How Did You Learn You Weren't Your Assigned Gender?

Honestly, it just kinda struck me one day. I started to notice I felt uncomfortable in my body and with being called female. I had like...weeks where I started figuring things out.

 

I wanted to look like and be a girl when I was very young. But of course, being that young, I had no idea what it was. I figured out what it was in my teens because I was called a crossdresser in which I looked into and saw that it didn't fit. I then learned of transgender and went from there.

 

It's just the way I've felt ever since I was little. It's only fairly recently I realised that there was a word for how I was feeling.

 

Something like this, just took me a little longer.

 

I just was always jealous of "other" girls(I never realized it was registering in my brain this way) and always thought of myself as a girl. Things didn't really start to connect until now.

 

Always wanted to be a boy and it never really registered, up to a certain point, that I wouldn't naturally grow to become a man. That thought hurt.

That and I never had a thing in common with girls or their experience with adolescence. I figured, of course, that all girls secretly wanted to be boys. That a girl would want to be a girl or be proud of it? Never something I could fathom, personally. Of course now that I realize I'm not actually a girl, it makes much more sense why I failed to see myself as one.

Though primarily, it had to do with the thought of becoming an adult. Secretly I intensely wished to be a man and becoming a full-fledged woman horrified me. Even to the point where interacting with adult females made me uncomfortable - as if my subconscious was saying "you're next."

All of "femaleness" felt inherently wrong and out of place with who I knew myself to be and who I wanted to become. It did not take long after learning what transgender meant, to connect the dots.

 

I used to always wish that I could be like the other guys, as in I wanted to be one (which I found extremely weird). Also my mannerisms somehow wound up being naturally masculine, so I suppose there was some subconscious stuff going on even if at the time I thought I was a girl. It took me around fifteen years for me to wake up to the fact that I really wasn't one. How? I read a blog post written by a trans guy, and I felt that I could relate to every single thing.

 

My whole life, I was dissapointed that I was not born a boy.

I hated the clothes my mom made me wear because it felt ''humiliating''. Same thing with the hair. I thought it was ''humiliating'' to keep it as long as it was and I hated it.

Then, when I would go over to my father's place, I didn't understand why he shaved. I wanted to have facial hair so bad and there he was, getting rid of it without remorse. He told me I never grow any. I asked why. He said ''girls don't grow any''. Then I thought ''why would anyone want to be a girl, then? It sucks!'' Yeah, facial hair was kind of a big deal to me xD

I also tried to pee standing up a few times, but I gave up when I saw that it was more trouble than what it was worth. (Don't worry, I didn't make a mess)

Then, when my mom FINALLY let me choose my clothing, I'd dress as masculine as possible. I LOVED when people ''mistook'' me as a boy, and I would never ''correct'' them. I also cut my hair short to help my case.

However, in High School, I didn't pass anymore. Boys were supposed to have a cracking voice, some facial hair and be taller by now. I didn't have any of that. I hid my own puberty as best as I could. I'd wear super baggy clothes to hide my curves, keep my hair long enough to hide my face contour and used extremely masculine behavior. Younger, I was warned about puberty, but I thought that if I wished hard enough, it would never happen. What a betrayal.

Needless to say, I was picked on a lot. People kept asking me if I was a boy or a girl, to which I told them to go fuck themselves. I looked way younger than my age, so even in secondary five, I looked like I just entered the school.

Sometime in secondary 4 (2012), I was depressed and I looked up things like ''I wish I was a boy'', ''why aren't I a boy?'' etc. Then, I found the trans stuff. I never heard about it, but the stories were so familiar to my own. However, it was one story in particular that caught my eye. Trans kids, brave enough to tell their parents at 4-6. I felt like if they could do it, I had no reason not to. So, I looked up how I was supposed to start (very hard to find info in French and what to do in Quebec btw) and I saw I had to go to the pyschologist. That's how it was.

 

I don't know I just started feeling a little different. I still look like a guy but something seems off when I look at the mirror.

 

Dunno. I couldn't place a certain day on it. I grew up as a tomboy, which is fine and dandy and quite frankly means little in terms of gender identity. Still for me, I was always hanging out with guys, fist-fighting with them rather than gossiping with the other girls. I was always a crossdresser as well. Feminine clothes are the bane of my existence.

Thing is I used to be quite transphobic. Looking back on it, it wasn't definitely me being defensive about the fact that I felt more male than female. I remember my shrink at the time asked me if I ever felt like a man trapped in a woman's body. I start laughing and telling her, "so what if I do? I'll deal with it. I'm a woman, and that won't change." I actually remember that conversation quite well, but for the sake of other trans people here I won't echo what I said.

I think I came to terms with it when I was 17 or so. Online friends started addressing me as "him" because they thought I had always been male, and I enjoyed it. Once I was at the mall and a man pointed at me and said, "that guy needs a haircut" and likewise I was ecstatic. Then came the process of me going over and over it in my head. "Am I really a man in a woman's body? Is this really what I want?" The resounding answer was yes, and bango-presto we have me today.

 

When I was 14 I realised I didn't feel like a girl, but after a few months of ID'ing as genderqueer I shoved myself back into denial. Then early this year, my mum insisted on getting me smart, feminine clothes for university and beyond. I hated even thinking about it, far more than seemed rational. Lying in bed that night, it hit me: I hated it because it meant I would be seen as a woman for years to come, and I didn't want that. "Oh, I'm trans. Ohhh shit. This is gonna suck."

Follow this with months of second-guessing and doubting myself even while researching transition, admiring trans men, settling on a male name, and getting therapy, and you have the story of how I realised I was trans.