I have difficulty picking a specific radio button on this poll. For me the question isn't so simple.
I was manifesting cross-gender behavior as early as the age of 4, when I first began preschool. I felt impelled to align with the girls by inner urges that I did not know how to consciously articulate or understand at the time. I grew up always feeling uncomfortable, with a sense that I was a misfit, but unable to articulate to myself exactly why-- largely because of fear, and because nothing in my upbringing allowed any awareness of gender issues. You just did what you were told, or suffered punishment. As it was, I suffered plenty for not fitting in with the boys and constantly needing to align with the girls, let alone pursuing that issue in any depth. The authority figures maintained strict denial of that, and I wasn't bold enough to challenge the system, so I was coerced into denial too. I always hated the male roles imposed on me, and yearned for the feminine, but felt forced into denial.
In retrospect, I always felt drawn to model my life on that of my sister, so that I quietly absorbed as much as I could of her girlhood, vicariously and secretly, to avoid reprimands. I read her books, played her girly games and dolls, attended her tea parties and her Girl Scout meetings. I wore her dress when I was 10, and liked it, but only one time because I was afraid of being caught. My full awareness of who I was only evolved gradually over the years, to the extent I was able to get past the denial, and it wasn't until I was in college that I realized I should have been a woman. But it took many more years before I stopped burying the desire by telling myself it was impossible, and embraced my reality.
So these issues are not necessarily clearcut. My self-knowledge and actions are in bits and pieces spread out here and there throughout my lifetime, and it was only later in life that I was able to put all the pieces together, when in retrospect it all added up to clarity about who I had always been inside. And how through childhood trauma I had deeply buried so many pieces of evidence that when taken cumulatively in the full light, made it clear who I really am.
The standard, classical transsexual narrative has us all getting up on soapboxes from the age of 3 and proclaiming our true genders to the world in no uncertain terms. But I feel that stereotype does a disservice to those of us who lacked the boldness to challenge the system though we always knew inside something was different. We don't all have to fit exactly the same model to be accepted as legit.
As I've answered before to this question, the answer I could give might be age 4, 10, 22, 37, 43, or 45-- depending on how the awareness of this condition is defined. I spent most of my life deep in denial of this reality thanks to the trauma around it from early childhood.
