For me personally I thought I was a girl until my parents forced me to watch Thomas the Tankie EngineTM.

Content warning for mentions of suicide, self harm, abuse.

I realised something was off when I started to feel isolated and left out everytime I got split from my female relatives off with “the guys” like my dad and uncles and conversely felt at home hanging with my female family members.

Then spending too much time day dreaming about being a girl and “pushing that big red button to swap genders” but just assuming that was a normal thing.

My mental health puberty onwards tanked and i never felt like I had an identity or knew who I was. I felt like a toy that needed to be wound up and set off doing its preprogrammed day to day boy life. That an constantly falling in love with my guy friends and imaging horny things where I imagined a girl version of myself probably should have made me realise something.

Going to a Christian school and having regressive parents probably glued my fake male persona pretty tightly. That plus abusive parents and a incredibly toxic patriarchal family structure had me in pure survival mode for most of my formative years. I tried to kill myself around age 11 due to it all, the abuse, the identity issues, feeling like I wasn’t the real me etc.

As I grew older I found that I just didn’t engage or relate to typically boy things like when my friends were all going nuts over beard oil and I was perplexed that was even a thing. I just assumed guys grew beards and vibed.

Conversely I intimately related to a lot of the cultural norms pushed on girls including an interest in fashion, makeup, I was neurotic about styling my hair and looking “cute boy next door” which was just soft boy fashion. Like things I now wouldn’t ascribe gender to but back when I was a teen everyone gendered.

I think as well what should of being a red flag was that I kept in touch so to speak with my real self throughout my life. I’d always imagine my real self and I interacted and perceived my life through her which clashed with the guy persona I’d learnt to adopt from my friends and family and gave me all sorts of issues.

As I got older and was slowly conditioned to be this alpha Chad wannabee by my friends I found myself struggling with more identity issues, suicide, self harm, internalising men’s issues but not knowing why I’m meant to be angry and upset about dick size for example. It got really messy and since I was in a band I tried to be super player/womaniser to offset the mockery I got from friends and family for being so soft and effeminate. I was like a 5’6 petite soft boy with long hair who wore oversized hoodies in a band of 6ft hyper masc womanisers who’d weirdly all spoon me when we’d crash at each others uni flats etc, it totally confused me but seeing how alien their vibes were to mine made me at least acknowledge I wasn’t a traditional guy at the time.

Eventually the constant thoughts of wanting to be my real self and someone I know taking the plunge made me realise I couldn’t bottle this up anymore and conversely I could actually be my real self.

However with an abusive partner I had to slowly ease myself into it to protect myself from her wrath including doing the whole pipeline of coming out as bi, to being a femboy, to identifying as non-binary, all the try and scratch the itch and avoid “ruining my life” that I had at the time.

Eventually I realised it couldn’t go on like that anymore and with the help of my gender doctor I finally shed the last bits of repression and here I am.

Now I have a bf and I’m very happy relatively (I’m Bri’ish ffs, I can only be so happy).