I'm glad it resonated with you

Absolutely. That stigma is the only thing that is holding me back.

Here's the passage that inspired that, I think you'd find it interesting:

She’s like, I’m the sort of person who has too much self-regard to stay at this job, too, except I guess I’m all damaged.

Meaning: trans. Not in, like, an I should not have transitioned sense. More like, okay, I have been trans since I was a tiny little baby. Whether it was something in my brain from before I was born, like people argue sometimes, or it was something I picked up developmentally after I was born, like other people argue sometimes, or whether somebody sexually abused me and then I repressed the shit out of it and then that repression transmogrified into transsexuality, as some other folks will argue, who fucking cares. Maybe there is a gene, maybe it’ll turn out Freud wasn’t a crackpot who liked logic games more than human beings, maybe my mom was overbearing and my father was distant. I don’t care, whatever, I’m trans. I have been trans since I was little. There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all. Meaning hormones. It is stupid and there are these hoops you have to jump through, boxes you need to check: I have only ever been attracted to men, I have never fetishized women’s clothes or done anything remotely kinky, I have never been sexual with the junk I was born with. Pretty much you have to prove that you’re totally normal and straight and not queer at all, so that if they let you transition you will be a normal het woman who doesn’t freak anybody out, and so we often, as individuals, internalize these things, and then we, as a community, often reinforce them. All of which is relevant specifically because you are supposed to have known you were trans since you were a tiny little baby.

Maria didn’t though.

She felt weird when she was little, but she assumed everybody else did too. She didn’t figure out what kind of weird until she was like twenty. She’d known something was messed up, that she was distant from everything. She’d known that Those Kinds of People were out there somewhere, but it felt like there was nothing but us normal people in here. This is what everybody thinks. When she was twenty she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized. If you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

I'm sure someone told you this before but you should read Nevada. It's a good book for babytrans imo. I found out recently that the author went into therapy as a day job to support her writing and even if she wasn't a therapist when she wrote Nevada, her interest in it is reflected in the story. Maria and James are archetypes of trans women compiled from commonly shared life experience. Maria and James are different people in the story but they're also the same person at different points in their life. So like, all the trans women you admire probably start off close to James, and the book really helps in showing that you can be a Maria, or even something more.