The way I see it, HRT is magic but what it doesn’t do is make you someone else. The latter part is what I see many people (including myself) struggle with. I used to hang out in voice training communities a lot and see so many people say “I seem to be doing fine and other people like my voice but to me it still sounds like the old me, what am I doing wrong”, which seems absurd if you really think about it. Of course you are going to sound like yourself and, similarly, you are going to retain some physical features the “old you” used to have. You are you after all and not someone else, and there is nothing right or wrong about that, that’s just how it be.

So when someone says (again including myself) that they will never look like a “cis woman”, I invite them to question where they got the idea of what this mythical “cis woman” is supposed to look like and realise that this idea is fundamentally built from images of other people. The real worry, then, is expanding this idea to include yourself (if yourself wants to be a cis woman anyway) and HRT happens to help with that a lot.