First time posting. Hope this is the right place to share it, or that someone finds it valuable to hear.
I grew up on the internet, pretty much. Instead of socializing with people around me growing up, I used reddit to join discord servers for my favorite music groups, all which were of course infested with TRAs, which immediately plunged me into the deep end into weird transgender twitter social groups. Everyone I was talking to was pretty much just like me, young nerdy effeminate shy men, and they were all transing, so I thought I should be like them. Immediately I became self-loathing and withdrew from society because I hated my body and my parents. I dragged my feet long enough not to actually alter my body. I like to think I was smart, but in reality I was suicidal and I thought I would rather kill myself than come out to my family so I didn't bother trying to take care of myself at all. Thankfully in the last few years I have been able to save myself from that nightmare.
People all the time would tell me, an androgynous young man, "it's not too late to start HRT before you get ugly". Funnily enough, several of the people telling me this were detransitioned men who were dating trans people or TIMs who wanted to get double mastectomies to remove their hormone moobs. It is pretty easy to see that as classic Freudian projection, but at the time, I believed everything they said because I looked up to them, and I just felt like a hopeless, ugly failure.
I got peaked by reading regularly here which helped deprogram all of that. I came for the lolcows but I started reading Stinkditch like a dissident Soviet reading samizdat papers. Everyone was saying what my gut had been feeling the whole time, stuff I was too brainwashed and gaslighted to allow myself to think. When people found out I read here, I lost friends instantly. That in itself also peaked me. Then I lost more friends when I started befriending the detransitioners who didn't suck the girldick and hated all of this as much as I did. In the meantime, I had worked myself into a decent career and was finally taking care of myself and participating meaningfully in society and reality, whereas all of the people I had formerly looked up to entered spirals of unemployment and drug addiction and crashouts. That made me feel like I was making the right choice. I also came to realize it was because they were trans, whether they realized it or not, because that is the logical conclusion of cutting off everyone you know and running away so you can take drugs and jack off to yourself in the mirror forever.
I can't tell you how ecstatic I felt finally cutting off these people and becoming a full cultural conservative and listening to detransitioner/TERF podcasts. I felt like I was being honest for the first time in a long time. It's been hard losing lots of friends and accepting that I lost years of my life to this but I have gained so much more from embracing that I am a man and embracing truth and finally joining reality than any of those people ever gave me.
I learned that the best way to take care of yourself is the opposite of what gender ideology tells you: to accept yourself for who you are, love your family as much as they love you, and be a man and grow up.