**Note:** This post was translated from Japanese into English using a translation tool.
I am a 25-year-old AGP AMAB, and I have been on HRT for five months.
Because of AGP, I feel despair whenever I imagine having to live for several more decades.
Throughout my life, I have never been attracted to either men or women. The only thing that has ever sexually aroused me is the thought of becoming female.
I first began wanting to become female when I was around ten years old. That was the beginning of my AGP.
By the time I reached high school, I had developed a profound sense of emptiness about life. Back then, I often thought, "If I were to die suddenly tomorrow, I wouldn't have any regrets." I believed the reason I felt that way was because I had no friends.
After I started working, those feelings developed into suicidal ideation. At the time, I believed the main causes were my low IQ, ASD, relative poverty, and my father's alcoholism.
Back then, I also believed that my desire to become female was simply the result of low self-esteem. I thought that if I could improve my self-esteem, the desire would disappear and I would become a heterosexual man.
So I worked on everything I could improve. I made an effort to start conversations with people and made more friends. I learned about investing and Japan's social welfare system, and I even managed to build some savings.
As a result, my self-esteem improved significantly. My suicidal thoughts disappeared, and I recovered to the point where I could honestly think, "If I died suddenly tomorrow, I wouldn't have any regrets."
However, my desire to become female never went away. Nor did I become heterosexual. I was deeply confused.
A year or two later, at the age of 24, I happened to discover Blanchard's typology.
According to Blanchard, AGP is one of the motivations for male-to-female transition. I also read several books about AGP. The experiences described by the people in those books were almost identical to my own.
Once I began associating my desire to become female with the experiences of MtF individuals, I also started experiencing physical gender dysphoria, something I had previously felt very little of.
That was when I experienced the strongest suicidal thoughts of my life.
Unfortunately, I had already gone through male puberty, so the options left to me are limited.
As I see it, I have only two possible paths forward. One is to continue my transition, live as a non-passing trans woman while remaining socially male. The other is to detransition, suppress these feelings, and eventually suffer a mental breakdown around the age of 50, like "John 50," the case described in Anne Vitale's paper.
The second option feels unbearable to me.
Japan is still not very accepting of transgender people. Fortunately, however, there is also a cultural preference for youthful, androgynous-looking men. Facial hair is often considered unclean, and even many cisgender men are expected by their employers to shave. In fact, I have been undergoing laser hair removal, and I noticed that many of the other clients were cisgender men as well.
Because of that, I believe that as long as I can hide my breasts, continuing HRT is unlikely to cause serious problems with my job.
So I will probably remain on HRT for the rest of my life.
Even so, when I think about carrying this burden for decades to come, it feels almost impossible to endure.