That you would like to share, of course.
I grew up with a family who didn’t really like transgender people or identities. They were fine with gay or bi people, just not trans people. They thought they were their birth gender, that they were delusional, and wanted to “shield” me from learning about it or people who were trans.
In second or third grade, when I was eight years old, I really liked tomboy characters. I, for example, had watched To Kill a Mockingbird (the movie) and really liked Scout Finch.
As a kid “shielded” from learning about trans people, I didn’t quite know the term to describe myself. All I knew was “tomboy”, so I thought that my desire to be a boy, be mistaken for one, cut my hair short, and play boys’ sports and hang out with only boys was a common “tomboy” desire, so I must have been one.
When I was around eleven, I was still shielded, but I learned from a 13-year-old kid who bullied me at school (who was sometimes nice) what genderfluid meant. I, of course, didn’t understand, so I tried to talk to people in my family and verify the information, but they wouldn’t give me an example and said I shouldn’t know what it means and that it’s bad.
Later on, I read that it meant “not having a fixed gender” and took the kid’s information that it was “some days being a boy and some days being a girl” and realized it applied to me. I was really into Danganronpa at this time and Leon Kuwata was a huge “role model” of mine. My whole life, my favorite characters, or “role models” (not really, but I wanted to base my personality off them) were men.
I wanted to wear a hoodie to hide my long hair and boobs, and be called “he”. My girlfriend at the time just laughed at me (she wasn’t very nice at the time but oh well, she was ten).
I wanted to prevent my boobs from growing as a child going through puberty, and when I was young, was convinced I had a penis (as I knew boys had penises), just a really, really small one. I thought in the future, it would even grow into one or I could “stretch it out”.
About the “role model character” thing, I wanted to make my personality like them and be like them, which I thought was “just a fictional crush” just like my family and others thought.
When I was twelve, I would sometimes, again, feel like I had a penis.
When I was thirteen, I identified as a trans boy named Mikey. I met a girl (14) online and she confessed she had a crush on me after we were friends for several months. We dated, but she then spread/heard a rumor about me that I said something mean about her, so she broke up with me and started to say some nasty stuff about trans people after that. I felt so bad after the breakup and what she had said, that I detransitioned.
I began to question again before realizing that I actually am trans, and no matter what pronouns change, “he” was always one of them that stayed the same, so I guess I can mainly use that (they and he are of equal preference, though sometimes they or he are slightly stronger, then she).
So whenever people think I was “influenced by drag queens and trans people” and that my family “abused” me, no, they had the same mindset. I, in fact, didn’t know what trans people were and was not exposed to them. I was instead exposed to other boys and girls at school and knew I wanted to be a boy, I just didn’t know how to describe that feeling.
I can’t even answer that question.
I knew I “should have been a girl” since just before I hit puberty. But I also knew I wasn’t. I spent several decades after that wishing things were different, including wishing I was trans so that I could access “sex change surgery”. I even tried tucking (without knowing tucking was a thing).
I grew up in country town Australia, before home internet was a thing, so I had no exposure to trans folks, or even any avenue for understanding trans folk, except for the transphobia that mainstream media put out there.
On top of that, I don’t really “get” femininity (or masculinty), and I never cared for experimenting with clothing or presentation. I felt no draw to the things that the media told me trans people all feel. So, it took me a while to get out of the cycle of “I should be, but I’m not” that I got myself stuck in.
Close to 10 years ago, I finally accepted that I’d always been a woman, and that I needed to do something about it.
So when did I realise? Either 40 years ago or 10 years ago depending on how you look at it :)
I probably could have figured it out earlier than I did if I had context or access to the internet at an earlier age. One of my earliest memories is asking Mom why the princes in her bedtime stories always spend their happily ever after with princesses. It seemed arbitrary and “That’s just how it is” never sat right with me.
But what I had growing up was the local and school libraries, and in Texas in the 90’s they only contained some passing references to two-spirit and intersex folks. There were aspects of those experiences that spoke to me, but they didn’t exactly match my own.
There were more obvious signs, of course. So much so that when I accidentally outed myself at 16 and my family thought I was gay, my Stepmom told me that she had figured that out when she met me at age 9. I remember thinking, “I wish someone would have told me back then and saved me the trouble of figuring it out for myself”, though obviously that’s a bit absurd.
Thanks to my voracious reading habits, the concept of sex wasn’t unfamiliar at age 9. That same year I had given my 10 year old best friend “the talk” when he hit puberty unprepared and freaked out over his first boner. That was a formative experience, it had never occurred to me before that puberty could be so distressing. I knew what to expect and I wasn’t happy about all of it, but I thought it was inevitable and thus wasn’t worth worrying about.
That changed when puberty hit, but I didn’t have the words to explain my dysphoria. We’d gotten online that same year and I quickly discovered the existence of trans people, but womanhood fit me just as poorly as manhood so I “knew” I couldn’t be trans. Some exploration in adult chatrooms showed me that I was most comfortable when seen as a mixed gender, which I had to dismiss as a fantasy because there was no such thing as nonbinary people back then. Even the word “genderqueer” had only just entered the lexicon a few years earlier, and it wouldn’t reach my ears 'til I was almost done with high school.
By then I had a couple of boyfriends, one of whom was deeply uncomfortable with my attempts at crossdressing, so I mostly kept my gender to myself. I could only be “me” among the other furries online, and for a long time that felt like enough. The burden of my dysphoria became a familiar weight in my chest and I did my best to ignore it for years.
It wasn’t until the late teens that things started to change; Elliot Page came out, research was showing the benefits of hormone therapies for enbies, and I finally met some folks online who openly shared the same salmacian genderfeels I’d always experienced. That shattered my egg for good, I couldn’t convince myself that it was just a fantasy anymore.
wow, that’s so great - I grew up in a time when “genderfluid” didn’t exist as a word or concept, and when being gay was seen as like being a pedophile …
you found out you were trans so much younger than I did - I didn’t learn until I was an adult, but I personally believe there were many signs growing up just like you experienced, and they absolutely happened even with no exposure to or knowledge of trans people.
I even remember being 5 years old and realizing it was like some cosmic mistake that I was born a boy, that “god” or the universe intended for me to be born a girl. I also was trying on my mom’s heels in her closet when I was even younger, but I think it’s pretty normal for kids to explore gender like that, so I don’t put much stock into that as proof.
As a teenager I hated the thick hair growing on my legs, and I would secretly shave it so nobody knew those changes were happening. I never felt comfortable with my picture being taken, I loved wearing like women’s jeans, and I basically always wore as much women’s clothing as I could get away with. I always carried a purse, even when bullied for it.
I always knew it would be better to be a girl or woman, and always would have said I wished I were one.
It took me so long to learn I was trans because every time it came up I would look up the DSM and disqualify myself, I didn’t believe my distress was significant enough (in retrospect being suidical from the age of 13 would have probably qualified, I was just so used to it, I thought everyone felt like I did), and I didn’t assert strongly that I actually was the opposite sex, so I couldn’t be trans. Trans people know they are the opposite sex, and their distress is so severe they can’t live without transition - I didn’t know trans people could be like me, uncertain about their gender or certain about the desire to be the opposite sex but not certain I was the opposite sex.
So once I learned that trans people do exist like me and that I pretty much exactly fit a common trans narrative, it became impossible to deny I was trans - and I felt an obligation to do something about it for my health and the impact I was having on everyone else by living a miserable life.
I didn’t want to transition, I don’t want to be trans.
Your experiences sound very typical to me, so many trans experiences are like yours. The idea of social contagion has been debunked: https://juliaserano.medium.com/all-the-evidence-against-transgender-social-contagion-f82fbda9c5d4?sk=00d1347269d63762493cc79d17699b69
Besides, if the conservative medical establishment could cure gender dysphoria and change gender identity with social influence or therapy, they absolutely would - they didn’t arrive at the current model of gender affirming healthcare through ideology or activism: https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/care-not-controversy
It’s just good medicine, the risks are low and the clinical outcomes are not just good but excellent - and there is even a growing body of evidence proving gender identity is genetic and biologically fixed, so the science backs up the medicine. It just makes sense, there is no real controversy among the experts on this.
i think when i got into collage, but maybe before that already, i started to feel uncomfortable about being a man. i didnt like the way i looked and how i failed at masculine beauty standards. i had learned about patriarchy and it made me not want to be a man and especially not want to be perceived as one because that felt like being perceived as a monster.
i also learned about femboys at around that time. i realised that honestly i would much rather be like them, but they also cracked my ideas about gender and sexuality a good amount, cause if men can look like women, then how does gender make any sense?
i started watching (trans) bread tubers talk about post modern ideas of gender and gender being a social construct. that made me realise that gender is fake and that it only restricts me and forces me to conform to norms and that it upholds injustice and that it really makes me unhappy.
so i rejected gender and now i’m a happy androgynous it/its blob, living with my cutie nonbinary partner, still struggling with internalised fatphobia and transpobia but ultimately more free and at peace than i ever was :3
I know this is very out of vogue at the moment, but I think one of the first clues I should have picked up on was when I was reading Harry Potter and got to the polyjuice potion, and immediately wondered what it would be like to use it to change into a woman and have sex as a woman. I didn’t even really realize I was bi at the time but I rationalized it in my little christian brain that I would be married to a woman, we would take the potion to turn into each other, and in that way it would still be 100% good christian marital sex. got a lot of mileage out of that little loophole.
Didn’t get any actual cracks in the egg until several years after marriage, after my partner came out as non-binary, and I began seriously questioning my own gender. Then, a lot of daydreams and speculations I had started to make a lot more sense.
Yeah that’s a big mood for me too. I didn’t put it together until adulthood
