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 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.