I'm aware of what hormones do, I did plenty of research before getting on them. I take hormones so that my body is feminized, which I like. But I don't present as a stereotypically feminine woman in terms of long hair, dress or makeup. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand.
I'm usually perceived as a gender-nonconforming woman, which is how I'd like to be perceived as. The only reason people like me are uncommon is selection pressure due to medical gatekeeping. There are a lot of trans people who have no interest in conforming to gendered expectations, but are coerced to by the threat of losing access to medically necessary healthcare.
Medical gatekeeping is not "a fact of life" that can't be changed. There's less of it where I live and it works out just fine. Informed consent is the modern protocol and the rest of the world should adopt it, but GCs in places like the UK oppose that and want to reinforce silly stereotypes like "if you don't wear a dress you're not a real trans woman".
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edit to respond: sigh, no, transness does not hinge on gender expression. It hinges on gender identity and subconscious sex, neither of which are the same thing as gender expression. Gender identity is only somewhat related to social conceptions of gender expression.
What a lot of GCs do is deny the existence of gender identity. But that's just empirically false based on the evidence from millions of trans people worldwide, which includes literally me as a human being, writing this comment right now.
It is important to note that this is a contingent fact about Homo sapiensβit is possible that a different species with our level of intelligence doesn't have anything called a gender identity. But humans do.
Please read Whipping Girl. It goes into all this in quite some detail.
Well, historically, the broad shift from a focus on "transsexual" status and "sex change/reassignment" (focusing on primary and secondary sex characteristics) to one on "transgender" and "gender reassignment" (focusing on some canonical gender expression) was driven by consensus within the trans community.
If anything, the more traditional or "gender critical" POV is that the earlier 'transsexual' focus was in fact appropriate, in which a transfemale person can be transfemale no matter what they express as, whilst "cis", "trans" or "fluid" gender expression is a bit of a red herring.
What do you think is the psychological cause of not wishing to be recognised as a gender-nonconforming transwoman?
What is the identity difference between woman and transwoman?
The stated purpose of feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy is specifically to alter secondary sexual characteristics in a feminizing or masculinizing direction, respectively - so yours seems to be a comparatively uncommon use of such HT. Given that "medical gatekeeping" is merely a fact of life that applies to all sorts of substances and that there are also many arguments for gatekeeping access to steroids specifically, the proactive step forward for people like you would be to get your specific medical need described in the medical research literature so that, in the longer run, policies around access to steroids can be changed to more naturally encompass cases like yours. Blaming GC positions for such issues is just not very sensible.