Its not that I hate being a girl. I actually like being a girl a lot. I like getting to wear skirts and be a princess and dressing up. I really like fashion and clothes.
I don't want to
I feel disgusted with my female socialization. I want the aggrevized pride that comes with being seen as male. The sense of self-importance, the whininess, the muscle mass. I want people to feel threatened by my physical strength, I want to win every arm wrestling match. I want people to see me and wish I would pin them to the wall. I want to be more intelligent, I want to win every argument. I want people to see me and think I'm worth listening to.
Perhaps then, what I really need is feminism. But there's a bore with contemporary feminists, even the extremists. I have no sacred connection to "womanhood". I do not see what I should see as important in my vagina, or my breasts, beyond getting to play sexual dress-up or other fantasies. I don't like the female body - on an ideological level, I have no issue with it, and even on a social level - but I don't feel empowered by connections to womanhood. I am disgusted by "the divine feminine", or the weird way some people talk about connections with birth gender assignment ("AFAB").
I wish I could put on sex organs like clothes. To have boobs when I want sexual attention, and for them to be gone when I am in my day-to-day life. I hate seeing my chest through my shirt.
I like womanhood in some ways. Mostly, I like the concept of it. Body-wise, I dislike both sexes. I don't want to be on testostrone or estrogen, but at least one is required for bone matinence. If I had to compromise then, maybe I should just get top surgery. I find that I dislike the way other people look with just top surgery and no other changes, but maybe I would like it on myself.
I wouldn't mind if low-dose testostrone was a requirement to get top surgery though. Maybe I would forgive myself for going on it if it was a means to an end.
I just don't want my family to hate me, I think. I don't think they would ever love me as a trans man. I would fantasize, as a kid, about being hit with an alien-sex change laser, maybe during a dramatic self-sacrifice to save my family. And then it would be broken, so I could not change back. My family would pity me, say that they can still see me as a girl if I want, but I would shock them by being bravely okay with my new body. I would tell them its okay, I am okay being their son now, and they would commend me for being so brave. And I would be happy and loved and show them how brave I was.
That's never going to happen, of course. It's just a fantasy.
I think I'm trans, but I'm more scared than I am dysphoric. I'll live a thousand lifetimes in a hell of my own creation just so no one gets mad at me. Of course, people are still mad at me, and I live as an out nonbinary person in my personal life (away from my family), so it's not like I'm even doing a good job of staying closeted. But I still think of my parents and my siblings, and I can't transition, because I'm much less likely to win custody in the future as a trans person than a cis one.
I don't know if I would enjoy living my day to day life transitioned than not. Frankly, I feel that I only began to have an identity as a person a couple of years ago. Most of what I want feels superficial.
So I have a complicated relationship to gender identity. Sue me. I use they/them and I go by an androgynous name and I wear the nonbinary flag at pride festivals, but that's not good enough for most people these days. It's certainly not good enough for the workplace. To lots of people I'm just a girl playing pretend, so I need to lean into masculinity to compensate. But it has to be in a way that makes people like me, so I can't get mad about being misgendered, but maybe my abject failure to conform to womanhood can be used as evidence in the eyes of cis people that I'm "really" trans. As for getting a job, I guess I'll just move to a liberal state in the USA and go from there. It's the only chance I have to find employment while still using they/them.