For those harsh moments of lucidity that break through the armor and pierce your heart.
For me, the cute moments of playful experimentation couldn’t quite penetrate my denial, but they did weaken it enough for the strong hits to make it through. I would quickly try to block and repair as best I could, but the structure was compromised and couldn’t hold like before. All these hits came from myself; from actually considering that I could be trans
😭
When I was a teenager still I was buying women’s clothes, trying to arrange a girl’s night with a female friend of mine, had picked and used a feminine name, and even painfully explained to my boss at the time (who insisted I was a gay man) that I wasn’t a gay man but actually it was like I was a woman on the inside so I was maybe a gay woman. Never did the thought even cross my mind that I might be trans.
When the idea came up later that I might be trans, I ruled it out easily. Trans women knew they were girls when they were three years old, and they were in medically significant distress from being in the wrong body. I had gone through childhood as a boy without any such self-conception as a girl, let alone severe distress. As far as I could tell, I experienced no dysphoria. I couldn’t have been trans, the DSM made that clear to me.
It was over a decade later before I learned that gender dysphoria can look like what I experienced, or that I actually had fairly common and stereotypical trans experiences, like dressing in my mom’s heels as a four year old and continuing to “cross” dress throughout my childhood and into adulthood. Oops.
I fully believed I was a cishet boy for my entire childhood. I never once considered that I could be, or even wanted to be a girl. I legit didn’t know; the reveal was a total surprise 😰
ah, I remember wanting to be a girl growing up - but I thought I just (tragically, accidentally) wasn’t a girl. Unlike “real” trans people, I didn’t insist that I was a girl. When I was like 5 or 6 my family told me this story that a psychic consulted before my birth predicted I would be a girl, and I remember thinking the psychic was right in some deep sense, that I was supposed to be a girl, that the universe meant for me to be a girl and that there was just a mistake. I didn’t know what to do with this information, I didn’t think it mattered that I wanted these things - I thought they could be entirely normal and reasonable. I have no idea if I shared it with anyone, but I know my family would have not taken seriously such desires, especially from a young child. My favorite Disney movie at this time was The Little Mermaid, which I never thought was significant, but now I wonder if little boys enjoyed the princess movies as much as I did growing up.
My attempt to wear heels when I was four was met with literal threats of violence from my father, so I knew it was very bad to do. I also didn’t know about “trans” as a concept growing up, the closest I had was Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura as examples, and in both cases it felt like those people were “trans” because they were evil. I didn’t ever think that idea was connected to the feelings I had, wishing to be a girl wasn’t related to “trans”.
I grew up with sisters and I didn’t like the way gender separated us - I wanted to be included, and for the longest time I assumed this is why I wanted to be a girl or felt I should have been, either because the cosmos demanded it (as the psychic knew), or because I wanted to be close to my sisters.
It was actually really hard for me to ever overcome this rationalization, that there are actually boys with sisters who don’t want to be a girl or accepted as a girl so they can be closer with their sisters and female friends. This idea feels foreign or made up to me, like the assumption is that of course any boy in my situation would want to be a girl. My model of boyhood and masculinity is based on my own experiences, which has been difficult to re-think.
The only good gender reveal
Same for me, too. Although on reflection, certain things like practicing tucking to resemble female genitals, offering to present a school event in drag, and praying to wake up as a girl, may not have had entirely cis motivations.
I also assumed that my complete failure to fit in at an all-boys school was just due to being a nerdy kid.
I really didn’t have obvious signs, as most of my symptoms were attributed to autism. I didn’t like going shirtless, although I wasn’t sure why. I hated going into men’s locker rooms and didn’t fit in well with most boys, except the boy with long hair. I was jealous of him and always wanted to grow mine out, but my mom would constantly tell me that I wouldn’t like longer hair because it gets heavy and hot.
However, I never once felt like I was a girl or felt like I wanted to be a girl. I was fine with feminine things, but many of them are too much trouble to get too invested in outside of special occasions. I want to know how to walk in heels, but I rarely want to wear them (not to mention I’m already conscious about my height 😖)
It took a long time to realize the shirtless and locker things weren’t just because I’m fat :/
Long hair is super worth it tho
Maybe not obvious, but those all sound like signs to me! But that’s the thing about denial, right? I’d put everything down to intrusive thoughts, and if you asked me any time up to the day my egg cracked, I’d have been convinced that I’d never wanted to be a girl.
I’m not trying to suggest that your experience was anything other than you say, of course. It just sounded very familiar!
I know what you mean, and you are correct about those being signs. The main challenge was how my suspected autism got in the way of me recognizing it.
Despite definitely being autistic, the doctors that could’ve diagnosed me as kid, didn’t. My personal theory is that it’s related to the underdiagnosing of cis girls with autism. Although it’s often attributed to girls being socialized differently, I have met a number of transfems who, like cis women, weren’t diagnosed with autism until later in life. It’s like the doctors expect a male gendered type of autism in AMABs, so they underdiagnose us too -_- (again, just a pet hypothesis that I’ll never get to test)
Anyhow, I was always very unhappy about my social existence, feeling out of place as I tried to hang out with boys. Kinda like the stereotype of boys finding girls mysterious, I did not understand dudes at all. However, I also failed to realize the gender differences because I felt pressured to only hang out with boys. I was a goodie-two-shoes who always tried to do what was expected of me without being asked. I needed to play as a boy character because I was a boy, end of conversation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When it comes to signs, I still discover new ones whenever I think about my past. I always did suck at finding the answer when I had no idea what it should look like 😭