I live in a deep blue area which might provide a little layer of protection, but does that just mean I'll be even more entrenched and trapped when the liberals roll over and turn me in?

Funny enough it's always math related professors that are the worst with this, any classes related to biology seem to have way less bigoted stemlords teaching them.

I am AMAB. As a kid I wanted to be a girl. I don't know if it was gender dysphoria or just me being affected by bullying and lack of affection. I didn't want to play football and I always found the boys to be mean and while some of the girls were also mean, most weren't and I envied them for how they treated each other and wanted to be a part of them. I don't remember if there was something more to it. I would picture an imaginary friend in my head who was a girl and while we didn't talk we understood each other as if we were the same person.

Then puberty came and it all went away, but I began feeling a numbness. As a prepubescent kid, I was always known to be very emotional. I remember when our class was watching a movie there was a scene where a dog sacrificed itself to rescue a girl from drowning. I along with one other girl were the only people in the class who cried to that. And I would often cry when I discovered how terrible the world is for other people. But now I struggled to feel. I rarely was sad or happy and I never showed affection to people and had very few, if any, friends. And whenever someone suffered I would try to suppress my empathy because there was no way for me to deal with those emotions. Once in a while however I would when alone have outbursts of extreme sadness, crying at the intense loneliness I suddenly became aware of and the emptiness I felt. It never lasted long however and I would soon suppress it again in order to live my life, because there was nothing I could do about those emotions. This entire period I did not think about gender.

The one thing I can say for sure is that I never was attached to my maleness, the only good things I appreciated about being born male was not having to deal with periods, and the immense strength I had without exercising.

Some months ago I started wondering «What if I am a woman?». In the days that followed I then had a dream while sleeping where I saw a version of my self but a lot more feminine looking. I did not feel repelled, it felt natural. I also added she/her to my pronouns in social media to experiment, but nothing ever came of that because people don't talk about me.

Some days ago I decided to shave all my facial hair and pluck my eyebrows and shave my arms and hands. Combined with my already long hair, it made my face androgynous looking and I could glimpse a woman looking back at me from the mirror and it filled me with joy. That day I went out in public looking like that with my sister (who didn't question me about my change in appearance). I remember it made me feel good, I was smiling the whole day through and while I got some weird looks I felt protected with my sister by my side (though to be honest I passed in front of a church where a funeral was going on, with the biggest grin ever on my face, so kind of expected to get weird looks XD).

When I came home, I realized «I think I am a woman.». That realization filled me with so much joy I couldn't focus. And I was filled with a drive to live and to act. I was the happiest I had ever been in the past years. I was in bliss. I actually wrote the date down, because I felt like on that day I was born again the way I was meant to be. I could feel again. Although I couldn't cry it was because, despite wanting to cry every few minutes, within a second I would be euphoric again, before any tears could even be formed. I also began feeling a lot more affection for people. My most used emojis began to be hearts and 🫂. And I also began attributing a lot of what I had felt in the past to gender dysphoria.

Now however days have passed since then, and I feel this numbness again. My facial hair is growing back and I no longer see a woman in the mirror. I no longer can identify gender dysphoria in the past the way I did some days ago. I don't feel gender anymore, the same way I couldn't feel gender before the realization. Was it all just a "phase"? Maybe this is just my way to cope with not being able to live the way I am meant to live, and it will all come back when I make steps again to affirm my gender, the way I did just before the realization... I guess that's what I have to work towards.