Only speaking for myself, you are completely wrong. Never in my life have I had a single symptom of gender dysphoria, right up to the instant I'm typing this.
All those hiding in the closet, by their own admission, wish they didn't have to. They lack balls so perhaps THEY are the ones with gender dysphoria. All this nonsense about risking careers, families, etc is an excuse. And it also happens to be a fear, just like I said earlier. Fear of losing your job.
Guess what? I hold a decent job. I direct more than a dozen engineers in a company with more than 100 employees and I report directly to the president. Guess what else? If he saw me dressed, he'd probably laugh about it and move on. You know why? Because I'm freaking valuable to my company. They don't want to do without me, crossdresser or not. If you're worried about losing your precious career, maybe you should concentrate more on your job and less on your dressing.
Courage is not the lack of fear. Courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. That's what I did. 65-70% of you out there are too scared to take the first step and that's the truth. All this talk about jobs, family, friends etc is easily overcome by doing it in a different location. You don't have the guts. The first time I went out, my heart rate was hovering around 165 the whole time. I couldn't even drive. I stayed in panic mode the entire night. But I did it and that's more than most here can say. And I did it within weeks of starting to dress. The thought of dressing to the nines and prancing around the house for years is just pathetic.
Many of you would do well to study a thing called "comfort zones." Once a comfort zone is expanded it NEVER shrinks back to its original size. It can only grow. Every time you do a scary thing, it is less scary. But you have to man-up and do it the first time.
Something to think about...
Imagine if the 29,300 members of this forum all agreed to go out once a week and talk with at least 10 strangers about crossdressing. We would educate 293,000 people a week, 10 weeks = 3 million people and in a year over 15 million people would know more about crossdressers. It would be more accepted. We would suffer less ridicule. People would expand their OWN comfort zones.
But that's not going to happen until some people grow some sack.