How do people even explore their gender identity? (While keeping it secret and not having access to much?)
I'll be upfront, I don't even know if I am transgender fully. I'm trying to figure it out. But it's been eating away at me for the past couple years.
To give some context, I live in a rural town in LATAM. For the past three goddamn years, I have been trying my damn best to piece together enough money to move to the city and start living alone. My hope is that I can move there and finally start working towards becoming my own person, away from the family. But three years is a long time to feel suffocated and stuck in a place you're growing to hate. I feel like I am actually going insane, and a part of that is because I utterly despise living as this disgusting, rotten, putrid man. I hate this body, I hate my masculinity, I hate what I am. I hesitate to call it gender dysphoria because I don't feel like I have the right to use that term, but I feel this distinct need to explore a more feminine side of myself. Even if it isn't out of me being transgender, I know I want to unmasculinize myself.
But I also don't want my family or anyone else in this town to find out. Not even because they are the most transphobic a town could be, one of my distant cousins here is a trans woman and seems to be living just fine. I just know that everyone here already thinks I'm mentally ill and unstable, and I don't need to add to that. Like "oh, maybe he's going through another episode, that's why he thinks he's a woman". Fuck that.
But I just don't know how, I can barely call myself a human most days. Everywhere I have looked has told me to buy some new girly clothes, but I just don't have the money for that or even to modify the ones I do have. It literally took me an entire fucking year to afford to go to the city and make a fucking bank account. I also tried drawing, but every time I have tried it has devolved into "you gotta work on your technical chops so you can maybe get good enough to do commissions". I can't use my mother's makeup or clothes because she'll find out immediately and I just don't want her to know. I have a hard time bringing myself to shave because what if the family finds out? No shaving cream, just a cheap razor with water and soap, but I just don't want to risk it.
Literally the only thing I feel like I have is porn and sexuality. Which is itself a problem. I have become obsessed with these beautiful transfemme/femboyish bodies. And I realize that it is leading me to understand my own potential femininity in almost purely sexual terms, and to hate my body even more. Like this viaceral feeling I feel in my body to feminize myself is not coming from a genuine understanding of my gender identity, but rather both a sheer hatred of my masculinity and by this sexualized ideal of the kind of meatrag fuckdoll I want to be. Like transfemininity becomes sexualized in my mind, and not a potential reality. It's an obsession with meat and flesh manifesting. I wouldn't dignify it by calling it gender euphoria. I feel disgusting, rotten, putrid just admitting it.
But I genuinely don't know what else to do. Maybe I'm just an unimaginative fuck, I don't know. If I sound desperate and bitter, it's because I am. It genuinely eats at me. Add to that anxiety about an online relationship, forcing myself to recover from an alcoholic relapse cold turkey, and sexual trauma, I just don't know what to do.
How do people even explore their gender identity? What the hell do I do?