Hi Everyone,
Basic demographics - I'm a 25 year old FTM just starting to transition. I work in insurance and have been married to my wonderful supportive husband for 3 years. I'm a compete geek and nerd (I identify with both) and my current obsessions are 'Welcome to Nightvale' and 'Doctor Who'.
I've been lurking around for ages and have posted a few times under my other username but it's a username that I've also used for a lot of accounts in the past as a girl so it seemed weird to keep using it. I finally settled on a new 'boy' username and so here I am.
I don't know if it's just my imagination but I feel like I'm quite old to be considering starting transitioning now. I know I'm not objectively old but it feels like a lot of people take the plunge when they are younger, especially amongst the ftm crowd. I didn't really mind being a girl when I was a kid. My parents never forced me to be a girly girl so I guess I never really worried about it. When I was a teenager I started to question my gender and I started to think that I would be happier as a guy. At the time though my level of disphoria was pretty low so although I investigated what it would take to pass as a guy and even joked with my friends that I was going to turn up to school in a male uniform (I went to an all girls school), I put it in the too hard basket and never took steps towards passing.
Throughout university I usually dressed androgynously and made more friends with guys than girls. Although that was great I was still always disappointed that I could never truly be 'one of the guys'. Again though, the benefits of being a dude didn't seem to outweigh the difficulties of transition and the stigma attached to transsexualism. I stayed as a girl in my every day life but any time there was a costume party I would wear male costumes and most of my classes and hobbies were traditionally male.
Since graduating and "growing up" though I've found that suddenly these options are closed to me. I still have a few guy friends but mostly it feels like guys don't want to hang out with me (or their wives don't want them too) just because I'm a female. I work in a corporate office and the standard of dress expected for women really pisses me off. I've also got really sick of people pre-judging certain things about me and treating me a certain way or expecting me to act a certain way just because they read me as female.
It's like when I was young the world was happy for me to look like a girl but act like a guy, but now that I've reached a certain age I'm not allowed to any more. So it's finally reached the point where I feel like the benefits outweigh the consequences. I've started to dress in men's clothes and am planning to make an appointment with my GP soon to get a referral to a gender counsellor.
Thanks for listening - I'm not sure how interesting the above is for anyone to read but it really helped me to write it all out anyway.
