Hey y'all. I'm warning you this is going to be a long story, but I want to ask anonymous people who have no agenda with me to see if I'm actually who I think I am or if there's something else that's underlying that I haven't accepted about myself yet. I'm going to tell you the entire story of how I felt in terms of my gender, gender-identity, and things along those lines from the beginning until now. My name is Syd. My legal name is Sydney, but I go by Syd exclusively now. Throughout my life I have gone back and forth on whether I prefer being called Syd or Sydney. I don't mind the name Sydney as a name, but I think Syd is more fitting for my personality because it sounds slightly more androgynous. I sometimes spell it as Sid because the 'Sid' spelling is stereotypically more androgynous than the other spelling. My early childhood was pretty gender-ambiguous. My parents didn't know whether I was amab or afab until the day I was born, so I ended up with an androgynous wardrobe. My favorite color has always been green from the get-go (not that colors have gender, but usually green is a bit of a 'unisex' color according to stereotype). I hated wearing dresses and tights and having long hair (that my dad would never let me cut). My typical go-to outfit was a Gap hooded sweater, boot-leg jeans, and a pair of nikes. I was diagnosed with Autism when I was 3, and didn't have any real friends at school because I didn't fit in that well. I did, however, have exclusively male cousins for the first 10 years of my life that I considered to be my brothers, and I had 1 stepbrother and 2 stepsisters after my parents divorced that I would see on the weekends. I never quite fit in with my stepsisters in all the girly things we did, but I didn't exactly feel like "one of the boys" either. Fast forward to puberty age. When I first grew pubic hair and breasts, I felt very uncomfortable in my own skin. I was however, thankful that for the first several years after puberty, I was an A cup. Some of this stemmed from not being comfortable with having it, but I feel like even more of it stems from heterosexual males giving me unwanted attention. My father used to tell me that I would need to take care of what acne I had "for the boys" (this was before I fathomed I was bisexual). And again, while living with my father at this stage, he still wouldn't let me get my hair cut short (which was something that I wanted to do for a while at this point). I dressed slightly more feminine at this stage of my life, but still had a bit of androgynous vibes. I wore skinny jeans, converse, a t-shirt with lots of tanktops underneath (because they made my breasts less noticable through my clothes), and a hoodie. Then when I hit 15 things got a bit more intense. I went from an A-cup to a B-cup, and seeing that in the mirror made me feel uncomfortable. I didn't like showers starting at this age because they reminded me of my breasts. I almost completely ditched wired and padded bras at this age because I hated that they reminded me of my chest and made me feel like I had bigger boobs. My questioning of my gender got even moreso because this was when I discovered Tumblr and Transmen that would be on there- some of them having similar experiences to mine. I wore ties to school and unisex T-shirts and skinny jeans and would put my newly short hair underneath a beanie. I remember one time being called "he" because one of my teachers assumed I was a boy, and feeling uncomfortable with it at the time. Eventually, I was grounded by my mom (I had moved out my dad's when I was 13, and the stepsiblings were gone). My mom grounded me because she told me that she never wanted me to be transgender, I used my beanie as a crutch, and was angry when she found out I confided in a friend about this confusion. This goes into another phase of my life: After this moment, I did everything to be as Cis as possible. I would dress feminine almost every day. I shaved everything. I pulled out those wire/padded bras that were collecting dust and started to wear them. I grew out my hair to be really long and dyed it red. I remember feeling happy in this stage of my life because I got a lot of my mother's positive attention- which felt like a first for me since I was a small child. My mom really wanted a girl, and I really played into that to make her happy. I was happy during this phase because I felt like my mom loved me. However, I still hated wearing those bras and I was super deep into the closet with myself about my bisexuality . Gender was a completely taboo thing for me to think about at that point. So I adopted being Cis, and i felt happy because I got positive attention for being Cis, but at the end of the day it felt like I was playing it up a bit to feel her love. After a year of presenting as very feminine, I slowly progressed away from it. When I was 19, which was 2-3 years after my ultrafeminine phase, I started questioning my gender again. I discovered gender fluidity and felt I could relate to some of it. I had someone address me by the they/them pronoun and felt very excited. I started going by Syd completely at this age and made me feel more comfortable in my own skin. Then I went to study abroad in Nicaragua, a country I had never been to before, and decided that I was going to be completely myself there. I wore cargo shorts from the men's section, I wore exclusively sports bras, people there exclusively knew me as Syd and it felt nice. I remembered questioning my gender a lot down there, but I also didn't care so much because I felt like I was still myself. I studied abroad with a group of all cis women, and I remember feeling like the odd-one-out because I was the most "boy" of the group. I remember having a dream once when I was down there where I woke up in a male body and I was perfectly happy with it, then I was sad to wake up because I wanted to do more in my male body. I told one of my friends while abroad about this dream, and she told me that she wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now, I would end up being a transgender man. Now I'm 20, and here's my stance on everything: I like to dress anywhere between masculine and feminine, but I tend to resort to something in the middle. I use she/her or they/them pronouns because he/him sounds strange to me, but I love when people refer to me with more gender ambiguous or masculine language (server instead of waitress, child instead of daughter, etc.), but I don't care too much if I'm referred to by feminine language. I do not want to take hormones in order to transition. Right now I don't want to get Top-surgery because my dysphoria isn't dire and I'd rather not risk it, but if I ended up having breast cancer, I would do a double mastectomy in a heartbeat before considering chemo or radiation. I want to get a binder eventually, but I am waiting until I move out of my family's home before ordering one because I don't want to have that conversation with them. I have no bottom dysphoria what-so-ever, however if tomorrow I woke up in a cis male's body, I don't think I would mind that much. Like, I don't dislike my body per se and I don't feel too inclined to change it, but I also feel like I'd feel similarly if I woke up tomorrow in an AMAB body.
