I also transitioned when I was 26, so I can attest that it's a good age to transition at :-) (Not that there is a wrong age. I just happen to have personal experience here.)
I don't know where you live, but the best first step is probably to try to find an informed-consent clinic or a doctor who prescribes EEI (exogeneous endocrine intervention, though probably saying "testosterone" is most likely to be understood). You may want to get therapy as well (especially if you've experienced trauma or depression over and beyond the usual expected amount from being trans), but if you choose to do that, you can do it in tandem with pursuing medical intervention. If you can, find someone who doesn't agree with the WPATH standards of care, as they are limiting and deprive us of agency. Where I live, Lyon-Martin Clinic is an example of an informed consent clinic. There is a fairly long list of other such clinics and doctors at http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/jjezi/informed_consent_registry_show_your_playing_hand/ -- but, if you don't live near any of them, you can always just find a doctor you trust and show them a copy of _Medical Health and Maintenance for Transgender Men_, available for free online.
"Informed consent", by the way, basically just means that the doctor (or nurse practitioner in some cases) explains the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy to you, and you sign a statement saying you understand those risks. There's no "real-life test" or other gatekeeping; no one tries to assess you to see if you're trans enough, people trust that you know that for yourself.
If you decide to get top surgery and/or genital reconstruction surgery later on, you may need letters from a therapist and/or psychiatrist for those, unfortunately, but it should generally be possible to be prescribed testosterone without those letters (however, your mileage may vary depending on income, insurance coverage or lack thereof, and -- unfortunately -- your race and disability or lack thereof). Also, some people opt to have surgery before starting testosterone. It's not what I did, but everyone is different and there's no one right way.
There are a couple useful groups on Yahoo!, though like any group online there are plenty of misogynist and otherwise oppressive things that get said:
and from there you can probably find links to other groups. There's also http://ftm.livejournal.com/ (I don't know if there's anything that's been formed on DW, and I haven't read the LJ community in a long time) and obviously stuff on reddit, but it sounds like you know about that.
If you want to email me (my email address is in my userinfo) I might be able to suggest more specific stuff about finding informed-consent people in your area, but you can probably also chase links from the reddit post that I linked to above.
Good luck... and sorry for taking so long to reply.
Re: hey
I don't know where you live, but the best first step is probably to try to find an informed-consent clinic or a doctor who prescribes EEI (exogeneous endocrine intervention, though probably saying "testosterone" is most likely to be understood). You may want to get therapy as well (especially if you've experienced trauma or depression over and beyond the usual expected amount from being trans), but if you choose to do that, you can do it in tandem with pursuing medical intervention. If you can, find someone who doesn't agree with the WPATH standards of care, as they are limiting and deprive us of agency. Where I live, Lyon-Martin Clinic is an example of an informed consent clinic. There is a fairly long list of other such clinics and doctors at http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/jjezi/informed_consent_registry_show_your_playing_hand/ -- but, if you don't live near any of them, you can always just find a doctor you trust and show them a copy of _Medical Health and Maintenance for Transgender Men_, available for free online.
"Informed consent", by the way, basically just means that the doctor (or nurse practitioner in some cases) explains the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy to you, and you sign a statement saying you understand those risks. There's no "real-life test" or other gatekeeping; no one tries to assess you to see if you're trans enough, people trust that you know that for yourself.
If you decide to get top surgery and/or genital reconstruction surgery later on, you may need letters from a therapist and/or psychiatrist for those, unfortunately, but it should generally be possible to be prescribed testosterone without those letters (however, your mileage may vary depending on income, insurance coverage or lack thereof, and -- unfortunately -- your race and disability or lack thereof). Also, some people opt to have surgery before starting testosterone. It's not what I did, but everyone is different and there's no one right way.
There are a couple useful groups on Yahoo!, though like any group online there are plenty of misogynist and otherwise oppressive things that get said:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FTMEarlyTransitioning/
and from there you can probably find links to other groups. There's also http://ftm.livejournal.com/ (I don't know if there's anything that's been formed on DW, and I haven't read the LJ community in a long time) and obviously stuff on reddit, but it sounds like you know about that.
If you want to email me (my email address is in my userinfo) I might be able to suggest more specific stuff about finding informed-consent people in your area, but you can probably also chase links from the reddit post that I linked to above.
Good luck... and sorry for taking so long to reply.