Early signs you gave yourself that you were trans, but failed to recognize

[Emily.T]

I guess for me looking back it would have been the disappointment at 13 when I didn't start growing breasts my mindset on being female was really strong from about 8 yo i asked my mother why my breasts weren't growing and all I got was a look of disgust and that is also when the abuse started from her I remember buying a chain at 12 with my pocket money to wear to school.  I wish I understood trans stuff then.

[Erik Ezrin]

And yet with all of this, it will somehow be a shock to everyone around me I am sure.

Yeah, I had many tell-tale signs too, but yet my parents were super surprised, and my mom was just like "But... but... you are such a GIRL!" and then she would recall the few odd female moments I've had. Like how I danced around in flowery dresses as a 3yr old kid (I just liked the free feeling they gave me), or how I dressed up as princess ONCE (also at a very young age. I can't even properly remember why or when, etc.) While I dressed as a knight ten times more and when I grew up despised the idea of wearing a dress. She just all conveniently forgot all of that...
Parents *sigh*

[GnomeKid]

Definitely this. Except it wasn't really shock, I knew that I was supposed to feel the way they did, but the "I must be an alien" feeling surprised me all the time.

Ahh see... I think I've always been pretty stubbornly myself.  And the few times in middle school when I thought... "why don't I feel the way everyone else feels" I was quickly reminded of how dumb that is....

For example, I remember in middle school a group of my 3 closest girl friends were talking.  I came up to join and was told to go away because I wasn't enough of a girl to understand what they were talking about.  I was obviously quite offended.  I left and went off to feel bad about myself.  I didn't want to be a girl, but I didn't want to not have friends because of it.  Shortly thereafter I learned they were discussing their eating disorders............. I no longer felt wrong for not wanting to be a girl. 

Thats not saying being a girl = having eating disorders, but the experience deflected some of the bull->-bleeped-<- that I could have felt otherwise. 

I do remember trying to figure out with my one friend why she liked boys.... I really couldn't fathom the attraction.  I didn't realize for a good few years that its because I, in fact, like girls.... I've always sort of been a late bloomer =p

[ErinS]

I remember trying to understand my feelings, and coming across Blanchard's typology. I read the ->-bleeped-<- description and was like,"That's not me", then read the overly-gay description and was "That's DEFINITELY not me, guess I'm not trans." I honestly wonder how much damage that school of thought has caused.

Then the whole masturbation thing where the feelings go away for 5 minutes, and you convince yourself you're just a weirdo, and ignore them coming back until you're walking down the street and get surprise slammed by dumptruck load of envy when a pretty, feminine girl comes strolling past.

[Evelyn K]

I've always had this presumption that when we seek mates, we are inclined to choose someone who has identical features as ourselves. That we are attracted to the opposite version of ourselves, and those kind of bonds are strongest in the attraction sense. I presumed that was why some of the best couples with lasting power tended to look like each other. I presumed that I can increase my dating potential by chasing gals that looked similar me.

This carried over to my own hot babe internet pic collecting, except the pics I kept where of gals that looked similar to 'me', and most of the time they where only fully clothed, artistic softcore or vanity shots. Just like this.



Then one day it all clicked as to why I was so hung up on such a feminine idealization of me. Being aware of the whole trans thing I curiously did some investigating - and POW...! You know that feeling.

Other signs where my female like nurturing tendencies, for instance during my late cancer stricken father just two years ago. I had an intense devotion to his care, doing all the house chores, a labor of love beyond what most sons would probably prefer to do, or would delegate to the help instead. I was always jumping at the opportunity to take care of those dishes, this even extended to close friends homes at dinner invites. It was my way of contributing.

Let's see, imagining for years that the towel wrapped around my hair after a shower was really *my* long hair...

Remembering hearing my mother say to my father when I was 16, "he would look good as a girl, no?" in the parking lot when I was walking ahead of them. An odd prediction...

I'm probably more emotional than most guys. I also male fail every online "what is your brains gender" tests.

Oh yeah, there's my extreme misandry and seething hate every time I read the news about another woman raped or murdered, and all the collateral crime and violence testosterone brings into our society.

I've had it. I'm not rooting for the home team no more.

Good riddance.

[theadanielle]

I am an odd case...I KNEW I felt female as far back in my childhood as memory goes.  I knew everyone saw me as a boy, and I tried like hell to "sneak" or invent (thin) pretexts for using/wearing girl things.  In HS had a female character in D&D (yes, I'm that old) and married one of the boys' characters.  I always felt desperately uncomfortable in Men's restrooms and if I walked up to a urinal I could never make myself pee.  I HAD to sit down.  i was not the slightest bit unclear about the fact I was going to transition until about a year into college.  (PS - I started drinking like a fish around that time!)

Somewhere between 19 and 22, I gradually DECIDED I was not going to be transsexual, but gay. I thought that would be easier for my family and for me. During my senior year at university I "purged" my women's wardrobe by tossing EVERYTHING, dresses, accessories, wigs, makeup, you name it, in a dumpster.  I didn't wear women's clothes again until almost a year ago (I'm 43!).  It was really during that time that I went into total denial and failed to recognize that I hadn't changed at all.  In retrospect, i had plenty of signs to read.  Three of the biggest bricks HP dropped on my head during this time:  1.  all the female identities I used, computer usernames, phone identities, etc. - such as the time I was working market research on the telephone and suddenly one day just introduced myself as a woman without even thinking about it.  ("Joyce" I think I was!)  2.  When i bought women's formula vitamins "by mistake", secretly hoping that what made them women's formula was estrogen ("oh, oops!").  3.  The fact that every five years when I would get invited to the high school reunion, the first thought I would always have was, i can't let them see me unless I'm a woman!

[Ashley Allison]

I feel a fundamental personality sign when I was young was me being highly sensitive and caring about others; basically, I was highly emotional.  I remember being accused by males, both young and old, of 'being just like a girl' on numerous occasions.  Ultimately, this was highly damaging to my sense of self and ego.  I couldn't understand, especially at a young age, why it was so wrong  to feel the way i did.  Now, of course, I realize what I was expressing was totally outside the norm of male emotional expression.  Looking back, I feel I was even more feminine in this regard than my sisters.  With puberty came testosterone, and now I feel the general blunting of these emotions.  Are they still there? Yes, but tempered, and I do my best to not show them for fear of more ridicule.

On another more specific level, a root sign of my impending female identity was my total lack of enthusiasm from sports, especially team sports.  When I watch them, I simply can't comprehend how people can get a long lasting level of enjoyment from them.  I can actually sense there is just not a part of my brain that exists that should understand the pleasure of watching or participating in them.  Being young, I was placed in sports to play, but alas I just didn't get them and was soon consumed by other pursuits.

There were early signs I wasn't purely male, and I still feel these are fundamental parts of my intrinsic neurological architecture. 

[EmoAlice]

I'm afraid to think about it too much for fear that it will convince me further that I am trans.  I guess you would call it cognitive resonance?  Starting with the diagnosis and then looking for symptoms to match up just seems scary to me.  But of course, I can't help but do it and the signs all seem to point in that direction: Signing up for "female" sports (My parents we're certainly not afraid of me doing "girly" things if that's what I wanted to do), wanting to play with "girls" toys, wanting to do basically everything that girls did and boys didn't.  That is until I couldn't take the ridicule from my peers anymore and learned to keep what I really liked and enjoyed doing a secret from the world.  Unfortunately, I couldn't stand doing the "boy" stuff either, so I never really found anything enjoyable to do.  My childhood as I remember it was very empty and that's carried on into my adult life as well.

[StirfriedKraut]

Back when I was in early elementary I used to tell the kids at school one day that I was a boy and the next I would say "Oh i guess I'm a girl". I didn't even remember this until it was brought up in a psychological examination years later.

I remember I was confused. I didn't have siblings and my parents were quite distant so I didn't really learn about gender roles. I was extremely curious about the male anatomy though. When i was around 9 years old I would dress up this weird ass doll I had to look like a boy. I had this odd habit of playing with it as if it was me and i was making it go on weird adventures. I'd put socks in my underwear to try and pretend I understood the concept of having something down there.

By the time i was 10 I learned what the word "queer" was. I had heard it said by one of the older kids when they were talking about my short hair. I wanted to know what that meant. So like the curious child that I was, i did some research. The word "transgender" came up. I only had a vague idea of what it meant but it made sense to me. Up until that point of my life I had longed to be one of the guys and i didn't understand why. I was always just called a tomboy by family and that made no sense either. So when i finally had a word for it I told my school guidance counselor that I thought i was transgender and that I would like to become a boy now. Needless to say she didn't know what to say to that too much and just told me to wait until I was 18 to be sure. I agreed.

I waited until I said I would. It sucks that I was, and still am somewhat, such a severe case of depression that it wasn't until recently that i formally came out to another shrink about feelings of being trans.

[Miss_Bungle1991]

I always identified with male characters on TV and in movies and video games, I remember this when I was as young as 5. 

I did the same thing. Except that was with females (obviously). I remember writing a TaleSpin fanfic back around 90/91ish (WAY before I even knew the term 'fan fiction'), and I wrote myself in as a character. But I wrote myself in as a girl (using the female variant of my birthname). When my friends found out about this, it wasn't the fact that I was writing something like this that tripped them out. But when they saw my character that I had created in the story, they were like, 'Dude, what the hell is this about?". I didn't care what they thought, though.

[janetcgtv]

I prayed every night to wake up a girl with no memory of ever been born a boy.

Evelyn K: I just love in your signature the woman putting on lip stick. where did you find it?

[Klaus]

Looking back on it, my life is littered with "that really should have been a clue" moments. The typical stuff like checking the "wrong" gender box on forms, wanting to be male characters, refusing to play with the dolls family members bought me because they were "for girls." Then I remember being 3, wearing a particularly frilly dress my mother had picked out for me at a restaurant and thinking it was weird that everyone was gushing over me instead of balking that a mother would put a boy in such a girly outfit. I also remember flat-out telling my parents I was a boy and trying to get my teachers to call me by my masculine-ish birth name.

I also put off buying bras for way longer than I should have. I kind of got away with it till I was 14 and discovered sports bras. I think I felt like if I didn't acknowledge it, puberty wouldn't come for me. When flat-out ignoring the changes didn't work, I purposely gained a bunch of weight, which made the problem even worse and led to an eating disorder.

The only school I ever felt remotely comfortable at was a Christian private school that had unisex uniforms, and that was in spite of the school itself being a nightmare. These all should have been red flags in retrospect, I guess.

[NoMan]

I guess for me looking back it would have been the disappointment at 13 when I didn't start growing breasts my mindset on being female was really strong from about 8 yo i asked my mother why my breasts weren't growing and all I got was a look of disgust and that is also when the abuse started from her I remember buying a chain at 12 with my pocket money to wear to school.  I wish I understood trans stuff then.

I really understand you on this. I don't really understand why parents are disgusted by this.. People should be let to be whatever they want/feel to be.

[naomi599]

One of the earliest memories I have that was a blunt hint that I was trans was when I was 4 years old. I always liked hanging out with all the girls in my old neighborhood and even thought boys were yucky. At that age I learned the difference between genders and tried everything to rid my self of my downstairs curse. Since then I have always been struggling to live life in the wrong body and my dysphoria was amplified during puberty when I wasn't growing breasts. I kind of accepted that I was in the wrong body at the young age of 4, but of course the whole idea of transitioning didn't exist to me until I discovered the internet when I was 15 and did research into hormones and herbal supplements.

[LordKAT]

Dysphoria hit for me when I was 3, in an experimental Head Start program. That is when I learned that what I know myself to be, isn't what others saw. That what I did and said didn't fit what was expected. Nothing made sense after that. From that point on, it was just one more thing after one more thing. 

Silly head start, why give me doll, I want my fire engine back. Why ask me to pick my favorite toy, then tell me it isn't.

[Jill F]

Dysphoria hit for me when I was 3, in an experimental Head Start program. That is when I learned that what I know myself to be, isn't what others saw. That what I did and said didn't fit what was expected. Nothing made sense after that. From that point on, it was just one more thing after one more thing. 

Silly head start, why give me doll, I want my fire engine back. Why ask me to pick my favorite toy, then tell me it isn't.

When I picked up a doll in preschool, they took it away, gave me a rubber ball and told me to play with the boys.  At least they didn't take my crayons and coloring books.

[LordKAT]

When I picked up a doll in preschool, they took it away, gave me a rubber ball and told me to play with the boys.  At least they didn't take my crayons and coloring books.

Weird isn't it. They now make dolls for boys.

[Jill F]

Weird isn't it. They now make dolls for boys.

They did when I was a kid as well, they just called them "action figures". *le facepalm*

I also think it's freaking hilarious that the make moisturizers for men now and call them "hydrators".

[Emily.T]

I really understand you on this. I don't really understand why parents are disgusted by this.. People should be let to be whatever they want/feel to be.

Thank you noman for your comment quite often I wish that I was just born a girl or born to parents who understood and would have helped me sooner.

[Silver Centurion]

I'm really glad that I found this thread. Reading everyone's posts has helped me realize that I am in a whole lot of denial! >< As far back as I can remember I hated being dressed up to go to school or to my grandparents. Best times were when I could wear my t-shirts and jeans and go digging in the back yard, playing in the mud or running around doing some sport. As I got older I often raided my brothers collection of Gi-Joe's, Transformers, He-man and other such toys. I loved to play football with my cousin and by the fourth grade I finally got to cut my hair short. I didn't have to wear dresses anymore which was a relief and though my clothes were still too girly it was something I could live with. I was constantly trying to get my dad to let me be a part of what he was doing because my brother clearly didn't want to and I very much wanted to but that never panned out. Middle school got interesting. My mom was always harping about being more feminine and I was like EUGH nooo! I think she might have started giving up then because eight grade rolled around and I broke my ankle severely playing football in gym class.

I've always hung out with guys and am not all that comfortable with women and that carried into high school. Wasn't too thrilled with puberty but I couldn't do anything about the cards I was dealt so I carried on dressing as I wanted to and hanging out with the guys and enjoying the mystical land of the weight room!After high school it didn't really seem to matter. I worked, worked out and the friends I made at work were primarily male. I met my husband through them and I played football with the people from work. I still remember someone on the opposing team one night had overheard that there was a girl playing and it spread like wildfire and everyone was trying to figure out who and it was me. Very next play I took out a college football player who was working seasonal that summer and everyone was going nuts about it and I was like haha if only they knew. I was accepted for being me and I did the whole kid thing and the problem was I couldn't be happy. I got griefed by family for my hair, my clothes, my interests. So I just blanked everything out but that didn't work nor does trying to be feminine when I don't like it and can't do it at all. I don't think like a woman, feel like a woman or act like one but I believed that was ok because that's what a tomboy is. Doh right? My husband has been a major help and so has this community of amazing people.