I don't really draw, so sorry for the bad 'artwork', but I've been struggling a lot recently and trying new methods to elucidate my feelings to myself.
I feel increasingly that my HRT doesn't matter, that my dressing in a more traditionally feminine way and legally changing my name and being openly myself doesn't matter. People look at others and the first thing that they do is try to categorise them by gender; am I looking at/speaking to a man or a woman? I need to know this so that I can know how I should treat them. Nothing I can ever do will change the fact that I do not present as female. I acknowledge that it is not constructive to attempt to convince myself that I have no hope because of things outside of my control, and that will lead to stagnation and a worsening mental state, but that's easier said than done. I look in the mirror and I hate with a burning passion the reflection that stares back at me with its square jaw and Adam's apple and differently sized eyes . I hate its broad shoulders and its narrow hips and its deep chest and its breasts that look perverse on its frame. I hate so much, and yet this hate does nothing. It accomplishes nothing at all, and yet it cripples me, forces me to cry and try to tear myself apart, to sequester myself in my lodgings and to bleed, to bleed because I know that I never will.