I remember as a child wanting to dress as a girl. This was met with violent rejection by my family for the most part. I learned quickly as my personality was forming that parts of it were dangerous and scary, and to never show those parts. As I grew media showed me that Trans people were at best mentally ill, but most often paraded as sick, dangerous freaks. I felt like girls were more interesting, but I was just a boy.
I identified as male most of my life, but I resented it. Men just dont look good, arent interesting to look at, so what’s the point of nice clothes? Male spaces are toxic, sports are boring, but of course im a guy so im not allowed in the girl spaces I wish I could be in. When I was a teenager I discovered anime, specifically ranma 1/2, and holy shit did i wish I could just turn into a girl. Still a guy though.
Everything developed into fetishism, because I learned that what I was feeling and doing was perverted. And the only spaces where it was expressed was through kinky spaces. I got lucky in that I found a long-term relationship that allowed me to express myself, and explore the feminine part of me. But I was still a guy.
As an adult I was vaguely dissatisfied with things. I was in a great relationship, still am. But I hated playing, dressing up or whatever because I would always have to put it away to go out into the real world. I remember my spouse once asked me how I felt during a scene, am I a boy or a girl in the moment? and I was annoyed because the thought I had was that im a girl, always a girl. Still didnt get it.
One day im driving along having a conversation with myself as I do when im driving. It was a conversation I’ve had many times wondering about certain quirks of my creative process. But this time a little subconcious voice popped into my head to answer. It said “maybe you do that because its the only time you can ever feel entirely like a girl.” And i said, “what?” And my subconscious said, “okay bye!” As thousands of connections hit all at once in my brain.
Now I know, but im terrified of it. Im middle aged, and my whole life Trans people were freaks. Thats obviously wrong, but I chose the worst time to figure it out. Because the country i live in has decided to use Trans kids as a bludgeom of what’s wrong with society. Im trying to live more authentically but I feel isolated. Therapy is helping, and I recommend it if you can get access to help. But I have a lifetime of toxicity to unravel.
sorry you have to deal with that :( it sucks people can’t stop judging others for just existing as themselves, but i guess they also grew up in that repressive environment :/ sounds like you have a great supportive partner though.
She is great, the best part of my life. She have me the space to explore myself, and accepted me as i was and am. I was a kid in the 80s and 90s not the best time for representation. I remember many years ago a friend calling me out for my own toxic views of trans people, and I think that was one of the first little movements toward being able to accept myself. And that’s the thing, im glad there is better representation now, and groups and allies that young people growing up like i did can find better models so that dont have to wait till middle age to figure themselves out.
Hey never too late to reinvent yourself (or in this case be the self you already were), especially with good people around.
Yeah for as bad as the younger generation has it in other ways, it’s really uplifting how radically accepting they are lol. Hopefully that changes the tide, the puritan boomers will be replaced with the super accepting youth :>
i figured it out that i wasn’t happy with my gender in middle school, but i also didn’t really have the words for it, plus the stigma and family pressure was such that at the time that i decided to just repress and focus on studies/career. it didn’t help that the environment in both the college i went to and the career i picked trended towards the conservative and misogynistic.
i survived mentally via escapism, playing female characters in stuff like wow helped a lot. after graduating, moving to a new city, and working for like a decade i finally started to realize how depressed i was and started transition.
by that time i had got more involved with my local anarchists and i was good friends with a really cool trans woman that i met through organizing and she really helped pull me out of denial.
i never really trusted the medical system and would never be particularly honest with doctors, especially male ones. eventually my comrade pointed out that i could just walk into a clinic and get a prescription with informed consent, so i did! it only took me like 20 years.
Lacking the words for it is so real. I’m working with 2-3 year olds and a big part of what I’m doing this year is helping equip them with the understanding of gender (including the words to describe these things) and working with staff on anti-bias and how to recognise their own.
It’s refreshing to see how so many kids by the time they’re hitting primary school are knowledgeable about this stuff. I know one primary school near me as ‘theys’ toilets along with the boys/girls toilets. I am so excited for these generations to grow up and start running things.
that’s really great work to be doing! some of my friends with kids have been just so great about letting them express themselves however they like and seeing that genuinely gives me a lot of hope.
I was viciously transed against my will by TotallyNotJessica’s memes.
I actually just let myself try being the slightest bit femme “just to see how I’d feel” and it felt so good it shattered my whole conception of myself.
Unironically, a meme is what got me started questioning. I was a dense egg, so plenty of things. I should have probably noticed earlier, but I never even considered those things could be a sign of being trans. Then I saw a meme about a perk of being NB and my first reaction was “that’s just normal for people, right?”
I wouldn’t have figured it out if not for comic. I had a moment of unanticipated envy over a picture of two girls kissing and went through the rest of the comic word for word.
I mean I was only half joking about TotallyNotJessica memes cracking me.
You’re welcome ☺️
For real though, I did research on the topic of gender identity as part of my BSc in psychology. I had a bunch of ‘this trans specific experience is relatable to me’ moments but I always put it aside. I finally started to ask myself at some point how many ‘relatable’ moments do I need to have for them to be statistically significant … so I started questioning joined the instance here and was totally not trans. Just working things out and I was quite sure I might just be non binary.
A meme you shared was an egg_irl starter pack, made it onto my local feed.
I thought okay show me what you’ve got and marked all the things that I felt I relate to. It was all but two of the items. That combined with my rateable moments finally did crack my egg for good. I have started the process and long road to HRT and can now finally put into words what I have been suppressing for the last 20 years.
PS: I only wish you would have done that when I was 12, when I was experimenting being a girl in secret, alone in my room without internet 😅 took you long enough :3 😜
Now I am left with one question, what are you gonna make with all the eggs you have cracked? Omelette, pancakes or something else? Do you just collect them like Pokémon?
**edit for time line corrections and adding of the meme post in question.
That egg_irl starterpack was one of the most powerful memes I’ve ever come across, so I’m happy to know that it got someone! I too wish I saw this meme earlier in my life, but better late than never.
Also, I totally feel you on viewing the evidence for being trans in terms of statistical significance. What finally pushed me over the edge into coming out was realizing that there would always be a chance that I was wrong, but the chance was so incredibly small that I’d have an easier time overturning the Standard Model.
As far as what I'm doing with y'all...
I’m building an army to conquer Antarctica, our ancestral homeland :3
All hail the queen of Trantarctica
Ooooh I am an official asset and or sleeper agent, how exciting.
That starterpack was so good I showed it to my therapist recently, she really dug into each item and we discussed how exactly it relates and at what point I first had it apply etc… I would not be surprised to find her show it to people who are questioning ^^
I spent a lot of my life not really liking my body and feeling ambivalent about relationships and love nothing really did anything for me.
While i was working graveyard shift at a retirement home i was helping one of my residents get to bed and she pulled me aside she brought back plastic beads for all the caregivers, she put them on me tilted her head and said wow that’s beautiful.
It was like getting hit by a truck i had to leave i was so flustered it felt like my face was melting and my heart wouldn’t stop racing.
It took a lot after that for me to realize the full extent and getting on meds for diabetes helped a lot with other stuff that had been missed but i still think about that simple compliment.
I was 36 and saw a random Discord message talking about how they “were male due to momentum” and said to myself “hey that’s me!” By the time I had finished that thought I was ready to slam my head through my door, how could I have been so blind? So within a week I had checked the info I needed and ordered gel and started my journey. It’s been a few years now and I’m happier and healthier than ever, really just wish I had started earlier, but oh well.
Lived for like 18 years thinking it was just a “fetish” and it will eventually stop. Meanwhile I was increasingly depressed of the fact that I wasn’t born a girl but also “surely is an obsession I can’t control” to the point that in retrospective doesn’t make a lot of sense. Let’s say trans people aren’t well perceived here (or represented) so, internalized transphobia did it’s part too. Was due an MLP Fanfic that I had to confront myself and it took me like another two or three years of internal conflict to accept that, in fact, if my three genie wished are “being born a girl” and the button press between “a billion” and “being a girl” were always the same and indeed it was not a very cis thing think, then I might be trans.
Now I’m utterly afraid of the process of HRT, its outcome (not passing) and the immediate social, physical and mental danger it poses nowadays.
But at least I know the root of all my anxiety, depression, and what later on learnt was called “dysphoria”.
and the immediate social, physical and mental danger it poses nowadays.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been on HRT for over 2 years and the only person who I’ve clearly male-failed to while at work is a chaser delivery person. If others have noticed, they’ve never said or done anything to suggest they do. And I don’t exactly put much effort into hiding it. YMMV, but you have at least some time.
Thank you, I appreciate it <3
It was when Madeline from celeste taught me how to dash twice
I microdosed some LSD while home alone one night and decided I needed to shave my face. Looked in the mirror once I was done and thought “oh wow, she looks nice :)” and then proceeded to softlock myself for 5 minutes
Called a friend who is also trans immediately after at like 2AM in a panic and she helped talk me through my thoughts and feelings, and within a couple weeks I managed to accept it
Anyway, several years later and now we’re dating and live together and very very gay :3
Well, I became obsessed with yuri fan art and felt sad I could never be in a sapphic relationship, which somehow wasn’t enough to realize.
Then I cried when watching a video of a male YouTuber coming out as gay and couldn’t figure out why.
Then PhilosophyTube (before they came out as trans) explained what being transgender was with clam chowder.
And finally that PhilosophyTube video led me to Contrapoints which was the final nail in the coffin.
It’s weird, it’s not like I never heard of the concept of trans people before, but it just felt like any attempt I made to explore those feelings were immediately suppressed by my brain until it was presented in video essay format.
I knew I was nonbinary but then I decided I wanted to transition and felt like the term trans fits me as well, I sorta picked up the term because I feel like it describes what I already knew :3
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Figured it out back in the 90’s and went into denial while I lived in envy of trans women for another 20 years.
we were very bigoted and racist online, but still liked lesbian relationships, and really wanted to be in one. we saw an artwork of astolfo making out with another boy, and initially thought they were girls. upon learning they were male, we went “oh… honestly, still super hot. wait, i’m a boy, i should do that!”
had a brief coming as a femboy, then fast forward a couple weeks and we do not even identify as male.
we experimented with some feminine clothing we had access to and really loved it. we also thought to the euphoria we felt one time when we were referenced as “daughter” and began to think about what our gender really was. it was still hard to accept that we weren’t male, so we opted for the designation of bigender, although genderfluid was probably the better descriptor for what we believed we were hehe (lots of exposure to queer people, but not a lot of actual knowledge at the time). this continued on for a few months. family also being nonbinary made us feel a lot better, even if we didnt talk about it to them for years.
then, we realized that being male just isnt us in any capacity, and after some internal debate we settled on being a girl. we accepted that we weren’t even really sure what gender actually is, but dressing femme and being called a girl sounded nice so we went with that.
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I spent years on reddit enjoying trans memes and laughing wryly at how weird it was that I checked so many transfem stereotype boxes despite not being trans. Silly shit like New Vegas & 4X games, music&etc. But I never had any obvious “wrong body” experiences as a kid, life sorta went to shit in a variety of ways for me right around puberty but I just assumed that was how growing up felt, so the possibility that I might actually be anything other than a boy never occured to me. ADHD/autism so I always took shit literally and at face value, everyone said I’m a boy so I must just be some sort of weird boy with problems. Decades of psychedelics and having friends and acquaintances who transitioned, no lightbulb moment. It didn’t even begin to click til I read the gender dysphoria bible, specifically the section about biochemical dysphoria. It accurately described my experiences and gave me a reason to suspect that I might not have to spend the rest of my life that way. I started HRT less than a month later, felt better than I had in my entire adult life almost immediately and haven’t looked back.
Actual trans knowledge: About 7 or 8 years ago I found an egg discord and hung out there learning until I was sure I had the right answer.
Earliest major clue: Saw Beetlejuice when I was 6 and really wanted to try on the red dress Lydia wears at the climax of the film. That night while I was lying in bed, moonlight falling through lacy curtains cast a shadow on my arm that looked like a long black lace glove, and I was absolutely fascinated by it.
I’m a child of moonshadow.
