It wasn't! Almost no step of my transition has been obvious, and involved - without exaggeration - thousands of hours of internal thought and debate.

When I initially started thinking of transition, I saw it from the perspective of getting other folks to understand and accept my gender identity. In mainstream cis society, that's achieved in one way: passing as a cis woman that I'm usually seen as one.

I'm not saying that's an unreasonable goal, but I did pull apart that my motivation was corrupt. I was doing these things for cis folks, not for myself. And very much a part of who I am trying to be is living true to how I want to live, not how others expect me to live.

So I spent another thousand hours figuring that out.

In the midst of that I realized something very strongly: I do not consider myself male in any way, and find almost everything about existing as a man painful and unwanted. I don't remember much about my youth but I do remember hating everything testosterone was doing to my body as I went through puberty. I felt comfortable removing testosterone from the equation, and started HRT a few days later.

HRT isn't a permanent switch. Without surgery, my body will still naturally want to produce testosterone. If I stopped taking estradiol I would revert back to mostly what I was. Even laser hair removal is somewhat reversible since follicles will start to grow back once testosterone is high enough. Breast growth isn't naturally reversible, but is very slow, so I had almost a year before anything noticeably permanent happened there.

For me HRT is more about aligning myself internally. Brains function differently when saturated in testosterone, and mine knew this was wrong for me. (Okay, one external thing that's very nice: i dont smell like a boy anymore)

Before HRT my thoughts felt very disconnected with the way my body felt. That (and societal pressures) led to me suppressing my real personality. With these better aligned, my mind and body more naturally work together. Instead of feeling uncomfortable with masculinity (which i hated) and femininity (which i wanted but couldn't have), both parts of me feel comfortable existing as we are. Regardless of what societal labels come attached to my behavior.

In the before times, I was a bit like a cis guy in that being treated "like a girl" brought about uncomfortable feelings -- my body knew there was a disconnect. HRT got rid of that disconnect.