How did you justify/explain your dysphoria before you knew you were trans?

I did not understand for years that my depression and the negative feelings I had about my body were connected.I thought I had some level of clinical or endogenous depression. I simply could not connect the two. And yet I would constantly wish to get breast cancer so I wouldn't have to explain why I wanted a masectomy. I repressed the reason for my depression or dissociated from it. because I could not handle it. and just told myself I was just depressive. Fullstop. The pieces only came together in my forties when I realised how much (most) of that negativity and darkness relates to my body parts, and ways in which I am expected and even expected myself to dress and behave (ie as a woman).
dunno if that makes sense to ya: I repressed it and chose to be depressed and frame myself as a depressive instead

 

I convinced myself that my envy of men's bodys is a crush. I didn't know that it's possible to connect to your gender and body. That it can actually reflect yourself.

 

by telling myself that it was wrong, that it was a secret, people will think you're crazy.... later that I could control it by dressing for very short periods of time, that is was just about sex, that it was a minor fetish......

facing the bald truth is daunting to say the least, but one of the best things I ever did for me, now I am moving forward to me....

 

I put it down to feeling ugly, even though if you had asked me what about me was ugly I would have had no idea. I tried a bit to look more feminine, thinking that would help, but then I just felt really fake the more feminine I looked and acted. I didn't have any other explanation so I gave up for a long time before finally figuring out that trans guys were a thing and that I could be one.

 

I blamed my social dysphoria (feeling out of place, wrong etc.) on sheer awkwardness. It didn't help that my mum would spend plenty of time whispering shit into my ear about how everybody hated me because I was good at maths.

As for physical dysphoria, I put that down to negative body image. Developing anorexia as a result of that dysphoria strengthened this belief, since I did not know the cause of the eating disorder and couldn't find any other possible reason for having it.

 

I agree with ^

I blamed social dysphoria on me just being really insecure and awkward and blamed physical dysphoria on bad body image since I had an eating disorder at the time.

But overall I didn't really give it too much thought, I just knew I hated a lot of feminine aspects about myself but didn't think it was weird or anything, it just felt normal to hate those parts of myself.

 

I did this. So much. Opposite genders, obviously, but that's exactly what I did. I always kinda thought if I worked out, I would get that body, only a male version of it. Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I convinced myself that I only wanted be a girl temporarily, just to see what it's like, and that that was normal. Maybe it is, but I know now that I don't want it to be temporary, I want it to be permanent....

 

I only remember two instances.

The first was identifying myself as male when I registered for sites. At the time, I was convinced I did it for my own safety.

The second is more explicit. I was convinced my parents were secretly raising me as a girl. I legitimately thought I had a penis and searched up pictures as proof. It didn't work out, needless to say.

 

I didn't recognise it for what it was. I blamed my feelings on frustration with gender roles, and my craving from time to time to present and be treated and recognised by cis girls as one of them on social rejection by girls when I was at primary school, due to having Asperger's. I never hated my body - in fact I liked being a boy (except when I didn't). But I'd had this girly thing going on since I was about 12 which I didn't know what to do with or how to express. The labels "feminine guy" and "girl" didn't feel right, but "boy didn't feel 100% honest either. And I wasn't consistently unhappy - these feelings would turn up in concert with a mini identity crisis every few months. I thought if you were trans then you were transsexual and it had to be unhappiness and feeling you were in the wrong body all the time. I blamed that girly thing on stereotypically girly interests. The thing is, if I make a list of all the oddly "non-boyish" feelings I had and actions I took, it's quite obvious that I'm either transgender or gender non-conforming cis. I know I'm not cis because there have been times when I have felt that "girl" is the only accurate description of who I am inside and I've had the painful variety of dysphoria too. If I'm not cis, then by definition I am trans and the only question is whether I'm binary or non-binary.

 

Back before I had ever heard of the term "transgender" or dared to think of myself in that way, I definitely felt disconnected and oddly emasculated.

I had no friends during puberty, so I did not have a "normal" to compare myself to. I was just socially awkward, so I blamed that. The embarrassment associated withwith purses, skirts, feminine hygiene products, and lingerie confused the hell out of me.

I always remember when I had to go into the women's underwear section of the store, I'd feel very out of place and tried to play it cool, like I was just there for my mother or sister - no way for me. Then I'd pick the closest thing to boxers and scurry out of there.

Physical changes were humiliating and I always did my best to hide the fact that I was acquiring feminine aspects, and not masculine. Seeing my teenage brothers go through puberty made me inexplicably jealous. I'd complain how lucky they were and all that. Never really connecting the dots that "normal girls" don't want to be boys. I just figured every girl would rather be a boy.

Then the strangest thing. Whenever I tried to imagine myself as an adult, I was always male. Thinking of becoming an adult female made me nauseous so I simply refused to. In my flashes of imagination, I'd see myself as a dude with stubble and short hair and in that regard I felt immense happiness.

And I remember as a thirteen year old, having the taboo thought that "I'm like... gay guy trapped in a girl's body."

All of this was before I did any research about being trans. Before everything. I was in a perpetual state of humiliation and didn't know how to explain it. I dismissed my thoughts on the pretense of being awkward, a tomboy, slightly autistic, and so forth. I never thought maybe there was truth to it.

 

When I was younger, like elementary age, I always thought boys were "cooler" than girls and I wanted to be like them. So I strived to be just as cool as a cisboy, which fed into my dysphoria a lot.

Then in Middle/High School I told myself to get over it and accept the fact that I'll never be a boy. So instead of trying to become a boy I went down what I thought was still the "cool" path. So basically I became an edgelord and fell into this emo/goth phase all throughout High School. Wore tight clothing (always black), wore black nail polish, tried to make my hair super edgy looking.
..gosh I was a mess.

I became something I liked the aesthetic of but I knew it wasn't me at all. Come college the phase slowly died, and once I learned that I was transgender and was in fact a boy who had been dealing with dysphoria all his life, my emo phase vanished. I then finally started to become me and it was the such a relief.

 

Oh, I had the "lesbian trapped in a man's body" thought NUMEROUS times throughout my life....

 

I just attributed the disconnect and feelings of loss and pain to having cancer as a child. I was just broken and everything I felt or did was directly in consequence of the childhood illness. Later on my family did the same thing when I came out.

 

I think I have always had little clues that I wasn't all female, but it didn't really dawn on me. I guess I figured I was a tom-boy. I did feel like a girl sometimes, and the other times I guess I just kind of thought that is how other girls who were tom-boys felt or was trying to be like the other girls and fit in. I also didn't really know there was a "Fourth option" where you could be not within the binary of male, female, or transgender (FTM/MTF).

 

That reminds me of something: there were days (like today) where I couldn’t tell whether I was a boy with a dollop of girl, or a girl with a dollop of boy.

 

I like that description. I don't think when I was younger I noticed as much what it was that didn't make me feel all female, and up till a few months ago I wasn't able to put a name to it or even recognize that it wasn't just being a tom-boy. Perhaps it was because I was switching between both genders and female and not having as many male days? It wasn't until I had a day where I couldn't describe how I was feeling as anything besides being male/a boy that I finally figured it out.

 

I'd say I felt humiliated if I acted feminine or wore dresses. I basically acted exactly how I do now, but I didn't know I could be a boy, so I just tried to be as close to neutrality as I could.

I guess I never tried to explain how I felt to people, because they wouldn't understand. Heck, they didn't even understand why I didn't want to be called ''pretty''.

 

I felt like that about purses too. I didn't think women were weird for using them, and like the concept of a place to carry copious amounts of junk with me everywhere is appealing, but this "purse" thing felt extremely contrary to my nature and I hated people thinking I would do that. Same thing about growing my hair out again. I was -done- with that. At one point my mom and her neighbor were talking about my beautiful long hair and how I should do that again while I was there because I was home from college for the summer in 2013 and I blurted out "But I'm not a girl like that!" This was before I ever consciously considered I might be trans. This was one of the key moments leading to my realization, tho.

I also tried using "butch" as my alibi for gender nonconformity all throughout high school, but I had a different problem. Definitions around hard butchness excluded many things I eventually want, like pregnancy and other things in that vein, but softer forms of butchness didn't explain my incredibly strong masculine feelings. There was too much of an expectation of playing one specific role. It let me dress like I wanted, but it wasn't a good description of who I am at all. I was ashamed to like some feminine things because people would assume that meant I was like other girls. Even though I really did like those things, I didn't want people to -know-. And I felt bad about that too, because I believed that one saying that girls who say "I'm not like other girls" really mean "I don't want you to treat me the way you treat other girls". And why was it that even if women were being treated with respect and given full rights to their own choices, I still didn't want to be treated like a girl. I didn't want to be considered a girl or seen as a girl and I was even starting to seriously begrudge being "technically a girl".

When I first realized "oh, I'm not a girl!" it felt like a complete breath of fresh air. It was weird because of how tightly I'd previously been clinging to my cis lesbian identity in avoidance of traditional gender roles. But after that, I didn't know what I was. It sounded equally suffocating to be a guy. I didn't ever want to be trapped like that again. I couldn't go back into a box after breathing for the first time. I couldn't. So that's what made me realize being genderfluid made a lot of sense and gave me space to just be what I am. In that we're different, but I still empathize a lot with what you're saying. I've been thinking about this for a while but I never could really put it in words.

My dad frequently threatens to write a book called "you can justify anything" because people always find an explanation for why things are the way they are, even if it's kind of ramshackle. :lol: I liken it a bit to all the diagnoses I went through for my mental health problems. They tried a lot of things that didn't explain enough and then eventually I found something myself that explained everything and didnt leave me with nagging feelings that I was wrong. Now, to try and get other people to understand...:rolle:

 

Well, until high school, I either didn't have any or I just shoved it down. In high school, I started justifying it as "this is just because I'm a lesbian". I wanted to look like a boy because I admired butch lesbians who were so masculine that people couldn't tell what their gender was. I wanted to date a girl because it meant I could take on the role of the boy in the relationship, but that's just what lesbians do. All of my excuses were about me being a lesbian (and it turns out I'm bi, so I was just super wrong on all fronts).