When did you start to realise

[Zandara]

I am wondering at what age the people here start to realise you were in a body that seemed wrong. What was your first GID experience.

For me my first real memory of GID is sitting on my bed when i was about 11 or 12 and trying to make my breasts start growing. I was seeing young girls at my age (i am male) developing breasts and wishing mine would start growing.

Update
An even earlier memory just surfaced from when i was 8 or 9. I was reading a superboy DC comic (anybody remember them) and the story was that super boy was changed by magic to supergirl. I remember wishing that could happen to me and i must have read that story 20 or 30 times. 

Yes Sarah that's what i meant at that age i did not anything about GID. I just had the feeling that something was not right.

[Muffins]

Around five or six instead of going out to play with my brothers I'd rather stay home and play in my mums walk-in robe... that was way more fun. Plus they always cheated while plays armies... why did my imaginary gun never kill anyone? wwhhyyy? ppfftt.

[Cindy]

Very early, I didn't realise I was a boy until I went to school and that was a shock. Came out to my parents at about 13 asking why my breasts weren't growing and my period hadn't started.
Wasn't a good day that

Cindy

[cynthialee]

I was clueless as to what was going on with me until at age 9 I saw an episode of the Phil Donohue show where they were show casing a panel of transsexual women.
There were 5 women on the panel and only 1 of them had a good outcome with her srs. The other 4 had complications, and although none of them were sad they transitioned they were bummed that they didn't have sensation down there or that they were not orgasmic.
I knew right then and there I was just like those women and I didn't care if I had a bad outcome. I wanted surgery. Unfortunatly I was living with my Ubber Christian grandmom at the time. She had already given me a HEAVY dose of Levitical laws and I was literaly convinced that I would be killed for breaking gods laws by my family. As a result I would be incapable for many years to make my first abortive attempt to transition at 22. (but that is anouther story for anouther time....)

[justmeinoz]

Having just bought Kate Bush's "Lionheart" CD, I realised that the songs helped get me through a particularly black period in 1979. 
I realise now that I reacted to her lyrics emotionally as a woman, and with just a little more info would have made the connection. "Missed it by that much!" as Maxwell Smart used to say. Pity someone didn't give me a nudge, would have saved a lot of time and heartache.
Karen.

[AbraCadabra]

Good one, this question is.
I still have this photographic clear picture of myself sending in front of full length mirror of that girly virgin white bedroom suit I then slept in.
I was adamant to have my ears pierced, which I did, and then went on to figure out how can I cut off that unwanted "extra". At age 8 it was not really much extra and seemed like just a quick snip away from THE solution.
Yet having had cut my finger just a few days earlier and barely escaped a hiding because of the bloody mess left behind on some kitchen towels etc., I was too scared I'd not be able to avoid another mess and surely a hiding would follow.
Can say that "saved" the Willy. 40 years later nature still did not agree. Had this major brain-quake 3am in the morning some 2 years back realizing *I'm a girl inside* after all, dispite all the hard trying to proof otherwise. So it still has to be the GRS in the end.
At least I didn't damage the "spare-parts" back then for to make a nice "innie" from this misallocated "outie".
I so wish we could re-grow it just from stem cells, and get it just right. Dream on, hm?
Axelle

[Cindy]

Dear Axelle
Pretty name BTW
I tried self castration several times but passed out. You would have thought parents and hospitals would have caught on. But it was a different era.

Hope the younger girls and boys get it better.
And they do. They have us

Cindy

[spacial]

Like Muffin, I was about 4 years. My older brother had just started school and I knew I was next. I wasn't looking forward to having to mix with boys. On the few occasions when I had met other girls, I was so much more relaxed. But boys always seemed so silly and rough. They did seem to have (or claimed to have) such interesting adventures. Though in retrospect, I doubt these were quite what they claimed.

It was the start of many years of introspection.

[arbon]

At around 4 or 5 there was one day when the neighborhood kids were playing a game - the parents had put a bunch of goofy  cloths into a box and the kids were to run to the box and put them on (over the cloths we had on) and I remember  how excited I was that there might be some girl cloths and that my mom might not mind if I did that because it was a game. But I was not able to get anything.

What I remember most when I was young is being very confused about my gender, wanting to be a girl (especially once I started school and was around lots of other children)  and also remembering that I had to keep it secret. I was scarred of disappointing my mom.

[myraey]

First memory about this , age 4. Of course I didn't know anything about gender issues back then. Around age 13 I was thinking about it and knew the whole concept. If I had grown up in the 50s I am sure information must have been harder to come by.
I still don't know what it all means and what I am

[AmySmiles]

Before puberty, probably around kindergarten,  I knew that I didn't want to be like the other boys but still knew that I was one.  Often I spent recess alone by myself because I wasn't really accepted by either group, at least not as "one of them."
All the others wanted upper body strength and liked playing football and rough games, and there I was playing hopscotch, jumping rope, and trying to be as flexible as all the girls were.  For some reason none of this clicked and I just felt like an outcast for most of my early life.

Then shortly after puberty, I started going to my brother's friend's house, who was really into anime.  All the pieces started clicking together when I watched Ranma 1/2 for the first time and saw that after he turned into a girl he wanted desperately to be a boy again.  At that point I actually started paying attention to other boys and realized they were the same way as he was and that I was different.  That was when I began scouring the internet to figure out what the heck I was.

[Sephirah]

It's hard to say that a certain event was indicative of my realisation of who I am, especially in childhood. Looking back now, it's easy to see the signs, but saying I knew what was happening at the time isn't right. Probably up until the age of 14, I guess, I knew what I felt, but not why. And before that it wasn't so much about gender, but more a general 'wrongness', that I attributed to everything under the sun. When stuff started happening to my body that didn't fit with how I thought it should be, I blocked it out. And I mean totally. Oddly I didn't think "this is wrong" or "why isn't it like that rather than this?". I kinda just... went into a sort of mental shutdown.

I don't think I actually allowed myself to dwell on it too much, and things being what they were, I wasn't really allowed to anyway. This led to me being pretty introverted and very... hmm... I guess shy is the closest word, as a kid. I figured everyone just hated me, probably because I hated myself, or... people had learned how to act a certain way and I just hadn't, or... I just had one of those personalities that 'didn't fit in'. Part of it was probably that I went through those years on a sort of autopilot, I guess a defense mechanism to protect my mind from everything happening that, had I allowed myself to think about it, would have led to things being far worse.

Spent a lot of time on my own, even at school. But that's something which is best left forgotten. However, a by-product of this is that I never really socialised with either boys or girls there, I was left to my own devices because the school had a policy of punishing the victims of bullying rather than the perpetrators and I spent the best part of 3 years isolated from everyone else at the back of a classroom with my work brought to me by a teacher because it was "for my own good". Naturally I blamed myself and figured I just wasn't cut out to be around people. I was a 'thing', some sort of nondescript mass. I would watch the different classes in the room socialising though, the interactions... but in an oddly distanced way. I guess this 'observer mentality' has stayed with me throughout my life.

Anyway, long story short, I guess when I actually realised who I was, was at the same time I allowed myself to accept who I am, and not find every other possible rationalisation imaginable for the way I felt. That came... hmm... I guess in my early 20's.

[AbraCadabra]

Isn't it just amazing how similar, in the overall way of things, all these experiences go?!
It makes me wonder some times what Mother Nature has or had in "mind" with us, i.e. having to go through operations in order to get over all this? Really?
You go figure...
One salient point I did not mention in my first reply I had completely suppressed for YEARS - it surfaced during one of the many therapies I went through to figure out what the hell it was with me - it was at about age 5 when I was made to throw away my rag-doll!
Even whilst I'm writing this I still have tears welling up after so, so MANY re-visitations.
I was absolutely heart broken --- it was at this point when things started to get "rough" for me. Having had to throw away my "girlie-dummy" (the rag-doll).
Coming back home from that outing I was still looking forward to have my teddy-bear AND IT WAS ALSO GONE!!
I had no boy-toys up to that point and was not interested in that stuff. But yes it only made sense so much later, as at that age gender issues are not really clear at all, i.e. one cannot easily relate one's differentness to that little wienie between one's legs.
In my case I sure was a nosy and bright child and at about that age managed to investigate and finding that a cousin about four years older had something "wrong" down there, she had an innie. She kindly, after some "arm-twisting", gave me the opportunity to "fix" it, hee-hee.
Suffice to say that I got quite frustrated to pull this innie out so as to make it an outie --- all I knew EVERYONE would have!
Hey, I sure got that one wrong. Yet it shows that at that age one does not relate to such fact as: "girls do not have a penis..."
Hells bells, now we sure do know and as it turns out it was me rather that was saddled with the wrong plumbing!
Also later on I ONLY wanted to hang out with girls --- but you guessed it, they where not at all interested so as most of us, I started to "shut down" and unhappily considered that it must be my lot to wind up "sitting between the chairs". Can't blame any one 'cause I just didn't figure what it was with me and getting constantly violated seemed the way the world had it picked for me.
How strange in deed it all seems at times...
Axelle

[BillieTex]

very young, mabey 4 or 5, i wanted to be a ballerina and go to dance class, unfortunatly i had what i had and back then no alternatives, i'd be less screwed up if there was all this support back then. I'd have gotten started early and pass by the time i was 20 

[cynthialee]

My mom told me that I was so girly that by the age of five my parents assumed I would grow up to be gay.
Then I went and really confused them when I started dating girls in my teens.

[Northern Jane]

I was sure I was a girl all through childhood and it just confused me when I started public school and they wanted me to use the boys room. It distressed me when my (female) playmates started pushing me away but I didn't "get it" until I was 8 (thought I was a farm girl and certainly knew the difference between male and female).

At 8, I was playing with a male cousin when he said "You should have been a girl." I said I was. He said, "No you're not, not really." and in that moment I knew I was in DEEP trouble! At puberty things got worse because my puberty was 50/50 .

[Inanna]

It's hard to say that a certain event was indicative of my realisation of who I am, especially in childhood. Looking back now, it's easy to see the signs, but saying I knew what was happening at the time isn't right. Probably up until the age of 14, I guess, I knew what I felt, but not why. And before that it wasn't so much about gender, but more a general 'wrongness', that I attributed to everything under the sun. When stuff started happening to my body that didn't fit with how I thought it should be, I blocked it out. And I mean totally. Oddly I didn't think "this is wrong" or "why isn't it like that rather than this?". I kinda just... went into a sort of mental shutdown.

I don't think I actually allowed myself to dwell on it too much, and things being what they were, I wasn't really allowed to anyway. This led to me being pretty introverted and very... hmm... I guess shy is the closest word, as a kid. I figured everyone just hated me, probably because I hated myself, or... people had learned how to act a certain way and I just hadn't, or... I just had one of those personalities that 'didn't fit in'. Part of it was probably that I went through those years on a sort of autopilot, I guess a defense mechanism to protect my mind from everything happening that, had I allowed myself to think about it, would have led to things being far worse.

Spent a lot of time on my own, even at school. But that's something which is best left forgotten. However, a by-product of this is that I never really socialised with either boys or girls there, I was left to my own devices because the school had a policy of punishing the victims of bullying rather than the perpetrators and I spent the best part of 3 years isolated from everyone else at the back of a classroom with my work brought to me by a teacher because it was "for my own good". Naturally I blamed myself and figured I just wasn't cut out to be around people. I was a 'thing', some sort of nondescript mass. I would watch the different classes in the room socialising though, the interactions... but in an oddly distanced way. I guess this 'observer mentality' has stayed with me throughout my life.

Anyway, long story short, I guess when I actually realised who I was, was at the same time I allowed myself to accept who I am, and not find every other possible rationalisation imaginable for the way I felt. That came... hmm... I guess in my early 20's.

That sounds eerily familiar to my life.  Mental shutdown is a good way to describe coasting along unwittingly through the complete wrong puberty.  I can also relate to the kind of social experiences you had.  Ugh... not happy memories. 

[Nurse With Wound]

I first time I started actively thinking about it was probably 14. Though if I think back to when I was a lot younger it was pretty obvious since I used to make up stories where I was a girl and other things, though I was some how oblivious and never actual thought about it. Probably because I never had anyone breathing down my neck trying to make me behave masculine so gender differences were quite blurred to me at young ages.

[Keroppi]

One salient point I did not mention in my first reply I had completely suppressed for YEARS - it surfaced during one of the many therapies I went through to figure out what the hell it was with me - it was at about age 5 when I was made to throw away my rag-doll!
Even whilst I'm writing this I still have tears welling up after so, so MANY re-visitations.
I was absolutely heart broken --- it was at this point when things started to get "rough" for me. Having had to throw away my "girlie-dummy" (the rag-doll).
Coming back home from that outing I was still looking forward to have my teddy-bear AND IT WAS ALSO GONE!!

Oh tell me about it. I had lots and lots of soft toys / animals. Came home one day and there was only 4 left. At least my parents left me with a few I guess. I still have them. Started added a few back since. I have a long list of different animals soft toys I'll be buying when I have the money.

Yes, I'm still just a little girl at heart.

[Lisbeth]

It's difficult for me to put ages to things that happened over 50 years ago. I use when I moved at age eight as a marker. Before age eight I remember standing in the closet among my mother's clothes. After eight I remember going to sleep at night wishing I'd wake up a girl.