Before we start, some context. I am AMAB, ~20, living in red state with no friends I trust IRL to talk about this kind of thing for fear of them being transphobic.

I am pretty sure that I am transgender. There's so much shit that I look at my life and see as clearly being trans, but there's things that make me feel like I am not trans enough. The archetypal trans woman story is the I knew all along, I only liked feminine things, only was friends with girls as a kid, feeling 100% massive dysphoria over every single thing, and is basically the "perfect" trans woman. I on the other hand can't say that about myself. I don't mind being around/friends with men, I like many masculine things like guns and metal music for example, I don't literally want to kill myself out of dysphoria, and in retrospect earliest sign that I can remember as something that I see now as "holy fuck I'm so trans" is when I was 13 ish. I am not the 100% gender role compliant woman and so I feel like claiming myself as trans would be an imposter, an insult to those "real" trans women.

So what things I see as early memories that in anyone else I would see as them being trans are as follows. In 8th grade my school did a weekend trip to a language immersion camp thing(yeah,yeah i am bourgeois pig i know), and a friend of mine thought it would be a funny bit to use female words(it was a language with grammatical gender) and call me by a feminine version of my name as a joke. And you know what, I kind of liked it. This is so obviously trans, gender euphoria from being addressed as she and a woman's name how the fuck did I wait until now to accept myself. This was before I even knew what transgender was even a thing you could be. Friend who did this came out as gay, then non binary so clearly they weren't being sexist/homophobic as joke as was all too common at the time. When I was younger I used to not want to show my chest in public for shame reasons and would wear a swim shirt at the beach and in the pool or lake. That is not a thing cis men feel. Same thing in gym locker room changing was anxiety causing as hell. Male puberty with growing beard and chest hair specifically I can remember feeling just absolute dread over what was going on. This is gender dysphoria clearly. Another memory I have that is not cis from around this time was wishing that I would wake up as a girl and thinking elaborate plans of what I would do, how I would talk to everyone. Another thing was once I knew of trans people being a thing that I can explicitly remember was a scenario of some freak accident that resulted in the removal of testicles and so I could have an excuse to start taking estrogen hrt and transitioning. How the hell did I not start seriously questioning my gender years earlier?

Unfortunately, I kind of know why. My politics started with becoming disillusioned with christianity after having my brother go to a christian school that said the earth was 5000 years old so he couldn't make a project about dinosaurs. From there I found my way to r/atheism(yeah). With some of my other interests being video gaming and firearms, and being a young angsty white "male" I was basically the prime candidate for alt right radicalization. I never fully fell down that rabbit hole thankfully, except for on one specific issue: gender. Ignorant past me saw right wing claims of "auto gynephilia" and the idea that trans women are disgusting subhuman perverted male abominations, and combined that with some uninformed idea of feminist thought that maleness was inherently sexually predatory, and looked at my trans thoughts mentioned earlier and made the wrong fucking decision. This dumbass attempted to perform self conversion therapy to become the right wing incel idea of masculine. I was a bad person then but I'd like to think that the brain worms from that time about other people are gone. Unfortunately, being a communist in my views about everyone else does not prevent me from being internalized fascist to myself. Imagining myself as trans I see myself as this hulking man-creature with sasquatch-like body hair, voice deeper than the bassiest bass sound, 5 oclock shadow on face. Any other trans comrade I do not see this way, but I can't extend that acceptance and love towards others to myself? What is wrong with me?

Reasons why I am reconsidering this now is because even though I managed to push myself back into the closet for a while I can't keep it any longer. I remember after I had somewhat deradicalized myself of fascist ideas on gender that I thought that since I don't want to kill myself over dysphoria that I would just take the path of least resistance and live as an unhappy man and it would be fine. Society is transphobic, family is transphobic, friends are definitely not accepting by any measure, so transitioning would just ruin my life. It's a huge decision and I struggle to decide what to make for dinner, let alone accept myself as trans. The inciting moment was when a non binary friend of a friend was going to start on testosterone that I thought "why would anyone want that, to become masculine" and it has spiraled from there. I try convince myself that I don't have dysphoria but if thats true then why do I spend so much time every day obsessively trying to shave my body and feeling raw disgust over a single missed hair. Why do I look at pictures of myself with the face app gender swap filter and feel loss over who I never would have been. Why did i ask my parents what my name would have been if i was born a girl. Why is the only way I can masturbate to mentally dissociate it from the fact of my own penis being what is being touched. I just want to know if I am trans or not but I can't look into my own brain see "am I trans" pop up as a variable isTransgender=True;. I don't even know how to be feminine because all my friends and siblings as a kid were male or at least I knew them as such at the time. What the fuck should I do here.

Sorry for all the rant, this is the first time I have ever put this feelings out to anyone at all ever. Can some one just please tell me I am trans or not or where I go from here. I want to be a woman but I don't want to have to be trans(because internalized transphobia) and I don't know what I am supposed to feel here.