To Transition or Not to Transition

Hey folks, a friend told me to post here, so i figured i'd give it a whirl, inb4 sorry for the long ass wall of text

so heres my life story(skip to the interesting part if youd like): it all began in middle school. hormones. hormones everywhere. i was hitting puberty, and until this time i was relatively unaware of differences in the development of males and females, i was aware of what fully developed adult females and males were like, but for whatever reason i had never really thought about developing into an adult male. until one day i saw a girl who was a rather early bloomer. in an instant i was overwhelmed with a rush of emotions, i was at once jealous,envious, anxious, confused, angry, displeased with my own body, embarrased, sad, and scared, i wanted what she had and i felt wrong all over, i wanted to be a girl. i was at once struck with the implications of my biology, that i was destined to be male, and that i would never get to be a female, i would never have boobs or a vagina , and i was devastated. and whats more i realized the full implications of the way i was thinking, i knew that this was wierd i had heard my friends crack jokes about that south park episode mr garrisons fancy new vagina, i knew that what i was thinking and feeling would make me a social outcast. so i decided it would stay a secret, no one would ever have to know as long as i could hide it. but the feelings didnt stop. every day at school became a living nightmare, constantly reminded that i could never be a girl. but somehow i thought that that was a normal thing to have to deal with, and so i never said anything, i just kept it hidden, just my cross to bear. i became increasingly depressed and socially isolated, jealous of girls for being able to be girls, jealous of guys for not wanting to be girls and for just being happy. i was skeptical that they didnt also wanted to be girls, so i often tried to probe their minds in an effort to see if they too had wierd shit they didnt talk about. but it seemed i was alone. at some point i decided it must be some kind of fetish, because i often felt something i can only really describe as a phantom limb vagina and the thought of having sex as a female aroused me. i started going to school in bland clothing in an effort to be "normal" and often went days without speaking to anyone.i prayed to god every night that i would wake up the next day as a girl. i just stayed in my own little world, cumpulsively playing video games and trying to forget about everything. sometimes when i looked in the mirror, or thought about myself, for a split second i would percieve myself as a female . it always made me feel kind of better, but then i would still be stuck with male anatomy and would continue in my depression. this went on until high school, i still regularly had those feelings of jealousy and desire to be female, and dissatisfaction and uncomfortability in my own skin. i started doing parkour as an escape mechanism, where i would often train until i hurt myself in one way or another. it's a miracle i didnt die to be quite honest. i got into a serious relationship with a girl for the first time, and the gender stuff kicked into high gear again. i was madly in love, but i was constantly plagued by thoughts about how amazing it would be to be her, to be a female, and how fucked up it was that i was thinking stuff like that. i couldnt perform sexually unless i shut my eyes and thought of myself as a girl, which rarely worked. we ended up breaking it off senior year and i fell into a deep depression, smoking weed and cigarettes constantly. i got it into my head somehow that if i had sex with a girl i would be a man, i would stop wanting to be a girl and i would just be able to exist as i am. so i ended up going way out of town to meet a girl i knew (she was a good human being) in hopes of being able to sleep with her, as her parents were out of town. we had a romantic evening, and when the big moment came , both of us lying there naked, and i couldn't do it, i started thinking about what it must be like to be a girl in that scenario and i got so uncomfortable that i honestly thought about leaving right then and never speaking to her again, i got so anxious and upset i don't understand how she didnt kick me out right then, but she was nice and told me it was ok and made me breakfast the next day. so that fall i went off to college, where i continued being depressed, smoking cigarettes, weed, and generally being reclusive. a girl told me she thought i was cute, so we hung out and got high a few times, all the while i couldnt stop thinking about how i wanted to be her. and she said she was in love with me. i couldnt handle it, i freaked out, had a massive panic attack, became depressed and almost suicidal, ended up losing like 30 lbs in the following month or 2, finally ended up hospitalized for wieght loss, where i actually ended up losing more weight and was subsequently re-fed. i then went back into depression mode, cigarettes and weed, and started going to a community collge. later that year i got a kidney stone, and ended up on vicodin with a uretal stent, which they then removed without pain killers (i had run out so i only had weed, i smoked alot of it beforehand tho) and it was one of the most traumatizing things i have ever been through. it was around this time i got into psychedelics.

heres where it gets interesting :a month or so went by, i turned 20, and i was sitting there one day contemplating my life, when all of a sudden i had something of a breakthrough, so many pieces of my life suddenly made sense and fell into place. i thought "that feeling i get when i think about being a girl, or am around girls, that feeling is responsible for so much of the suffering i have experienced in my life" memories were flooding back from my whole life, every time i had that god awful feeling, the feeling of envy and jealousy and unhappiness in my own skin and anxiety, that feeling had been haunting me and constantly bringing me misery, yet i had never really considered that my having that feeling might be significant. i just figured it was some wierd quirk, and dismissed, never had i actually questioned what that feeling was or why i was having it. so i googled "why do i want to be a girl" and found this The Gender Variant Phenomenon: A Developmental Review and suddenly so much made sense. i fit into the third group so perfectly, i was in tears. my secrets were all right there, the praying the shame the hiding, the attempts at behaving masculinely it was all there. i understood for the first time the seriousness of the issue as i read on. i searched transition, and found reddit.com/r/transtimelines and suddenly there was hope. with tears streaming down my face i called a therapist that same night, and the next day i was in an appointment. i asked for a letter for hormones and she said no, i had to wait because she didn't even know me. i understood. so i waited. i came out to my mom. i told her everything. in her words her "heart broke for me", she has been the most overwhelmingly supportive person i could have imagined. but therapy was going no where. my therapist gave me a book called "paper genders" by walt heyer, which was a book by an evangelical born again who had detransitioned. he claimed no one could change gender, and that the change was simply cosmetic, insufficient to correct the problem, comparing transexuals to pedophiles and grs to lobodomy. i became incredibly dissillusioned in my desire to be female, i started thinking i must have had a psychotic break, i must really be a crazy male. i spiraled into deep depression, and started taking real drugs(pain killers, cough syrup, sleeping pills). one night after a particularly huge dose of vicodin ativan robotussin tramadol and benadryl (preloaded with white grapefruit juice to really make it interesting) i began nodding so hard that i am sure that if i had not spaced the dosing of the drugs out like i had, i would be dead. i couldnt speak i couldnt move, my breathing slowed, i somehow managed to get myself into bed, where i propped myself up in case of vomiting and began to pray.i reevaluated everything. somehow i survived. somehow i didnt die that night, and it was a miracle. i quit smoking, stopped taking hard drugs and soon after i found dmt. at this point i thought i could not change my gender, i thought i had rid myself of the desire to be female, but something happened when i took dmt for the first time. i felt like a girl, i saw my self as one and i was happy, genuinely deeply through and through happy for the first time in years. i started going to a new therapist, but she was kind of oblivious to everything, and i began smoking cigarettes for about a month, until eventually i couldn't continue conciously killing myself. i abandoned that therapist, quit smoking again, and found a new therapist. she told me that i wasnt insane (i honestly doubted that) and to try crossdressing, as a way of furthering my understanding of my gender, and also to go to a local meeting of trans folk, so i complied. i went to the meeting and i was so scared, i barely spoke, and i almost didnt make it through the whole thing. i felt like an intruder, an alien. i left more confused than ever. about a week later i went and bought a dress, and some shitty make up. i went home shaved my legs, and tried the dress on. i almost started crying, i was so happy, i looked like a fucking clown but damnit i felt so happy i couldn't care. it was amazing for the first time i was really seeing myself as a female it was right there, so real. i almost didnt want to take it off, but i didnt want to freak my parents out so i took it off washed the make up off, and immediately i began doubting myself. i began to think again "you're just crazy, you arent a girl, you are just a confused gay guy, your biology has spoken,you cannot change that." doubts were rampant. and basically i have been in a cycle of crossdressing and feeling happy then subsequently doubting myself ever since, it's been months of this, and i don't know what to do. my therapist is writing me a letter for hormones but i have so many doubts, i don't know how to continue, i don't know what i am and i am frightened of becoming sterile, i don't want to make an irreversible mistake and it's so scary, i don't know if i have the courage to actually transition. i have been in a constant thought loop of "transition!!! why are you wasting your life doubting this, just go for it!!!" when i innevitably think "just leave your body the way it is, you don't know what your brain wants, there is no scenario in which steralizing yourself for an ideal makes sense" which innevitably leads to doubt spirals and self loathing denial of any part of me that wants to be a girl. so now i am confused depressed and unsure as to how to proceed, my therapist keeps saying things like "very few non trans people feel what you are feeling" which i innevitably write of as bias, and i'm now incredibly uncertain if i want to transition or if i am really trans...

so i guess i come to you folks with a few questions: do you think i sound trans? what does one do to become certain about this whole thing without risking depression + suicidality? how did you reconcile the sterility? help me obi wan kenobi your my only hope!

tldr: i have wanted to be a girl since middle school, am now 21, and have been in therapy for over a year, and im considering starting hormones, but i doubt myself, and don't know how to make myself certain of wanting to transition, and i've already tried crossdressing and introducing myself in a mirror as trans and coming out, they all felt good, but my inner skeptic is still not convinced, any ideas?

 

thank you all so much.. i've been thinking about it and talking about it alot and i really don't know how to proceed, as for those questions i don't know the answers really, i've been happy as male when i wasn't thinking about being a male but when i thought about it i instantly started feeling down on myself.. male pronouns don't feel super wrong but they definitely don't feel right.. i can imagine myself in the future as both, and frankly i don't know what would make me happier.. if i am still obsessed with wanting to be a girl in the future then i likely wouldn't be happy as a guy but if i could reconcile the two sides then i could probably be happy as a dude.

i think the real problem for me is that i don't know how to be certain, or at least i don't know how to be more certain. i am insanely skeptical of every feeling and thought i have so no matter what i settle on i instantly start doubting. sperm banking freaks me out, are sperm banks really a viable option?
what things can i do to be more certain?
i can't really socially transition as i would lose every social tie i have, and would look like a freak.. and i have tried coming up with a name but they all sound wierd and alien.. female pronouns make me feel good but it still feels wierd.. i just don't know how to come to a conclusion