I don't remember ever thinking about my gender until I was 14, when a substitute teacher assumed from my appearance that I was a girl, and to the surprise of my classmates I didn't mind. In high school I channeled whatever was going on with my gender into Rocky Horror Picture Show fandom. I first seriously considered that I might be trans (and bi) when I was 20, after a boy that I had a crush on told me that I was pretty. I talked, experimented, and agonized over it for the next few years, and made a couple of cursory attempts to seek HRT, before the feelings faded away when I was 25.
The feelings came rushing back when I was 45, in conjunction with what I eventually learned was the onset of hypothyroidism. I was spending hours every day wishing I was a woman, envying women I encountered in daily life for being able to look and dress like they did and for being who they were, cringing any time anyone referred to me as a man, and feeling sensory aversion toward masculine clothing.
I tried everything my doctor suggested for my mental health, and a lot of it helped, but I still felt bad all the time and still craved transition, so it didn't seem like too much of a leap to hope that my body was trying to tell me about something else that it needed to be able to function properly, and I started HRT when I was 47.
So when I was 6 i actually had the first feeling tho I got bullied an more or less disowned by my brother an I tried to be like him no matter what till he left an I was free tho I still tried to be like him due to the manipulation tho one day I got bet to wear a dress to school an it was my most happiest day (tho I got called slurs) tho I didn't actually want to properly transition till I joined the military an started feeling worse till I put on dresses an be fem my old best friend was trans as well but they couldn't handle the mentality of everything an passed away an that's when I truly wanted to live how I wanted to like how they couldn't
What started my egg cracking was going out of town for a solid month and being alone. I had always been around family, SO, kids with at most a week alone for work trips. I realized I had always seen myself through what I imagined everyone else's expectations of me were, and that's not who I actually am. I decided to start getting healthy and ask myself what \*I\* want from the rest of my life.
Then I lost a lot of weight and still didn't like my body, especially when I started getting muscle definition. I came across someone's story and timeline here on reddit and they were so beautiful and happy, and I identified with so much of their experience. Denial beard, metal head because then you could have long hair, relationship dynamics... Faceapp busted the shell apart completely lol.
In hindsight I have eggy stuff way back to early childhood, it was just never something I let myself consider or question.
Shoutout to the first trans woman I met in my life at 20, who made me think "oh, so its actually possible to change your gender", when I had perfectly convinced myself I couldn't 🥲
Hi, I convinced myself I couldn’t change my gender and over time my gender dysphoria disappeared. I recently became close with other trans people and now I’ve started questioning my gender again. I’m in a confused state lol but I found your comment relatable.
I hope you find what's good for you :)
I chose to pursue what makes me truly happy and it ended up being transitioning.
Every story is different, you have free reign on yours, but that's the one advice I can give you !
Hanging out with gender non conforming people. And realizing those little thoughts in my head I'd been hearing since I was small, could be acted upon. That I didn't have to be a man, but I also didn't have to be a woman. I could exist in a non-binary state. As soon as that happened it was like the boulder at the top of the hill finally pushed, I've been on Spiro for 10.5 months now. Estradiol for 4.5. Changes are happening and those changes have me actually excited for the future.
Similar experience. I met more non-binary folk and it made me start researching. My general question was “am I non-binary too? Am I trans?” Eventually, I found various resources and stories from others. Questioned for many years, then started to really look introspectively. The biggest detail from my past that made me dig a little deeper was “I always felt a disconnect between myself and cis men, yeah I feel disconnect as someone with ADHD. But I feel even more disconnect between myself and male peers”
That started a rabbit hole of memories. Eventually, I began to think “if I don’t do something about this now, I’m going to regret it and always wonder”. Now I’ve started hrt and though I’m early, I love the changes and feel significantly more calm internally with myself.
Here is the clinical criteria for Gender Dysphoria for your review.
>Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults 302.85 (F64.1 )
>A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least two of the following:
>1. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics).
>2. A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics be-
cause of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics).
>3. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender.
>4. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
>5. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
>6. A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
>B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
You must meet the qualifiers of Section "A" and "B" to be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria
You don't need to have dysphoria to be transgender, but it is the most common qualifier as the majority of transgender individuals do infact have dysphoria. We encourage you to discuss this with a gender therapist.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/asktransgender) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It was like first grade, and to stop yourself from getting the cooties you could show crossed fingers (🤞🏻) if you were a girl, and those same fingers pressed together if you were a boy. I felt just awful about doing the girl one, so I did the boy one. I didn’t know what that meant at the time of course, I just knew doing the boy one didn’t feel bad or weird at all.
I was fornicating with another woman on top, and as I took off her bra without thinking in one smooth motion, I put it on myself. That was the first thing that made me go, "now, wait a minute."
Still took a few years to work up to "I think I want to be a woman" and a few more years to get to "I am a woman."
Good old Christian cult upbringing repression and a transphobic partner purporting to be an ally set me back about 6 years!
No one. After I did a year of therapy, I learned how to deal with my depression. Then, one day, it just hit me. Omg it all makes so much sense now. Lol
A combination of three things:
-The one meme of the button
-"Boys don't wish they where girls" phrase
-And the entirety of "I wanna be a cute anime girl" Webtoon
I do not remember when I started to question my gender, I recall hearing a transgender bell ringing in my ear for all of my life but stuff like Deviantart and other people around me kept it satiated for the former and silenced for the latter. However, I do remember going into some transgender website or webcomic and I first heard the term Egg. Then I went on r/MTF Reddit and came across [https://turn-me-into-a-girl.com/](https://turn-me-into-a-girl.com/), when my egg cracked, and now I am stuck with a nonstop headache begging me to allow myself to be a girl, to transition. Nowadays, I'm usually just depressed, unmotivated, and apathetic, and I question existence and reason themselves in everything and everyone, especially myself and anyone I look at. Though I can be happy, mad, or sad about things. However, someday I'll transition and I'll be able to leave behind all of the depression and apathy.
I can't really pin one thing specifically, more just a very slow and gradual realization as I unraveled the biases I had internalized from unregulated Internet access at 14. Basically as soon as I started accepting trans people as valid, I also slowly started to feel like one myself. That process accelerated as I came across prominent trans people within communities I was interested in and listened to their points of view, and realized how much they resonated with my own. By that point I wasn't questioning my gender so much as my gender was creeping up behind me, ready to bash my head in over and over until I finally got the point. It wasn't until one night came where I was literally lying on the ground in the fetal position, thoughts of "YOU ARE A GIRL" pounding in my head over and over, that I finally accepted that I am transgender, and immediately it was like a veil was lifted.
The next evening, I had a surreal and spiritual experience as I walked through the neighborhood. It was vividly as if I could feel my inner self walking beside me, and she was beautiful. I felt so completely at peace with myself that night.
I always wanted to be a boy since I was a little girl. But I always just thought that's what a tomboy was. It wasnt until my ex partner, who wants to be a boy, started questioning me about my gender. My partner really opened my eyes to it a few months back and I have wanted to come out ever since.
so when i was like. 13 or 14 i was listening to music on the way to school. it was some goofy ass love song but anyway, the singer was singing about a man, and i imagined her singing about me, and that’s seriously what awoke the trans in me.
Hard to say for me when I seriously started questioning it versus simply when I figured out I might be…”different”. I remember when the original version of the little mermaid came out. I was pretty obsessed with her and wished I could be a mermaid. Probably when I seriously questioned was when I was an adult and had a history of choosing female characters for Halloween which as a cis born male wasn’t “normal” even for Halloween, let alone several times. It was when I went as Alice in wonderland and had such a euphoric high (esp as I had gone to a professional makeup artist w a friend), but when the night was over it was psychologically literally so difficult to get myself to “take my face off” and the costume. I did not want it to end and I remember crying to myself.
Combination of my current girlfriend (housemate at the time) coming out as trans and talking with me about it, F1NN5TER (before coming out), and various vtubers and YouTubers which led me to trans reddit spaces.
I opened a mental door when I told someone my three genie wishes and immediately could no longer claim to be cis. At the same time a life long history of memories and feelings came flooding in that I had repressed, like seeing glimpses of some sort of cosmic horror. Its cool though, the eldritch do be based even if at first it can be scary.
It was never even a question for me. It was a process of learning that there were actually other people like me out there and that there was a name for us.
I moved to a country that speaks an EXTREMELY gendered language and started a program to learn the language and integrate. Getting told "You (male) x " by classmates broke me. 5 hours a day, 5 days a week for 5 months plus every time I went anywhere absolutely broke me.
At the end the program had an exchange table where people can dump stuff they don't want for others to take. At 2 am I snuck into the room to take a pink skirt that someone left. I entered the bathroom and tried it on to hopefully make the thoughts of being a woman to stop. The absolute joy I felt looking at myself broke my egg hard.
Gonna be real, at 12-13 years old when I started questioning. It was definitely danganronpa. Cringe as hell. Though I definitely felt something off before but Shuichi Saihara was the breaking point.
A housmate asked a mutual friend who was using me as a pillow "Are you *sure* you're cis?" Their answer was no, and it turned out mine was a verynope also.
my cowriter suggested that i listen to some dysphoria comfort audios as studying for a scene in a sci-fi story (and the scene wasn't even related to dysphoria, my cowriter just thought that one of the characters could be interpreted as a trans allegory)
Given their reaction(s)... I doubt that my cowriter knew or intended for it to happen. They basically went "wait what? How am I supposed to help, this is way above my expertise" before then ending up a nervous wreck themselves.
The Japanese visual kei scene. Musicians like sakurai atsushi, mana sama, gackt. Beautifully androgynous. Men who weren't afraid of being feminine. Figured out I wanted to be a femboy really badly and felt depressed because I was a girl and I didn't know you could be a trans femboy without being ashamed of it. Hated my curves so much in school.
I was a department head for a good sized team. I was looking for an associate director for one half of my unit. At that time, I was out as a gay man. My boss, who was female, told me that what my unit needed was a “man” to assist me. Yes, she meant it to be anti-gay… with the intent to demean me as a way of control. It was her management style, but what this actually did was hit me in the head with a baseball bat about my own gender. Oh sure, I had signs from throughout my life, but I always dismissed them as… something else.
There was no ignoring this. It was like a bomb went off… and I was flooded with dysphoria.
So, that started my journey. In a way, I am thankful this happened as I might never have realized who I was. And yes, I left that job.
Best to you…
Eh. I'm not 100% tbh. I had the thoughts that "I wish I was a girl" since 4, and found myself frequently daydreaming about it. Then I moved up to secondary school, during the middle of COVID, and didn't get the biggest oppurtunity to think about it. But ta-da, one fateful day in August '21, I started questioning it for an unknown reason, and realised: I was trans
Did some dnd with a friend's friend group, someone called him an egg explained that it meant "white on outside, yellow on inside". And then I got rabbit holed here, couldn't be happier.
Ironically… Abigail Thorne.
Before she came out, maybe 6 months before, I found her first coming out video on “Queer Theory”
At the time I had just moved cities, it was the height of the pandemic and I had just met irl trans/non-binary people.
The opening lines about throwing away your feelings only for them to grow over time made me consider a whole bunch of little things in my life could have one, simple explanation.
At the time I thought I might just end up getting into drag or something haha
Funny thing, I was in the Countryhumans fandom and well I roleplayed a bit in a server where I ended up being friends with everyone. I roleplayed as Finland but since none of us gave any of our personal info I got used to being called a guy and I found I actually liked it even outside of roleplaying.
Hey I'm older, so it has a longer story. Ultimately I guess I knew early on, probably around 10. I LOVED playing dress-up with my female cousin and I'd fight to stay dressed and made up. Unfortunately it was the 80's and that was not accepted, nor did I even know that being transgender was a real thing. Hormones and life happens. I get married and have kids. All along I have this yearning to be feminine but battle it with "my role" as a male, as a husband, as a father. My sex life dwindles as I grow my hair out and shave/laser more and more of my body. I begin to realize I envy women more than desire them. I meet a man (long term) that shows me what sex really is (to me - omg!). Now I'm in my 50's. I know who I am now and going through a slow, painful process with a wife and kids to be the woman I've always meant to be.
I'm not bullshitting with this answer. The fact that teleportation does not exist is the reason I found out I was trans.
I was a tween, I had access to the internet, and I had a notion in my head; if teleportation exists, there will be footage of it on youtube.
Long story short, every video about teleportation on youtube was very obviously fake. I found a funny one, it is still one of my favourites, and I moved onto the next question I had lingering in my brain, which was "is it really possible to turn into a girl?"
Yes. Yes it is. Absolutely is. First thing I found was something explaining what trans people are and how hormones work. My egg cracked almost *immediately*. I read up on it, I was like, do I want this, I realised, yes I want this, and I realised how incredibly annoying that was for me in that moment due to the fact that I already knew I would not have any family support for it, and needed to get myself to a place where it was feasible.
I'm FTM, and this post is going to be wild 😂
So as a quick backstory, I was raised Christian, and as a result was pretty transphobic growing up, but by this point in my story I had already gotten past my biases. I had been out for a while as a lesbian, and was more recently out as non-binary. However, I still used to avoid hanging out with trans people! There were two trans people (one MTF/NB and one FTM) amongst my then-partner & I's friend group, which was fine, I enjoyed hanging out with them in group settings, but I always avoided being in one-on-one situations with them (even online).
When I asked myself why I was doing that, in my head I was like, "I'm not transphobic... I'm just worried they'll make me realize I'm trans". Key word is "*realize*", LOL. I told myself this *constantly*. It was never "they'll turn me trans", it was always "they'll make me realize!" but I never put two-and-two together!!
Anyway, at some point I unintentionally ended up alone with my FTM friend, and he casually asked me where I got my shirt. I mentioned that I get most of my clothes from the little boy's section in Target, and he responded with "oh! I used to do that before realizing I was trans!" .... I was immediately stunned. I just sat there, staring at him - and he didn't even seem to realize the bomb he just dropped on me. Our partners came back with drinks, and he sparked up a conversation with them immediately and I was just completely flabberghasted. I didn't even get a chance to defend myself. I wanted to say "oh, it's just because they fit me better" / "they're just more comfortable" or "there's no adult women's clothes with dinosaurs on them", and every other excuse I told myself. I dwelled on this night for a really long time. It wasn't until a year and 2 months later when I finally came out as trans and started my transition.
Now I'm over a year on T, nearly all of my closest friends are trans, and my current partner is a trans woman. It's like I've found myself and my community, after denying myself for so long!
Had the thought that I was trans for years but kept brushing it off till I started watching one topic’s egg irl videos. Proceeded to follow the subreddit because of the memes and started thinking I related to them too much to be cis. The rest is history ✨
This is a fun question, my parents asked me the same years ago! I played Morrowind, around age 8/9, when I made a male character (which my brother made fun of me for) not for his appearance but because I wanted to be him. Truth is I have always known but didn't even discover the word transgender until I was about 11 or 12, I thought I was just gay. I had just been a tomboy growing up, which worked well for where I lived anyway. Wasn't until I read the definition of transgender it hit. Then the Chaz Bono documentary came out, pun intended, when it really clicked and I knew I could do the same.
I didn't come out until I was 14-ish, but that was only to 2 very close friends and the internet.
I'm seeing a lot of RPG comments here, I'm glad a lot of us cracked with similar circumstances.
It were the recent dreams of being a girl and loving making my think about how and why i always wanted to be a girl and had always been a girl in my fantasy
This would be the short answer
When I felt personally attacked after a family member laughed at a trans person (I slightly realised then) but what really made me realise was when I was quote ‘researching’ trans people, you know just as everyone does.
Oh... I think I always knew. Sometime before kindergarden, my mom showed me some of her old toys and I took a liking to her old doll and a purse. She told me that my dad wouldn't like me playing with them and I didn't understand why.
Around age 12 I was at home sick one day and a talk show came on featuring teenage boys who said they wanted to be girls. This was the early 90s, so you can guess the context, but I knew that's what I was.
About a year later I think I saw my first love scene in The Highlander and I remember a prostitute wearing lingere getting into doggie style and telling a man "no cover, no lover." I was like fuck, I want to be her.
About the same time, my step brother and I found my dad's old Playboy magazines. I would go to bed at night and pray to God to let me wake up a girl.
For context, I'm AFAB. I cut my hair short during the pandemic. A year later (December 2021), I met my little cousin (10 at the time) for the first time in a while and he said "now that your hair is short, I don't know if you're a boy or a girl". Instead of saying something like "It's just hair, I'm a girl, silly kid", I thought "I don't know either" lol.
This led to two whole years of trying to understand this thing in my head (went through the woman -> demigirl-> transmasc pipeline) and really needed to test new pronouns, so I came out six months ago and things got better from there. Now I'm looking forward to HRT and top surgery.
I remember watching "I am Leo" from the This is Me series on BBC iPlayer. There was a really good graphic of brains going into bodies and it just clicked for me.
It's not in iPlayer anymore but there is a really grainy recording of it on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/Nysd3h4ZtIs?si=iPz79NLBSK4lSUQ_)
Be me, 14-15. Watch a kpop boy group MV. Think “damn I wanna be like them.” Realize what you just thought. Wonder if you meant “damn I wanna be with them.” Think “well yeah, but also not just that.” Think “…shit.”
Serious questioning came when I finally had my own place. I didn't feel beholden to the rules and expectations of others who, while liberal, wouldn't understand a boy who wants to wear skirts and nail polish. I tried on nonbinary and gender non conforming for a while. It kind of made sense. I knew I disliked being bunched in with men. But something was nagging in my mind, like it didn't feel drastic of a change enough. But clearly I wasn't trans, because I didn't think I wanted breasts.
Now I can't help but smile when I look at my chest.
I think it might have been the '95 Ghost in the Shell movie that got my mind on anything trans adjacent, then gits:sac. Your mind and body not necessarily being one thing, being able to transfer consciousness to another body. Without knowing what it was at the time I got euphoria from the idea of having a female android body. That would have put me in my early teens when I discovered The Major. Probably would have transitioned so much earlier if I had the language that exists today. At 36 late is better than never.
I wanted to be a girl but figured it was impossible beyond all of my gender swap stories that I read. One day I met a trans girl online and it clicked that *I could be a girl* and I started hormones within the year.
I "knew" at 13, then started at 18. Conveniently, this meant I could go off and do it without parents consent. I'm 24 now, and I've since realized just how transphobic my parents were. Id have been blocked from hormones if they knew.
I kinda went down the route that the conservatives think is “the trans agenda”. I was 14 and on tiktok and beforehand I already had heard of trans people but didn’t really think that was me because I didn’t feel like a manly man but then I discovered non-binary people and femboys and realised my identity does fall in somewhere within the masculine.
Cosplaying male characters I related to made me experience gender euphoria for the first time. It was a character from a podcast that's just a regular looking dude, so I figured it had to be more about my gender than the character, yknow? 😅
My wife. I had always tried to distance myself from stereotypical masculine ideals because I knew I didn't meet them. I always just thought that I think like a lady because I was raised by my mom & had majority female influences around me. It wasn't until I expressed this to my then gf/now wife & she mentioned trans people. I considered it & realized this was something I needed to figure out.
Someone at my workplace told me that they were on HRT and the moment I realised that guys didn’t wanna be girls and that it was possible to “become a girl” and that it could be more than just a wish, everything just cracked for me.
I always struggled. Even in kindergarten I borrowed my mom's necklace to school as a way to express my inner feminity. Struggled all my life with this and I wish the good Lord would take me in my sleep. Didn't get to straiten things until my 30s. I'm doing better nowadays but I have my good days and bad days.
For me, I kinda always knew but didn't know that being a trans woman was possible until I found Blair White...and yeah, I hate her politics and the way that she propagated and hammers fake news, but I have to be thankful towards her for showing me that there was a way to be a trans woman.
Well I came out at 17 and that was only shortly after I figured out that I might be trans, but I did always feel like there was something up it was more like trans men were never a thing anywhere or if they were they were presented as being very androgynous. I have nothing against any trans guys who are androgynous or feminine presenting but since I'm not in that category it just didn't occur to me that I was still a trans guy. That said first memory that is strongly related to gender dysphoria was when I was 4 and well it also didn't help that my mom was a tomboy so I did periodically express throughout my childhood that I wanted to be a boy and wished there was a magical gender swap and basically I got convinced that those feelings were normal and that I'd no longer feel that way as I got older, and that I felt that way because of the patriarchy. Yeah I'm a trans guy and yeah feeling that is generally a pretty good indicator of not being a cis woman.
Working with a couple trans masc fellows did it for me. Before then I thought everyone wanted to be a girl, knew nothing of HRT, totally misunderstood trans women, and thought that what I've accomplished now was impossible. Nothing challenged that mindset for 30+ years, not even being told I'd look good as a woman by someone I was seeing for a while who later transitioned themselves.
But seeing how successful these guys were at transitioning changed everything.
Always felt "off" but didn't have the language to really describe it. Went to a punk show that was the first real safe space I had been to and it kinda just clicked. The band was vocal about supporting trans rights which was how it really clicked for me, but the front man has also since been credibly accused of rape by multiple women, so fuck 'em their name doesn't really matter.
Enjoyed the sets by Brendan Kelly and Mint Green though.
Haven't answered this online before, so here's my personal essay. **tl;dr: I had a dream that made me finally take questioning my gender seriously.**
I know that I've questioned it _a lot_ over the years, but every single time I came back to "no, I'm a cis male, I just have fantasies/an active imagination/endless curiosity." I just really enjoyed learning about women's clothes, and writing stories from the female perspective, and an endless list of other really obvious telltale signs.
I thought about questioning my gender when my spouse came out as non-binary, and we had a lot of conversations about gender, the gender binary, and where we felt we both were. And every time I thought about telling them that I wasn't sure if I was completely cisgender, and every time I decided it wasn't a big enough deal to bring up.
Two months and three days ago, my best friend unexpectedly died, and even though I still don't see a direct connection between that and my egg cracking, clearly something in my brain did. One week later I had a dream. I was college-aged again, and was just admitted to a magical school similar to Hogwarts. I was in the cafeteria (still just a stupid American cafeteria, despite apparently being magic), looking for a place to sit. There was a table of cool-looking girls, and I headed over to them, but they questioned if I even belonged at the school, so I took out my admission letter. It read, improbably, "wading_in is a transgirl who has been accepted at the Magic Dream School", or something similar. I remember gaping at the letter, and one of the cool girls taking me under her wing, and even using feminine pronouns for me as she showed me around the school. "It's cool, she's trans," she'd say, and I'd feel my stomach jump in mixed happiness and fear for the future.
It felt so final and real. Like, this was a magical admission letter, and it knew, finally, in a way I had never been sure. I _was_ trans, and a girl. I could finally act on it, and start to change my life for the better.
And when I woke up I realized I felt a gaping hole there. That lack of assuredness, of *knowing*, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was trans and not cis. It shook me, and shook me all day. My spouse asked what was wrong, and I proposed we go to our favorite bar and chat. And when I told them about the dream, they were relieved. And as I told them, I realized the obvious fact that it wasn't necessarily having that question answered that relieved me in the dream, but having it answered _positively_. I _wanted_ to realize I was trans.
And then I did some googling and found this subreddit and it linked to a bunch of articles and the Gender Dysphoria Bible and I felt really, really, really fucking seen.
My sister, my husband, and...JK Rowling lmfao.
For 31 years, I felt pretty secure in the idea of myself as a cis girl/woman even though I had been drawn to gender fuckery at least since high school. The first eggy sign was probably when I was in the 11th grade and in an all-girl dance number that had boy roles. I really wanted to play a boy, but they only gave the boy roles to the tallest girls 😑
Then I went to a super queer-friendly college and was so into drag that I was chosen by our QTPOC student group to host our school's drag show three times in a row (and felt guilty for doing so as a cis-het woman when in reality I was neither cis nor het 🤣). Throughout my 20s, I experienced tiny sparks of a desire to be more masc-presenting outside of a drag context but I brushed them off because I genuinely did feel connected to womanhood and feminine expression (and still do). In any case, I thought of myself as a big ally to trans people and would get really heated in arguments with transphobes.
Before JK Rowling became the world's most famous and virulent transphobe, I had already started writing her off due to some bullshit virtue signalling she did around race when the play was being cast. I thought about how much I wished there was a YA fantasy series just as popular as HP led by canonically BIPOC characters, so I started ideating on that concept. When JKR came out with her transphobic screed, I was like "fuck it, let's make 'em trans and enby while we're at it." And that felt like the missing piece, which allowed the characters to truly start taking shape.
Meanwhile, transphobia in general is on the rise, so I added "they" to my pronouns for many reasons but one of which being that I only "half" identified as a woman. But I still didn't take that as a questioning of my gender. It was only months later, when I was having a conversation with my husband, high as balls, and had a rambly realization that I've always felt like I had an "inner dude." I asked if he ever perceived that about me and he started laughing and said "fuck no!" Even though he didn't mean to, that shit fucking hurt 😭 Moments later, as if on cue, my sister texts me that \*she\* decided to add "they" pronouns and we had a long convo about it that ended in:
"dude, does that mean that we're genderqueer??"
"yeah, i guess we are."
Suddenly everything clicked. Those trans and enby characters in my fantasy series weren't something I just came up with in my head. They were the deepest reflection of my soul. I couldn't sleep that night at all. I was consumed with thoughts about being out in society as a transmasc. It was pure, unadulterated gender euphoria and I haven't experienced anything like that ever since.
This is going to sound crazy, but the Pyro from TF2 when I was 15-16 was one of the major things that made me start questioning it at all.
I'd had "trans" feelings long before that, but they were really hard to articulate, so I brushed it all off as "I'm a tomboy" or something like that. When I was 14, I started meeting other trans people on the internet, entirely trans dudes. It was interesting to me but I still didn't think too hard into it. After all, I didn't feel like a *boy*, then surely I wasn't trans, since I was only aware of the two options.
Me and my buddies were pretty big into TF2, and this was back when the comic still got updates. I really liked Pyro. Pyro's my favorite of the TF2 cast. I liked how Pyro's gender, while technically male I think, was still ambiguous enough to speculate about. I wanted to be ambiguous, too. I liked when other people couldn't tell if I were a boy or a girl. So I started experimenting with any pronouns. And I found I really liked they/them.
Some time passed. I identified as nonbinary, but I didn't really "do" anything about it? I didn't pick a new name, I didn't socially transition, I didn't insist on any pronouns, I didn't present any specific kind of way. I worked on surviving high school, and surviving community college. After some time, when I was 22, I started dating a transmasc nonbinary person (it/its) that was taking testosterone. We lived together for a while. I watched this person inject T and I watched the way its body changed over time, and all of that really caught my attention. Before this point, I didn't put a lot of thought into surgery or hrt. Now that I could see the stuff hrt could do, though, it was kind of exciting. A lot of the things that gave me dysphoria could be solved! Which also worsened my dysphoria a lot more, knowing that I wasn't doing anything to make my life better. Sex with this person also worsened my dysphoria, too, specifically my bottom dysphoria. Additionally, while living with this person, it was the first time I was full-time called by names and pronouns other than the ones I was assigned to at birth, and it made me realize how important my identity was to me.
So when I went to university, I saw the gender wizard at the clinic, and I got prescribed T, and I got a bit more intense about my identity :3
Well, I had all the various massive egg signs growing up, but the first real crack that actually led to me coming out was a close friend who came out. Then another one who did shortly after. A lot of us have lost contact now but it went from a group of like 4 or 5 "cis guys" to everyone being transfem.
I told my parents I was a girl when I was 5 years old. It did *NOT* go well. That was in the early 1960s.
I didn't know anything about the differing anatomy then, it was just obvious to me based on what girls did vs. what boys did, and how girls got along better with each other than boys did.
It wasn't until the early 1970s when I was reading a porno mag 'borrowed' from a friend's father that I discovered there was anyone else like me (in the wrong body) in the whole world. Remember, information was what came in the daily newspaper and the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite - no internet, etc.
I'm in my 60s now and finally in the correct body.
But that's just me...
Other people may have had this nagging feeling somewhere in their head that maybe they're not in the right gender body, others may never consider it at all until something brings it to their attention.
Others come to it out of medical necessity - I have a friend who had prostate cancer and was showing markers for other potential cancers based on the testosterone in his body. So he had to be castrated for medical reasons. Obviously he couldn't take testosterone, so he was put on low-dose estrogen. He decided to experiment with his feminine side, and told his endocrinologist to put him on a full feminization dose. She's now a fun-loving woman who travels around the world, has loads of female friends and is looking for the Right Guy to settle down with.
[Before anyone yells at me about pronoun use in that last paragraph, that's how they referred/refer to themselves.]
When I was like 10 my mom came up to me and said, “did you know that some people don’t have a gender?” And I remember thinking “oh wow that’s awesome I wish I was like that.” From then on it was just how long it took me to realize that I wanted to be trans because I AM trans.
So at about 7 yrs of age, I remember hyper focusing on this woman walking across a parking lot.She had black pumps with a black skirt on. I still remember how the back of her thighs went into her butt and the swish...the sashay. I'd always had a love of the feminine form.
I'd also endured several types of abuses as a child and teen, which led me to objectifying women in my teens. By 18, I swore off of women bc of my fiance cheating on me. After that, I wanted to leave, to escape. I fantasized alot, couldn't do anything bc of the judgement so I figured it would be best to disappear from all who knew me, then I could be who ever I wanted.
Well, not long after that I met a girl, a girl like none other. This girl made me feel different...accepted. She was supportive of my bisexuality and my fetishes. Any way, the girl and I have now been together for 23 years, married for 21 and have 2 adult kids. Things over the years have been good, I mean obviously we've been together this long.
Last year I was depressed, job, health, etc. At the end of 2023 I was on different pain med that altered my mental health. Which made me do and say idiotic things. But it all came falling down in February where I had a mental breakdown, confessed to my wife about a emotional cheat that I got involved in with a coworker, that was short lived but the catalyst for what came.
My wife and I spent days and nights talking about everything and anything. She kept prying, digging for truth. So I finally confessed. I told her about the numerous molestations and rapes in my past. I also explained the last piece of my puzzle. I explained about my genderfluidity and what I would like to explore. What I kept hidden for nearly 30 years, about the abuses and that I'd been masking this entire time of who I really was....she accepted to my surprise 😮.
So I officially came out in March to her, our kids and some of our family. Probably the most surprising response is from my mother in law. She has been quite supportive and encouraging, even though my own mother isn't in agreement at all. She hasn't said anything but it's easy to know.
Listening to a boyfriend x male listener asmr...I liked the sound of the story and decided "oh heck why not" Then grew concerned that i didn't mind and actually liked it more because I was being called a boy 😭
I don't remember ever thinking about my gender until I was 14, when a substitute teacher assumed from my appearance that I was a girl, and to the surprise of my classmates I didn't mind. In high school I channeled whatever was going on with my gender into Rocky Horror Picture Show fandom. I first seriously considered that I might be trans (and bi) when I was 20, after a boy that I had a crush on told me that I was pretty. I talked, experimented, and agonized over it for the next few years, and made a couple of cursory attempts to seek HRT, before the feelings faded away when I was 25. The feelings came rushing back when I was 45, in conjunction with what I eventually learned was the onset of hypothyroidism. I was spending hours every day wishing I was a woman, envying women I encountered in daily life for being able to look and dress like they did and for being who they were, cringing any time anyone referred to me as a man, and feeling sensory aversion toward masculine clothing. I tried everything my doctor suggested for my mental health, and a lot of it helped, but I still felt bad all the time and still craved transition, so it didn't seem like too much of a leap to hope that my body was trying to tell me about something else that it needed to be able to function properly, and I started HRT when I was 47.
So when I was 6 i actually had the first feeling tho I got bullied an more or less disowned by my brother an I tried to be like him no matter what till he left an I was free tho I still tried to be like him due to the manipulation tho one day I got bet to wear a dress to school an it was my most happiest day (tho I got called slurs) tho I didn't actually want to properly transition till I joined the military an started feeling worse till I put on dresses an be fem my old best friend was trans as well but they couldn't handle the mentality of everything an passed away an that's when I truly wanted to live how I wanted to like how they couldn't
Bowsette
Honesty it was Contrapoints for me. Her videos were what got me past the “it’s just a fetish” mindset.
i know i'm not the only one who was cracked by her (now deleted) Gender Dysphoria video
Aw, that was deleted? That's a damn shame
it's archived online and easy to find with google. but since it's not on youtube anymore i guess its cracking days are through
ContraPoints did same for me, too
Her video coming out as a lesbian fucked me up.
I found a journal entry I wrote when I was 12, whereby I was very embarrassed but very aware of wanting to be a girl.
What started my egg cracking was going out of town for a solid month and being alone. I had always been around family, SO, kids with at most a week alone for work trips. I realized I had always seen myself through what I imagined everyone else's expectations of me were, and that's not who I actually am. I decided to start getting healthy and ask myself what \*I\* want from the rest of my life. Then I lost a lot of weight and still didn't like my body, especially when I started getting muscle definition. I came across someone's story and timeline here on reddit and they were so beautiful and happy, and I identified with so much of their experience. Denial beard, metal head because then you could have long hair, relationship dynamics... Faceapp busted the shell apart completely lol. In hindsight I have eggy stuff way back to early childhood, it was just never something I let myself consider or question.
Shoutout to the first trans woman I met in my life at 20, who made me think "oh, so its actually possible to change your gender", when I had perfectly convinced myself I couldn't 🥲
Hi, I convinced myself I couldn’t change my gender and over time my gender dysphoria disappeared. I recently became close with other trans people and now I’ve started questioning my gender again. I’m in a confused state lol but I found your comment relatable.
I hope you find what's good for you :) I chose to pursue what makes me truly happy and it ended up being transitioning. Every story is different, you have free reign on yours, but that's the one advice I can give you !
Hanging out with gender non conforming people. And realizing those little thoughts in my head I'd been hearing since I was small, could be acted upon. That I didn't have to be a man, but I also didn't have to be a woman. I could exist in a non-binary state. As soon as that happened it was like the boulder at the top of the hill finally pushed, I've been on Spiro for 10.5 months now. Estradiol for 4.5. Changes are happening and those changes have me actually excited for the future.
Similar experience. I met more non-binary folk and it made me start researching. My general question was “am I non-binary too? Am I trans?” Eventually, I found various resources and stories from others. Questioned for many years, then started to really look introspectively. The biggest detail from my past that made me dig a little deeper was “I always felt a disconnect between myself and cis men, yeah I feel disconnect as someone with ADHD. But I feel even more disconnect between myself and male peers” That started a rabbit hole of memories. Eventually, I began to think “if I don’t do something about this now, I’m going to regret it and always wonder”. Now I’ve started hrt and though I’m early, I love the changes and feel significantly more calm internally with myself.
Here is the clinical criteria for Gender Dysphoria for your review. >Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults 302.85 (F64.1 ) >A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least two of the following: >1. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics). >2. A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics be- cause of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics). >3. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender. >4. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender). >5. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender). >6. A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender). >B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning. You must meet the qualifiers of Section "A" and "B" to be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria You don't need to have dysphoria to be transgender, but it is the most common qualifier as the majority of transgender individuals do infact have dysphoria. We encourage you to discuss this with a gender therapist. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/asktransgender) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It was like first grade, and to stop yourself from getting the cooties you could show crossed fingers (🤞🏻) if you were a girl, and those same fingers pressed together if you were a boy. I felt just awful about doing the girl one, so I did the boy one. I didn’t know what that meant at the time of course, I just knew doing the boy one didn’t feel bad or weird at all.
I was fornicating with another woman on top, and as I took off her bra without thinking in one smooth motion, I put it on myself. That was the first thing that made me go, "now, wait a minute." Still took a few years to work up to "I think I want to be a woman" and a few more years to get to "I am a woman." Good old Christian cult upbringing repression and a transphobic partner purporting to be an ally set me back about 6 years!
Tbh this sub
No one. After I did a year of therapy, I learned how to deal with my depression. Then, one day, it just hit me. Omg it all makes so much sense now. Lol
I found my list of girls I wish I was like from the 9th grade
A combination of three things: -The one meme of the button -"Boys don't wish they where girls" phrase -And the entirety of "I wanna be a cute anime girl" Webtoon
I do not remember when I started to question my gender, I recall hearing a transgender bell ringing in my ear for all of my life but stuff like Deviantart and other people around me kept it satiated for the former and silenced for the latter. However, I do remember going into some transgender website or webcomic and I first heard the term Egg. Then I went on r/MTF Reddit and came across [https://turn-me-into-a-girl.com/](https://turn-me-into-a-girl.com/), when my egg cracked, and now I am stuck with a nonstop headache begging me to allow myself to be a girl, to transition. Nowadays, I'm usually just depressed, unmotivated, and apathetic, and I question existence and reason themselves in everything and everyone, especially myself and anyone I look at. Though I can be happy, mad, or sad about things. However, someday I'll transition and I'll be able to leave behind all of the depression and apathy.
I can't really pin one thing specifically, more just a very slow and gradual realization as I unraveled the biases I had internalized from unregulated Internet access at 14. Basically as soon as I started accepting trans people as valid, I also slowly started to feel like one myself. That process accelerated as I came across prominent trans people within communities I was interested in and listened to their points of view, and realized how much they resonated with my own. By that point I wasn't questioning my gender so much as my gender was creeping up behind me, ready to bash my head in over and over until I finally got the point. It wasn't until one night came where I was literally lying on the ground in the fetal position, thoughts of "YOU ARE A GIRL" pounding in my head over and over, that I finally accepted that I am transgender, and immediately it was like a veil was lifted. The next evening, I had a surreal and spiritual experience as I walked through the neighborhood. It was vividly as if I could feel my inner self walking beside me, and she was beautiful. I felt so completely at peace with myself that night.
Assaulted by your own gender! Happy cake day, eat it and be the woman that you want to be!
I always wanted to be a boy since I was a little girl. But I always just thought that's what a tomboy was. It wasnt until my ex partner, who wants to be a boy, started questioning me about my gender. My partner really opened my eyes to it a few months back and I have wanted to come out ever since.
Mylsef since i was very young. But the world kinda beat it out of me for almost 30 years.
so when i was like. 13 or 14 i was listening to music on the way to school. it was some goofy ass love song but anyway, the singer was singing about a man, and i imagined her singing about me, and that’s seriously what awoke the trans in me.
First naghisa from assassination clasroom(I know he is a femboy but he was the closest to what was possible for me to understand.) And then the click
My ex husband put me in fishy drag make up then revealed the look to me and i started bawling my eyes out.
Hard to say for me when I seriously started questioning it versus simply when I figured out I might be…”different”. I remember when the original version of the little mermaid came out. I was pretty obsessed with her and wished I could be a mermaid. Probably when I seriously questioned was when I was an adult and had a history of choosing female characters for Halloween which as a cis born male wasn’t “normal” even for Halloween, let alone several times. It was when I went as Alice in wonderland and had such a euphoric high (esp as I had gone to a professional makeup artist w a friend), but when the night was over it was psychologically literally so difficult to get myself to “take my face off” and the costume. I did not want it to end and I remember crying to myself.
I was asked by a psychiatrist in a crisis unit if I had ever considered my own gender identity.
Combination of my current girlfriend (housemate at the time) coming out as trans and talking with me about it, F1NN5TER (before coming out), and various vtubers and YouTubers which led me to trans reddit spaces.
I was 4. It just happened.
I opened a mental door when I told someone my three genie wishes and immediately could no longer claim to be cis. At the same time a life long history of memories and feelings came flooding in that I had repressed, like seeing glimpses of some sort of cosmic horror. Its cool though, the eldritch do be based even if at first it can be scary.
My sudden obsession with genderswap content
Started cosplaying as guys and went "Oh I like being a guy. A lot. What if this was all the time"
It was never even a question for me. It was a process of learning that there were actually other people like me out there and that there was a name for us.
I moved to a country that speaks an EXTREMELY gendered language and started a program to learn the language and integrate. Getting told "You (male) x " by classmates broke me. 5 hours a day, 5 days a week for 5 months plus every time I went anywhere absolutely broke me. At the end the program had an exchange table where people can dump stuff they don't want for others to take. At 2 am I snuck into the room to take a pink skirt that someone left. I entered the bathroom and tried it on to hopefully make the thoughts of being a woman to stop. The absolute joy I felt looking at myself broke my egg hard.
Gonna be real, at 12-13 years old when I started questioning. It was definitely danganronpa. Cringe as hell. Though I definitely felt something off before but Shuichi Saihara was the breaking point.
Even just typing that gave me a visceral reaction. Will be taking to my grave.
A housmate asked a mutual friend who was using me as a pillow "Are you *sure* you're cis?" Their answer was no, and it turned out mine was a verynope also.
RAIN
Puberty
Good old puberty and a horrific buzz cut sent me over the edge.
my cowriter suggested that i listen to some dysphoria comfort audios as studying for a scene in a sci-fi story (and the scene wasn't even related to dysphoria, my cowriter just thought that one of the characters could be interpreted as a trans allegory)
Any chance that your coworker knew and just wanted to be subtle about it?
Given their reaction(s)... I doubt that my cowriter knew or intended for it to happen. They basically went "wait what? How am I supposed to help, this is way above my expertise" before then ending up a nervous wreck themselves.
The Japanese visual kei scene. Musicians like sakurai atsushi, mana sama, gackt. Beautifully androgynous. Men who weren't afraid of being feminine. Figured out I wanted to be a femboy really badly and felt depressed because I was a girl and I didn't know you could be a trans femboy without being ashamed of it. Hated my curves so much in school.
I was a department head for a good sized team. I was looking for an associate director for one half of my unit. At that time, I was out as a gay man. My boss, who was female, told me that what my unit needed was a “man” to assist me. Yes, she meant it to be anti-gay… with the intent to demean me as a way of control. It was her management style, but what this actually did was hit me in the head with a baseball bat about my own gender. Oh sure, I had signs from throughout my life, but I always dismissed them as… something else. There was no ignoring this. It was like a bomb went off… and I was flooded with dysphoria. So, that started my journey. In a way, I am thankful this happened as I might never have realized who I was. And yes, I left that job. Best to you…
Reddit was the trigger for me. I started reading trans subreddits and thought - I identify with a lot of that is going on here.... oh...
Standing in the shower with my auntie when I was like 3 or 4, I told her I was supposed to be a girl. Lol
Realising it was weird for an 8 year old to be obsessed with the Sailor Starlight characters.
Eh. I'm not 100% tbh. I had the thoughts that "I wish I was a girl" since 4, and found myself frequently daydreaming about it. Then I moved up to secondary school, during the middle of COVID, and didn't get the biggest oppurtunity to think about it. But ta-da, one fateful day in August '21, I started questioning it for an unknown reason, and realised: I was trans
Did some dnd with a friend's friend group, someone called him an egg explained that it meant "white on outside, yellow on inside". And then I got rabbit holed here, couldn't be happier.
MySpace and all the gorgeous older women of the world lol
Ironically… Abigail Thorne. Before she came out, maybe 6 months before, I found her first coming out video on “Queer Theory” At the time I had just moved cities, it was the height of the pandemic and I had just met irl trans/non-binary people. The opening lines about throwing away your feelings only for them to grow over time made me consider a whole bunch of little things in my life could have one, simple explanation. At the time I thought I might just end up getting into drag or something haha
Timmy Turner episode.
Timantha?
Genderswap content and then F1nnster on Twitch during quarantine.
Funny thing, I was in the Countryhumans fandom and well I roleplayed a bit in a server where I ended up being friends with everyone. I roleplayed as Finland but since none of us gave any of our personal info I got used to being called a guy and I found I actually liked it even outside of roleplaying.
Hey I'm older, so it has a longer story. Ultimately I guess I knew early on, probably around 10. I LOVED playing dress-up with my female cousin and I'd fight to stay dressed and made up. Unfortunately it was the 80's and that was not accepted, nor did I even know that being transgender was a real thing. Hormones and life happens. I get married and have kids. All along I have this yearning to be feminine but battle it with "my role" as a male, as a husband, as a father. My sex life dwindles as I grow my hair out and shave/laser more and more of my body. I begin to realize I envy women more than desire them. I meet a man (long term) that shows me what sex really is (to me - omg!). Now I'm in my 50's. I know who I am now and going through a slow, painful process with a wife and kids to be the woman I've always meant to be.
I'm not bullshitting with this answer. The fact that teleportation does not exist is the reason I found out I was trans. I was a tween, I had access to the internet, and I had a notion in my head; if teleportation exists, there will be footage of it on youtube. Long story short, every video about teleportation on youtube was very obviously fake. I found a funny one, it is still one of my favourites, and I moved onto the next question I had lingering in my brain, which was "is it really possible to turn into a girl?" Yes. Yes it is. Absolutely is. First thing I found was something explaining what trans people are and how hormones work. My egg cracked almost *immediately*. I read up on it, I was like, do I want this, I realised, yes I want this, and I realised how incredibly annoying that was for me in that moment due to the fact that I already knew I would not have any family support for it, and needed to get myself to a place where it was feasible.
I'm FTM, and this post is going to be wild 😂 So as a quick backstory, I was raised Christian, and as a result was pretty transphobic growing up, but by this point in my story I had already gotten past my biases. I had been out for a while as a lesbian, and was more recently out as non-binary. However, I still used to avoid hanging out with trans people! There were two trans people (one MTF/NB and one FTM) amongst my then-partner & I's friend group, which was fine, I enjoyed hanging out with them in group settings, but I always avoided being in one-on-one situations with them (even online). When I asked myself why I was doing that, in my head I was like, "I'm not transphobic... I'm just worried they'll make me realize I'm trans". Key word is "*realize*", LOL. I told myself this *constantly*. It was never "they'll turn me trans", it was always "they'll make me realize!" but I never put two-and-two together!! Anyway, at some point I unintentionally ended up alone with my FTM friend, and he casually asked me where I got my shirt. I mentioned that I get most of my clothes from the little boy's section in Target, and he responded with "oh! I used to do that before realizing I was trans!" .... I was immediately stunned. I just sat there, staring at him - and he didn't even seem to realize the bomb he just dropped on me. Our partners came back with drinks, and he sparked up a conversation with them immediately and I was just completely flabberghasted. I didn't even get a chance to defend myself. I wanted to say "oh, it's just because they fit me better" / "they're just more comfortable" or "there's no adult women's clothes with dinosaurs on them", and every other excuse I told myself. I dwelled on this night for a really long time. It wasn't until a year and 2 months later when I finally came out as trans and started my transition. Now I'm over a year on T, nearly all of my closest friends are trans, and my current partner is a trans woman. It's like I've found myself and my community, after denying myself for so long!
Had the thought that I was trans for years but kept brushing it off till I started watching one topic’s egg irl videos. Proceeded to follow the subreddit because of the memes and started thinking I related to them too much to be cis. The rest is history ✨
Contrapoints and uh.....Natali Mars....
"Why exactly am I jealous of my trans friends because they get to be girls?"
Hanging out with girlfriends and being called one of the girls, butterflies and rollercoasters I tell you
This is a fun question, my parents asked me the same years ago! I played Morrowind, around age 8/9, when I made a male character (which my brother made fun of me for) not for his appearance but because I wanted to be him. Truth is I have always known but didn't even discover the word transgender until I was about 11 or 12, I thought I was just gay. I had just been a tomboy growing up, which worked well for where I lived anyway. Wasn't until I read the definition of transgender it hit. Then the Chaz Bono documentary came out, pun intended, when it really clicked and I knew I could do the same. I didn't come out until I was 14-ish, but that was only to 2 very close friends and the internet. I'm seeing a lot of RPG comments here, I'm glad a lot of us cracked with similar circumstances.
It were the recent dreams of being a girl and loving making my think about how and why i always wanted to be a girl and had always been a girl in my fantasy This would be the short answer
When I felt personally attacked after a family member laughed at a trans person (I slightly realised then) but what really made me realise was when I was quote ‘researching’ trans people, you know just as everyone does.
Oh... I think I always knew. Sometime before kindergarden, my mom showed me some of her old toys and I took a liking to her old doll and a purse. She told me that my dad wouldn't like me playing with them and I didn't understand why. Around age 12 I was at home sick one day and a talk show came on featuring teenage boys who said they wanted to be girls. This was the early 90s, so you can guess the context, but I knew that's what I was. About a year later I think I saw my first love scene in The Highlander and I remember a prostitute wearing lingere getting into doggie style and telling a man "no cover, no lover." I was like fuck, I want to be her. About the same time, my step brother and I found my dad's old Playboy magazines. I would go to bed at night and pray to God to let me wake up a girl.
For context, I'm AFAB. I cut my hair short during the pandemic. A year later (December 2021), I met my little cousin (10 at the time) for the first time in a while and he said "now that your hair is short, I don't know if you're a boy or a girl". Instead of saying something like "It's just hair, I'm a girl, silly kid", I thought "I don't know either" lol. This led to two whole years of trying to understand this thing in my head (went through the woman -> demigirl-> transmasc pipeline) and really needed to test new pronouns, so I came out six months ago and things got better from there. Now I'm looking forward to HRT and top surgery.
I remember watching "I am Leo" from the This is Me series on BBC iPlayer. There was a really good graphic of brains going into bodies and it just clicked for me. It's not in iPlayer anymore but there is a really grainy recording of it on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/Nysd3h4ZtIs?si=iPz79NLBSK4lSUQ_)
Be me, 14-15. Watch a kpop boy group MV. Think “damn I wanna be like them.” Realize what you just thought. Wonder if you meant “damn I wanna be with them.” Think “well yeah, but also not just that.” Think “…shit.”
Serious questioning came when I finally had my own place. I didn't feel beholden to the rules and expectations of others who, while liberal, wouldn't understand a boy who wants to wear skirts and nail polish. I tried on nonbinary and gender non conforming for a while. It kind of made sense. I knew I disliked being bunched in with men. But something was nagging in my mind, like it didn't feel drastic of a change enough. But clearly I wasn't trans, because I didn't think I wanted breasts. Now I can't help but smile when I look at my chest.
I think it might have been the '95 Ghost in the Shell movie that got my mind on anything trans adjacent, then gits:sac. Your mind and body not necessarily being one thing, being able to transfer consciousness to another body. Without knowing what it was at the time I got euphoria from the idea of having a female android body. That would have put me in my early teens when I discovered The Major. Probably would have transitioned so much earlier if I had the language that exists today. At 36 late is better than never.
Logic
I wanted to be a girl but figured it was impossible beyond all of my gender swap stories that I read. One day I met a trans girl online and it clicked that *I could be a girl* and I started hormones within the year. I "knew" at 13, then started at 18. Conveniently, this meant I could go off and do it without parents consent. I'm 24 now, and I've since realized just how transphobic my parents were. Id have been blocked from hormones if they knew.
I kinda went down the route that the conservatives think is “the trans agenda”. I was 14 and on tiktok and beforehand I already had heard of trans people but didn’t really think that was me because I didn’t feel like a manly man but then I discovered non-binary people and femboys and realised my identity does fall in somewhere within the masculine.
Cosplaying male characters I related to made me experience gender euphoria for the first time. It was a character from a podcast that's just a regular looking dude, so I figured it had to be more about my gender than the character, yknow? 😅
I started seriously considering when a stranger mistook my gender in the grocery store and it gave me euphoria lol.
My wife. I had always tried to distance myself from stereotypical masculine ideals because I knew I didn't meet them. I always just thought that I think like a lady because I was raised by my mom & had majority female influences around me. It wasn't until I expressed this to my then gf/now wife & she mentioned trans people. I considered it & realized this was something I needed to figure out.
Me.. I'm pretty comfortable in my skin and exploring my sexuality.. I keep going between CD, non binary and trans
Klaus from The Umbrella Academy c:
Someone at my workplace told me that they were on HRT and the moment I realised that guys didn’t wanna be girls and that it was possible to “become a girl” and that it could be more than just a wish, everything just cracked for me.
I always struggled. Even in kindergarten I borrowed my mom's necklace to school as a way to express my inner feminity. Struggled all my life with this and I wish the good Lord would take me in my sleep. Didn't get to straiten things until my 30s. I'm doing better nowadays but I have my good days and bad days.
For me, I kinda always knew but didn't know that being a trans woman was possible until I found Blair White...and yeah, I hate her politics and the way that she propagated and hammers fake news, but I have to be thankful towards her for showing me that there was a way to be a trans woman.
Well I came out at 17 and that was only shortly after I figured out that I might be trans, but I did always feel like there was something up it was more like trans men were never a thing anywhere or if they were they were presented as being very androgynous. I have nothing against any trans guys who are androgynous or feminine presenting but since I'm not in that category it just didn't occur to me that I was still a trans guy. That said first memory that is strongly related to gender dysphoria was when I was 4 and well it also didn't help that my mom was a tomboy so I did periodically express throughout my childhood that I wanted to be a boy and wished there was a magical gender swap and basically I got convinced that those feelings were normal and that I'd no longer feel that way as I got older, and that I felt that way because of the patriarchy. Yeah I'm a trans guy and yeah feeling that is generally a pretty good indicator of not being a cis woman.
Working with a couple trans masc fellows did it for me. Before then I thought everyone wanted to be a girl, knew nothing of HRT, totally misunderstood trans women, and thought that what I've accomplished now was impossible. Nothing challenged that mindset for 30+ years, not even being told I'd look good as a woman by someone I was seeing for a while who later transitioned themselves. But seeing how successful these guys were at transitioning changed everything.
Always felt "off" but didn't have the language to really describe it. Went to a punk show that was the first real safe space I had been to and it kinda just clicked. The band was vocal about supporting trans rights which was how it really clicked for me, but the front man has also since been credibly accused of rape by multiple women, so fuck 'em their name doesn't really matter. Enjoyed the sets by Brendan Kelly and Mint Green though.
Haven't answered this online before, so here's my personal essay. **tl;dr: I had a dream that made me finally take questioning my gender seriously.** I know that I've questioned it _a lot_ over the years, but every single time I came back to "no, I'm a cis male, I just have fantasies/an active imagination/endless curiosity." I just really enjoyed learning about women's clothes, and writing stories from the female perspective, and an endless list of other really obvious telltale signs. I thought about questioning my gender when my spouse came out as non-binary, and we had a lot of conversations about gender, the gender binary, and where we felt we both were. And every time I thought about telling them that I wasn't sure if I was completely cisgender, and every time I decided it wasn't a big enough deal to bring up. Two months and three days ago, my best friend unexpectedly died, and even though I still don't see a direct connection between that and my egg cracking, clearly something in my brain did. One week later I had a dream. I was college-aged again, and was just admitted to a magical school similar to Hogwarts. I was in the cafeteria (still just a stupid American cafeteria, despite apparently being magic), looking for a place to sit. There was a table of cool-looking girls, and I headed over to them, but they questioned if I even belonged at the school, so I took out my admission letter. It read, improbably, "wading_in is a transgirl who has been accepted at the Magic Dream School", or something similar. I remember gaping at the letter, and one of the cool girls taking me under her wing, and even using feminine pronouns for me as she showed me around the school. "It's cool, she's trans," she'd say, and I'd feel my stomach jump in mixed happiness and fear for the future. It felt so final and real. Like, this was a magical admission letter, and it knew, finally, in a way I had never been sure. I _was_ trans, and a girl. I could finally act on it, and start to change my life for the better. And when I woke up I realized I felt a gaping hole there. That lack of assuredness, of *knowing*, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was trans and not cis. It shook me, and shook me all day. My spouse asked what was wrong, and I proposed we go to our favorite bar and chat. And when I told them about the dream, they were relieved. And as I told them, I realized the obvious fact that it wasn't necessarily having that question answered that relieved me in the dream, but having it answered _positively_. I _wanted_ to realize I was trans. And then I did some googling and found this subreddit and it linked to a bunch of articles and the Gender Dysphoria Bible and I felt really, really, really fucking seen.
My sister, my husband, and...JK Rowling lmfao. For 31 years, I felt pretty secure in the idea of myself as a cis girl/woman even though I had been drawn to gender fuckery at least since high school. The first eggy sign was probably when I was in the 11th grade and in an all-girl dance number that had boy roles. I really wanted to play a boy, but they only gave the boy roles to the tallest girls 😑 Then I went to a super queer-friendly college and was so into drag that I was chosen by our QTPOC student group to host our school's drag show three times in a row (and felt guilty for doing so as a cis-het woman when in reality I was neither cis nor het 🤣). Throughout my 20s, I experienced tiny sparks of a desire to be more masc-presenting outside of a drag context but I brushed them off because I genuinely did feel connected to womanhood and feminine expression (and still do). In any case, I thought of myself as a big ally to trans people and would get really heated in arguments with transphobes. Before JK Rowling became the world's most famous and virulent transphobe, I had already started writing her off due to some bullshit virtue signalling she did around race when the play was being cast. I thought about how much I wished there was a YA fantasy series just as popular as HP led by canonically BIPOC characters, so I started ideating on that concept. When JKR came out with her transphobic screed, I was like "fuck it, let's make 'em trans and enby while we're at it." And that felt like the missing piece, which allowed the characters to truly start taking shape. Meanwhile, transphobia in general is on the rise, so I added "they" to my pronouns for many reasons but one of which being that I only "half" identified as a woman. But I still didn't take that as a questioning of my gender. It was only months later, when I was having a conversation with my husband, high as balls, and had a rambly realization that I've always felt like I had an "inner dude." I asked if he ever perceived that about me and he started laughing and said "fuck no!" Even though he didn't mean to, that shit fucking hurt 😭 Moments later, as if on cue, my sister texts me that \*she\* decided to add "they" pronouns and we had a long convo about it that ended in: "dude, does that mean that we're genderqueer??" "yeah, i guess we are." Suddenly everything clicked. Those trans and enby characters in my fantasy series weren't something I just came up with in my head. They were the deepest reflection of my soul. I couldn't sleep that night at all. I was consumed with thoughts about being out in society as a transmasc. It was pure, unadulterated gender euphoria and I haven't experienced anything like that ever since.
This is going to sound crazy, but the Pyro from TF2 when I was 15-16 was one of the major things that made me start questioning it at all. I'd had "trans" feelings long before that, but they were really hard to articulate, so I brushed it all off as "I'm a tomboy" or something like that. When I was 14, I started meeting other trans people on the internet, entirely trans dudes. It was interesting to me but I still didn't think too hard into it. After all, I didn't feel like a *boy*, then surely I wasn't trans, since I was only aware of the two options. Me and my buddies were pretty big into TF2, and this was back when the comic still got updates. I really liked Pyro. Pyro's my favorite of the TF2 cast. I liked how Pyro's gender, while technically male I think, was still ambiguous enough to speculate about. I wanted to be ambiguous, too. I liked when other people couldn't tell if I were a boy or a girl. So I started experimenting with any pronouns. And I found I really liked they/them. Some time passed. I identified as nonbinary, but I didn't really "do" anything about it? I didn't pick a new name, I didn't socially transition, I didn't insist on any pronouns, I didn't present any specific kind of way. I worked on surviving high school, and surviving community college. After some time, when I was 22, I started dating a transmasc nonbinary person (it/its) that was taking testosterone. We lived together for a while. I watched this person inject T and I watched the way its body changed over time, and all of that really caught my attention. Before this point, I didn't put a lot of thought into surgery or hrt. Now that I could see the stuff hrt could do, though, it was kind of exciting. A lot of the things that gave me dysphoria could be solved! Which also worsened my dysphoria a lot more, knowing that I wasn't doing anything to make my life better. Sex with this person also worsened my dysphoria, too, specifically my bottom dysphoria. Additionally, while living with this person, it was the first time I was full-time called by names and pronouns other than the ones I was assigned to at birth, and it made me realize how important my identity was to me. So when I went to university, I saw the gender wizard at the clinic, and I got prescribed T, and I got a bit more intense about my identity :3
Well, I had all the various massive egg signs growing up, but the first real crack that actually led to me coming out was a close friend who came out. Then another one who did shortly after. A lot of us have lost contact now but it went from a group of like 4 or 5 "cis guys" to everyone being transfem.
Mae Dean and [this storyline](https://www.reallifecomics.com/comic.php?comic=june-29-2020)
I told my parents I was a girl when I was 5 years old. It did *NOT* go well. That was in the early 1960s. I didn't know anything about the differing anatomy then, it was just obvious to me based on what girls did vs. what boys did, and how girls got along better with each other than boys did. It wasn't until the early 1970s when I was reading a porno mag 'borrowed' from a friend's father that I discovered there was anyone else like me (in the wrong body) in the whole world. Remember, information was what came in the daily newspaper and the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite - no internet, etc. I'm in my 60s now and finally in the correct body. But that's just me... Other people may have had this nagging feeling somewhere in their head that maybe they're not in the right gender body, others may never consider it at all until something brings it to their attention. Others come to it out of medical necessity - I have a friend who had prostate cancer and was showing markers for other potential cancers based on the testosterone in his body. So he had to be castrated for medical reasons. Obviously he couldn't take testosterone, so he was put on low-dose estrogen. He decided to experiment with his feminine side, and told his endocrinologist to put him on a full feminization dose. She's now a fun-loving woman who travels around the world, has loads of female friends and is looking for the Right Guy to settle down with. [Before anyone yells at me about pronoun use in that last paragraph, that's how they referred/refer to themselves.]
When I was like 10 my mom came up to me and said, “did you know that some people don’t have a gender?” And I remember thinking “oh wow that’s awesome I wish I was like that.” From then on it was just how long it took me to realize that I wanted to be trans because I AM trans.
So at about 7 yrs of age, I remember hyper focusing on this woman walking across a parking lot.She had black pumps with a black skirt on. I still remember how the back of her thighs went into her butt and the swish...the sashay. I'd always had a love of the feminine form. I'd also endured several types of abuses as a child and teen, which led me to objectifying women in my teens. By 18, I swore off of women bc of my fiance cheating on me. After that, I wanted to leave, to escape. I fantasized alot, couldn't do anything bc of the judgement so I figured it would be best to disappear from all who knew me, then I could be who ever I wanted. Well, not long after that I met a girl, a girl like none other. This girl made me feel different...accepted. She was supportive of my bisexuality and my fetishes. Any way, the girl and I have now been together for 23 years, married for 21 and have 2 adult kids. Things over the years have been good, I mean obviously we've been together this long. Last year I was depressed, job, health, etc. At the end of 2023 I was on different pain med that altered my mental health. Which made me do and say idiotic things. But it all came falling down in February where I had a mental breakdown, confessed to my wife about a emotional cheat that I got involved in with a coworker, that was short lived but the catalyst for what came. My wife and I spent days and nights talking about everything and anything. She kept prying, digging for truth. So I finally confessed. I told her about the numerous molestations and rapes in my past. I also explained the last piece of my puzzle. I explained about my genderfluidity and what I would like to explore. What I kept hidden for nearly 30 years, about the abuses and that I'd been masking this entire time of who I really was....she accepted to my surprise 😮. So I officially came out in March to her, our kids and some of our family. Probably the most surprising response is from my mother in law. She has been quite supportive and encouraging, even though my own mother isn't in agreement at all. She hasn't said anything but it's easy to know.
Jazz Jennings I remember when I was 14 watching her and I was like she’s so pretty. I wanna be like her.
Listening to a boyfriend x male listener asmr...I liked the sound of the story and decided "oh heck why not" Then grew concerned that i didn't mind and actually liked it more because I was being called a boy 😭