So, uh, hello. I'm new here and a little nervous... Well, more like, A LOT nervous. I've never really talked very much about this part of me, but I think it's time that I do. I'm an 18 year old female-to-male transexual. For as long as I can remember, I've always felt like something was 'wrong'. One of my earliest memories is of watching an episode of a cartoon, where a boy is turned into a girl for a day. I remember feeling extremely jealous, and telling my parents that I wished I could turn into a boy for a day. They brushed it off, of course, I was only five or six at the time.
Growing up I was always more comfortable playing with boys than with girls, we had more in common after all. I was never comfortable referring to myself as a 'girl'. I would just call myself a 'kid'. I actually wondered how it was that the girls in my class could be so okay with being female. I figured that one day I'd wake up and suddenly embrace femininity, that everything would suddenly start to feel 'right' as I got older.
Instead, as I'm sure you all can imagine, the exact opposite happened. I was a late bloomer, fortunately, I didn't start to develop breasts until I was fourteen, and my chest has remained pretty small, but I started to feel even more 'off' afterward. Then I got my first period and I felt extremely depressed, and didn't know why. Shouldn't I have been happy that I was growing up?
Soon I realized that I wasn't developing crushes on boys, like the girls in my class were. But I was starting to see girls in that way. So I thought that maybe I was a lesbian, that all of my discomfort with puberty, and my more masculine behavior all stemmed from being a homosexual. It wasn't until that summer, when I discovered the term 'transexual' on the internet while looking for advice on coming out to my parents, that everything finally started to make sense.
That winter I got my long braids cut off, and started wearing baggier and baggier clothes. I had always worn baggy clothing, so my parents thought nothing of it. But the hair cutting came as a surprise. I didn't feel ready to tell them what I was feeling, so I just said that I was tired of my hair always getting tangled. (Which was true, but certainly not the main reason).
About a year later, I finally told them what was bothering me. They weren't angry, and seemed supportive. Unfortunately, they still refer to me as 'she' and 'daughter', and still use my birth name. I want to ask them to stop, but don't want to come across as rude or anything. I understand that this is a big change for them to get used to, after all. (If anyone here has advice on that, I'd really appreciate it).
I'll be moving out and living on my own soon, and I hope that that will give me the opportunity to make some progress on actually transitioning.
