ah, I am a bit more dissociated and have a harder time recognizing “me” or “not me” - though once dramatic changes have happened I can acknowledge the older photos of me seem very foreign and I wonder how I ever looked that way, which is a kind of “me” vs “not me” feeling / awareness.

That being a woman is “me” is rarely clear to me in a normative sense, it’s more that I wish I had been a woman, but that I am not and never will be. Even when I have moments of thinking of myself as a woman, it’s a pragmatic social context kind of “being” and not a deeper sense - there is always that asterisks that I’m not “really” a woman.

Some of this is dysphoria, some of this is transphobia - the way they manifest in intersection or as a synthesis of both seem to make it complicated to parse them separately.

In some sense I am not sure learning gender expectations were any different for me - though maybe one difference is that the observation of women and the behaving as a woman feels easier and more natural to me, while behaving like a man always had some cracks in it - I did a good job with my “man drag” (behaving / living as a man), but I always had effeminate cracks or inconsistencies that were hard for me to eliminate or cover up fully - my voice, my hand motions, my expressiveness, my general being made people often think I was maybe gay. But it wasn’t as overt as some kids, like I really did hide my “gayness” so I could pass as straight somewhat, I just wasn’t amazing at it. Growing a beard and learning to wear certain clothes helped me - as well as learning to just not talk or communicate much, but that easily went out the window when I interacted with someone more. Even in the years prior to my transition when I was probably the most masculine in my whole life, I still had men disclosing to me they are straight as if they were worried I was attracted to them, implying they thought I was gay and that was a necessary boundary.