Am I a Transexual? I need Orientation please

Hello Biscuit.

I Don't like my female body, on the best days I don't mind it too terribly, and if I could choose I'd prefer a more masculine looking one. I'm attracted predominantly to guys. And when I'm alone in my room I think of myself as a guy. I really like guy's clothes, and have started shopping for them and frequently dressing in them! After a lot of thought about all of this, I came to the conclusion that I am probably transgender, FTM (though I prefer the term transmasculine, because I don't feel 100% male either). I'm 22, and have yet to talk to a therapist, take any hormones, or have any surgeries, but 22 isn't too old for all of that at all. Many trans people choose to physically transition later in life, and very few make the decision to change young enough to be put on hormone blockers. Some trans people choose not to physically transtition at all, for various reasons.

You sound like you might be transgender to me, since I can relate to quite a bit of what you said (but opposite, of course). The term transsexual tends to refer to a person that has physically transitioned from one sex to the other. It's a bit of a dated term, and some people don't like to use it, though others do (personally I don't mind the term). Transgender is an umbrella term that covers a lot of labels people might use when they feel like their assigned gender and their true gender don't match - transsexual, genderqueer, transwo/man, androgyne, bigender, gender neutral, gender fluid etc.

That said, I'm not walking around with a bunch of stickers, handing out labels. If you're starting to think you might be trans, think about why. If you feel more happy and cheerful as a girl, and you prefer expressing in a feminine way, and you think "well, I think I'm trans", then I think you've got a lot of signs pointing you in that direction.

 

Hey there, 20 years old is most certainly not too old. I started when I was 20. nearly 2 years (will be 2 years in a little over 3 months) later, things are going quite well for me.

A good indicator if you are trans is if you want to be trans, or so I heard on a forum before. It definitely held true for me.

That said though, only you can decide what is best for you. Gender has everything to do with how you feel, and only you know how you feel so only you can decide if transition would be right for you. Doubt is pretty normal though, so don't feel like you have to ABSOLUTELY 100% know. If transition seems appealing to you, then it might be worth some serious consideration.

 

Hi Biscuit! If 20 is told I'm screwed, I only started this year! It's never too old to be happy.

With the exception of the cross dressing which I never got to do (I have only mum and my sisters - 8 and 10 - so no chance of using their clothes!) your experience mirrors mine when I first started thinking hard about my gender.

I looked at my EC profile the other day and realised that while I had come here to question my gender, I had written something along the lines of "I'm not sure if I want to BE a girl all the time..." because at the time I wasn't sure about my body. I didn't think I hated it necessarily, I just knew that if I could choose at any time to give mine up and have that cute feminine body I had wanted for years (why it took me until 23 to question that I'll never know) I would have done so in a heartbeat.

Only you can know for sure, but I found experimentation was the key. If you are not sure about transitioning but the thought appeals to you, try some minor things that nobody will question and see how it feels. We'll all be here to help if you need it!

 

Yep I transitioned at 20 too

It is definitely doable but it's not easy or happy for everyone. I think you really have to want it and also be willing to move past a lot of discouragement and struggles. I wish I would have thought more about my transition and experimented with presentation more beforehand personally. Just cuz I didn't really understand how I would feel later on, even if it felt like what I needed at the time.

 

Well if you were to live as a girl, and pass as one in public then you would consider the following:

Clothes
Hair
Make-up
Voice
Body shape
Mannerisms

Before I realised I needed to transition, I experimented by removing all my body hair, skirts (in private), panties underneath boy clothes, growing my nails, bits of make-up.

It got to the point where I was wearing girls underwear exclusively, wearing a skirt whenever I was home alone and having people online refer to me as Holly. Then I told some of my friends and started to dress around them. It didn't take me long after that to realise what I had to do, although I won't lie it was a scary experience! Before I left my friends house the first time I said 'you can call me Holly sometimes'...then just as I walked out the door I turned around, ran back inside and just semi-shouted "No. Do it always. Forever. Call me Holly forever."

 

All I can add to what the others have said is don't let your fear of getting caught wearing what you want keep you from doing so.

 

And be prepared to defend what you are doing, because someone will tell you it's wrong eventually!

 

Hey there Biscuit!

So the question I usually ask myself isn't "am I trans". It's "what do I need to do". However you feel, I can say from experience it will get stronger as time goes by, and won't go away. That's the only thing you can really count on.

Just imagine the direction you want your life to go in, and imagine the kind of life you want to avoid, and then just figure out how to make it happen. If you decide you need medical help, then decide also what you're willing to do to get that help.

The same thing goes for your sexual orientation for that matter. Don't just stop at gender, although that is a good place to start. In addition to asking yourself whether the person you'd like to be with is a boy or a girl (or someone that defies both those), ask yourself what interests they have. How often they like to have sex. How ambitious they are, whether they work hard or play hard or are a homebody.

The point I'm making is that this stuff is complicated, and if you do decide you need to transition, you really need to put a lot of thought into what that means to you in order for it to be successful.

Words like "trans" and "gay" are quick ways for you to describe yourself to other people, they aren't who you are. You're a person. People can't be summed up in one word. Or to put this another way, if I were forced to use one word to describe myself anyway, the label that describes me best is "engineer".

If you decide you need to change your life or your body in any way, then the transition can be a little hard. But there's a lot of help online, and a lot of us have done it successfully.

If you feel bad about making changes in your life, because of how they'll affect other people, but still feel stuck or terrible if you don't make any changes, you should look at the gender link in the resources section . To make a long story short, there is a lot of evidence that a gender mismatch is, like being gay, something some people are born with, and something some people do need to fix. Some of us get driven to a point where we feel hopeless despair, but there is no reason to wait for that before you give yourself permission to do something about your problems.

In my opinion college is actually one of the better places to transition. Free access to therapy (although the therapists might not be able to directly help with transition), many campuses have LGBT housing, openly gay (sometimes openly trans students, although we still aren't as common), and if you're walking around as yourself people won't usually bat an eyelash.

It is hard if you've been going for a while as a boy. When I was in college I didn't come out to a lot of my study groups. But I did go into the campus LGBT center pretty frequently, and anyone keeping tabs on me and the company I kept would have been able to put two and two together.

It was still a nice gentle start to my transition.

So a lot of people call this kind of thinking "internalized transphobia". It means that you've been taught being trans is somehow something to be ashamed of.

A quote by Iggy Pop that helped me get past this is, "I'm not ashamed to dress like a woman because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman".

The thing is, your family doesn't have to live your life. Eventually you will need to be independent, and make your own decisions. If you make every decision to live the way your family wants you to live, will you end up with a kind of life you enjoy living?

Your family does have some life experience over you, and they do have your best interests at heart, and they're worth listening to most of the time for that reason. But they aren't you.

If you do decide to transition, getting to the point where your confidence comes from inside instead of what people like your parents think about you, is literally the biggest part of it. It takes way longer than any of the changes on the outside and is a million times more important.

A good place to start with this is to pick something and get good at it. It doesn't have to be something you can make money doing, it just has to make you feel good about yourself.

Your family might indeed act embarrassed at first. But if you are confident and not embarrassed, then they will become confident and not embarrassed. They will look to you as far as how to react. The bigger a deal it is to you, the bigger a deal it is to them.

That really is the best possible question to ask yourself. I hope some of what we said helps you find an answer

 

"not to mention I would be horribly embarrassed to look at my family members face when I'm transitioning even if they choose to accept me"

It extends further than this. cassie makes an excellent point that your family will look to you for how to react. If you go down this path, YOU have to prove to them that it's the right thing to do. YOU have to show them that even though they don't understand it, it makes perfect sense. If they see you, and they see that it has done the things you said it would ('it made me happy' 'it made me confident') then they don't need to understand to know it's a good thing, and you NEED them to know this.

If you transition you need to know that those closest to you really believe you know what you are doing, because people talk. You need to know that when Jill from number 52 see's your mum and says 'So why is your son wearing a dress' that she's going to turn around and say 'because my DAUGHTER is happy that way', not 'oh god I KNOW, what a freak!'.

This is why you have to think so hard about transitioning, because you need to know deep down that this is exactly what you need and it needs to be obvious to other people.

 

As a 46 year old mtf who just started transitioning 2 years ago all I can tell you is for me I found it hard to deal with what people in and out of the Trans world think of how a woman should dress and act.
I'm not a girly girl, yes I love smooth skin, painted nails, long soft hair, make up, and heals, but I also like ATV's, guns, and working on cars.
When I first meet with my local Trans community group I was instructed on how to act, this really put me at odds, she told me that I had to dress a certain way, walk a certain way, act a certain way and talk a certain way. This lead me closer to suicide (not a good thing) I had to come to terms with who "I" really was.
Yes I really am a girl, Yes I like guy things, Yes I like girl things.
I realized that the majority of women out there don't act all girly girl, they don't all wear dresses or skirts everyday, they don't wear heels everyday, they wear jeans, tennis shoes, cute tops (not blouses), they cuss, and they speak their mind and don't care what others think.
This, I found is how real women act!
I have always had to find someone to look twards as kind of my guidance as to who best fit my personality, most of them were men, I am tough, I don't back down from a fight, and I speak my mind. I found people like, Capt. Kirk, Commander Adama (Battlestar Galactica) and so on, I never found that tough female role model, sure there are tough females, but only female tough, not male tough, (no offence)
I am a girl who is male tough, so what to do? Well I found someone who is female and is the type of tough that I am It was Cara Thrace (starbuck) in the new Battlestar Galactica show. This was me! In real life!
To sum it all up is, don't try to fit into ANYBODIES mold of what YOU are. It is who you are, not what someone else thinks you should look, dress, or act like. You can be a girl, and be yourself at the same time. Discovering this has really helped me climb down off of the cliff and I hope this has helped you.
Love always, Jamie