Childhood Normalcy?

[Bunnyfulwanderer]

I wasn't sure how to title this topic. but here it goes. How many rather then, t-guys roughousing with the boys and being "tomboys" or the t-girls playing with their sisters dolls (only had a brother ) they just lived the best they could and tried to meet their parents expectations? how many lived a fairly "normal" childhood. I always here these people saying "I always knew" and I always did too...on some level..but it took me a long time for me to accept I could actually BE a girl...I just felt trapped. so all in all? is this normal?

and should that even matter?

[Mr. Fox]

I am FtM, but was not incredibly boyish as a child.  In my case, it is not a matter of trying to meet people's expectations, but rather I was (and am) very feminine.  I could have been born a cisgendered male, and I would still have played barbies with my sister.  There are many people who didn't figure out until they were older, but I think these people often don't say so because they feel less genuine for not figuring things out until their teens or later.  I figured things out when I was 12, which is fairly early, but at the time I thought I was slow in the coming.

[Nero]

I think my childhood was pretty normal. I was boyish, but also did what was expected of me. The school dresscode called for a skirt; I hated it but wore it.
There were some things I had no choice in.
I liked to play, but I also liked to read, draw, and other 'feminine' activities.

[sd]

I tried to be feminine a bit, that went over really well so I made sure there was little question without going overboard. When I dressed I kept myself covered up. No shorts, long sleeves, hats, etc and usually dark colors. Sports, no, but I did do woodworking and I am/was into cars. A lot of what I did was rather genderless otherwise or a little of each.

I wouldn't say it was exactly normal.

[VioletNight]

My childhood was fairly normal. I enjoyed the normal boy toys and electronics. I did (and still do) have a fairly large collection of stuffed animals that I played with through my early teens. Although I always considered that it was just me being childish. I never really paid much attention to or cared about anyone's gender, including my own, when I was young. I did not think about it really until my early teens.

[Ceri]

I did well on non-gender-intensive things like music. I was always terribly shy about anything that would put me on much exhibition, like showers for gym or pool, which contributed to my getting into such awful habits about exercise.

[Luc]

I was very much a tomboy as a kid, and didn't bother with trying to please my parents as per their expectation of me as a girl until adolescence. I believed myself to be a boy/wanted to be a boy entirely from somewhere around age 5-7, but didn't even know what transsexuality was until age 18 or so. Yes, I led a sheltered life. When I was 10 I found out what a lesbian was, and decided I probably was one, since I'd always been attracted to girls... despite the fact that I never felt like a lesbian apart from this fact, it was the best assumption I could make until I learned that it was possible to be trans.

But I remember having a very happy childhood. My parents didn't seem to mind at the time that I preferred bugs and toy cars to dolls, and I was happy to be who I was until that fated day I found out puberty had begun.

SD

[Rae09]

I was happy to be who I was until that fated day I found out puberty had begun.

That sounds exactly like me.  Up until I hit puberty and the T started kicking in, I lived a pretty normal childhood (albeit sheltered a bit), played toys "reserved for boys" and such.  But once I hit my early teens I automatically felt uncomfortable in my own body.  I did some CD here and there, but I never really questioned my gender.

While I had seen TV specials of people getting SRS and somewhat fantasized about being one of them, it wasn't until my first sexual encounter that I really realized something was wrong.  I was really uncomfortable with the whole "act", though I went along with it because I did care for the person (and I tend to be emotionally needy).

As for should it matter? I can't really answer that question because I'm still coping with that (took me months to see a GID therapist because I felt like I didn't fit the "criteria" and I would be shot down)...so yeah...woohoo for a novel

tl;dr felt normal until puberty kicked in, then the poo hit the fan

[Northern Jane]

Sadly I wasn't "normal" right from the beginning. I fit comfortably with the girls and not at all with the boys but didn't even realize I had a problem until about age 8 when I realized (with shock) that my body wasn't normal and might never be normal. When puberty hit it became even more apparent that I wasn't (physically) normal and my rebellion against my assigned sex became an all-out war.

It wasn't until years after transition/SRS (1974) that I realized that I was normal - normal for a girl cast into such ugly circumstances. Just plain ol' "normal". The only thing the least bit noteworthy was that I survived it all.

[Bunnyfulwanderer]

I like the answers this is getting I didn't say as much as I could have. I was just opening the discussion for introspection...and...well...yeah I know what everyone means...theirs many paths to the same place...and everyone is different...normal is just a general consensus...and not really a goal anyone should strive for.

[MaggieB]

My childhood was anything but normal. I was raised in a small town of 3000 and was not only trans but illegitimate. ( The only one in my age group)  I did not really understand that I was a girl but because I was told that I was a mistake and got badly mistreated by almost everybody, I assumed it was because of that. I recall looking at boys and wondering why they were so different and if I was even human.  It haunts me to this day fifty years later. It bothered me so much so that I wrote my book Dorothy's Boy in part to get some resolution about my childhood.
Now as I think back on it, I realize that it was my gender variance that probably got me the abuse.  Had I been a tough guy, I know I would not have been treated that way.  But the combo of being the only illegitimate kid and an effeminate one to boot, in a small town made for a rough ride and I have got the scars to prove it.

Maggie

[sneakersjay]

I had a fairly normal childhood.  The day I discovered that boys had penises and I didn't was a shock, because I thought I was a boy despite my parents calling me a girl.  I was a tomboy, pretty much, and my dad let my sister and I be tomboys, we played catch, baseball, etc, and let us get dirty.  Puberty was hard, because suddenly my body developed the wrong way, and I became extremely self-conscious about it, withdrew (became very shy and introverted), and eventually anorexic.  Parents by that time were very religious and I couldn't reconcile in my head wanting to be with a girl sexually, only as a boy.  Maybe I was gay (wouldn't fly in my family) but knew it wasn't that (I wasn't wanting sex with girls as a girl, but as a guy).  But yeah, overall, until puberty things were pretty cool.  Hung out at a dairy farm from ages 10-13 with all the neighborhood boys and the farmer's nephews.

Jay

[Pica Pica]

i spent most of my childhood pretending to be a talking bird or playing with puppets - i played with a few dolls and that, and my playmobil pirates as well, but mostly it was puppets and imaginary talking birds. I don't know if that is normal...i guess it is.

[icontact]

My parents are extremely conservative so as soon as I got old enough for girl's clothing my size to only be available in what they thought was too revealing, I was dressed in boys' clothes. I didn't mind it, one year I tried to be really girly because I thought I didn't have friends for that reason, gave up, went back.

[myles]

I had nothing near a normal childhood. I was a product of the 60's my mom ended up having 3 kids by the time she was 21 (started at 17).  We were totally raised as hippies, my brother was names after Taj Mahal, I after a Beatles song. Anyway she just decided it would be easier to raise us all as boys. We normally wore hand me down clothes and stuff from Woolworth and so forth. I was always a tom boy and always hung out with the boys and wanted to do what they were doing, even more so than my brothers. Never did the girl thing at all.
Myles

[Pica Pica]

your brother was named after Taj Mahal, Cool.

[Jaimey]

I was a tomboy, but it was totally encouraged...which is weird considering how backward and old fashioned my dad and his family are.  I played softball (which was like religion to my family...EVERYBODY played) and I always played with boys.  The biggest compliment when I was a kid was "you throw like a boy."  I had dolls, but I didn't play with them much.  I loved stuffed animals, but I never had many of those.  I spent most of my time outdoors.  My parents were very much of the "get up and walk it off" school of thought and I was always told not to cry and if I did cry, I was a "crybaby".  I wore dresses to church, but that's it.  In high school, I was in drum line and I played tenors/quints...but then again, our drum line was mostly girls, which is highly unusual.   

Wow...I got some really mixed messages as a kid.  I'm astounded that anyone was shocked that I wasn't "girly" as a teenager...

[Reese]

When I was about six, my brother got in an alcohol induced accident, starting the first of his many misdemeanors that occupied a great deal of my parents time. I was thrown to almost live with my neighbors: five boys. I can't help but wonder how much of my personality is attributed to the fact that nearly every moment of my childhood was spent with those idiots (and I say that in a brotherly way). I don't know if, had I not had them, I would have pursued more feminine things, but I suspect not.

[Carolyn]

Define Normal, is it to be as your parents saw fit when you were a child or to be how society saw fit when you were a child? If we go by either one I would saw, normalcy is something that has never quite been in reach for me, as a child I was a loner, in everything, no friends, didn't do things with my family, I was just away in my own world, it just happened that world was video games. In school I was shunned and separated from the other students, my teachers claimed I was retarded, however in truth I didn't care. At home if I wasn't playing Mario or Sonic, I was drawing video game based comics or I was asleep, the closest thing I had to "friends" in my early years were my cousins Matt & Justin only one of which I still have respect for. I had a little sister and two older female cousins, however I never interacted with them. The games My two cousins and I played were mainly hide and seek. About age 4 I become self-aware that something wasn't right with me, about age 5 1/2 is when my normalcy died completely. I just stopped interacting with my family and I went into my own world, so yea, define normal.

[Yochanan]

I was a "tomboy" I guess. Dressed in my male best friend's hand-me-downs, and felt excluded/awkward a lot of the time because I was really little and couldn't keep up with the other boys sometimes and didn't look like them. I got my first female friend in second grade but still did not think about gender at all. In fact, I didn't think about gender until I was in my late teens, maybe because I had a serious relationship from 14-17 and knew what was expected of me and tried to do it. Now that I think about it, when I dressed femininely, I always felt like I was cross-dressing. I feel like, if I'd been born a bio-male and my parents had been okay with me living en femme part time, that my life would have been the same. I've always been on the fence, but it felt pretty normal to me, I guess.