Frankly, I was terrified, anxious and I felt so incredibly
powerless.
I kept insisting to my parents that I'm really a boy (from age 5) and I that wanted them to call me by a boy's name and let me do boy things... well, they tolerated me dressing in boys' clothes to a certain extent, and didn't intervene when I played with my brother and our male friends. But that's as far as it went. Every time I insisted that I'm a boy they would tell me that I'm wrong or confused, and it became perfectly obvious that I couldn't safely tell anybody how I was feeling because doing so would always result in criticism & punishment. I had no support whatsoever.
My innate feelings of dread continued and increased throughout my childhood, getting very severe during puberty. But there was nothing I could do and nobody to talk to, so my overwhelming feeling at the time was one of despair. My body was betraying me by showing female secondary sexual characteristics that were the exact opposite of how I felt inside. I was convinced that I was the only 'weirdo' in the whole world who felt that way about myself.
I didn't hear the words 'transgender' or 'transsexual' until I was 19, but that was an MtF rather than an FtM. Still, it was a huge eye-opener for me to read her story & see that at least one other person had grown up feeling the way I did (albeit from the opposite direction). I did some research and found that FtMs existed but the results I found at the time weren't exactly encouraging. So again, I felt powerless to continue.
After 21 more years of self-flagellation I've finally decided that I deserve my happiness and so I'm discarding everything that's holding me back from being true to myself. My life's a mess but I've never been happier.
