When I first came to this website the one things I found myself constantly doing is reading everyone's stories on how they knew they were trans. I was curious if I could find anyone who had stories similar to mine, because if someone had a story like mine then I felt just a little bit more valid in my one trans-identity. When thinking about I feel that there are several people, several new comers and old timers, who feel this way and still look for stories that close to theirs. So please, in this thread, tell your story. Let us have a place where anyone who comes can find that they are not alone in their story, and that it shows there is more than just one way to be trans and realize that you are trans.
Okay, nobody has replied yet so here we go. "How did you know you were trans?" What a long complicated answer this is going to be. I first came to the conclusion/realisation/enlightenment that I was trans about five to six months ago, after a few months of tentative crossdressing and wondering for hours on end "am I trans?". At first I thought that because I hadn't known from the moment I popped out of the womb that I was a girl then I wasn't trans and had forced myself to forget about it. Then, inevitably the thoughts and symptoms came back and I did my research, signed up here, met some other people and thought "yeah, this is me after all!" I was happy and terrified at the same time and just like 99.9% of all other trans people I still had my doubts and demons. If you want a story to relate to yours to make yourself feel better then I'm sure this one helps, because I've had all of the doubts, over months and months. But it helps finding places like this. Finding people who go through the same things. I hope I can be a help but I'm just a normal person at the end of a day.
Soooo... I've known for 3 to 4 years. Even before hitting double digits I have wanted to be a boy (I think it stems from a love of the show Merlin and Harry Potter as I used dream about being them and pray for it. This manifested into just wanting to be a boy in general). After a while I just really really really became uncomfortable with being a girl. Ever since learning about trans wand what it meant I've questioned it. It eventionally came down to no Genie is gonna make me a boy (like I wished) so am I serious about this or not? I decided that I was. So yeah, I was trans. Yay. Hope this was okay
I totally made this and then forgot to respond myself xD I derp so hard. Well my story goes sort of like this.... I will never say that I always knew I was trans, that some small part of me knew I wasn't female. Yet, even as I say that, I also know that when I look back on my youth all the signs where there had I just been able to read them. When I was 3-4 and at preschool I always played with the boys are the really boyish girls. I had doing the typical girly stuff like tea parties and such. Of course, this wasn't seen as abnormal because I had two older brothers that I spent most of my time with. It was at his preschool that an instructor called me a tomboy and had to explain what that was, and I took it to mean a girl who was a boy. I really liked that. I really liked the idea of being a girl who is actually a boy. I excited told my dad that I was a girl who was also a boy, and that is when the lecture began. The whole ride to my brother's school was him telling me how only lesbians could be tomboys and he refused to have a lesbian for a daughter. I was only 4 but I remember feeling a great deal of shame and crying, finally telling him I didn't want to be a boy anyway. But in my head I kept telling myself I would grow up to be a boy. After that I sort tried my best to be a female. I can't really remember ever thinking that I wasn't female from the ages of 6 and up. Clearly that was what I was, everyone told me so,and why should I doubt them? I liked playing with barbies and reading, my room was lavender, my birthday cakes were princess themed and I related to many Disney princesses. I wanted to try makeup, shave my legs, get my ears pierced, and wear the clothes that the popular girls wore. Yet...below the surface things weren't always as they appeared. The best way I can describe it is by describing how recess was for me at times. I hung out with a group of 4 or 5 of the popular girls. I quietly listened to their talk about their celebrity crushes, thinking of my own but never chiming in, and then I would get distracted by the group of boy off to the side playing soccer. I use to play with them, but my developing chest made running uncomfortable for me, the feeling of movement was just wrong. For the rest of recess I would watch the boys with a sense of jealously. Wishing I had their bodies instead of what mine was turning into. Thoughts like that often flashed through my mind, and I always quickly buried them. My first real taste of dysphoria happened at 12, when I had my first period. I had been warned that I would get one eventually, but I for some reason it didn't dawn on me that it would actually happen till it was there. "Welcome to womanhood" was what I was told, and those words brought about a deep sense of lose with in me. I knew things were about to change and the thought made me sick. A year later I would be living with my mom, unlike my dad she let me wear whatever I wanted no matter if it was from the female side of the male side. I had always wanted to wear male clothing, I found it so much cooler than female clothing. I bought a few shirts and was excited. My mom looked at the size of the shirts with some uncertainty, not sure if they would fit. I told her they would and we took them home. In my head I was picturing how I would look in them, I was picturing myself flat chested. When I put the shirt on for school I was horrified to learn that it as to tight in the chest area. By all standards the shirt actually fit nicely, but I felt like it was squeezing me to death. It clearly showed I had boobs, and I had manage to forget that I had them despite already being at the small end of a C cup. The shirts were pushed into a draw to never be worn again. Instead I began to wear baggier and baggier clothing, and giant hoodies. I hate my boobs and wanted to hide them from the world, a feeling that only grew worse as they pushed into a D cup and then DD. I began to eat my feelings, an the weight gain that that resulted in only gave me more to hate; my hips. By sixteen I was a depressed mess. A day didn't go by that I didn't pray for breast cancer to take my boobs away, or thinking about carving away my hips with a steak knife. Add to this being bullied in school, and then a hormone imbalance from a thyroid condition that caused me to start growing facial hair. To me it felt like my body was as confused as I was; born female but trying to portray some form of masculinity that shouldn't be there. I looked in the mirror every day and felt like I was looking at a bad drag queen, or a guy trying to be a girl. I would look in the mirror and I would feel my world spinning out of control and I would feel literally sick, and I would cry. I happen to learn what intersex was at this time and I grew jealous of those people, at least they had a medical reason for how they felt. Then I learned about transgender. I clicked with it, but was unsure if that could really be me. Every story I heard was about someone assigned female but always knew they were male, some hide it and tried to be girls, and others embraced it. All of those stories featured FtM guys who were attracted to females. Though uncertain I decided to do research, and I found this old forum for trans people.(this was back in 2007 or 2008) I told them my story, how I didn't know as a kid, and how I am attracted to men, and I worded it as "everything would be easier if I was a guy". All three of those things seemed to make them believe that I wasn't trans. They told me I had to of always known, and had to like girls to be trans, and that I was just a female who didn't like my gender roles. I decided they probably knew better than I, so I started to suppress it as best I could. It became easier to do so once I graduated high school. I spent a lot of time by myself or with family. Admittedly I started wearing makeup and enjoyed it, but mostly I wanted to hide the shadow from my facial hair. My friend started helping me find more feminine clothing, though I still loved jeans and t-shirts the best. Also around this time I started experiencing a lot of health problems. I was to focused on how much pain I was in to worry about the other stuff. As for how I realized that I was trans....a mixture of things brought that about. The first was online role playing. I use to make female characters, my logic being that since I was a female I should be able to write/play them pretty well. It didn't take long for me to notice that I always made my females stereotypical girly, or stereotypical tomboy. There was no inbetween. Meanwhile, I had started writing male characters as well, mostly because the female roles were taken fast so if I wanted in the role play I needed to play male. My male characters were all over the place, just so many variety of males. From the typical masculine, to the fem, to uber gay, to nerdy, jock, etc. I just had so much fun with them and lost myself in them, and found myself in them. I knew how to be a guy far better than I knew how to be a girl. And a long with role playing came looking for face claims, meaning you usually found an anime or real-life person/character/model/actor to sort of be the face of your character and give people an idea of what they look like. When it came to real life face claims I found that I spent a lot of my time looking at males and finding myself wishing I had their body. Like that chest, and those thighs, that butt, that hair, that facial hair. It was also something I had started doing in real life, looking at guys and wishing I had parts of their body, becoming jealous of them. The next thing to bring me close to my trans identity was KPop, as strange as that sound. Kpop idols offer a variety of flavor of men, and it made it possible for me to see that there are guys out there who were a lot like me. But at the same time, a lot of the kpop people I fanboy/girled over like fem girls, so I decided to try and act as feminine as could. That last for about a year, each day finding myself looking in the mirror and thinking about how that wasn't who I really was. It sort of made me realize that I could never be feminine, it just wasn't in me. Something inside of me was very masculine, very male, and I was starting to realize it and it scared me a bit. I tried to force myself to look at females the same way I did guys, finding things about their body that I liked, trying to find female youtubers who I could admire, and forcing my favorite characters in shows to be female. The last combined straws was the weight lose of my illness, crossplaying, and the growing awareness in the world of transgender people. I had lost a lot of weight when sick, and the I thought losing weight would result in my boobs shrinking to a much smaller size, it was an unrealistic expectation as they only went from a DD to a D. I was hoping for something much much smaller.But I was able to fit in a variety of clothes not available to me at a larger size. I began dressing very tomboyish, and from behind I was mistaken as a guy a few times, and I was always uncertain about how that made me feel. My friend also got me into cosplaying, and I always dressed up as a male. I never wanted to be female, I flat out refused, and I was excited about picking out a cosplay for next time. But after taking a picture with someone and seeing it I realized my boobs made it impossible to hide the fact that I am a girl. I wasn't sure why this caused my chest to hurt so much, or make me feel so angry, in till I was in the bathroom of the hotel room getting ready at a convention and looking through facebook when I saw something about a gay ftm guy. Took me getting jealous that he got to be male after being assigned female at birth to sort of begin to suspect that I was trans. I had sort of forgotten that I had once suspected I was trans. From there it was researching and then finding this forum and them accepting I was trans and coming out to others.
I had no idea whatsoever when I was a kid; I don't think I had any concept of gender as anything outside of sex. This might've been partially because I was in an all-girls school, and so didn't really have any idea of what boys my age were/looked like. There were two "tomboys" in my year, both of whom were aggressive and into sports, and I knew I wasn't like them, so didn't even really identify as a tomboy. I do remember that I asked my friend if she'd rather be a boy or a girl, and she said "a girl, obviously", and I was surprised by the fact she felt so certain of wanting to be a girl. At around age 10 I developed this obsession with having short hair, but it was kind of messed up because I had really long hair myself and freaked out if anyone suggested I cut it. I don't really know what that was about, but I thought about having short hair so much that I guess it must be gender related. At 11 I went through a really miserable phase where I cried all the time and didn't see the point of anything (my parents thought I was depressed). I can't remember much of being aged 11-12. It's tempting in retrospect to associate this really bad phase with the onset of "the wrong puberty", but I don't know if that'd be accurate. Between the ages of 11 and 15 I basically had tons and tons of phases where I modelled my entire personality and appearance on specific actresses and singers. Looking back I think this is really obviously to do with being trans, i.e. I had no sense of my own identity as a woman so had to copy other people. These fixations were seen by others as pretty weird. At 15 I came out as a lesbian, and from that point the fixations pretty much stopped. I did a lot of online research into the LGBT+ community and a few months later started obsessively watching FtM videos on YouTube. I toyed for a long time with the idea of being trans, but didn't take it that seriously; it was more of a means of having fun daydreams about being a boy in the future. From coming out as gay I had been wearing men's clothes, and during this gender questioning phase I would tuck my hair in a beanie and try and pass. After a few months I began to take being trans more seriously and cut my hair, came out to some people etc. This was mostly triggered by this time a girl who didn't know me well guessed I was trans and called me "he", and I freaked out and got really excited and realised this was something I had to pursue. Then everyone at school found out. So I was basically like "okay, I guess I'm out", and kept going, and came out to some teachers etc. So I didn't really have a moment of realisation; it was more a long process, and the fact that looking back, I've been feeling consistently trans for a long time, so I probably am trans. More than one moment. If that makes sense.
All right, let's get some of us ladies over here too. I used to do a lot of stuff with my younger sister. She was the "only girl" in the family, so I ended up playing with dolls with her and such. People just assumed I was being nice. In second or third grade, I met a self-described tomboy. I had never heard of this before, and based on my experiences with my sister, I called myself a "tomgirl" for a week or so, until I was told that it wasn't a real thing. As I got older, I became hyper aware of gender roles and avoided doing anything like I had been with my sister. When the news started freaking out about this Bruce Jenner guy wanting to become a girl, I had a lot of questions for my dad about how that worked, more that a normal boy should have. I will now mention that all these memories had been extremely repressed until very recently. Fast forward to Christmas 2016. I get, among other things, the second Magnus Chase book, The Hammer of Thor. I am introduced to the character Alex, a genderfluid child of Loki. This was my first "real" exposure to the world of gender identity, and I started seriously wondering about my gender identity for the first time. I spent a lot of time on google, looking for some quiz that would just give me an answer. I gave up on the quizzes because they all asked about sexual experience, which I had none. (Yes, I do now realize that has nothing to do with being trans) I started just googling things like "how do i know if i'm trans" and eventually came to the conclusion that I was. I came out to my mom, she had a kind of neutral response, and I asked her to tell my dad for me. Then I started having doubts, and decided I was gender fluid. Then my dad talks to me, and things get confuzzled and now my parents think I was just confused, which, in all fairness, I was, just not in the way that they thought. I discover this forum, go back to the conclusion that I really am trans, and now here I am about seven months later.
In many ways I think it is extremely hard on the questioning youth of this the modern age because so much information is available to them at the touch of a button that these young minds cannot possibly take it all in and process it correctly. In my humble opinion I think far too many kids and young adults are being labeled "Transgender" and told to "Transition" so they may live happy fulfilling lives when in reality far too many become even more confused and in some cases suicidal as they struggle to figure out who they really are. I cannot stress and recommend loud enough that if you are having gender identity issues in your pre-adult years do not hesitate to seek the professional help of an open minded therapist who will guide you through a very difficult time in your life. If your parents are not supportive then seek help from a school counselor or in many cases even a walk in free health clinic may be your best bet to get you started in finding the resources you need. The hardest part may well be actually finding someone you can trust to fully disclose what is troubling you but once you do, the help is out there and available.
While I do understand what you are saying, this was suppose to be a thread for those on this site to share their stories, and that sounded sort of like you were telling them not to. since you have brought this up though, I don't think, as you put it, "far too many kids and young adults are being labeled "Transgender" and told to "Transition"". I think what is happening is that as people become more aware of what transgender is the more they realize just how different gender is for each individual. They start to see that those two little boxes no longer fit in today's world, no if they be transgender or not. And that will lead some to questioning, and some to realizing they are trans and some realizing they are not, and some will transition and some will not. I have been on a few LGBT sites since realizing I was trans and VERY FEW people have ever gone "You are trans and you have to transition!!" No, most places listening to the story the questioner tells and then gives an honest opinion usually starting with "You could be...." and from there offer up advice like exploring their gender in different ways such as how they dress or trying out a different name or cutting their hair, sometimes they ask how you see yourself in the future, and on and one it goes. There have been very few times when I have seen someone say that another is straight up transgender. As well on this site, and many others, it is stressed that no one has to transition if it is something they don't want or need. It has been stressed repeatedly, on every sight that I have been on so far, that there is many ways to be trans and none of them wrong. Yes, more and more information is being put out there, but that is making kids and young adults think they are trans. That is like saying people becoming more and more aware of gay people made others start believing they were gay. They are just realizing that there is more than one way of being. Some kids are going through a phase and will grow out of it, some won't. Some young adults are just realizing that their gender roles do not fit the gender they associate with, and we here are more than willing to assure them that they can like typical male gender roles and expression and still be female. Yet, most young adults who do the research and the constant question and end up here asking for help do tend to be trans in some what or another, and we are here to listen and offer advice. We tell them the options and tell them that they should do what they believe will make them happiest in their life. (for clarification, when I say trans I include any non-cis gender identity in that. Be it trans male/female to nonbinar/genderqueer/agender, no matter if they have chosen to medically transition or not) Again, this is a thread for trans people to share their stories about how they realized that they were trans, or how they came to question that, or even how they came to realize that they were not trans. It is my belief that it could be helpful to those that come here with questions and feeling alone. Please do not discourage them from doing so.
The moment I thought I might be a guy (because I was playing with non-binary identities already and was uncomfortable with being read as female) was a series of situations connected with wearing a suit and being assumed to be a butch lesbian. And getting some guy clothes and I realised I want to wear them pretty much all the time, like to be one of the guys, hang out with the guys not girls all the time, and I don't even want to look like a woman or seem like one to strangers. But I was aware for a long time already that I had a "male brain", I noticed that at 14 or so, and at the same age I had the idea to crossdress. I didn't actually do it until the last couple of years. So that's what the story is. The tomboy who doesn't feel like a female... This all already happened in college, I was 20. I came out, I changed my name, I'm happy about that. I can be understood better and I can just be myself without any filters. It has made my life better. I didn't have any signs until my teens. I mean, I wasn't a typical girl, but I wasn't a tomboy either. The puberty pronounced it more for me. I didn't seem like a typical trans person... I wasn't a trans child, I don't experience body dysphoria, and the questions that were meant to help figure out your gender only confused me. Same went for sexual orientation, by the way.
This is going to be a long, long story. So, forgive me now for that. I'll start when I was a kid. I was always more masculine as a kid. I would be feminine and dress nicely when needed, but for the most part, I was very masculine. This never caused a problem, it only became a problem when I started school. My parents never really cared that I was more masculine. The school took issue with it though. Needless to say, I was bullied a lot. The school blamed it on my masculine tendencies. My parents did not agree with this, but they did encourage me to act more feminine in order to "fit in". I did this for a good bit. It was not until I was in 4th grade that issues began to happen again. Kids began to physically bully me when I started the 4th grade. I fought back. I was the one that was threatened with suspension or expulsion. Thankfully, I made it out of that year without being punished. By 5th grade, I told my parents that I would only wear t-shirts and jeans. I told them that I no longer felt comfortable wearing skirts or dresses. They would try to get me to wear dresses and skirts, but I would fight them. They eventually gave in after a few very stressful shopping trips. I then began to wear all make clothes. I just thought at the time that I may be gay, but I suppressed that because I was involved in a very intolerant youth group. I had an unofficial agreement that I would dress in a more feminine manner for special events, but otherwise I would dress the way I wanted. As time went on, I pushed this more and more. I finally would usually wear only vests and pants for dress events. I first had thoughts that I was male when I was younger. I said that in kindergarten that In was male. I suppressed it when I was bullied. The thought that I was male did not come back until middle school, about the time I hit puberty. I did not like what was happening. My mom was excited when I had my first period, I was mortified. I tried to hide every time I was on my cycle. It was only my senior year of high school that I really thought something was off. I first thought that it was because I was bisexual. When that didn't fit I thought that I was a lesbian. I went through literally every sexuality label hoping that something would fit. I really was trying to avoid messing with my gender. I finally decided to go to the transgender group in my college. I went as an ally to one of my friends. There, one of my friends asked if I was transgender. I admitted that I did not know. That was the first time I admitted I was questioning my gender. I then said that I was pangender for a while. That was followed by bigender. From there, I really began to realize that I was on the masculine end of things. At the end of my sophomore year of college, I began to realize that I am transmasculine. I decided to wait and come out at the beginning of the next school year since it was so close to the end of the year. The only people I told was the transgender group. I asked them to use male pronouns with me. That felt amazing. Over the summer, I came out to my roommate first. She was very supportive. I had known her all of sophomore year. Then, in one night, I posted a thread on here saying I was transgender and I emailed all of my professors and my residence hall administrators. The next day I accidentally came out to my mom. I came out to her because she had borrowed my computer. She went to go onto her gmail. Mine was still logged in, and since that was the last email I sent, it was the first thing that popped up. Thankfully she was very supportive. I didn't ever actually tell my dad. He had to have emergency dental surgery right before I went back to college. I gave my mom permission to tell him once she felt he was feeling better. He was not at all surprised. In fact, his response was "do you think I'm fucking blind". Some of my extended family was not supportive. They all finally came around and realized that I needed to transition to better myself. I began to see a gender therapist. She happened to work for my college mental health service. On my birthday, I got the letter that I needed for hormones and to change my gender marker on my drivers license. I changed my name in May of 2014. I started hormones in April of 2014. It took a few months to get into the informed consent clinic in my area. I've been on them since then. For me, it was one of the best decisions I have made. I now live full time as male, even working in a male specific job. We have all male clients at my facility, so that is why I say male specific. It's not been easy. There were many times that I thought about calling it quits. But at the end of the day, it has been totally worth it. I am now passing full time. Most people think I am a gay male. I'm ok with that though, I'm not going to change my actions so that people perceive me differently. If I'm not being true to myself, then I did everything for nothing.
