Over the course of an exceedingly stressful year, I had frequented this board as I grappled with my gender and the equally shadowy and alluring prospect of transitioning. After my ex and I broke up and my schedule freed up for a new job and more time to work on myself, I managed to extricate myself from the field of vortex-like thought processes that come with an obsession with hormonal transitioning.

Two days ago, after briefly reflecting on the need that I feel to present more androgynously, I tried on a wrinkly, virtually unworn Zara dress that I had bought during that first period of questioning my gender. While looking in the mirror at myself in my dress, it struck me that I had never fully let go of the idea of taking E, but had kinda just set it down way out on the fringes of my everyday mind.

I now find that I've resumed an almost identical line of questioning as I had 3-4 years ago, complete with the routine suspicions that it could be endocrine disrupting chemicals in my environment causing this or childhood trauma or boredom or procrastination or the revulsion I feel at the thought of aging as a man or not being able to pull off the androgynous look I want or loneliness/hyper-independence. I'm again considering if I have a hormonal profile that would conveniently be rounded out by E, and that my body craves it because it sees a viable benefit from having more of it; again researching how humans have expressed gender non-conformity in the past, the concoctions and potions they consumed to achieve that almost mythic "mind-body alignment."

Two main differences in the way I'm "conducting" my present line of questioning though are that I'm more aware of how obsessive I can be things like this and that I'm far less dysphoric about being seen as a man than I had thought.

It seems that, if anything, it would be easier to get over this bout than the first one, so I might just see if I can ride it out again. That said, I want to be honest with myself.