First off, I wanna say there are boatloads of responses from trans people explaining their experiences here and in /r/asktransgender. It might be worth checking out if you don't find the answers you're looking for here.

I'm trans and I transitioned late in life, in my 30s. I also grew up in a conservative area in a religious household, and it was really difficult for me to come to terms with myself.

Being trans isn't about just gender or sex. When you say

transgender but, like, cissexual

The answer is "yeah, more or less" some essentialists might consider it "not really transgender", but whatever. How you identify and what steps you take to transition are up to you.

As for me, I know I'm a woman, which took a long time, but I've always known that I wasn't a man. Being around other men, I've always had a voice that says "oh, I'm not like them". Men (all humans, if we're being real) are many varied creatures, obviously, so I didn't understand why this mattered to me. But I knew that I hated my genitals and wished they were gone. Even before I had a word for being trans, I knew that I wanted them gone. My nickname for my penis was "my useless appendage" and I'd fantasize about just cutting it off.

I've always struggled with depression and my mood. For years I tried different cocktails of medication to try and help me feel better, but none of it got to the underlying issue. Since being on hormone therapy, this has been much less of an issue. This static noise that had been in the back of my brain finally just shut off. It had been there my entire life and it was quiet for the first time in my life. You cannot imagine the relief of that.

I never liked my body growing up. I'd fantasized about having a more feminine figure and have always really wanted breasts (though being a repressed good lil' catholic boy, I was terrified of voicing that lest god smite me down). After a few months of hormones, I finally got mine and it's the happiest I've ever been with a part of my body.

I still have dysphoria about some of my male features, but it's not nearly as bad as it once was. I look much more feminine now and I often get gendered correctly when I go out.

I'll say this about other people seeing me as a woman, it's nice, but not nearly as important as myself seeing that. It's an important internal/external consistency that I've been missing most of my life.