When did you know?

I realized at 18, about a couple weeks ago, but I've always kind of felt it since I was 4 playing with barbies.

 

Truley know.... last august....it makes alot more sense looking back on it now even though I had my doubts....i wish I realized years ago but that's not how it works i guess i was just confused and thought there was somthing wrong with me

 

I realized it when I was 16.75, roughly. Although I had my suspicions earlier (but was transphobic)... I have to say, I am glad to know who I am.

 

I didn't even know what it meant to be cisgender and that I didn't see myself as that until about one month ago when I asked myself seriously, "what is gender and how is it actually different from sex," then looked at the definitions.

My desires to be something other than male go back for years and I have a pretty solid feeling about them from experiences during my high school days. I just didn't realize that my identification had any validity until I understood how sex differs from gender.

 

To keep it as condensed as possible:

I've always sort of known or suspected, growing up. I'd imagine myself as very feminine but fierce, gracious but strong. I had always found the feminine frame more appealing, while what I did have, a biologically male body/frame, as tolerable. I was generally more interested in the social politics of women, too. When I started developing crushes and attractions, when it came to women, there was always something more. It wasn't just a, "Hey, I like you!", no, it was accompanied with a, "Hey, I want to be you!".

If I saw a woman, or a flock of them, out and about, sometimes I'd "zone out" and imagine myself as one of them, or with them, doing whatever.

I realized in retrospect that, those 'I want to be you' moments were, more or less, dysphoria. I was envious of women's features, not in an unhealthy way, but more of a, "Why the hell do I feel so strongly about possessing those features/traits, yet I look nothing like that?". I found the male form interesting and useful, but it felt more like a study case, while the female form seemed desirable and aligned-to-my-desires. Naturally, this led to some conflicting build up, which continued for several years.

At first I thought, well, maybe all [heterosexual/bisexual] males (as I identified at the time) go through this with females. I mean, I do like women, so maybe they have this infatuation with them too. As time went on and people came and went, I realized, this wasn't quite the case. It was at this point that I started doing my own research and some deep thinking, which resulted in some soul searching and, finally, this conclusion:

I am a woman, in a man's body.

Naturally, the next step was:

How do I rectify this?

I'm still working on answering that question.

 

When I was younger I just assumed I was an extremely socially awkward tomboy. I actually was suspicious that I had Asperger's for some time until I realized I was trans. The feeling of wrongness was always there, but I didn't have a word to put on it and I had no idea what transgender meant aside from the negative and highly inaccurate portrayals you see in popular media.

But to answer your question, I realized I wasn't cis at around age 15/16 and identified as agendered until I started questioning again at 17.

 

Almost exactly a year ago to the day. I always were trans but I saw it more as an unhealthy and perverse obsession with women, something that needed to be pushed away from my mind. At the same time I was never truly happy and felt that something was wrong. I just never made the connection.

Then about a year ago my fiancee started listening to Steam Powered Giraffe and was talking about how a member of the band was trans and I commented on how good that was for her that she was doing what she wanted.

Then it just clicked. Like, I said that about her, but I couldn't say the same thing about me. When I was me it was an undesirable trait. I just said "I'm a fucking idiot" and decided to humor the possibility and explore it. I dressing in women's clothes, I started doing things more femininely and let my hair and nails grow and noticed that the feeling of discontent I always had wasn't as strong.

At that point it became fairly obvious to me.

 

I realized when I started to notice that there was supposed to be some difference between "boys" and "girls". So I was about 4, in kindergarten. Of course I didn't have the knowledge or vocabulary or even a good enough grasp on the world to explain it. It was something I lived with in a little box in the back of my mind that sometimes I would sit and wonder about. When I was in high school I finally decided that I didn't belong in either the boy or girl column but I still didn't have words or anything I could do about it.

In university I started looking into gender and sex for a few sociology classes and finally found a word that fit well enough.

 

There were signs I was trans when I was a small child, but I didn't actually realize I was trans until 14.

 

I realized I wasn't cis when I was about 17, maybe 16.

 

I still don't know for sure what I am. May take me a year or so to figure out.

 

I knew when I was about 12. But when I look back, I've always acted a little "differently" from the other "boys" when I was younger.

 

I realized it a couple of months ago at 20, but I knew something was wrong since I was 3-4. In my childhood I was always telling my parents that I wanted to be a boy.

 

16. My friend had suspected that I was a lesbian for a while, but didn't breathe a word to me, as I was known to be conservative to the point where, whenever someone used the phrase "girl crush", they quickly apologized to me. (Honestly, I wasn't THAT homophobic - and I didn't dare tell them that I'd been sorta crushing on girls for a while then…)

Anyway, I experimented with "genderqueer" for a few months after - then, shortly after my 17th birthday, settled on FTM.

 

I won't lie that I knew something was up since middle school.

I was really questioning in college and grad school. I just accepted it in the past year.

(So... that mmakes accepting at 32).

 

I actually realized around when I was 6 I started having cross-gender fantasies that made me incredibly happy. I realized I was trans only 3 months ago, I realized I was bisexual last week. I'm hoping I can come out and start HRT this year but that may be overly optimistic.

 

I think for me i started feeling confused at about 10 but i just pinned it on my aspergers, but by 14 i realized that i was a girl, though brushed it aside figuring it was just a wild fantasy, making me rather depressed. But after my birthday last year i started looking at the LGBT news section of buzzfeed out of curiosity because i also new i definitely wasn't straight and i saw an article on trans* people and it just sorta all came together, so i did some research then i ended up here at my current age of 16.

 

Well there have been signs my whole life, but I didn't question it until I was 13, and I didn't figure it out until around September of last year.

 

I'm similar to a lot of others here

I always knew I was different from girls. But only last year did I stop being in denial.