im cutie

close out of social media, close out of those "gender envy" photosets, purge the idealized 6'2 chiseled abs square jaw image of peak masculinity out of your mind and just look at real men in your daily life.

i will always be under 6 ft. but you know who else will also always be under 6 ft? the delivery guy who dropped off a package at my office today. he was the same height as me.

sometimes my voice can sound high pitched. but you know who also has a high pitched voice? the guy who stood in front of me at the sandwich shop.

my facial hair is patchy. but you know who also has patchy facial hair? like....so many men. especially men who only just started growing facial hair like me.

there are dudes everywhere, and there are plenty of dudes who have features like yours who won't immediately get clocked as "not cis".

when your scope begins and ends at the media you consume, or the images you see plastered on screens or on magazine covers, you're going to get a warped understanding of what's expected of you, and you're always going to fall short if you make that your only criteria for transitioning "properly".

transitioning is second puberty. and just like how cis teenage girls need to stop comparing themselves to photoshopped runway models and cis teenage boys need to stop comparing themselves to the covers of fitness magazines, you also need to stop comparing yourself to unrealistic standards in much the same way.

however you decide to define masculinity for yourself or however masculinity happens to look for you, there's a man out there who also fits that description.

you're transitioning fine.

Everything above still applies. You're really tall, or fat? I promise you there are tall and fat cis women who have the same issues shopping for clothes that you do. Your boobs are kind of uneven or shaped weird? That's everybodies' titties. Boobs are just weird. You have broad shoulders? So do female athletes and lots of other women who aren't sporty. Even things like your voice that I mentioned above have a great deal of variation. Sometimes women just have deep voices, and lots of cis women are sometimes mistaken for men too.

A lot of the time, we do end up looking like the magazines. Tall, leggy, and thin. But like, even those women who do look like a magazine cover and who are cisgender, they still have tummies and hair in "weird" places and so forth. It's okay if you don't look like a magazine. I promise you that 90% of the insecurities you have about your body are shared by cis women. Too much facial hair (cis ladies often wax this), too short, too tall, big feet, boobs different sizes, boobs too small, too few or too many moles, etc. etc. etc.. Even typical HRT goals that a lot of trans women shoot for are kind of missing in a lot of cis women. You didn't get a lot of breast growth? The joke about the "itty bitty titty comittee" has been around a lot longer than trans women have been in the public eye. When it's laid out so plainly, it's a lot easier to see that the things we worry about aren't some deviation from the norm, just a deviation from marketing or objectifying media. If everyone is worried about them, then it's not really rare or unusual, is it? Those things are normal.

My sister waxes her moustache, and my mom joked about looking like a gorilla when she didn't shave her legs. Other women quite often have a lot more arm and body hair than I do, and oodles of women have square or angular faces. My grandma was massive, very tall and had very large feet. She needed to shop in specialty shoe stores and likely had trouble finding clothes in her size, but no one ever thought she wasn't a woman.