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Any non-traditional trans stories/feelings?

Discussion in 'Gender Identity and Expression' started by Turkey50, Jan 7, 2018.

  1. Turkey50

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    We have all heard of the traditional "I felt like the opposite gender since as far as I can remember" stories, but has anyone ever had different feelings? Any trans out there who never really felt gender dysphoric for their bodies? Any that actually enjoyed living as cisgender for a while or thought they enjoyed it? What are your stories?
     
  2. Foxfeather

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    Yes. I did not know I was trans. I was a tomboy for up until maybe my early 20s or a little later.

    i always thought and felt like a woman but then i saw all the beautiful women and awesome heterosexual sex and lack of breasts and just amazing perks of being male that I wanted. I realized later that I didn't want to be on equal footing with men, I wanted to be one, to go through the rest of my life as a husband and a man.

    It doesn't seem like it's possible now as i will never get surgery. It would never be enough. Not even the most expensive surgeries. So I just want to find a wife who will understand who and what I am and love me for it. In the mean time I am putting my all into being and becoming the best husband and man I can be. Tits and all.
     
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  3. And it exploded

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    It didn't hit me I was trans until a few months ago. I mean there where signs but I thought nothing of it. I didn't get any dysphoria when I got my period. (Though I've always hated having boobs) and now it is literally ripping me apart from the inside. Great
     
  4. Foxfeather

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    Try not to overthink or stress to much. I now exactly what you mean. There's the sense of realization and then "now what?" It's like being born on the wrong planet and not knowing how to get the fuck out of here. Seriously that's how it often feels to me.
     
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  5. Turkey50

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    Thank you for the replies. I ask because I am currently a cisgender male, but questioning my gender identity. It has really been eating at me for the past year. I have signs from my past that suggest I may be trans, but I also never really had body dysphoria and sometimes think I could just be overthinking things. There was actually a period where I fully loved my body and who I was, and if anything, I wished to be more masculine, but also periods of my life where I felt uncomfortable with my masculinity. But after some recent events, those small moments that might have indicated gender dysphoria seems to be more magnified. I kind of want to talk to a gender therapist, or really just any therapist to help me organize my thoughts but honestly, I am kind of too scared to explore this deeply. I just know that I am in a place where I really hate myself though, and although I have never attempted suicide, I have thought about it.
     
  6. AlexJames

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    Yes. As a small child, i was a boy at heart without knowing it. Mom might have forced me into dresses at every opportunity, but she let me like what i liked - animals, dinosaurs, and space. We didn't have much money but i had some dinosaur toys and a few books that i read cover to cover so many times. My first best friend, i would go over to her house and we'd play in her basement where her toys were and she had all these ponies and dolls and i always just brought dinosaurs haha. I had barbies, but i didn't play with them unless someone else came over.

    I always felt uncomfortable, like i didn't belong, like something was fundamentally wrong but i didn't have the words for it. It began in late elementary and got bad in middle school, when depression hit. I became a loner, no friends at all. In elementary i'd been friends with a group of boys and, until she moved, a tomboy girl. I remember in first grade me and the girl, we'd spend the whole recess either swinging or collecting rocks. The feelings of constant discomfort, never wanting to look in the mirror, but never having a focused point for it, not knowing why it was there, really ruined my teenage years. I didn't even like myself even if i couldn't pinpoint why. I was too busy avoiding the fact i liked girls not boys.

    It literally wasn't until adulthood - until joining here, really - that i had any clue i was trans. It wasn't until reading everyone's stories and finding myself in them that it clicked. I'd suppressed all the signs, just like i had with liking girls. So many times, time and time again, i wanted to have a dick instead but i always passed it off as just curiosity. I never really liked my boobs, but i was very logical about it and kind of just took it as a facts of life sort of thing. Surely every other girl must think this too its just taboo to talk about, i would tell myself. Just like i somehow convinced myself that wanting to kiss or touch your friend was totally normal to. Random bit but i was always drawn to boys clothes. Always hated girls clothes.

    I feel like the media telling people that trans people always knew, that by giving that message, by only telling those stories, they are doing a huge disservice to those like me and the ppl on this thread who maybe always felt wrong but never had a word for it. Or were really good at talking themselves out of stuff, at denying and suppressing, like i was.
     
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  7. Kodo

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    I am a pretty effeminate man at heart. It took me a long time to realize that, but I'm very happy to be the kind of guy I am. And with the ultra macho, bodybuilding, sports loving, beer chugging, dick waving masculine culture that is shoved down the throats of trans and cis guys, I quickly learned that none of that matters and it's all bullshit.

    I love art and music. Dancing is amazing and yoga too. I'm a vegetarian and a pacifist. I like the colour pink and I like glitter. Eyeliner on guys? Hell yes. Most of the time I dress really dapper. I put a lot of effort into having nice hair and smelling good. I've got an ear piercing. I'm a pretty androgynous guy and almost immediately get pegged as gay. I am different from other men and that is okay with me. You don't need to be "trans enough" and you don't need to have known since you could talk. I didn't know I was trans until I was fifteen. And I had a beautiful, perfect, happy childhood as the girly little boy I was.

    There is incredible variance among people with gender expression. This is true of cis and trans people alike. It's time we push through society's false barriers.
     
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  8. Wesley007

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    I have a reply for this but I will have to wait until I come home
     
  9. I suppose? I’ve been kinda back and forth with my gender identity so maybe that’s kind of irregular.
     
  10. Wesley007

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    Every time I reflect upon the identity of my gender I am conflicted only because my memory serves me as presenting as more masculine to some family over others such as my grandmother, I used to have a toy dog I used to say I was his dad and he was my son and my grandmother didn't see a problem with it, my mother always interferred and said no you're a girl or show me pics of me in a dress and say "I wanted it"
    So idk
     
  11. Yumette

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    I’m 46 years old and didn’t think I was anything but female up until spring 2016. Yes, I have always seen myself as different from many other females, but not in a tomboy way necessarily. I mean, I would have loved nothing better than to have been able to wear skirts and dresses on a daily basis and constantly drew princesses in big dresses. I loved collecting shiny paper scraps ( die-cut scraps? Sorry, I had to google the term in English…) as girls still did in the 70s and 80s, and I loved all the pretty knick-knacks on my shelf and was overjoyed to get a doll-house for Christmas etc. All my closest friends were girls, as well. But, as I grew older it became clear to me that I was still different. I even have proof of this in black and white since I kept a diary on a daily basis from age 13 to when I was 23. There is a remark written when I was around fifteen about being glad to have my then best friend ( also female ) in my life because this way ”we are able to be different from other girls together”.


    Different how? I’ll just give a list here, otherwise this post will turn into a novel…


    Never saw myself having children and have never particularly cared for children, either. The idea of being a mother was always an alien thought.


    I have always liked guys exclusively, but have never been too hot about heterosexual love or the way it is depicted culturally and socially in books and in movies. I wrote my first fictional gay love story in 1989 at the age of eighteen ”because it felt important to write” as I wrote in my diary at the time. Keep in mind, in those days slash fiction and gay romance novels were not something I had the slighest inkling of. It was all in my own head, I was just much more drawn to stories between guys and I would make them up in my head and use them as my day dreaming material because they made my heart flutter and have those wonderful feels in my stomach like nothing else…And whenever I did read and watch hetero love stories ( because let’s face it, not much else was available in the 80s and early 90s ) I just mentally turned the girl into a guy. I became very apt at this, too, hahah! Consecuently, this also became a pattern in my sexual fantasies; I didn’t involve myself in them but I always just fantasised about two guys together. I then projected myself as the other guy; the more active, desiring one, the ”protecter”


    The idea of getting married was always just ”bleh!” I never dreamt about my Wedding Day, for example, and in general I always thought that ideally I wanted a guy who was first my best friend whom I could then fall in love with and whom would then fall in love with me. ( Yes, in that order. ) No silly dating games, no flower giving, no schemes of making the boy wait and play hard-to-get or whatever… Whenever I have had a crush on a guy and have been lucky enough to get a response from him, my next thought has NOT been to act coy, but to get physical and be able to kiss and touch and cuddle him, especially if he is really appealing physically speaking, lol. I think much like a man in that sense; I’m naturally the one who desires and have never much cared about being the object of desire myself.

    I've had a handful of affairs/relationships with guys and they have never been all that heteronormative, but I actually never thought about that until recently. Still, I do think that this underlying transgender aspect of myself has probably prevented me from ever having a proper, long lasting relationship. At some point, usually after a couple of months or a year at most I have been the one to call it off because something about it just didn't feel right and I felt somehow trapped...even though, and I can't stress this enough, the guys I have been with were all very decent and good guys.

    But as I said, these were just things that I thought made me different in the way I thought about things and that it just meant that I wasn’t your stereotypical woman. Then, two years ago, I was watching this Japanese online show on YouTube. It has three guys interacting with each other, they will read fan male, chat about various topics, banter with each other in a playful manner and then play all kinds of silly games that often involves them being physical with each other in a cute, boyish manner. Think of puppies playing with each other, lol. Basically, it’s a show geared for a female audience who get a kick out of seeing guys interact with each other in this manner. I know it sounds kind of strange for most Western people, but in Japan ( and many other Asian countries for that matter ) ”boys being cute with each other” is a well-known part of popular culture geared for females. ”Finally, a show for me!” I thought =D And while watching the episodes this feeling washed over me, the feeling that I could easily be one of those guys on a mental level because I felt so in tune with them. I looked at them and thought of myself and asked ”What’s the difference?” Also, it came to me that I would actually love nothing more than be just one of them among them, yet at the same time I also desired them physically. They were more pretty boy rather than ruggedly handsome in a Western way and their conduct and body-language was not macho or even masculine in a Western manner, but more cute, soft and playful in a boyish way. At times they could be almost feminine in expression. I couldn’t get enough of them.


    I finally realized that there was a distinct male-side to my identity and sexuality. It wasn’t just me being a different kind of female and otherwise a heterosexual woman like anybody else, but there was something else in play and always had been, but since I’ve never cared for the Western ideals of masculinity strongly showcased in the Western world-view and popular culture, it was hard to identify with guys to any great extent up until now, even though I have often gotten on with them quite well.


    Well, I then started to google stuff and the rest is history… I quickly became aware of the concept of non-binary gender identity and that is how I choose to identify myself as of now. I’m lucky to have never really suffered from body or social disphoria. Sure, always hated my period and since I never wanted kids, they have been nothing but a nuisance, but yeah, that’s about it. My breasts were always thankfully smallish and easy to ignore ( it didn’t occur to me to buy a bra until I was in my mid twenties ) and though my first time packing did feel really good and somehow right, and I still do it from time-to-time, the lack of something between my legs is not too big of an issue - it might have been if I were much younger.


    I can still wear skirts and dresses and paint my nails if I so wish. I have always worn my hair long and never wanted short hair in the first place. Then again, I also greatly favor long hair in guys...
     
    #11 Yumette, Jan 10, 2018
    Last edited: Jan 10, 2018
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  12. Turkey50

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    AH right okay, so if I understand this correctly, you never had any severe problems with your gender identity at a younger age, you were just more gender non conforming, but now at the age of 46, you have realized you have this inner male identity that contributed heavily to your non gender conforming feelings, and now identify as genderqueer? Meaning you will occasionally express yourself femininely but you mostly identify as masculine?
     
  13. Yumette

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    Hi! :slight_smile: Sorry for the late reply, busy weekend at work...

    Yes, I think that's pretty much it; I saw myself as female, but could never quite understand why many other females around me and in the media seemed to be so different from me. It wasn't about clothes or interests per se, but more about how they seemed to think of themselves in relation to the world, to the opposite gender, to their own gender even. They also put much more stock in their womanhood or femaleness.


    Now, I actually never wanted to conform, I liked the way I was. This could at least partly be a result of my upbringing. My family didn't put any pressure on me in terms of "proper" gender expression - my Mom, after all, had always been pretty much a tomboy herself. I was free to form my own thoughts and I was also allowed a lot of physical space for a girl; no curfews, no rules or warnings about boys; about how they are and how as a girl I should be wary of them while out and about, well you know, there were no 'talks' about any of that. I think that in my country (part of northern Europe) these kind of talks are in general much more uncommon compared to, say, the US. We tend to raise girls without being as protective about them and we trust that they can take care of themselves. A fifteen-year-old girl can have a boyfriend and stay the night at his place or have him stay the night at her place. And yes, that includes sleeping in the same bed, hahah. It just isn't a big deal.


    Anyhow, I'm sure this is true for many of us older folks, but gender identity wasn't even a term on my radar in the 80s, at most people were aware of different sexualities and we would see cross dressers in movies or, I don't know, in music videos and such ( think Boy George ) but I'm pretty sure that the first time I ever came across something about transgender people ( referred to as transexuals back then ) was a documentary on TV around mid 90s. I would watch it with great interest since at this point I had taken an interest in gender studies ( a new field that I became aware of once I entered university in 1990 ) but that "aha!" moment never came with any of these kind of docs or even while reading books on gender theory. ( I was naturally much more into the study of masculinities rather than women studies. )


    So... a very relaxed upbringing, being only into guys and never having any reason to question my sexuality and never being attracted to typically masculine men which allowed me to reject heteronormativity to a large extent : all these things probably made it possible for me to live my life until now in a kind of 'bubble' with no real social dysphoria. As far as my expression, well, I think it's pretty neutral in terms of body language and my speech. I rarely wear make-up, not because it makes me dysphoric but because I'm too lazy, lol. Hey, I'm all for guys enhancing their looks with make-up and using cosmetics, don't mind that at all, as long as it's not severaly overdone. I do mentally see myself as more of a guy these days, especially in relation to other guys, but I don't put much stock in expressing it outwardly, it just isn't that important. That's one of the reasons I think of myself as non-binary or genderqueer. In my native language we don't have separate pronouns for females and males so that's a non-issue in itself, but it doesn't really bother me that people see my as a female, it has never felt constricting in the world I live in, even though these days especially I don't really identify myself with being one.
     
  14. astriferous

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    Yeah, I had no idea until online communities made me realize that trans people existed, and even when I learned about nonbinary people it still took me a while to realize myself. I could maybe pick out "signs" from my childhood but to be honest, I wasn't conscious of my gender as anything at all until I was 13 (which was some time after puberty hit for me, so it wasn't that). Like I "knew" I was "female" in a textbook sort of way since I was called that since birth, but I didn't become conscious of my own feelings about it until around that time, when I also became conscious of my body in general, if that makes sense. Before that I was in my own head all the time and didn't really think about myself. Becoming aware of myself and thinking about my gender in depth for the first time was what made me realize I'm nonbinary. It wasn't ever-present body dysphoria (I have some but it is confusing and inconsistent) or an unwavering knowledge of my gender from the time I was five or anything like that :blush:
     
  15. And it exploded

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    I feel so validated (I'm not nonbinary tho I'm ftm) while there where signs and I knew what trans people where from a fairly early age I didn't apply it to myself until now
     
  16. Lipstick Leuger

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    My partner is Non binary. They didnt know they were trans at all and have just gone to therapy the last few years to figure it all out. They questioned as a child if they were supost to be born male, but the terms cis/trans/nb did not really exist much and they did not know about them. So they settled as Butch, but when we met I knew they were masculine of center more than female identified butch. So finally when they came to me and said "I think I am on the trans spectrum and I want to figure out where" I was like "yes, I know" and promptly helped research a trans friendly therapist, who happens to be trans as well. So now this Summer top surgery and maybe a little T but not too much, they don't want the hair that goes with being 100% male! LOL
     
  17. Turkey50

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    I like your life story. If I had to be honest, growing up I always saw myself as male and another one of the boys (I am a male at birth), and never had a reason to question my gender identity either. From the day I can remember to about 5th grade, I didn't really feel different from other guys. In fact, one thing that helped me relate to other guys were common interests in things like video games, violent animes, bug, and TV shows. The problem is, when it came to growing up, getting into relationships, being intimate, and really just integrating as a man, I always had trouble really fitting in. I always felt out of place. I had trouble really embracing this inner man, but I saw my nonconformity as something that made me unique. It made me feel like I stood out from other guys. It wasn't until people started calling me gay that I began to really see that I was doing something different that wasn't always a "good" thing in terms of hetero/gender-normative behavior. Eventually I found a way to kind of integrate more into my adult/masculine role, but I really had to "fake it till you make it" to get through. I saw the masculine me was more of like a 3rd person view. I feel like I am looking at the person I am trying to be, but not really being that person. Every time I reached a milestone that brought me closer to how I visualized myself as "the man" I wanted to be, I felt somewhat of a disconnect or like there was still something missing. When I do masculine things, I feel like I am being fake, or trying to be someone I am not. Every decision seems to be a hard one because there is always a filter that say "what would another man do" or "what is the most masculine option" rather than "what do I want to do?"I feel as though I am having trouble growing into a man, no matter how much I have been encouraged, supported, or praised because I don't feel like that man. I have a hard time really empathizing with a lot of guys. I have recently been analyzing situations and visualizing myself as female. I had always had crushes on girls, but I wonder if all that was more of an admiration, because when I actually tried to date girls, I always had trouble pushing to a real intimate relationship because something never felt right. To visualize myself as the boyfriend, the go getter, the protector, the initiator, I feel like I am having abnormally large amounts of trouble appreciating my role as a man. I have talked to a lot of girls, made them smile, laugh, and had some interested in me (I think) but there is always this like slight internal hesitation. Most guys would be thrilled to have a girl respond positively to their masculinity but for me, it was always like, "oh man there is another mountain ahead" I have never been in a relationship, I have never been intimate with a man nor a woman. I quit pursuing a strong career path because I question the very core of my identity. I am also having a hard time really accepting being trans and feeling like a girl. Like the feeling comes and goes. It is strongest when I am alone in my head and ruminating, but it tends to dissipate when I am busy.

    Sorry for the vent. Just want to keep letting things out little by little. I have no money to see therapy and I have no one close that I want to talk about these feelings. I have told a few people about my trans thoughts, but most have kind of ruled it as anxiety or over thinking. I try not to fight back because I desperately want anxiety to be the explanation, but I also want the truth, and if I can't have both, I would prefer the truth.
     
  18. Elisten

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    This is similar to how I feel. I've never really felt like I fit in the 'the guys', but I figured it was just because I was weird. My wife eventually pointed out that I am very feminine, which, combined with some other factors, led to my learning that I am trans (just this last week).
     
  19. And it exploded

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    I have a neighbor who's a trans woman and I don't know much about her but it took her quite a few years to figure it out let's say. Her wife seems to be very supportive of her transition. And judging from the looks of it your wife will be the same way (not that I know your wife or anything)
     
  20. tranonymous

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    I only figured out that I was trans a year ago, I'd had a feeling that something was wrong for a few years before that but I didn't know exactly what it was.

    I don't really have too much of a problem with my body, I don't hate it it's just not what I want.

    I'm also completely at peace with the fact I'll probably never pass as cis.

    And finally I don't have any kind of urge to be a "feminine" woman, and have actually become slightly more "masculine" after I came out to the world.