Quote from: Dietlind on November 27, 2018, 01:05:47 AM
@ Kylo
I have never ever met a FtM trans person (at least not that I know). I read here that most, or at least many MtF trans people feel already very early in their life that they should be a girl, but are stuck in a male body. Did you have the same feeling and wanted to be a boy all your life? Did your parents allow you to life as a boy during the time prior to puberty?
My parents didn't care what I was doing. They didn't impress much on me - their idea of being progressive I guess - although these days they find the whole idea of me being trans distasteful, so I suppose it was only a cursory gesture on their part. . . I remember maybe age 6 or 7 being aware of my anatomy and not giving it much thought, but by age of 8 or 9 I was starting to have issues with it. It came out of nowhere. I didn't mix with other kids much and I practically lived inside our apartment or in the garden barely watched the early 80s TV or talked much with other people. I couldn't have been influenced by much other than what came from inside my own head.
QuoteI have difficulties to comprehend the idea that anybody would want to be a different person than the assigned sex, when this young. Rational thinking cannot to be expected from children that young.
I was a thinker, not sure how deeply at the age of 6 or 7 but I was rational, I know that much... I remember clearly rationalizing what I should do after an (unrelated) frightening situation back then. (I believed that I had heard a ghost speaking in my room. This had never happened before, and never has since. Ghost or not aside, I was sitting in bed planning out whether or not to tell my parents the next day and decided against it, because rationally speaking I had zero proof of the voice or the incident and didn't want to appear foolish or worse, unstable). I must have been 7 at most. By 8 or 9 I remember being self-aware, thinking to myself consciously about my existence and declaring myself aware of things to myself.
QuoteI know that I never had any desire to be either sex, I just did what I was told/taught to be. Somebody decided that I am a boy, and I tried to live the life of a boy. I failed most of the times if I was compared to other boys, but i did not connect it to my non existing gender, but rather to me as a failure. In fact, I never had any real association to any gender, but just did what I felt was expected of me. I always felt more at ease with girls, but partly because they were not in competition with me, and thus I could not fail.
I just wonder how this young life was for a girl who tried to be a boy?
Much the same at first. There was only awareness in the beginning, of myself and my own body and no real basis for comparison. I didn't even have a sibling I could compare myself to until I was 8. But even around 6 or 7 I noticed the behaviors of other kids at school and knew I was not behaving as they expected. I got annoyed at a boy who attached himself to me in order to "protect" me around this age. I didn't know why but I found this to be a problem. The girls did not like me much and tended to shun me. In return I shunned everybody, except a small few kids who for some reason looked past my inability to fit in. Even at that age the girls all flocked to be with each other and the boys usually did too. I didn't identify the problem until a couple of years later but I remember being quite angry if anyone suggested I might be someone's girlfriend. Adults probably put it down to kids and their "cooties" talk, but for me the idea was utterly unimaginable.
The early behaviours that I showed without having any notable influence over me are some of the most compelling evidence I was trans. They nearly always were most obvious around anything concerning male-female dynamics. I would be happy to play with boys and girls, but only so long as the girls were allowing me a "boy" or "animal" (i.e neutral) role to play, and the boys weren't attempting to put me into a "wife" or "girlfriend" role. I still had no idea why this was. I didn't think about it, I just reacted to it. I had not yet declared myself to be masculine at all, but I knew firmly that being put into a female pidgeonhole would have me refusing to play and walking off. This continued for the rest of my life in varying degrees but it was always there - a discomfort with the female side of the sexual dynamic. I rarely considered gender consciously at that time, but reacted predictably whenever someone attempted to put me in that box. My grandmother tried to encourage feminine behaviors in me and failed. When she started doing this (must have been when I was 8 or 9) and actively started to tell me I "should do x because that's what girls do" I suddenly realized I was feeling disgusted about that idea. I might have been metaphysically rational about the basic world around me but I was effectively gender-blind in many ways - it did take some time before I even realized these people thought I
was a girl, because apparently I didn't. I guess the best way to describe it would be that I knew I was a girl on some primitive level, but I didn't truly
believe it. When it came home to me that everyone else believed it, I started to actively psychologically rebel. It took about 9 years to get to that point, being left mostly alone to figure it all out for myself since my parents never impressed any roles on me. They knew I was strange from day one and they made mention of it sometimes, but never did much more than that.
There were no sons in the immediate family either to facilitate any recognition (or lack of recognition) of gender. Maybe if I had seen my brother more often than I did at that age, I might have become aware but I remained half-blind to my own gender till puberty. Half ignorant and half hyper aware of "something wrong", but not knowing what that was.
