When I was a young child, I naïvely believed anything I experienced or that anyone told me as true. As I started adolescence, I started to question that, and realised that people who tell me stuff might be mistaken, or intentionally lying to me. I became very interested in optical illusions, and realised my senses could be fooled too. I had to rely on measurable, repeatable truth that scientific experts had written in pop science books.
Then I thought about simulations, being in a story (like in Sophie's World), gods, and every other possibility that the entire world I experience is not real and is created to test me, to observe me, indifferent to me and I'm there by accident - whichever it was, I couldn't believe for sure that anyone besides me really existed, or anything I knew through my senses. Only my logical reasoning could be trusted. I am doubting therefore I exist, but I couldn't know anything else for sure.
Until recently, I realised when I was ruminating one time, and thinking about which is better: truth or happiness. Most of the times I'd ruminated, I knew I'd come to the conclusion that I'd rather be right than happy. I had logic to back this up, it's more important to know the truth because then I'm happy about being right. But when I'd been happier, I thought being happy was more important than being right - after all, what's the point of being right if it doesn't bring you pleasure, seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering being the whole goal of life?
I realised that what I thought was logical reasoning to support my conclusion wasn't logical at all. It was a rationalisation to support whichever conclusion made me happier at the time. When, for chemical reasons in my brain, I was happy, I wanted to remain happy. So I'd subconsciously convinced myself that I had logic to convince myself that happiness is preferable. When my hormone levels were low so I was feeling down, telling myself that at least I feel better because I know the truth is a way of coping.
And I realised that when my 'logical' reasoning is just a rationalisation for an emotional state caused by brain chemicals and my body, I can't trust any 'logical' argument my brain thinks of. I don't exist because I'm thinking, I exist because I have an innate sense of existing. So therefore, I can't trust anything I think is logical. But wait, that there is a logical statement! So I can't trust it either! And so on... aaaAAARGH!
The more I try to find truth, the less I find I know. I somehow get even more agnostic than I thought it was possible to be, I at least thought, 'Alright, I have no idea what the universe is, but as an external observer I know that I exist.'
I am no longer an external observer! My observations about how my hormones and body affects my emotions, which in turn affect how infuriated I am at the fact that I don't know stuff, that I don't have free will - not the other way around - means I can't even think anymore, as my brain is part of the compromised system. I am compromised.
The more I learn, the less I know.
Gender dysphoria is pretty hard to miss honestly, at any given moment the sheer anguish and mental pain from it would follow me through life long before I even knew what a gender/sex was.
When I first read about it, it made a lot of sense to me, but I still carried out a lot of research before I did anything, I knew my parents wouldn't be accepting and as a teen in the third world making an enemy of your parents is a bad idea, so it better be worth it.
The difficult part is actually understanding that what you're experiencing is not universal and being able to detangle that from all the other feelings.
A year or so later I finally bit the bullet and started taking HRT in secret at 17.
Well that was 10 years ago now almost, I just had SRS (lower surgery in PC speak) last year, healed in about 6 weeks or so and I couldn't be happier, I'm an independent adult with degrees, a career, friends, an S.O. and way too many hobbies haha.
Every year for me is happier than the last and I'm so eternally grateful to those who came before me who shared their experiences and and the enormous amounts of luck it took me to get the healthcare I so badly needed.
My only regret is that I was never told as a kid that gender dysphoria was something that even existed or could happen to somebody as a medical condition, and that I didn't grow up in a society accepting enough where I could've gotten the healthcare (puberty blockers) I sorely needed and I could've just avoided both the suffering I endured as a kid and the physical scars of the wrong puberty that I'll never be able to remove from skull size to ribcage diameter.
Thankfully I'm never misgendered and "pass" in as far as I can tell, but I'll never not notice those things myself, even if cis people don't and don't get what the big deal is.
I've often consoled myself in carrying that burden with the hope that folks like me won't have to suffer so much in the future, saw myself as something of the last victim of a war that was largely over, but alas it appears the future even in the west where I live now will have enough suffering to go around for everyone, especially so folks like me.
If anything, the political and social situation has in fact only gotten worse in the past 10 years. And all of it so meaningless really. Sigh