What where your first experiences with transitioning and figuring out your gender identity?

Hi Idk1212 - I think I read that article around this time last year when I was just coming to terms with the fact I'm trans.

My story is very different. I'm 51 and it took me over four decades of denial and hiding and trying to be male and then a crisis unlike anything I've ever known (losing my partner and then Covid) for me to realise the truth about myself.

In answer to your question it didn't really click until then. What still staggers me is the ability of the human mind to believe in two completely contradictory things at the same time. I mean, I knew I had this deep longing to be a girl from the age of 6, but the idea that I myself could be 'transexual' (as it was termed back then)? No no no, never, not me!

In many ways you're lucky Idk1212, it is so much easier to be trans these days than it was when I was 16. I had no role models, in popular culture transgender people were either seen as figures of fun or worse, grotesque mutations. All I knew was that I didn't want to be one of those sad solitary figures marooned between the genders - who would? So I ran away from the idea, buried it deep inside.

That feeling is wonderful, isn't it? That's exactly how I felt when I finally accepted myself for who I am.

Beth x

 

Oh, that article! It's good. I wish I could resonate, but I think gender stuff gets muddied up pretty heavily when you're also neurodivergent, as I am.

I'm not MtF, more Ft[?], but for my two cents: I very much have not 'always known'. Hell, 13 years later and I still kinda don't know! As a kid I just existed kind of chaotically and heedless of gender roles (I was regularly mistaken for a small boy until my hair got too long, because my favourite toy was a rubber alligator and my favourite clothes were orange - I did not care, beyond the idea that it was absurd that love of reptiles was gendered), at puberty I went, "Whew, good thing I was warned in advance about this, guess this is my life now, time to try to learn How To Girl Properly since apparently that's become very important", and then in my mid-teens I got into cosplay.

And then I got into crossplay. :Oc I, like, only cosplayed boys as soon as I learned that cosplaying boys when you're a 'girl' was a thing. As soon as I realised there were options in gender, I was all over it. I was a boy, I was a girl, I was a girl-boy-boy-girl! I kept it to 'costume' for a while before coming out more explicitly as genderqueer, telling my friends they could call me Leon and treat me like I was a boy if they liked, and back in the day of Facebook third-person statuses, I'd just use he, she, or they about myself interchangably, and that (in combination with a wardrobe update and several haircuts each shorter than the last) was pretty much my "early transition"?

There can be something extremely freeing about the point where you step outside the realm of gendered expectation - you get to explore a whole new world of options, and you get to have full agency over your self: what new aspects of presentation you like, which from the gender you were assigned you throw out in favour of new things that suit you more, and which - if any! - you keep. (I went through a phase of aggressively rejecting any attachment to the colour pink. I love pink, actually. If my body ever stops looking like a Cis Girl Body in a dress, I'll be straight back into dresses.) Enjoy the exploration - try anything you like, and find where you're happy. Vivian is an absolutely lovely name, by the way!

 

I resonate with most of it. I had a LOT of difficulty getting through life as a kid. Every day was a struggle. I knew from pretty much the first time I remember getting my hair cut that something was up. My parents got clothes for a girl, because the ultrasound on me was misleading. While I had an older brother, so most of my stuff was also handed down, a common theme in baby and childhood pictures is me looking female or feminine. From actually dressing like a girl to just looking extremely androgynous. As grew up I presented more masculine, simply because it' what my mom got me in terms of clothes and haircuts.
I was a smallish, somewhat shy boy with a dirty blonde bowl cut, at least from the outside. I got picked on a bit as a kid for being somewhat feminine, but it never got too bad because I was interested in many boy things and due to some difficulties in my life I acted out and fought a bit. I certainly didn't appear as trans to others.
I didn't talk much about the gender problems I had because I didn't have the language skills. I can count two times as a kid I attempted expressing gender dysphoria. Once was to my step-father, and incident which ended poorly. Once to a school psychologist (I had many), where I was entirely ignored.
Now PUBERTY is where I started to really realize something was up. Girls were SUPER into me back then, to the point where I once got chased down a hallway. lol. Twelve year old me though, realized I was into boys. I had numerous crushes I never spoke of. I hated most of the changes that were happening to my body, to a point where, as a twelve year old, I seriously considered attempting to remove my own genitals to prevent puberty. I was not even remotely happy. There was no joy in my life. Anyway, yeah. I had a pretty solid idea I was trans and had some concept of what that meant from this time forward. I often fantasized about being a girl, or even just being treated as one. If I had any idea I could actually transition I would have, immediately. I was sheltered and never really had internet access, so I never looked into it. I finally realized what was happening when I bought myself a lab top for an AP class in high school and joined this forum, under a different name and an email account I lost access to years ago.
Seven or eight years later I'm me. It's great.

 

Nothing really clicked, it was a gradual conclusion. Or maybe starting to pass as a guy (I identified as nonbinary back then) made me realised that it was what I was looking for.

Clothes, coming out, short haircut.