Things to consider if you're not sure about transitioning.
Some main things you should do now, and why you should maybe decide to act sooner than later
It is common that when people have some inkling that they would prefer to look different to how they are, they don’t know how to act.
The no-bullshit answer is, you should just try to get on HRT as soon as possible. I have some brief guides on types of HRT:
But if you are choosing how obtain, or whether this is something you really want to do, you may end up on the fence for a while. I will discuss some things to consider.
Why should you get on HRT sooner?
If you are in your teens or early 20s, this is the period of your life when you are experiencing the most changes per year while being on a type of hormone.
Early changes finish pretty quickly, male hormones cause a growth in ribcage and facial features, and a deepening of voice, but mostly stop after teenage years. Over time, they will still cause you to have more face/body hair and masculinize your skin when young
Female hormones do cause breast growth and pelvic widening, but beyond this the changes are not as pronounced as you get older.
Your bones tend to fuse at some ages between 20 and 25, and so if you want to be able to get some gain to bone structure, it is better to get started sooner.
But even if you are above 25, hormones just tend to cause gradual changes over a long time.
Getting started on HRT causes body fat and skin texture changes for most, and this is gradual and takes a long time, and there is genetic variance on how well this works such that you may need to make adjustments to the standard regimens.
For more permanent changes (such as voice masculinization on male hormones, or breast growth on female hormones), my personal vibe is there is a degree to which final results can depend on age too, but this has not been well studied.
What should I do before I have fully decided?
If you are transfeminine:
If you ever want to have kids, Gamete storage is good to do as soon as possible. It’s often slow and annoying, and takes a long time. Getting gamete storage before starting HRT is more likely to give good outcomes than needing to stop later. See guide
It is also beneficial to get started on hair removal ASAP. This takes a long time, and does not interfere with basically any other forms of life. Getting some laser sessions booked soon is just generally good.
It is hugely beneficial to get started on DHT blockers at the least. These generally have few side-effects you would be worried about as a transfem, and help prevent future facial hair growth and head hair thinning.
If you are transmasculine:
If you ever want to have kids, doing egg freezing is also something to consider ASAP. It is a more annoying process than sperm banking, requiring around 2 weeks of injections and usually also removing you IUD if you have one. You should do this sooner anyway, as egg quality degrades with age rapidly, often becoming quite poor in mid 30s. The optimal age is around 19years and it only degrades from then.
Other factors are not as urgent for transmasculine people.
Dipping Your Toes
Often when people are not sure, people want to know what they might look like if they were to transition, or what it would be like, whether they would pass or not.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to give generalizable advice here.
There are social costs to transitioning and not passing, but the degree of these costs depends a lot on field of work and location. If you are a software engineer on west-coast USA, then being visibly trans is considered pretty normal. If you are in the middle-east, then the costs are significantly higher, though also people tend to be significantly worse at clocking people.
You can try various methods to try see whether you would ever pass or not, you can try consider your height and measuring parts of your body, and these can give some indication, but are much more lossy than is optimal. You can attempt to use a “face gender swap” visualiser, but often even these are kind of limited. You can look on reddit r/transtimelines though there is a lot of variation and it’s difficult to see people similar to you, and people often have more or less luck, and various surgeries help too, and effects such as lighting and angle and expression and makeup make a huge difference.
I write some about different factors here:
It is very difficult to judge how people might perceive you with some changes. You have seen yourself everyday for your whole life, and assigned your birth label to your appearance, so it’s difficult to judge otherwise.
You can try some low-cost methods to see what it’s like, but these are very lossy and generally feel jarring when contrasted to the features on you that are not yet femminine.
You may be tempted to try: wearing different clothing, using makeup and contouring, doing various physical exercises, using a face swap AI. These are OK, but quite lossy.
You can also try a dose of hormones for a while. This can give an idea of what it feels (a week is rarely enough for any long-term changes, but can give some idea of the mental effects, such as on libido)
Overall, most people who do choose to transition end up not wanting to permanently detransition, even if they don’t fully pass. (many need to take a break for various reasons, but I don’t count this). The fraction is low single-digit percents.
For transfeminine, the tiny fraction of people who do de-transition, this tends to be from not being able to pass, (such as being 6’5 and having a rugby build).
For transmasculine people, the tiny fraction who do detransition, the main two factors is from finding male social life quite socially isolating, or from finding that they were transitioning not so much for a desire to look masculine, but to run away from some of the stressful parts of womanhood.
But most people who do detransition, still end up somewhere non-binary rather than a binary version of their original gender.