People keep asking this on Quora, presumably out of a morbid fascination of the assumed sense of dread that person would feel. Oh my god what have I done. In fact it would be very dire, and I am truly empathetic for the extremely few people who have managed to get to that position.
The system guards against this happening. Nobody walks into a therapist’s office on a Monday and is wheeled out of an OR that Friday. It doesn’t happen like that. This is a many year process. I traversed it in what is probably one of the faster times and I started mid 2012 and had GCS in late 2015, by which you can see there was quite a bit of time for consideration.
First there is time to consider transition at all, in my case 4/2012 to 10/2013. Transition is itself a very major step and not a fun one. It turns your life upside down. Some people detransition at that point because they decide they’d rather live with the dysphoria, and some discover that they have other paths. It would be the truly rare person, except for a person specifically trying to game the system who would reach this point and not be gender dysphoric and be detransitioning because they aren’t trans.
Confirming the hormones is the first test. HRT generally brings a feeling of wellness to those who are truly trans and the opposite to those who are not. This too tends to weed out any fakers from the group.
You go full time, for me in March 2014, and the poop really hits the rotating blades. Job troubles start happening for all too many. Family and friend issues too. Again, nobody wants this and you have to really need transition to deal with the bullshit.
By time you’re considered minimally qualified for surgery you’ve been on HRT for a year and full time for a year. For most people that means a good deal longer than a year since you generally don’t start HRT and go full time the same day.
Then you schedule surgery. I was fortunate in slipping in a few months later but waiting times of two years is fairly typical. For me surgery was November 2015. I had three years (really my entire childhood and adult life) to consider what I was about to do. I took it incredibly seriously. I considered what I would do if it proved somehow to be a mistake and decided I could live with it.
In fact, the first couple of days after surgery were very tough. I was ok, but I had some panic attacks about whether I had made a mistake. I was fine of course.
What could I have done had I made a mistake? Not much. Stop estrogen and start testosterone. Get a double mastectomy and consider whether any of the inadequate bottom surgeries available to FtM patients would be adequate (they wouldn’t in my mind).
If I had been FtM the options are better depending on what exactly was done in the bottom surgery.
The bottom line is that there is so much preparation and real life experience exactly to prevent people from making that kind of dire mistake. I even asked a second therapist for an opinion – that’s how sure I wanted to be.
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My Gifted Life 