i was in a similar situation to you physically, it’s really never too late to start. i repped for over 20 years before starting transition in my 30s. i didn’t have a huge crashout but hanging out with other trans women made it feel a lot more approachable. it finally got to me and i started hrt.
once you start and get used to hrt, i highly recommend getting on shots if you can tolerate it. multi-day cycles are way better than having swings during the day or based on your metabolism. injectable also doesn’t hit your liver and is pretty easy to stockpile.
if you have any way to get laser or electrolysis, i found that made a huge difference in my mental health as well as how other people interpret my appearance and address me. you can find places to do it on the cheap, esthetician schools often let you get that work done for deep discounts. i started doing that as soon as i started hrt, the androgen suppression means you won’t get as much regrowth.
eating food is another big one, you will get fat redistribution on hrt but it requires that you have some fat to redistribute. i really had to work through a lot of restrictive behavior patterns that i’d accumulated over the years, but it’s been worth it to grow tits and ass.
i had saved up a bit in advance, but not a ton. doing it through a school definitely made that money stretch out a lot.
they are okay, i used them very briefly when my insurance was giving me shit. too much skin irritation and the dose you end up with depends on how well it sticks to you. plus the dosing on those is more for cis women in menopause unless you use a bunch. to get to a therapeutic dose with those i’d need 3-5 of the largest patches, rotated twice a week. they are also relatively expensive and not always easy to source. compared to that i found sticking myself every 5 days is way easier.
you definitely don’t need to start with that, but it’s very easy to do subcutaneous injections. i rarely draw blood and barely feel a thing these days. i ended up injecting in my torso because i’m pretty thin and when i was doing it in my leg i’d always be hitting muscle.
that does hurt, i hope you are able to find some community. i do hope you are reflecting on this though, it’s not fun having other people (including other trans people) obsessing over you. if someone in any friend group becomes the focus of someone else’s fixation, the group is going to close ranks around that person.
the reason i say to reflect on this is that if your takeaway is that they’re ‘haters’ you’ll carry that and associated behaviors into the next community and it’ll happen again.
if the takeaway is ‘i did something that made someone uncomfortable and i need to understand what that was and not repeat it,’ that’s a thing you can actually work on. plus it leaves the door open to rebuilding somewhere, maybe even with some of these people eventually.
i know you don’t mean anything by it, but in my experience ‘transwoman’ with no space is the preferred spelling of people who tend to argue that trans women aren’t women. not passing judgement, just fyi. i prefer to use trans as an adjective, like ‘tall’ or ‘loud’ or ‘annoying’.
good luck, i started via informed consent at pp and it was not difficult at all, but definitely recommend getting your primary care doctor in the loop for running ultrasensitive estradiol bloodwork routinely