Let me start out by offering my opinion on the OP's question to say that nothing ever really "halts dysphoria" but HRT may help you take some of the wind out of its sails?
Quote from: Swedishgirl96 on November 29, 2018, 10:00:53 AM
... I believe that it will have a psychological effect at least on me that when you are on hrt your body is actually being feminized a little bit everyday, though it may go slowly it is actually happening. I think that will have a big effect on me at lest. That things are actually happening.
Before I started HRT, I was an emotional basket case to the point of becoming non-functional by refusing to continue to live my life the way I had been. It was just too crazy and I didn't see any way I could go on or envision any sort of light at the end of the tunnel all made worse by signs of my long delayed puberty beginning to show which absolutely mortified me. It was immobilizing.
Up until I was 15, my gender had been ambiguous. People that didn't know I was a boy weren't sure what I was both by appearance and manner. Along with the liberties I was allowed in expressing myself pretty much by demanding them, by the time I was 16 my long years of confusing people had wound down. People, strangers, shopkeepers, waiters, etc., accepted me as a girl without having to wonder and it just seemed normal and the way things were supposed to be. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why I was this way or how I'd turned out like this but I just had somehow? I knew it
was weird but it didn't feel weird.
The problem was by the time I was a junior in high school, that same girl that everybody else saw and treated me as went to school looking and acting no differently but was known as a he/him/it with a boy's name and I just couldn't do it anymore. I had no "boy mode", never had and no clue even how to boy. I liked the learning part of school, I was a bright kid, but doing this five days a week when I was known as a she/her and by a girl's name the rest of the time everywhere else found me in a dark and troubled place struggling to not drop out to get away from it all. I hated, hated, hated it. Before that year was over, I knew I was not going back which sparked a major civil war with my folks.
The whole gender thing never really mattered much to them. They'd seen me struggle not being a girl all my life, never really treated me differently from one and how now being seen and affirmed as one just seemed inevitable and the only thing that made sense in a sea of nothing making any sense but not graduating high school was something that really did matter to my folks more than anything. They weren't about to cut me any slack because I was different or how hard it was for me but they did recognize I wasn't going to make it without getting help. I had doubts I was going to make it at all, period.
But help came. I started HRT at 17 at the beginning of summer before my senior year basically on the condition that I'd try to go back to school and tough it out until graduation. It was proposed to me that once I did graduate, I'd never have to be known as a boy again so having something to look forward to was dangled before me like a carrot to motivate me. Seeing this light at the end of the tunnel did have a big effect on me which is hard to separate from the actual emotional effects of estrogen. Knowing that
something was happening and I had a plan and at last a name and understanding explaining my life made a huge difference and I'm sure the HRT was as much a part of that as anything. It gave me the boost that my long nightmare would be over in just nine more months and to maybe not care so much about those hours of the day of being that chick that was really one queer MF'er of a dude. Ugh! I may have mentioned I hated this? I did make it to graduation, by then with breasts and hair down to my waist and as intended, never had to be known as a "boy" ever again after that. That was forty-five years ago in 1973. I was 18. Had I not started hormones, I likely wouldn't have been able to finish school so they did help.
Fitting seamlessly into the world, I got a job in an office and got on with a normal life as an average late teenage girl/young woman. My folks were disappointed I didn't go to college but I think they understood the academic environment had so been toxic and traumatic for me that even if I was a full time girl I wanted nothing to do with it. I discretely had SRS in my early 20's, was married at 30 for a dozen years, started my own small enterprise in my early 40's that I'm still doing and have had a couple of 5+ year LTR's since then and will be 64 years old in a month. Guys at the corner pub where I spend most of my time have argued with me that I'm even over 50 so the years have been good to me and I've held up well. I've had a successful and rewarding life but don't think for a minute that I've ever been completely dysphoria free about one thing or another. I think it is unrealistic no matter what drugs you take or surgery you have to think that you're never ever going to not be a little dysphoric about
something, even if it's just your history which even though was hella long ago for me, is still part of my baggage. Yes it becomes manageable and I think HRT does help with that. It can even lay silent at times and can change focus or return in different ways as you get older but I would say some degree of dysphoria is something you might always have to live with? Certainly if you're in the throes of a gender crisis, dysphoria can get better and in many cases a lot better and HRT will probably help but HRT and even surgeries alone aren't necessarily the nuclear force one might expect when coming to terms with your own level of dysphoria which really comes from within.
Trying to sort all this out as mature adults transitioning from an established former life is absolutely mind boggling to me in its complexity and difficulty. I wish you the best in power and strength in finding your peace.
