A little while ago, I finally come out as trans to my friends. They’ve been wonderful, supportive, and encouraging. They were honestly the whole reason I finally was able to discover myself, especially my GF. But, and here’s the key, I’m in a very delicate living situation, I’m pretty poor, and I can’t reasonably just leave where I am and live somewhere else, not right now at least. Between the world and my rather transphobic family, I’m kind of stuck. I obviously can’t get more feminine clothing, hair, ANY makeup of any sort, or anything I really want to try. I don’t wanna make this a whole sob story or anything, so basically. Does anybody have some advice to FEEL more like a girl?
There are some real great practical suggestions here already, which is wonderful! I’ll add that so much of how we feel about ourselves can really be influenced by how other people see and treat us, and we shouldn’t underestimate that. It’s so good that you’ve got good, supportive friends - asking them to gender you as femme as much as they can can really help and really shift how we think of ourselves, too.
Something that really helped me, too, that took me far too long to learn, was getting comfortable with just playing - with clothes, make-up, hair, anything gendered. We can take it all so seriously, because it’s important to us, but that meant whenever I did something to my appearance and it didn’t turn out exactly how I imagined I felt real stink about it. Actually thinking to myself “I’m just having a play with this and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t turn out right” made a huge difference, and made it way easier for me to keep experimenting!
All of my friends call me by my preferred name and pronouns now. They’ve always been absolute dears, and I didn’t expect them to reject me or anything, but it still means so much when they call me by my new name, or when we’re playing a game like Payday and get downed and hear someone yell “Someone get her, I’ll get the Dozers!!!” XD And yeah, I have been trying to relax and not pressure myself, but I still find myself getting stressed. Hearing someone tell me “it’s okay, you can take it easy.” means a lot, truly. Thank you!
You’re so welcome! Truly - you’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out, and cis women have years and years of getting to play with how they look - you deserve that play, too!