Man, life can be so stressful.
I'm having a lot of trouble currently in regards to thinking about my gender and this website has so many helpful posts and comments about all topics transgender and I thought I'd finally make an account and see what you guys have to say about my situation.
I am 20 years old and I have grown up male all my life. I've never been a super masculine person; never been super into sports at all, I've always been super empathetic and loving towards everyone, and I've always sort of had trouble fitting in in school and what not. During middle school I had really long hair. I never really wanted to cut it for some reason after I hit 5th grade because I suddenly hated how a buzz cut looked on me. Since middle school I pretty regularly grow my hair out fairly long and then get it cut because it eventually becomes a nuisance.
I always had trouble with bullies in middle school and early high school, have struggled with anxiety since about 4th grade, and depression since middle school.
I had never really struggled with gender all that much for most of my life. I sort of just accepted that this was the way everything had to be and I didn't have much of a problem with it. In elementary school there were a few times I sneaked into the closet and would wear this skirt I had found at school once, but for the most part I was fairly gender conforming and never really had that many issues with being a boy.
In middle school like I said I always wanted my hair kept long and people sometimes bothered me and said it looked too girly, which was stressful but I really hated cutting my hair.
I've never really dressed super masculine, I've always worn skinny jeans and sweatshirts and flannels and mostly dark colors, but I've never really wanted to wear super bright feminine colors or anything.
In high school I often got made fun of for the first couple of years by my friends because of how anxious I was all the time and how fun it was to mess with me (both as a constant punch line for jokes, and also they'd often try to scare me because I had these anxiety-drive really fast automatic reflexes and I couldn't help it but they thought it was hilarious to mess with by waving a hand in front of my face or whatever, just mentioning because maybe all my problems are just anxiety and stress related for all I know). Freshman year was pretty difficult in terms of my friends messing with me and what not. I was always depressed or anxious about something and it was always easy for them to latch onto that ->-bleeped-<- and make it funny.
Sometimes in high school when I had to wear suits and stuff to formal events I internally sort of hated wearing them. Idk why, but it's like I just hated the overmasculinized feeling of a suit.
But then in high school I sort of eventually starting doing somewhat Ok. I was pretty ok with my appearance, my flannels, my jeans and my hair and everything. I was fitting in alright and I had some real friends who didn't screw with me all day every day. I had a couple of really ->-bleeped-<-ty relationships, and I have currently been in a pretty good one with my girlfriend for almost 4 years now.
Senior year I had a really great time, everything seemed happy and I had good friends and my relationship was great and I had fun classes and I didn't have much anxiety or depression or anything.
Things were mostly ok.
Then in college I got a job working as a cashier at Lowe's, I was seeing my girlfriend and friends often enough. (though I was stressed because ended up moving 19 hours away to go to school at her dream school, and this is still something that is hard to deal with and I might end up moving down there next year and putting a pause on my school for a while, but that is another issue entirely but in case this is maybe all just stress related I thought I'd mention it).
But basically at some point probably around 1.5-2 years ago, I started really worrying that I was uncomfortable being male. I think it started when I noticed I was starting to lose my hair. I now have the hairline probably ten to fifteen years older looking than it should, and I do my best to hide it but it is getting very difficult and contributes to a lot of stress and anxiety and depression issues.
I started thinking every day practically about whether I might be transgender possibly, or maybe non-binary or something, idk. And now it's been 1.5-2 years of me thinking about it non-stop and I'm not really all that much closer to figuring out my head than I was before.
Part of me really feels uncomfortable with being physically male sometimes. My body hair, my increasingly broad shoulders, my increasingly masculine and less boyish facial features etc. And part of me feels being uncomfortable always having to pretend to be more masculine than I actually feel inside. I feel like I get along with women so much better than men in a lot of ways, and it is really nice to be able to talk to them and not feel like I have to pretend to be this person I don't feel like. And sometimes I do really wish I had a female body and could just be female. And I really feel sometimes like if I had been born female, I wouldn't be having these feelings of worrying about my gender.
And this feeling some days is like off the walls crazy intense and I get convinced I must be at the very least non-binary and at the most transgender. But then days to a week or two goes by and all of a sudden I feel like everything is fine and I'm not really all that bothered by my male body or presentation that much for a few hours or a day or two (though I will always hate my balding head lol).
And it is just kind of frustrating. And sometimes it makes me feel really anxious or depressed. Sometimes I feel like multiday/week periods of depression are partially to the fault of these feelings.
I have two transgender friends. And because the trans community really is a small population, it seems like I think like I must be fooling myself into thinking these thoughts because how likely really would it be I would have two trans friends and then end up not being cis gender. Like the % of people that are trans is so small, so maybe I'm just worrying about this and making myself think I have problems I don't actually have.
But then I feel what seems like a genuine sense of dysphoria all the time and think maybe there is something to my thinking these things.
But gah. I don't want to be any kind of transgender. It is so much easier if you just fit neatly into a socially acceptable category ;-; I would prefer to just feel how I did around my senior year of high school when I felt like I fit in fairly ok and didn't worry about all this stuff. So many friends and family members would never treat me the same if I were hypothetically say trans or non-binary and actually presented as not male to the world. I know my girlfriend's mom would literally be disgusted with me for the rest of time because she's a super religious Filipino woman.
It is so stressful to always have to be worrying about how I feel like my identify actually fits in as. And its frustrating not feeling like I actually know what I am. I feel like I change my personality depending on the people I'm around all the time and I never actually have a solidified feeling like "this is me". When I'm around certain friends I end up acting much more feminine and feeling different, and when I'm around only my guy friends I end up being much more masculine and making jokes in a very bro-like fashion that sometimes feels like I'm acting.
I thought for a while I might be a cross-dresser, and maybe I just only need to feel feminine sometimes in order to make the feelings go away. (Which might be true for all I know, I've never really tried that a whole lot as a solution) And the thought of being female actually turned me on immensely for a while, not really the wearing of female clothes, but the idea of being female while having sex, and I thought that must be it and that it was just a fetish or something and that I was normal but had this sexual fetish which I could've totally just dealt with. But it kinda stopped being that for me and I still feel the other dysphoric-like feelings.
My girlfriend once put makeup on me and I felt all depressed. Like looking at myself in the mirror it was like this part of me that I could never be and like, this feeling of if I had been born female maybe I'd have looked kinda like this (but better). And it made me feel really sad. Because I will never look female.
But then later that night I pretty much felt ok and didn't have much dysphoria and didn't think about anything for a while.
I had been hoping I'd have a clicking feeling once I had makeup on, like maybe I'd figure out I was definitely not transgender or definitely something, but I don't feel like it really cleared much up for me, maybe it just made me even more confused.
Gah.
Am I just fooling myself and am just a perfectly normal level cisgender person? Am I actually trans but sometimes can just bury the dysphoric feelings better than others? Am I genderfluid? Am I somewhere in the middle of everything?
I don't know and it is scary and frustrating and I just want to feel comfortable in my skin every day.
I know I probably should go see a therapist (which I used to do all the time from fourth grade through middle school but haven't done a whole lot since then other than a few times), and maybe even a gender therapist. And I probably will do these things eventually, but I'm just wondering what you guys think, aside from thinking I am a bit of a mess, where you think I fall on the gender spectrum.
