Hi all. Thought I would come to you all to see if anyone else experiences this and see if you might know what's going on with me.
I am seeing a therapist, and I have tried to discuss this with her, and she's given me ideas, which I'll explain at the end of my post. This could get long, as it's extremely hard for me to describe since it has to do with gender identity, something already difficult to conceptualize for most.
Quick details about me are I am 6 months into my transition, 5 months on full HRT. Before 6 months, I had no idea I was trans (more like I'd forgotten the language to express it thanks to heavy repression/denial), but had unmistakable trans feelings for a year, consisting of the usual longing and aching to look like a woman, and that vague pain of feeling it's impossible. 8 years previously I had realized I was transgender, but fear brought me to denial and repression, like I had lived in since childhood, complete with random shameful acts of crossdressing and fantasies. So everything finally fell into place 6 months ago to allow me to rediscover my trans identity, and this time I was happy to embrace it and move forward, starting hormones a month later.
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To put it simply. A lot of times (at least 50% of the time?), I can't feel my gender. Doubting that I am actually a girl is something that happens daily. It's entirely fear based. There's no joy in the doubting, it's painful because it feels like my gender will be ripped away from me and I'll be forced to go back to living as a male.
I want certainty and I don't have that certainty. All I have is that I'm 100% certain I want more than anything to be a girl. I want to be trans, just so that I can transition to female. The issue comes in there, is that I don't know if I am a girl.
Does that make sense? I can hardly feel my female gender. I'm never experiencing a moment where I ask myself the question "Do you want to be female?" and the answer isn't an emphatic "YES". I would give anything to be reborn cis female. I feel like the fact that I was born male makes it impossible somehow for me to ever be what I feel would be a real girl.
I don't feel like a real girl. Maybe for a short few times each day I'll feel like a girl, and those times are my happiest, filled with joy and contentment and peace like I've never known, like everything is perfect and right with the world because I feel right with my gender. Other times, I feel nothing.
I end up in this default state, where I don't feel any gender. And it terrifies me because it seems to default to male. There's a voice inside me that's menacing and hateful and it tells me "See? You're male." And my heart's response to that is pain and fear, because I don't want to be a male. I want to be a woman. I don't ever want to go back to living as male. I feel as though if I had to go back, I would have to be heavily medicated to endure living as a male.
So this is probably confusing right? What's my problem? It sounds like I'm on the right path so what am I worried about?
I hate that feeling. I hate when the feeling of being a woman leaves me, and I'm left with nothing. From pure happiness, to frustration and fear and in those moments I would give anything to have been born cis female. Anything to be suddenly transformed and not have to feel that pain. In those moments I look in the mirror and I see all my masculine features and I want to scream and cause my physical harm out of rage and hurt. I feel hopeless and helpless and like I will never be ok. It makes me feel fake, fraudulent. I catch myself feeling this way in public and I'm no longer a cute girl, but a big hulking male who might as well have a beard and poorly fitting women's clothing on. The same monster I saw in the mirror everytime I crossdressed throughout my life.
Is this dysphoria? Is this my own special brand of dysphoria hell? Because it isn't just based in how I look and my body, it's based in feel.
Maybe I'm heavily confused about what I should be feeling. Maybe my issue is that I feel like a girl 24/7, and I have no frame of reference to know that I feel like a girl, because I've always believed based on my body and society that I am a male, and forced myself to swallow that lie?
This has been following me around since day 1, and I don't know what to do. They say that cis people can't feel their gender, that they just are. Am I experiencing a lack of dysphoria, feeling a gender-blindness of being female, and associating it with the opposite? Or do I have some hidden male identity or do I have it all wrong?
I'm tired of suffering over this. I'm tired of hurting. I'm tired of it never changing. I'm in pain and I don't know where to turn anymore. I don't want to be genderfluid or non binary or cis male, I want to be a woman. Why? I don't know, I just do. I'm openly trans, I'm full time in my female gender, and that's what I want and when it's working, it's beautiful and perfect. I want that all of the time.
edit: My girlfriend thinks I might be conflating mood with gender, that I am always female but feel it best when I am in a good mood, and don't feel it at all when I'm in a worse mood.
