I know a bit about rural life. I grew up in a community of around 160 people a very high percentage of whom were above retirement age.the hour bus ride to the nearest proper town was only possible between 08:00 and 18:00. So I saw people at school but was largely isolated unless I spent the night.

I was mostly ignored by everyone and extremely lonely and when I went to Edinburgh, I just made up my mind that I was going to talk to everyone and make an effort to socialise as much as possible. It worked, and I got involved with everything. I had 4 different friend circles and did something every evening. But I wasn’t getting anything else done. I was avoiding being alone because if I was alone I would be trapped with the thoughts of being vastly different from my peers and woefully misunderstood. I felt even more alone in those times.

But you have the advantage of knowing you’re trans. I didn’t. What eventually helped more than anything is meeting my current partner and eventually opening up to her. But I never would have met her if I’d stayed in my rural pit. Living rurally isn’t bad per se, but it requires that you are sociable and not picky about who you socialise with. Either that or you have to be extremely comfortable with your own company.

I recommend contacting someone you know irl who has moved to the closest reasonable sized city and asking if they can show you round/help set you up with a job. People at work will ask if you want to go to the bar after work. You need to say yes whether or not you think they are people you want to hang out with.

You also need to find the low effort mentally ill crowd. To do this, go to any cheap looking pub that has a board game night and go talk to the autistic looking people dressed in black. They are likely to know other trans women and that’ll get you into the community.

Also, I’m not sure how it is there, but my town has a pride week that includes things like a trans café, trans swimming hours at the local pool, and a pre-march breakfast sponsored by the national trans patient association. These could be a good way to make yourself known to your people. I intend to go to a couple of those events next week (pride week is in November where I live so students from out of town can participate).

You can usually meet some easygoing people if you turn up to weird stuff happening there. Like with Edinburgh as an example: the Beltane fire festival. The crustys taking part in that took me out to the forest where we built a sweat lodge, played team building games, drank chilli whiskey and mushroom tea, and danced bollock naked round the campfire until the dog walkers started asking why we were all dancing around naked at 10 in the morning? and could they join us?

Basically the people who are outside of normal society will largely look after each other and they tend to accumulate in larger cities.