I've seen this forum around before via google searches, but just now did I realize it was still... active, still a living community, so I joined. So hi I'm Alex, a pansexual trans guy (female>>>male or designated female at birth in case anyone isn't sure what that means, I feel like most people on this site probably know but I always get people asking "so wait what were you born as"). I wasn't lucky enough to be born with a gender-neutral name, I just chose one that was gender neutral so I could have my family use it around strangers without said strangers knowing I was trans and immediately hating me (I love living in the South :dry. I'm 17, so I guess I was lucky enough to figure out who I was fairly early. I'll stick to the stuff having to do with my gender/sexuality right now, to avoid an extremely long post. It's gonna be long, though, cause I've never really gotten the full story out before all at once. I figured out I was pansexual/bisexual sometime during or after the 8th grade. That's when I first met someone who was bisexual, and I learned that you didn't actually have to choose between only dating boys or only dating girls. My mom's response was basically just "Okay, good for you", though I think for a while she thought it was just a phase. I didn't really care, she wasn't trying to force anything on me and she wasn't being mean, so although she wasn't taking me 100% seriously I was okay. I didn't actually start dating anyone for real until age 16, so some people didn't really take me seriously when I said I was into both boys and girls. (One time someone told me that because I've never done anything with a girl I'm only "bicurious". At that point I'd never done anything with a boy either, but that wouldn't have made me "straightcurious" if I was saying I was straight... Note that back then I didn't think about my gender much, I just generally was called a girl and went with it.) For a while, I thought that was the biggest thing I'd ever have to hide from my relatives, and it wouldn't even probably come up until I got really serious with a girl. Then, around age 14 or 15, I started learning more about the trans community. I already knew trans people existed- my mom described it to me when I was little as people who were born in the wrong body. Which isn't really accurate for all trans people, I realize now, but I'll give it to my mom for being relatively progressive. I remember thinking in the third grade, walking through the cafeteria, "How would I know if I'm a boy or a girl? What's the difference? I act a lot like a boy, does that make me a boy in the 'wrong body'? But I also act girly sometimes, does that mean I'm 'normal'?" I was raised Wiccan, believing in reincarnation, so I decided that if I got a choice when I was reincarnated, I wanted to be a boy the next time around, just to see what it was like, to see what the difference even was. I constantly insisted I wasn't a girly girl, I was a tomboy, don't call me girly. Once the novelty of spinning around in a dress wore off around age six, I refused to wear them unless I was forced to. I hated the color pink, I refused to play with Barbies, I acted like anything girly was toxic to my very existence. Ironically, when started my mental sort of "transition", I also slowly started becoming more comfortable with stereotypically girly things. I learned about the trans community mainly through the internet and tumblr. I learned about guys who loved makeup, and girls who liked to dress really masculine. I learned about nonbinary genders. I learned that just because you looked like a girl or a boy, that didn't mean you were a girl or a boy. That was revolutionary to me, all of it. It only took me about a month of knowing genderfluidity was a thing to start labeling myself as genderfluid. That made sense, right? Because some days I wanted to dress masculine, and other days I wanted to wear makeup. I waited about another month to tell my mom I was questioning my gender. I was more worried about seeming "random" than being unaccepted. So it was a big shock to me when she told me that all she saw in me was her baby girl, that I didn't give off any boy vibes. That she had a friend who was transgender and she was miserable constantly, that this revelation could only lead to pain for me. That she was going to have my testosterone and hormone levels tested and she wouldn't accept me if they weren't inconsistent with that of a girl's. It took a long time for her to start accepting me as genderfluid. But eventually... she did. By then, though, I was realizing something. The gender changes I was going through, the fluidity in genderfluid... was very... confused. When I was a boy, I felt convinced I was a trans boy, that all those girl feelings weren't real. When I felt like a girl, I was convinced I had been faking the whole thing. For a while I started wondering if I had multiple personalities. I still think I might have had some kind of serious mental disorder going on, as there were moments in time that I couldn't recall, moments where I was apparently very angry or very upset. Anyway, after a while I realized I sort of felt more secure when I felt/dressed like a guy. Happier. That the moments I 'felt like' a girl, the days where I presented like one, I felt unhappy, forced, like I was only doing it to please my mom, so she'd still have a little girl she could connect with. Eventually I started hinting to my mom that I felt I might be a full-on trans guy, not genderfluid. It was a slow realization for me. I started just by using he pronouns. Then I stopped labeling myself as genderfluid. Eventually I quit trying to please my mom by dressing girly and wearing a lot of makeup. My mom went through that process with me, with lots of blowout fights happening along the way- "Do you know how hard it is in this world for transgendered people? Do you know how hard it is to be a man? Are you even sure about this or are you trying to join some exclusive club on tumblr?" She echoed the same doubts I had in my head. I wasn't really trans, I was faking it for attention, it was all in my head. Or, I should just stop this and pretend forever to be a girl, to make things easier for myself, to make my mom happy. Talking with my therapist a lot helped me work through those feelings and figure myself out. My mom grew more comfortable about my gender by realizing she wasn't losing any kind of special connection- I was still her kid, I hadn't changed at all, it was just that her perception of me had changed. I think she's still a little sad sometimes that I'll never wear her old prom dress, but she's equally excited at how good I look in ties. She says to me sometimes, "You know, I always wanted a son. I guess now I have one." Like, God, fate, the universe, whatever, just kind of gave her a son in a really unexpected way. As I said before, I grew more comfortable with girly stuff, too. Once I realized I was a guy, I was no longer being girly by wearing cool eyeshadow or dark eyeliner. I was being a guy in makeup. I wasn't being girly by wearing a crop top, I was being a hot guy in a crop top that showed off his cute, albeit chubby, tummy. (Seriously, google "boys in crop tops." You will not regret it.) When I wore girly clothes, I wasn't a girl. I was a crossdresser. It felt... it felt okay. I get dysphoric sometimes in girly clothes, and I never wear them out, but I'm more comfortable with them than I used to be. My transition is very slow, and I'm not transitioning yet in the classical sense (testosterone, surgery, etc) but I'm okay with that. First, a haircut. Then, a boy's wardrobe. Then, name change with those I'm out to. Then, get a binder. Slow but steady, gives me time to make sure I feel okay with everything and don't start freaking out again (Oh god! I'm faking! I'm gonna regret all of this!) I'm out to everyone that I know will accept me. My mom, I already told you her reaction. My birth father's reaction was, "Honey, as long as you graduate highschool, you can identify as a horse. If it makes you happy, I will treat you like and call you a boy." My stepfather's reaction was the best. He actually said "Well, duh." Then he told me he'd been waiting for me to tell him this. It felt even greater because I felt like he hardly knew me, current me, since he hasn't seen me in person for years, he raised me but my mom and him separated when I was 12. My final thought, and a question too for those who identify as gay but not trans, is this: It all feels really surreal. Because I didn't grow up in a family that explained to me very well about gender, I never thought growing up that I'd turn out to be trans. I never thought about it much, like I assumed trans people got some kind of letter saying "surprise! you're not a girl!" Some days I think I'm living in a really weird dream, that none of this is real, and I start panicking. So, if you're gay or bi, and if you grew up in a household that didn't really explain much of it to you, does it ever feel surreal for you? Do you ever have that thought... "I don't think there's any going back now. This is really happening. This is really me." Wowie. Thank you if you actually read that block of text up there. TL;DR: I'm Alex, I'm new here. Nice to meet ya'll.
