We were meeting for a catch up, last few times I saw her I was doing a kindof unconvincing boymode but this time I just showed up as myself and dropped the news on her.

She was pretty great all things considered. Huge relief. Feel like I can move on now. I'm out with all my friends, I'm out at work, so she was the main hurdle I needed to get past before I could just start living my life freely. I'm really glad it's done.

You're all making me want to jump on the selfie bandwagon so here goes. Love you all.

I don't know what to say exactly. My emotions are intense. I feel like I'm alive. Like I'm human. I look in the mirror and instead of seeing a scratched out void I see me. A woman. Heck even a pretty one.

My community has embraced me, my partner has been so wonderfully supportive,my friends have my great. My family...well let's worry about them another time shall we?

I want to post selfies because (a) I'm cute now and (b) I want to be a part of the tapestry of this community just like our dear ones who post here often. But I'm just too sketched out about posting face on the open Internet for now. So you'll have to take my word for it that I'm real and not just a large language model trained exclusively on posts from this community.

Things are fucking difficult for us everywhere. The world feels so hostile but that's what makes pride so important. Love you all. Keep slaying.

I wanted to post something to mark the occasion. It's felt like a very long wait but I finally have estradiol and cypro in my system. Fear has been steadily giving way to excitement. I've been getting steadily more confident in my identity and the doubt monster in my head is getting smaller and quieter in the face of overwhelming evidence that I am in fact a woman.

I wanna briefly reflect on how grateful I am to other trans people. People that don't know me, that don't owe me anything, have helped me in countless ways, big and small. Some have helped it without realising it just by being themselves in a proud and unapologetic way. Some have given me time and energy and resources and support that have saved my life. I will forever carry around a debt I'll never be able to repay and I'll be trying to pay it forward at every opportunity I get.

It's is the honour of my life to be in community with you all, with all my trans siblings around the world.

Trans liberation now. Love and solidarity for ever.

Edit: thanks for the lovely replies everyone. Love to you all.

Me right before cracking

Hello beautiful women in my phone. I just had a consult at a laser clinic and apart from my chest, tummy and back, my body hair is mostly too blonde/ginger to get at with laser (though still dark enough to see clearly).

On T my body hair grows pretty fast and thick and hair removal at the moment is constant and miserable. I'm wondering whether E can help make it idk, chill out a bit? I'm starting E + cypro very soon so that's what I'll be working with going forward.

Any girls in here with the kind of hair that laser clinics cant touch? Did E help?

I was replying to @Quokka@quokk.au earlier but seemed to make sense to ask everyone here:

Is anyone on a hair regrowth journey here? Is anyone taking the combo in the title? I'm curious about a few things.

1. Did you start finasteride at the same time as starting hrt? Given that I'm about to start HRT, I feel like i should wait to start fin for a few months ago I can tell what emotional changes come from HRT and what come from fin.

2. Did you get the dreaded depression side effect from fin?

3. How do you take them and how do you take your E? Is there any worry about hepatic stress from taking all of these orally?

4. Any increased body hair growth? If so, even after laser / electro?

5. How careful do you have you have to be with hair care? Are you sleeping in hair covers? Using expensive conditioners etc?

6. Are you getting the results you want?

Egg cracked towards the end of last year. At the time I thought "hey I've lived my whole life like this, if I need to boymode for some reason it'll be fine right?"

I'm still pre hrt and have a buzz cut so it's not like I'm super fem right now, but more and more I've been wearing what I want to wear: skirts or cute women's trousers, jewellery, makeup etc. At the very least I'm not going to be mistaken for a cis boy when I leave the house like this.

The feeling of dressing the way I want had been so freeing, the feeling of being seen, especially by queer folks, as something other than a cis man, and the chance to catch sight of myself in a reflection and like what I see. All of that has changed something in me.

Now when I dress in my old clothes in spaces where I feel like I can't be myself, it makes me want to scream, it's unbearable. I can't even imagine being the person that looked like this every day. It's so strange that so much can change just by changing your perception of yourself.

The positive side is that 3 months ago, my biggest fear in the world was that I was somehow faking, not really trans, and that all the joy I felt was some mistake or something. That "imposter syndrome" would sneak in if I accidentally went a few hours without feeling dysphoric, and my brain would go "see look, you're cis silly".

It's getting pretty hard to maintain that delusion when dressing like a man makes me want to puke. So, even though this seems like a sad post, I'm actually happy. I know who I am. I just need to finish coming out professionally and with older family so I don't have to pretend to be a man any more.

Really wanted to just get that feeling out of my head. Thanks dear ones.

My hands are my most reliable source of gender euphoria while i wait for hormones to arrive.

So I made a very dumb mistake. I have been using hair removal cream for the last month or so and getting good results. My skin was handling it well and the grow-back was much softer and slower than shaving. Good times.

Yesterday I didn't time it correctly and left it on certain areas too long. I didn't realise that 2-6 minutes was a strict upper range and that it's dangerous to leave it on longer.

So yeah, I took too long and now I have a very unpleasant chemical burn on both my ass cheeks. I had to cancel plans so I can sit inside with my butt in air while it heals.

Setbacks like this have really thrown me into downward spirals in the past, and I was very upset at first, but I'm trying to move past it, see the funny side, and pick myself up.

Early transition can feel a lot like you're fumbling around in the dark sometimes. I wish I had a community-assigned trans mentor with me at all times to gently warn me when I'm about to do something stupid.

Alternatively, maybe some of you have some similar mistakes that you can look back and smile or laugh at now, and maybe if you share them I can feel less like a dumb idiot while I wait for my ass to cool off.

Anyone in the UK on HRT and getting blood tests? I am going through the onboarding process for GAHT via Imago.tg.

Imago provide the full list of tests I need to take, but I can only contact my GP via their online intake forms. They do provide a space to ask for a nurse appointment for a blood test, but I'm a little cagey about outing myself to them if they will not actually help me. They don't have a way for me to just ask "can i see my GP" so i can talk to them in person.

As for private options, i only seem to see the off-the-shelf stuff at superdrug and the like, and none of their off-the-shelf offerings have the range of tests I need in them.

I'd love some advice from someone in the UK who's going through this process.