For me it's been an awakening process. I've spent the first 39 years of my life repressing the feelings I've had. Since I was 5, I can remember having feelings of jealousy toward girls, wishing I had been born a girl, looking in the mirror and not feeling connected to my own reflection, etc. I always thought I was a freak, and the shame caused me to bury those feelings so deeply not even my parents got wise to it. In my teen years, it really started to surface with a vengeance. I started experimenting with crossdressing both in private and in public. Still in secret moments or when no one would recognize me so ultimately still closeted. After getting married I tried a couple Halloweens crossdressed before I finally came out to my wife as having a cross dressing fetish. Still in denial of what was truly going on, I knew it was more than a fetish but refused to admit I was transsexual. In the last few years I came to understand the term genderfluid and thought that was finally an explanation I could support. More than crossdressing less than truly transsexual. I started finally working with a counselor and peeling away the layers of conditioned behavior, denial and repression and I find once again I'm still denying myself. Finally, I've come to terms with the fact that I am a trans woman, I've been female my whole life. I've tried to be "strong" and hide it and be the good male husband, father, etc. but I can't do it anymore.
Why do I want to transition? Because I've come to realize that what has been "normal" for me for 39 years is a state that I don't need to live in. I've never known a life where I was actually comfortable just being me, I've always felt constricted, repressed, hidden, so much so that I never understood that there was something more. Now I "see the light" and I know I can actually make myself much happier. I can be the person I really always have been. I can stop trying to have people see me as a typical man and finally let them interact with me as a woman. That is why I want to transition.