What was your first trans experience?

like some other people have said, i definitely acted like and thought i was a boy when i was below school aged. i was only friends with boys and never wanted to wear dresses and what not. once i had to be a flower girl for a wedding and i cried as i walked down the aisle (i got in some serious shit from the bride afterward :lol: ). then came school and gender roles were enforced. whenever me and my friends would play games or anything at recess, i'd always be the prince or ash ketchum or a boy cat or dog or whatever. i didn't get why my friends would make their characters girls, because why would you be a girl if you can be a boy, right??

i had very limited knowledge of trans people. i knew about drag queens and pregnant men, but the first time i really "heard about" trans people was when i watched a documentary about trans kids, at like 4 am on a friday night, when i was 14. i thought it was fascinating, but i didn't really connect it to myself (i think the doc was focused on medical transitions). a few months later my parents' friend told us her grandson (who is about 6 years younger than me, but i've known him since he was born) is trans. that was my first experience with a "real life" trans person, i guess.

 

I've never actually met a trans guy in real life before... but I don't know when my first sort of event occured that lead to this. I took a year to think about it, and duringbthat year I was genderfluid. I wouldn't dress up as a guy really, I'd just have male moments. but I also remember as a child always rough housing with my brothers, pretending to sword fight with sticks and always be rolling in the grass. I admit, I was weak though. I never really liked dresses, and I always dreaded having to wear dresses cuz I hated my legs. even with tights or leggings on. and currently I am always surrounded by girls at school and I really need some close male friends. not that I mind girls, and I love my friends, just I need more male company.

 

If there is a PFLAG in your area, maybe you could meet some other guys there?

 

met a trans girl many years ago when i was like... 14? she was a friend and still is.

got into a relationship with a trans guy a few years back then after a year he came out (he was presenting female when we dated). my only serious relationship aswell haha. i always knew something was up with him though, couldnt put my finger on it. but when he came out that of course was what i couldnt quite figure out and it all made sense.

both times though i didnt think anything of it. people are people. i dont really care.
sounds bad i guess, but meh. whatever. just do you.

 

I didn't really have a first trans experience...is that weird? It only started a couple of years ago for me and it's taken ages for me to actually come to terms with. It started off me feeling like I should be a guy in certain situations, but then next minute I felt female again and I was backwards and forwards all the time, moving through a whole spectrum of gender identities.

 

For me there were a lot of similar early experiences as other people. Top three? Well I played with both the girls and the guys, so not that........

- I don't remember when I started packing, but I remember getting caught and forced to stop when I was 4 or 5, and I'd been packing for a while at that point. I used to dream a lot that I was an amputee and someone had stolen my penis.

- I refused to respond to my given name and would only listen if my parents/teachers would call me Christopher Robin (like the boy from Whinny the Poo)

- Something I haven't heard anyone else mention was during puberty I had this thing where I kept expecting my voice to get lower and I really wanted it to. I'd practice singing as low as I could until I strained my voice and couldn't sing for days after trying to speed up the process.

I didn't encounter the idea that these things might make me trans* until junior year of high school. In an assembly for all the kids in my grade we had to fill out an anonymous form on drug, alcohol, sex, etc for survey purposes, and one of the boxes to check included transgendered. I must have stared at it for the majority of the class period, but at the time I didn't think someone biologically female could be trans*. I had the same form senior year, and I think that time I checked transgendered, and by then I'd started to let myself think about it a little.

 

Don't have any one "first" trans experience, since they can all probably be interpreted in various ways. I do know that these experiences have stuck with me, for whatever reason, while most of my childhood memories have faded.

1. Earliest was when I was in kindergarten preschool. For reasons to this day I do not understand, there was a day in my preschool class when all the boys were supposed to come in dressed as their mothers. (I swear I'm not making this up.) Of course, it's not like we were graded on being close replicas, so I ended up wearing this long, curly, gray wig that came from somewhere. Part of me felt extremely embarrassed by wearing this getup. Yet, even then, I was consciously aware of a feeling underneath it which I couldn't explain, but which I seem to have enjoyed.

2. Not a specific instance, but there were many times as a child I would do weird things for little reason that even sense to me. I recall constantly experimenting with various, shall we say, unconventional methods of dress (in private, anyway). One of my favorite looks was wearing an oversized sweater, a belt and my little cowboy boots and absolutely nothing else at all. Looking back, this seems to have been my substitute for a dress and heels. (I recall admiring my mom's high heels at an ever earlier age.)

3. Also not a specific instance. But there were multiple times in third and fourth grade where I would be mistaken for a girl. This was likely due to the fact that I was trying to grow my hair long like David Lee Roth at this age. (Of course, with my whitefro, I ended up looking more like Buckwheat.) Also probably because I was a pretty small boy, usually smallest or second smallest in my class. Being mistaken for a girl would always piss me off royally, at least on the surface. Again, I was aware of a certain "undercurrent" that contradicted my surface reaction.

4. I recall an occasion when my mom threatened to polish my nails if I didn't cut them, right in front of my brother. Like my hair, I almost always kept my nails long at this age, maybe partly out of laziness, but because I also genuinely liked looking down and seeing long nails on my fingers. When my mom made that threat, I was sufficiently embarrassed enough to cut them at that time. Although if she hadn't made the threat in front of my brother, I probably would have proceeded with letting her polish them.

5. Finally, probably my most manifestly transgender behavior of my childhood, when I started wearing my mom's shoes in secret starting at age twelve. Started with a pair of her flat sandals, quickly graduated up to her heels. And I have been in heels ever since.

Along the way, never experienced moments of extreme body dysphoria or overwhelming wishing for the other sex's genitalia. Although I would guess I have uttered the phrase "I wish I was a girl" maybe 700,000 times in my 37 years. So, not sure how strongly that great, anonymous "trans* jury" out there would assess this case. But it's now on the internet, which legitimizes all.

 

In Second grade I pretended I was a boy for a weeklong summercamp. That was probably my first experience. And then I had this whole plan of running away from home and cutting my hair and pretending I was a boy, like my hero at the time. Charolette "One-Eyed Charley". She cross dressed for almost all of her life. She was also one of the first women to vote, illegally and under her presumed name. There was a middle grade book about them, I think it was called Riding Freedom. I'm getting off topic, aren't I? Anyways, those were my experiences