It happens. Look around, it happens a lot with 'us'. We approach transition and one reason or another we turn away or detrasition. Family, job, freinds or social accpetance are typical drivers. Self acceptance is, I think, the biggest one. If you can not accept yourself first and foremost then it is very easy to allow your family, freinds or job to persuade you not to transition.
Did you ever sit down and read the litature surrounding Transgender issues? A Trans person feels that they have to Transition OR DIE. Those guide lines are written like that from experiance not conjecture.
There are other perspectives. Here a few of mine, from my personal experience with hrt as a teen, then college, then vaginoplasty, ffs later on, and just living a female life since college.
As an example, I started taking hormones at age seventeen, with no idea how I would get from where I was through to getting a vaginoplasty and beyond. I had to fight for what I believed, despite numerous very intense confrontational "interventions", and all sorts of people, including family at first, actively trying to stop me. I forged ahead on my own though, and I worked things out, got through college, got my vaginoplasty and so on, without ever knowing what might come next during many stages of the adventure. The obstacles for someone young like myself might be completely different from someone at forty, but there are huge obstacles for someone young.
However, the benefits afterward have been significant for me, and I consciously believed that when all sorts of people were desperately trying to get me to just "delay", with every tactic they could think of, for a long time. I believe that in hindsight, they too now understand the value of my having organized my live so that I only know adult life from a female perspective, that I earned my college degrees with diplomas that have my female name on them, that when I interviewed for my first job, I did it, and could do it, with the history of those college degrees with female names on them, so that I could build my employment history as a female human being from the very beginning. That is the perspective from which I know what it means to be female.
I know it is a perspective that is shared by many, but that it is one that gets left out often by the media: between the "Oprah" style shows about the parents with their trans-children, and the "Oprah" style shows shows with the middle aged families and cis-kids with trans-parents at the other end. I only know of few media presentation exceptions, such as the 2006 documentary called "Transgeneration" about a group of ts college students, both mtf and ftm, working toward surgery, that aired on the Sundance channel. Only one of them made it through to surgery during the documentary, but she provides a great public example of what happens when parents become accepting. She went on to get her vaginoplasty surgery from Marci Bowers, and then graduated from college.
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