I Knew I Was Trans When...?? What About You?

[Dawn Heart]

So, tonight, I'm just sort of taking a look back at myself over the years of my life and trying to make sense of what my transgender symptoms were from long ago, until this current day. I would be interested in knowing what all of your signs and such were.

Here we go:

1. Becoming aware of males and females, feeling like I belonged with the female group

2. Becoming aware of my own body and feeling like certain bits didn't belong

3. Looking up to female role models more than males, and wanting to dress, talk, and act the part of female role models as well as female friends and specific female family members.

4. Wanting to have a female name

5. Questioning if I was "normal" or not and hating my place as a male in a male body, never ever being able to identify as a male or identify with males.

6. Having romantic feelings for people that did not go with how a cisgender male would feel. I felt for people I crushed on, or actually fell in love with as a female would.

7. From the time I first began having sexual feelings and fantasies, I was always the female.

8. My emotional life and sensitivities were always opposite of what I observed in cisgender males. I was always more sensitive, I felt and thought with more depth and more maternal identity.

9. Praying every night to wake up in a female body

10. Enjoying female socialization and girl talk more than anything else.

11. Looking at other females wishing that I could look like them, and saying to myself "That was supposed to be me".

12. While shopping in stores, female clothes always caught my eye more than male clothing. I saw definite style possibilities

13. I hated and still hate being called or referred to with male pronouns

14. Hating that no one can see past my male appearance / body to see who I see and who I feel like inside.

15. Enjoying catalogs for the female items and things like cutesy knick knacks, etc. My female brain says to itself "You must buy this" and my rational mind says "you're broke, stupid!"

[sam79]

There was a similar thread which you might find interesting:

https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,132309.0.html

[Anna]

I thought all men did/ thought this stuff ^ but were just too embarrased to talk about it usually Maybe not

Anyway for me it was sitting at home admiring Lana Wachovski's pink dreads and reading her story on Pink News. I was wearing my favourite maxi skirt, top, necklace, bangle & cardigan at the time, painting my nails and thinking "So that's how "they" think." And then I realised.

I'm sorry to say I felt violently sick, sorry for myself and cried a lot.

[spacial]

I was pretty much as described in the OP, but unlike Anna, I knew others didn't think that way. I just felt a freak.

I think one of the reasons I am so agressively opposed to those that want children and young people generally, to suppress their feelings is that there are enough problems we all have to learn to deal with.

The developing competitiveness of boys for example. Many boys go through phases where they seem to take any opportunity to rip others down. Perfectly natural and none of us should reasonably feel bad. It's just some young boy growing up.

I did. I thought, what they claimed to see was there. I thought I was crazy, that every aspect of me was inadequate and stood out for ridicule.

[Anna]

I know, I know. I'm thick. 

In my defence I told my parents when I was about 5 that I wanted to be a girl and brought on myself years of corrective psychological head games and outright abuse - beatings, rants about being evil & a liar, threats of being locked in the asylum and then the full range of evangelical religious indoctrination & mental torture. I was so young when it started I had no idea what they were trying to do. NOW I do. But that stuff leaves it's mark. A tale like many others here have experienced I am sure.


Dawn I've been doing that thinking too recently and my list is very similar to yours. I'm not sure personally how much something like (6) is necessarily trans or just sensitive but FWIW that's also how I felt about love.  Some of what we use to say we're trans are  I think equally capable of being seen as just socially constructed gender stereotypes. I'm not going to transition based on the fact that I may prefer pink to blue for example.  For me the deciding thing is that no matter what I do there is something that always makes me think I am in the wrong body & not male. And what makes that trans and not bonkers are all the girly thoughts, feelings, emotions & behaviour that comes with it.

[Sephirah]

I knew I was trans when... I knew what being transgendered was. Although that was just putting a name to something really.

Before that point there was only a strange duality. In times with no physical awareness, such as sleep or meditation, I was female. Physically, I mean. In those times I felt complete. Internal and external in alignment. However when physical awareness kicked in, the sensation of an internal identity feeling chained within a false external shell provided the feeling of simply being an anomaly. Abnormal. A self-aware sentience staring out from behind a porcelain mask. The phantom physical feelings didn't help, either. It's hard to wake from a dream and feel like you have a body you don't have. Actually feel it as though it were the case. Very disorientating and distressing.

That duality is still there, only now I have a name for it.

I never really paid much attention to specific signs, as such, and what would classify me as doing things a female would. Partly because tying down specific traits or actions with one gender or the other doesn't sit well with me. It feels too... limiting. But also since I have always tended to just be - and express myself in accordance with my infinitely stronger internal identity - which I feel instinctively, on a very primal level to be female, regardless of what I'm doing. It's hard to explain but it's something I just know.

Often to my detriment, it has to be said, among my peers. With many comments of "you should have been a woman, you think and act like one." Or "if you were a woman, you'd be a b*tch." Or "You'd make someone a good wife one day." Made to sound derogatory but drawing a secret inner smile.

It's such a core foundation of my sense of self that I can't really do it any other way. I'm not that good an actress.

[Emily Aster]

I knew I was trans when... I knew what being transgendered was. Although that was just putting a name to something really.

Yeah, what she said. I realized the name for it when I had finally given up on the concept that praying to wakeup as a woman might be possible... I still kinda hope it is though even though I'm atheist   Luckily the Internet had just taken off enough that you could do searches... with gopher. I think I was actually looking on genetic engineering sites for transforming from a man to a woman when I stumbled on the tg world. At the time, I didn't realize how unbelievably painful it would be for your body to change from the inside out to another sex, or I didn't care.