I feel a little alienated from my sisters sometimes and took forever to understand myself because I lack the standard narratives everyone seems to have. I never knew what was wrong with my life. Not even a little. I’m AuDHD and I grew up when Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura were coming out. I had a privileged, well-off childhood with early access to the internet and my parents told me that if I just kept acing math and science tests I’d be set for life. So I just got up in the morning, put on clothes society told me to put on, sat through school, and then went home and dissociated out of my body onto the internet. On the internet I got to be no one without a body, shitposting on 4chan (before /tttt/ existed, thank the sun) and then fark and then reddit.
I never picked girl characters in rpgs, but you know the one rpg character I really, really got into imagining myself as? My Forsaken (undead) WoW main. Because he was dead, and struggling to find some purpose in his undead existence.
Taking hormones shocked me to my core because I suddenly came alive and hadn’t even realized I was dead. I felt present in my body and feminine and they went together and felt completely right. Looking back on my life now, I didn’t feel like a girl trapped in the wrong body, I felt dead and absent and coped with it by being anon online. Life never forced me to reckon with myself and that feels embarrassing now.
Now I’m craving sisterhood and validation and being seen. But I’m well into middle age and I’m shackled to a house in the suburbs I sleepwalked into. I can be the woman I want to be but real growth is slow and I’m impatient. I keep vomiting my feelings at people like I am in this post (and people find it off-putting I think). Can anyone relate to my story?
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
In my 30s I slowly realized that a lot of my body issues stem from dysphoria. And now I feel I am too old and bald to even transition.
False, estrogen does wonders for your hair. Even if it didn’t work, wigs.
Yeah. It just feels like a lot of work, and like I’m faking it. There’s a lot of unpacked self esteem issues and AuDHD gives me executive dysfunction so even thinking about transitioning feels like a never ending checklist I will never get around to.
In my experience, I wasn’t about to start building up momentum to function until after I started estrogen. I’d been on psych meds for nearly a decade and they helped a ton but it never really clicked until I started HRT.
It’s literally never too late, you are not too old. I transitioned in my 30s (a lot of my hair grew back thanks to hrt btw, and so did my girlfriend. I know a woman who transitioned in her 60s
You can transition whenever, you’re allowed to be whoever you are however you want.
Even if you avoid social transition hormone changes can feel wonderful emotionally if you’re trans. I remember feeling like colour came into the world for the first time, I was able to take joy in things.
You can.
Furiosa is really hot in Fury Road and she’s bald, and wigs can do a lotI don’t look like Charlize Theron lmao, but yeah, I’m figuring it out. It just gives me mad dysphoria
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
You should, if nothing else it’s a beautifully filmed movie. It will not necessarily show your experience, because every trans experience is different and we just try to shoehorn them into a normative mold. But that’s what makes ISTTVG important: It is a story that is not the usual “i always knew” cliché with long, tortuous doing makeup and looking at your reflection longingly scenes.
I feel many of the things you describe, i don’t feel some others, and some things were slightly different for me. And i think that goes for every trans person. We’re really not a monolith. But dissociating for a long time is a very common thing. It’s something i see with most of my friends, no matter how different our biographies are in other regards.
Thanks. I think I’m still internalizing the idea that we’re not a monolith and that I don’t have to measure up to somebody else’s marrative to be real and present.
Similar unawareness and background myself. Looking back on it now I see all sorts of small hints that I was so ignorant of. Also middle aged and sleep walked into the suburbs. I lucked out with an incredible partner, a satisfying career, and really nice home life… For now at least. Happens to a lot of us, I’ve met others in the same boat who had little to no signs. I think for those of us who were so wildly in the dark on things, middle age can invoke a feeling that the clock is ticking and people start asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
Yeah, I hear you. My gender transition is also like a midlife crisis and whoa mama it’s exciting and frustrating feeling stuck in the burbs. If I didn’t find an incredible supportive queer partner I’d really be in trouble. Thanks
No. The thought of being trans never once seriously crossed my mind till I was 22 and then It felt more like a momentary lapse of judgement. Fucked around till 34 and lived as cis het dude pretty obliviously.
Only now with 35 im slooooowwly coming to grips with being trans but I doubt I will do anything about it.
I also would say I have 0 dysphoria and yes dare I say im happy and kinda content.
Thanks, yeah oversharing is the way to put it and nice to know I’m not the only one doing it. And I’m getting comfortable with the idea that people online don’t have to be strangers
Yeah ^^
FWIW I don’t even think calling it “oversharing” does it justice… I’m grateful you posted this, I’ve not substantially messaged or anything on hex for a while but I want to say it. Your sharing helped me here, as I always picture it, it’s like the world has this black hole of misery and need that no one can fix by themselves, or even without large collective effort. But we at least don’t have to be alone, or hurting alone…
It’s a valid social need… no lesser than any physical need like hunger, it’s a visceral thing and like all other human needs as a society and species right now we all enter this world needing, only to get gaslit and shamed instead. The Harlow monkey experiments (had to look up the name) come to mind… You needed to share, it was a good space to, and honestly I feel shared with (in a good sense)…
I’m glad it helped!
I feel better after sharing it, and am figuring out how people are social in these spaces
Im a stranger. But I dont have to be. You can hit me up in the dms if you wanna talk (no pressure) …about anything really.
Similar story here. It took me until I was about 40 to realize that I had been unconsciously suppressing something for most of my life. Looking back with that context, there are a handful of things that I did or felt that suddenly make a ton of sense.
Also my grandma called it when I was 10 by saying I should have been a [fem version of my soon-to-be dead name]. I didn’t get it at the time, but maybe she saw something. ASD and AuDHD run in the family, so there’s that.
Your post is pretty relatable. I am not transitioning but came pretty dang close to starting last year, and its been something very much on my mind (off and on, sometimes very on and sometimes not so much) for years at this point. FWIW I’m in my mid 30s.
Not really sure what I am but I do occasionally dump pent up feelings to my partner. Also did the sleepwalking into the burbs thing and have managed to get out of that in the last few years but a lot of the consequences of earlier choices are still hanging around, for better or worse.
I have this suspicion that some of my struggles are with internalized misogyny and/or transphobia, but there certainly some other material concerns.
I think throughout my 30s ive been struggling to come to terms with being literally, physically alive still. Starting in elementary and middle school I had some strong feelings and assumptions that I wouldnt be alive past my early 20s, and now that that’s been almost half a lifetime ago it feels like I’m trying to figure out who I am still.
Definitely can empathize with some of the things you mentioned. I have sisters but our relationships were effectively sabotaged by a shitty parent and for years I thought that my role was to be like the opposite of my closest sister, which heavily shaped our relationship and my own development. Ive also always just worn what I was told to wear. Even today family members keep buying me clothes (even when I pushback) often enough that its an easy excuse to avoid shopping for things that might express my identity better (that, and shopping for fem clothes is often disheartening).
Just really feels like I’m stuck pretty often. I think a weirder contributor is that I’ll go months feeling like “yup, I’m some variety of trans” , then months where it’s less noticeable, so then the feeling becomes “nah, you haven’t even bothered trying recently and have been getting by just fine being a schlub. Maybe its just a sex thing. Or maybe its just a cross dressing thing. Or maybe youre just grasping for straws to explain away and fix your lifelong depression. Or maybe etc etc”.
Truthfully, id really like to try estrogen to see how I feel on it, but I’d like to know that feeling without the body changes first, for a variety of reasons.
Anyway, thanks for sharing OP. These stories are really helpful.
You’re welcome! Thank you for sharing your story.
Truthfully, id really like to try estrogen to see how I feel on it, but I’d like to know that feeling without the body changes first, for a variety of reasons.
I felt the exact same way. I was curious about how I’d feel on it more than I wanted body changes. I was intrigued but scared by the idea of feeling differently, thinking differently on them. I dithered on it for several years. With a trans friend’s encouragement I tried them.
The first full day after injecting I felt alive and present in a way that I can’t remember feeling since I was a little kid. I started being able to process what I was feeling while I was feeling it, instead of being hit over the head with an emotion and only being able to process what I was feeling in the aftermath. An intrusive thought that normally I’d dwell on and be upset and angry at nothing entered my head, and I was able to stop and go “that’s just gonna make me sad to think about. I don’t want to feel that way, I’m gonna dispense with this thought and not worry about it.” And it happened.
Everyone’s body and endocrinology is different, but in my experience the body changes take weeks to start and happen slowly, but I felt right and certain that it was good for me immediately. All the advice I’ve gotten told me that mental changes come before physical body changes, and if you don’t like the mental changes you can stop them and you should go back to the way you were before.
So that’s some more of my story there; you don’t have much at all to lose by trying estrogen.
Truthfully, id really like to try estrogen to see how I feel on it, but I’d like to know that feeling without the body changes first, for a variety of reasons.
For what it’s worth, if you’re able to get some of the faster-acting stuff (e.g., transdermal gel) plus a T-blocker, you can do it for a couple of weeks without any permanent changes.
Just… Don’t do what I did. I tried the herbal route, and that is fully capable of causing serious liver problems (because you have to dump enough phytoestrogens into your system to override the bioidentical stuff already present in your body). I was fine for about two or three weeks, but then I tried to tough it out through a week of migraines and finally had to give up. At least it gave me the “free trial” of my brain on HRT, so to speak, which was all the convincing I needed to go through with the real deal.
What is the herbal route? I wasn’t aware there were any plant estrogen-likes that could make it across the blood brain barrier.
There are a few variations, but pueraria mirifica (estrogenic), red reishi mushroom (T-reducer/blocker), dandelion root/milk thistle (increases bioavailability of basically all of this shit by suppressing the CYP3A4 liver enzyme [same as grapefruit]), and I think peony root (secondary T-blocker, mild estrogenic) was the cocktail that I landed on after a few weeks thanks to the goobers over on a forum for self-hating eggs with internalized transphobic brainworms (BreastNexum; do not go there, it is a silly place, and not in a ha-ha way). Suppressing CYP3A4 long-term can seriously fuck you up, and multiple people from the aforementioned forum reported landing themselves in the ER, possibly due to other interactions since that enzyme metabolizes so many other compounds.
Like I said, it’s a bad idea when so many safe alternatives exist.
Interesting!
I think I’m not supposed to have grapefruit because it messes with my meds. I’m guessing that’s related to that enzyme as well?
Yep, that’s the one. Suppressing it prevents your liver from metabolizing a whole host of things, and in the context of trying to keep a medicine dose at a specific concentration, that’s uhhhh… Not great. Dandelion root extract and milk thistle are even more potent than grapefruit juice.
Even today family members keep buying me clothes (even when I pushback) often enough that its an easy excuse to avoid shopping for things that might express my identity better
You could see if there’s any clothing swaps in your area.
Honestly I should do this too… I still have a bunch of old clothes.
That was exactly my experience except I’m nonbinary
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
Yeah but just because it’s good
Yeah, I also had no idea until my 30s. I think it’s pretty common for people our age; being trans wasn’t in the media like it is now
Exactly how I’ve explained it to my spouse – when we were kids, the vocabulary just didn’t exist out in the boonies. Everything was just “gay,” and that was the thought-terminating cliche, as if the mere concept were suppressed simply by limiting the ability to put it into words.
as if the mere concept were suppressed simply by limiting the ability to put it into words
It definitely was suppressed!!! Like obviously some trans people managed to figure it out from first principles without needing to have heard about it first, but a lot of its us didn’t.
(Please note my use of the phrase “first principles” is just cuz it’s in common use currently. In the philosophical sense, first principles are metaphysical bullshit, very undialectical)
Oh, absolutely. I guess I meant more that we still are who we are, even if some of us had to take the long way 'round to figuring it out. Stigmatization of mental health care really didn’t do us any favors, either, although 1990s psychiatry would have probably amounted to “you just have depression, shut up and take the Zoloft” because a lot of us in this situation don’t perfectly fit Blanchard’s bullshit categories.
I was going about my life completely obliviously until one day BAM the thought “what if I was a girl” entered my head and refused to leave and I could hardly eat for 3 days as I was consumed by such intense thoughts about it. Never hinted at until then.
Reading an overview of a Ranma 1/2 fighting game for Super Famicom when I was 14 and thinking “yeah, I’d probably just
myself constantly so I could stay a girl full-time” and then memory-holing it for two and a half decades? Couldn’t be me… Totally normal cisgender thoughts. Yup.
I relate to a lot of what you just said. I’ve seen it said that hegemonic culture emphasizes the stories of trans people who have always known they were assigned the wrong gender while delegitimizing those who “just” wish they were assigned a different gender at birth. I’ve found that I fit into a third: someone who refused to even entertain being the opposite gender.
I’m tempted to share my life story, but I realize it’s not very wise to do that on a public forum. It’ll suffice to say that I’ve had an irrational fear of being seen (or seeing myself) as feminine throughout my life basically until this year. When I first heard of the button test, my answer was:
Shit! I better not get anywhere near that button! I don’t want to accidentally hit it with my elbow or something! In fact, maybe I should collapse the entryway into this room in case I get really stupid and want to push it or something. Not that I’d ever want to do that! Uh, yeah, I’m not pushing the button. Toooooootally a cis guy here!
Hell, my head still starts to spin when I try making a woman character in a character creator. I panic and shut down the game. At my point in the journey, all euphoria is met with equal and opposite dysphoria. I wept my eyes out as if someone had died when I started trying out femme names with my therapist.
I’ve felt like there was something ineffably wrong about myself for as long as I can remember, but could not pinpoint what. A recurring thought throughout my life has been “there’s nothing wrong with my life, but everything’s wrong with the person living it”. I haven’t started HRT yet (I have submitted a form for consultation and apparently there’s virtually no gatekeeping where I live, so fingers crossed), but even without them, I’ve noticed that finally being honest with myself has given me a faint desire to live that I’ve lacked my entire life. I’m finally imagining I can be part of the future, instead of assuming I’ll be dead some time in the next 1 to 5 years for no fucking reason.
the one rpg character I really, really got into imagining myself as? My Forsaken (undead) WoW main. Because he was dead, and struggling to find some purpose in his undead existence.
Taking hormones shocked me to my core because I suddenly came alive and hadn’t even realized I was dead. I felt present in my body and feminine and they went together and felt completely right.
I can really relate… in many ways I’ve fallen back into “living death,” but that spark of life- that especially was so bright, for that while I lived more fully (for all I was still a total traumatized and dysfunctional mess). I’d always felt like a corpse, tbh I was constantly telling myself even in my preteen years that I had to “gain” or “claw my way to life…”
Regressing (not detransitioning, just typical dysfunction/depression/etc) has been hard… I really need to get out of my shell more.
CW typical unhealthy brain stuff, SH adjacent
spoiler
If I actually am present in my body, oftentimes it feels like my body is a necrotic, cancerous mess. Sometimes I imagine being able to carve up and modify myself like I were the corpse I often feel like, rather than some dysfunctional meat computer. In fairness I guess I’ve always had this really unhealthy relationship with myself even outside of dysphoria, as a kid I interpreted the whole (ex)Christian schtick of “if your hand fails you, cut it off” in a pretty literal way and it still sticks
Life is definitely out there, though. I’m- not brave enough to return to it yet as I am (dysphoria, but equally or maybe moreso dysmorphia and shame over life in general), not ready. But even as-is it’s better than it was before the egg cracked… I need to rewatch I Saw the TV Glow too tbh, but in general even just seeing others commiserating, or remembering it in myself, or the small bits of good genderfeels and feeling like myself in general, it’s like a warmth that keeps me from just vanishing, bedrotting or dissociating into nonexistence. So basically- thanks, too.
