Time.

It takes time to unpack a lifetime of transphobia directed at you. It makes it hard to accept yourself, it makes it hard to come out and then it makes you second guess and invalidate yourself.

But it's all shit that the world has place on you. And you can undo, but that also takes time. You need to give yourself permission to take the time needed to work on it, without beating yourself up for being not being able to undo a lifetime of indoctrination in an instant

like whenever I see other trans women who don’t pass it gives me a little burst of dread

As a someone who does pass, these moments fill me with guilt and a degree of imposter syndrome as I wonder why I got to be lucky when I am no more valid than anyone else. And then that's more guilt as I then become self-conscious of something that I know so many people strive and yearn for. But these moments also prompt memories of my early days when I was absolutely not passing, and how fragile, scared and humiliated I felt.

Letting go of passing as a concept entirely is probably unrealistic for most of us, but when you have these moments of dread it's healthier to recognize your common fears, struggles and vulnerability. Don't let dread win, because you only ever notice 100% of the people you do notice. Some of us eventually live in stealth, and then have internalized intrusive thoughts from that as well.

In a sense I guess I'm saying the grass is always greener, so it's better to learn comradery with those that feel the same as you do, as opposed to using them as a yard stick for yourself. It's not something that will just click and fade away, but a consenious choice to be the kindness we all want to see in the world.

Don't waste your life projecting your thoughts on others and stressing over your projections, you can't know what others are thinking.

The people that passing would matter to are the exact people you I highly recommend avoiding, why care about what they think?

Something that helped me a little is that, if anything, these feelings are an exhibition of our sisterhood with all other women. Even as much as they wish they didn't, 99.9% of women regardless of gender at birth, wish they could change their looks in some way, wish they could remove that thing they're most insecure about. All we can do is the same that all other women do, find the version of ourselves that makes us the happiest.

But inside that there also has to be some realism. The ladies we envy, the models and movie stars and idols and influencers and who ever else, they are a statistically tiny portion of the population. There's a couple of billion women who will never, and could never, look like that and that's okay. We are probably one of them, and that's also okay.

Don't feel guilty about wanting to pass. It's a complicated issue that plagues most of us.

I felt just like you-- I still do when my thoughts get dark.
I started doing this when I started playing roller derby. We come in so many shapes and sizes. My "derby wife" is cis and we have the same body.
Most of us "look trans", cis people included, because we vary so much.