Yeah, I think it's hard to say exactly where and how this changed for me, but it definitely did. I was always a very feminine person, and this would manifest itself around certain places and people. Like pre transition, I had a few friends, specifically that I felt safe acting feminine around, and I would. But the rest of the time, and in general, my emotional responses to things and my feelings did feel very masculine to me. In a way that felt invalidating and made me feel kinda gross with myself.

I would describe myself as very girly now. Like my emotional reactions to things do not feel masculine in any way to me anymore, and i feel like i respond to things in a way society generally assigns femininity to. I also feel girly, and feel that after years living as a woman in all aspects of my life I feel my perspective has changed a lot and my understanding of myself too. It definitely started after starting HRT, when I felt like I could be the "feminine me" all the time.

I also went to therapy a lot and was told by several therapists that if I don't like something about myself, I can choose to change it. So that definitely played a role in it, too, consciously changing how I emotionally respond to things. I took gut reactions, language I would use, and how I processed and expressed my emotions and consciously changed them. I changed how I speak, my intonation, my cadence, and my pronunciation and changed them consciously to the way that I felt less dysphoric about. My voice does not pass yet, I'm considering surgery, but how I speak is unmistakably feminine. My friends and people who know me well are always very bewildered when I get misgendered, because aside from my voice and a couple physical factors it's hard to see me as anything but a woman.

I can't say for sure to what extent the actual chemical changes in my brain impacted that. It's probably non-zero, but not as much as feeling safe to be myself and consciously changing parts of my personality and responses I didn't like and wanted to leave behind. I became the woman I am today. She is the person I always wanted to be, and I worked very hard to be who I am.