I understand the fear. It’s hard to live with the knowledge that who you are might mean you’re rejected by even the people you assumed would love you unconditionally.

But on the other hand, what’s the value in being loved for the character you play? Wouldn’t you prefer to know how they feel about who you actually are?

I saw from your other comment that you’re dipping into presenting more like you feel, and that’s great - there’s no rush.

I’m two years into hormones and my life has been so much better for it, despite being reluctant and uncertain at first - only in the past year or so have I really been telling people. Cis people are spectacularly unobservant and you’d probably be able to hide that anything’s changing for a while.

I would maybe suggest focusing less on labels, and more on what you actually want out of life substantively? You can associate more with women or things traditionally aligned with femininity if you want to, and regardless of gender identity.

But also, if as your post implies you want to be and for people to see you as more feminine - then I think you should consider taking steps to pursue that? In all likelihood, we only get one life - and it’s too short to spend miserably living a lie longing for something else. There’s no need to begrudgingly degender yourself if that’s not something you actually want to do.

If physical changes are something that you actually want, less the social stigma - you can see about quietly beginning gender affirming care without publicly announcing any change to your identity. It’s also not something that you have to stay the course on if it turns out not to be right for you. You might find that it slots some things into place though.

Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job. Sponsorships, grants, and other funding instruments exist for people who do work which is committed to the public domain.

Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.

I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.

At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.