For my it wasn't about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.

Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying "if I didn't have a reason", so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn't have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.

They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.