I am a MtF transgender and I was wondering where do transgender feelings come from? I just remember knowing I should have been born a girl at a young age.
I've read research reports showing that the brains of transsexual people resemble the brains of cis-people of their true sex much more than cis-people of their birth sex, so I would guess it comes from having the wrong body for the sex of your brain. How that happens, I don't know.
No idea where they come from, honestly. I like to think of these feelings/thoughts as my subconscious's way of saying "Wake up stupid! You're a man! Stop pretending!" Six when I first had these thoughts (or earliest I can identify when they began. Might have had more of a vague sense of wanting to be a boy from a young age). But it's only been recently that I've recognized them as pinpointing them to my true gender.
I wish I knew the answer... I know I felt like it in childhood though and a young teenager...I'm not sure though where the feelings come from... :eusa_thin Hmm...
It's not really known for sure what causes us develop the gender that we do. There is almost certainly an innate biological component to it; however, it seems too soon to completely rule out environmental contributing factors. Most studies done on the subject have woefully small sample sizes and, since they are conducted by cis people, often focus on a narrow range of trans* experience (this one, for example, looked at 11 MTFs and 1 FTM and appears to focus on classic, HBS-like transexaulity, something which many trans* people don't identify with). I imagine that gender is similar to just about every other facet of who we are. Pre-birth factors provide a specific range of possibilities, and later environmental factors determine exactly where we fall. For example, I doubt there's anything that could have made me fully male or a complete girly-girl (I'm AFAB), but had I been forced to be female I probably would have had much stronger feelings of being non-binary than I do.
Well, a few weeks ago, I found this comment: somewhere among the comments on this page (for those of you who are squeamish about blood, don't watch the video; and the Reddit links are extremely interesting). As the person doesn't link to a particular study, I copied his comment to make some research about this later.
