Hey Nulliza! I'm going to write you an essay, i hope that's okay.

Firstly, yes! Your experience is really really common. Like really really common. There is a great book that helped me called "Am I trans enough" by Alo Johnston. It really helped me when i was in your position. The author writes that imposter syndrome is so common to the trans experience it might as well be listed as a symptom of gender dysphoria.

I also highly recommend the gender dysphoria bible if you haven't been there already. Apart from a lot of very useful facts, it contains several tweets from trans people, where you might see your experience being reflected.

The fact is, for most of us, we didn't just "know". There was no magic fact I could point to that made me sure. Every transition starts with a leap of faith. In fact, every day is another leap. My therapist told me that transitioning isn't one decision, it's thousands of decisions, you have to keep making them every day. You can stop at any time if you don't like where you are going.

The popular story about "what it's like to be trans" that we receive through the culture is often one of kids cross-dressing since they were toddlers, where there were obvious signs right from the beginning. I think that story persists because it's palatable for cis people. They can point to that and clearly separate themselves from it so they don't have to think too hard about their own gender. My experience is nothing like that.

I never recognised my experience as gender dysphoria, I just hated myself. I felt just total nothingness when i saw my masc self in the mirror. It was the euphoria of trying to feminise myself for the first time that made me start to recognise my previous baseline for what it was. You've already reached that part of your journey.

As time has gone forward, the "evidence" has just stacked up for me to the point that calling myself cis at this point just feels silly. It turns out that cis people are barely thinking about their gender at all, let alone googling "am I trans?" and writing in trans comms asking for advice about it. Cis people actually quite like being their gender. They don't long to be another, they don't feel giddy with joy when someone calls them by a pronoun other than the one they were trained to use from birth. They don't feel a rush of intense euphoria when they break out of the prison of their assigned gender for a split second and taste free air for the first time.

When the doubts creep in, ask yourself "if i could just press a button and permanently switch gender, and there was no fuss, and everyone just called me by my new name and used my new pronouns as if I had always been that way", would I press it?

Another good strat is to read through the effects of HRT and ask yourself if you want them? I remember once thinking to myself "if I'm wrong about being trans and I take hormones for no reason, at least I'd have a more femme body". Yes that's very cisgender thought Domi.

Nobody knows, nobody can decide for you, follow your joy. Wishing you the best.