What is gender identity?

I think most people isn't aware of the existence of gender roles at a younger age, at least I didn't. So during that time it just feels natrual to you that you're the gender you feel like, something might feel off about your body but the feeling is foreign and you don't know what to make of it.
Until you eventually read other people's stories, or have some life changing revelation.
It's easier than it sounds like to live your life as a lie.

 

People might not notice it because your in big denial

 

Gender identity isn't something you can pick and choose, you're born with it. A person that didn't know that they're trans until a later age was always trans even before they knew it. It's innate and can't be conditioned whatsoever. You can push and shove that fact into a closet (pun intended) and act like you're cis but deep down this can never be changed.

 

It's kinda like that one person who is in heterosexual relationships then when they realize that they are gay (or stop being in denial, they could realize it but still be in denial) they understand why they were so unhappy.

 

It's something you're born with. You're raised one way as a kid, for a while maybe you assume that's the way you were supposed to be. Then, when you start questioning things, you look back and realize that you were never really happy, and when you realize your identity in full, as the gender you want to be, you can finally feel satisfied and sure of yourself. It's like whenever you have poor vision and you put on glasses for the first time. I never understood how miserable and off I was as a child until I began to put the pieces of my identity together. To me, something always felt foreign, but I could never exactly place what that was. When you read others' stories about being trans, something will just click. It's hard to explain. It's just something that you feel and know.
My gender is an integral part of who I am. When I look past gender roles, my soul, my very being, is male. Physically, I want desperately to be male, because mentally I am already there. I'm sorry if it's frustrating, but really, it's a feeling.

 

I believe it is something you are born with.
I was one of the ones that didn't come to terms with it till I was in my 20s. I should of know as a teen but I went into denial. And as a kid I had moments where I thought I should of been a boy or felt I was a boy, but I thought all girls felt like that. And then I was told I had to be and act a certain away, and being a people pleaser I tried my best to conform.

There are a lot of reasons why people might not know till their late teens or twenty. Most of the time, as kids, we don't know how gender and gender roles impact life around us. Its when the body goes through puberty that the changes started to make us aware of things.

 

I think you could definitely draw that parallel if you wanted to. Gender is an inherent thing you're born with; gender identity could be considered the words you use to describe it at the time. My gender is male, but I have identified with many different labels in an attempt to figure that out, so you could say that my gender hasn't changed by my gender identity has. I don't know if that's widely used (or used at all), but it would make sense to me.

I don't think gender is a feeling. I'm a guy because I want a male body physically, and I want to be seen as a guy. When I look in the mirror, my brain instinctually tries to see male features and tries to ignore feminine features. I don't think there's any particular feeling that all guys have, other that discomfort with being physically and/or socially female.

 

Some people just don't have the words to describe what they're feeling.

I had lots of misconceptions about what being trans meant for most of my life. I grew up in a small town and went to a relatively conservative college. This may be hard to believe, but I'd never even heard of trans men until most of the way through college. I thought trans meant you were a woman born with a male body. I'd experienced dysphoria practically forever, fantasized about being androgynous, written story after story as a kid about people whose gender was impossible to determine, played video games with androgynous avatars, worked out to try to look more masculine, dressed in men's clothes, even had an alter ego from a young age who was a warlock of ambiguous gender. But I didn't think whatever that was fell under the umbrella of trans*.

Then I found out about the existence of trans men and wondered if I could be a trans man. But even though I knew I wanted my body to be more masculine, I knew I wasn't a man. I figured I was just confused and abandoned the topic.

It wasn't until just recently that I found out about the concept of being trans and non-binary. It immediately made sense, yet I'd had no way to express who I was my whole life (and I'm in my late 20s), so while I'd always been non-binary and knew it, I could never explain it even to myself. Who I was didn't change, just my ability to describe it, if that makes sense.

We live in a society that's just beginning to acknowledge that sex =/= gender, what to speak of acknowledging the existence of more than 2 genders, so it's no wonder that people who don't fit the traditional narrative of penis = man, vagina = woman have a hard time reconciling their identities with the semantics that are available to them.