things below is just me thinking out loud, need somewhere to write out my thoughts are they bounce around my head and drive me crazy
I think I tend to over think things at times. I ponder over things constantly till I grow numb towards the subject and push it to the back of my mind. This has happen with my gender several times. Starting when I was 14 and first learned exactly what a transgender person was. Again when I was 16 and wished I had been a boy so that boy male-ish features wouldn't seem so out of place as they were on a female body. And then again when I was 22, this time it lasting 7 months and is still going on. I can't help but think that if it was a simple phase that it wouldn't keep coming back, each time a little bit stronger than the last. At 14 it was doubt and the conclusion that I couldn't be. At 16 it was simply a wish, a wish to have reason behind why I felt the way I did, like I was simply faking being a girl and failing the performance, but I was to feminine and while the thought of being born a boy was nice I didn't exactly feel like a boy. So I told myself that in the next life I would definitely be born male, and then I focused on other things other than the fact that I hated myself. With trying to fix the mess that was my high school GPA and then taking care of health problems for the next few years, it was pretty easy thing to do. I don't know why dressing up as a guy and looking in the mirror made me happy, but it did. It felt right enough for me to question everything. Slowly at first. Thinking perhaps I was gender fluid, because there was just no way I could be a full blown transgender person, or that transition was something I needed. I was not unhappy with my life, and I was under the impression that all trans people were unhappy, it was the only story that I knew. Then looking more on it I no longer felt that gender fluid fit. My gender waxed and waned, but it never really flowed. I searched for other other labels. Demi-boy, bi-gender, transmasculine. Masculine, male, boy. My brain seemed obsessed with finding a label that proved that there was a hint of manliness in me. I have to be male, I have to be male. It was what I was telling myself, because I felt way happier presenting as male than I ever had as a female. Stress and anxiety that I didn't even know I had seemed to melt away. But it was replaced by other anxieties. Going out in public in a binder, not shaving my legs, wearing male clothing. I was trying to break out side a box that i had been in my whole life, and it was terrifying. I was raised to always be conscious of what other people thought of me. I was raised to worry what a stranger who would only see me for 20 seconds of my life would think about me. I was raised by a family that was worried about how the world would view them, after all they were involved in the politics of the small Southern town they lived in. While I had not spoken to that part of my family in 10 years, 13 years of training is hard to rub off. And if I was worried what strangers would think it was worse worrying about what the other half of my family would think. The ones who accepted me no matter what, the ones who would let me run across the country side barefooted and in my brothers' clothes as kid. It was their reaction I was worried about. I could not bring myself to tell them, to ask them to use male pronouns, or help me find a male name. If i told them and it turned out I wasn't, I wouldn't ever be able to live the shame down.
I told myself that I wasn't lucky enough to be trans. I knew lucky wasn't the right word to use, but that was how I felt. The the trans men I had started watching on youtube were lucky because they knew enough about themselves to know that transitioning was right. They got to be boys, while I felt I would always be somewhere in gender limbo. Never a female, but never quite a man no matter how much I wished it to be.
They only answer I had was that I had to be faking, going through a phase, out for attention. But if I was out for attention would I really be biting my cheek and keeping quite instead of shouting it to the whole world. Instead I sit behind a computer screen and only talk about how I feel on two forums.
And then at some point I realized that I wanted to transition, but to what I didn't know. I didn't want a female body, I wasn't female no matter how feminine my personalty may be. But I didn't want a male body either. In a way I liked that my hips were a little bit larger than my waist, the only thing that never changed was that the boobs had to go. I wanted to transition to me, and I wanted HRT because I wanted that male hormone, just one more step to being the guy I always didn't know I wanted to be. At night I know this is what I want, but by the next day I am riddle with doubts and fear. I wonder how much of it is fear of what people will thing, some sort of shame. But at the same time I have a fear that I am not trans. Because if I am not trans, and I am not female, then what I am I?
Sometimes I wonder what would of happen if I had never started questioning again. Would I of lived a content life of a women, or would it just of popped up again at some later point. I can't help be feel it would of popped up again. It has a habit of doing so no matter how much you push it away, and once you give in to it there isn't much of a going back.
