jamie. I also didn't hate my body. I have always stayed in shape, so I thought of my body as good looking and healthy. That changed after accepting being transgender though. One day, after cleaning myself, I looked in the mirror and thought, "WHAT THE F**K?!?!" 

I think what caused the change was, until that point I never considered deriving any happiness from my body, and just focused on functionality. Now that I was seriously contemplating the happiness having a female body would bring me, looking at my genitalia, and the definition of my muscles, made me feel wrong, very strange, and a little sad.

Gender dysphoria is a new and uncomfortable experience for me, but acquiring it was vindicating, and in my experience, it is not nearly as difficult to live with as repression. If you want to experience it, try stretching the limits of your imagination, and envision living as female, from the sun in your hair, to the nail polish on your toes, and then take a shower and see how great you look. 

Looking in the mirror in the bathroom before or after a shower is painful, but I usually just listen to music to take my mind off the dysphoria. Getting clean and trying to make myself "feel" beautiful helps. Just doing small things like shaving my legs or using coconut scented body wash and shampoo/conditioner help take my mind off my body with the aroma and sleek feeling my skin has. Just knowing that the hair on my head is growing and I'm keeping it clean and beautiful is a huge uplift in my mood. I'm not sure what I can suggest for FTMs, but maybe if you use a body wash with a scent that makes you feel more masculine can help. I know its sort of cheesy, but when I ditched the manly man axe body wash my mom would buy for me for a more feminine herbal essences body wash, I enjoyed showers more because I got out smelling how I pleased.

I wear a packer 24/7, and that includes in the shower. I get clean, I don't have to look at my junk beyond lifting the packer to scrub, the packer and the harness I wear it with both get clean. Win/win/win.

Binding would be tough, but maybe if you have a spare binder (especially one that's older and thinner), that would work. You could use it specifically for showering.

I used to just disassociate. I could put it all mentally aside for the 5 minutes that it took me to get in, get clean, and get out.

Quote from: FTMax on November 28, 2015, 08:25:36 AM
I used to just disassociate. I could put it all mentally aside for the 5 minutes that it took me to get in, get clean, and get out.

That's about all I can do. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Its like I have to mentally project myself somewhere else.

That´s a great question and I´m going to look through all the answers later, might help me as well.

I don´t shower that often. I´m disgusting  I couldn´t handle the feeling of water trickling over parts that I did not want to be conscious of. I found out that it did help when I wore a shirt and some briefs in the shower. I would put some soap over that, and scrub, so I didn´t have to touch anything directly. And just like some others, only showered when it was dark (& with the lights off).

I´m also a huge germaphobe - and I have a shared shower - so I ended up buying some wascloths and now I just take a bucket of warm water and soap and scrub lightly with the washcloth.

And I just never look in the mirror when I don´t have my binder and briefs on.