Oh I do have a question: how does it feel different to be a woman, if at all?

that’s a very complicated question with a very complicated answer, which makes it hard to answer

whatever answer I give will be misleading or insufficient, and that can be painful because it feels then like I’m causing harm (harm in the ways my answer might accidentally mislead other trans people who may be repressing or not aware they are trans, harm in the ways my answer might mislead cis people who don’t understand what it’s like to be trans, etc.).

You have to understand that because I’m trans, this has impacted my whole life, including my earliest experiences - I have really never known what it’s like to be a cis man or to be cis, etc. - but in another sense I obviously lived a life as a boy and a man, and a life as someone whose lived-gender matched their assigned sex - so I tend to think I lived “as a man”, and not just in social ways but also in the ways that testosterone can influence (e.g. I experienced the kind of urgent, visual, but superficial libido of a man, etc.). But it’s important to understand that along the way I felt off or weird about it all - even as a young child, I didn’t like changing in the locker room with the other boys, I didn’t like take off my shirt when I went swimming, and even when I was 5 years old I thought there was some cosmic mistake and I was supposed to be born a girl (I just didn’t know I actually was one already and needed to transition).

I’m also older, I grew up in an era where trans healthcare was not as accessible or common, and when the average person really didn’t know anything about trans people. The two main representations of trans people I had growing up were from Silence of the Lambs (the serial killer who killed women to make a suit so he could wear their skin to feel like a woman), and Ace Ventura (also a villain character who transitions from a man to live as a woman to evade the law; notably the scene when the villain is finally confronted and exposed, my family reacted to how extremely taboo that scene was by simply not allowing me to see it growing up - further confirming the stigma, wrongness, etc. of being trans).

I also grew up in a place and time when being gay was the same as being a pedophile.

So, I saw a lot of social change in my lifetime, and I didn’t have the tools to interpret my experience or to get the help I needed.

In some sense the answer to your question is that it feels no different at all - in many ways it feels completely the same. Even after bottom surgery my genitals it feels very same-y, to the point that this can be a point of distress because I have internalized and come to believe I’m male and a man, even believing that it’s manly or masculine to envy women or to want to be a woman. This is a twisted perspective caused by decades of repression and needing to cope and survive, and it feels like a life-long kind of mental wound that I am attempting just now to address and heal, and progress is slow.

But obviously things are very different, and there are plenty of ways it also feels different, in fact everything is different in a way. So it’s all the same and all different - that makes sense, right? 😄

When my body produced testosterone, I experienced what is called “anhedonia” but that’s just a fancy word that describes how it feels when you struggle to feel happiness or pleasure. A way this could look: I spent a lot of time and energy seeking pleasurable activities (things that made me feel happiness), and they had a muted effect in some ways. For example, a nice meal felt like survival to me - if I didn’t cook a delicious dinner every day, I would struggle to feel a will to live that was so bad I couldn’t get out of bed or get myself to engage in the necessary daily tasks I needed to get done. The pleasure from the meal was necessary, and for example if it was a stressful time and we decided to grab some frozen meals from the store or even something like a nice prepared meal from Trader Joe’s, those meals were not tasty enough or pleasurable enough, and I would experience worsening depression and would have to dig myself out of that hole in a sense. I didn’t know this wasn’t normal, it was just always what it felt like to be in my life. I was known for being grumpy, critical, and sharp. It’s maybe like living in pain all the time, I was really suffering but because it was normal to me, I didn’t realize I was even technically experiencing depression.

So, on estrogen, I just feel happy most of the time - my base level happiness is much greater, and I don’t rely on fancy meals to have a will to live or get out of bed. This can actually make life a little more boring in some ways because life is now pretty normal feeling, there isn’t the same extreme struggle that also led to me living in extreme ways (like, I admit my cooking was better before I started estrogen because the necessity to cook really great meals was much stronger).

Before on testosterone, I might go grocery shopping and not have the mental endurance to do much more than that once a week. On estrogen, I can go grocery shopping and then have social plans and do several busy things during the week and still feel fine. I might even be tired, busy, and running an errand and just feel happy in ways I never experienced before.

So being a woman feels like becoming a normal person, becoming a human being. Living as a man felt like living as a subhuman animal. As a woman I take care of my hair, my skin, my teeth, etc. like a normal person. Before transition, my hair knotted into neglect dreads and I washed it every day with hot water and bar soap and I shaved my head once or twice a year out of convenience (even though I hated it). I didn’t brush my teeth, I didn’t take care of body odor, I wore the same outfit every single day. I was really mentally ill, looking back - I couldn’t feel motivated by anything like self-care, it was just so entirely pointless and even immoral and wasteful in my mind. I judged other people for taking care of themselves, for the vanity and the waste of self-care.

So, it’s hard because I don’t think normal men live this way - I lived in extreme and awful ways before I transitioned, I was really a broken person who was hurting. Being a woman felt salvational to me, I thought anyone would want to be a woman and it’s just the obvious, rational, and moral choice if there was a choice. But I also believed that no-one can really become a woman (I even felt resentment against trans women for violating this, for pretending to be women, even as I strongly felt that trans rights were important and that trans people are valid - there was a part of me that needed to deny myself that path, and so being around trans people or exposed to media with trans people was simultaneously alluring and disturbing to me - so much cognitive dissonance arose, but I was also inexplicably drawn to trans women like a moth to a flame).

So yeah, it feels very different even if I’m still just “me” and I also feel like I’m the same. Hopefully that makes more sense now, but feel free to ask any follow-up questions or ways in which you are wondering how it feels different. Phenomenology can be hard to describe - but I would say some things really do feel different while other things really do feel the same. I think most people just feel the same before vs after, tbh - so that’s the most common answer you’ll probably find.