Because it was so important to me to elicit female gendering (to pass as they put it) I waited six months before requesting HRT, so as to get a jump start on electrolysis... and more importantly, to retrain my voice. I wasn't going to do this if I didn't sound right.
And it was hard -- because proper voice training (imo) takes listening to recordings of your voice practice, and that can be very dysphoria inducing. But then I found my one weird trick (a particular technique of maintaining laryngal tension) and suddenly my voice because my best asset.
Quote from: Sarah_P on July 11, 2017, 05:38:44 PMLike Dena said, get started on the hair removal (facial especially) ASAP - it's a looooong process.
Personally, I couldn't do the slow transition. I've been suppressing this for far too long. It's going to take a lot of willpower for me to stay on the dosage the doctor prescribes.
Yeah, going slow is very difficult -- once I started getting gendered correctly, I never wanted to go back.
One thing that helped was to compartmentalize -- I ended up full-time barely 3 months into HRT, with one very important exception: work. I knew some women in transition without a stable income to pay for all the surgeries and electrolysis (that would be necessary to get new work in the proper gender), and their journey was a complete nightmare. So I actually never came out at work, not until all my surgeries were complete (and then I changed careers, so I never had a "coming out at work" experience ever). My therapists signed off on this after my careful explanations of my plan, and especially after facial surgery (which only required a letter stating I was in therapy, not full time).