Susan's Place Transgender Resources

For me I started wearing my moms pantyhose when I was 10, but honestly I teeter tottered between feeling male and female my whole life, only now at age 40 have I decided to attempt to live full time as female. Its a strange place to be but part of my problem was the fear from the way I was raised and dealing with feeling judged by God and Family (but now I realize it would just be family).


I saw on Dr. Phil some children know they are a girl or a boy at age 4 even and would refuse to wear clothing unless it was what matched them. See I never really questioned my clothing till I hit my 20's

It was around 4 for me. Definetly 5 since just before starting kindergarten I have a very clear memory of putting on my older sister's school uniform and then being told boy's don't wear skirts to school. BTW, I took a pass on my older brothers clothes.

6-7. I told my mom to call me "Billy" and wanted to go to first grade as Billy.

--Jay J

I always knew I was "different" but didn't think it had anything to do with gender until I was 50.

I carefully kept it from myself until I was 23 (and knew for sure I wasn't moving back home after college - so it was safe). But I'd spent my childhood fascinated with trans fiction, and fascinated with strong women.

Even in my earliest memories I knew something was different about me.

I always played with the girls until it became really uncool and I had to switch to the boys to avoid teasing. Dont remember the exact age but I remember standing in front of a mirror wishing I looked different. At a very young age

I was three.. maybe four.. I remember the exact incedent, my mom and I were at the grocery store and she kept getting mad at the other women there because they were calling me pretty.. even then I had VERY long eye lashes and with no glasses you could actually see them!  Any way that was when she explained that girls were pretty and boys were handsom.. and I knew. I wanted to be pretty.. but couldn't  :-\

6th grade I remember telling myself if I was as feminine (petite, girlish, etc.) as the boy sitting next to me in English class then I would definitely become a girl. 

Boom.

i started throwing tantrums at age 3 wen my parents tried putting me in anything that was girls

I have Only 2 memories from before the age of 11, both of them in first grade. I had a really high voice, remember wanting to be cast in the school play as the wife of the main character, mostly because I loved her singing parts better and could do it better than the girls anyway. The other is a little weird and dont want to talk about it, but involves wanting to be a girl too

I was 19 years old. A female friend chastised me for crying at an Abraham Lincoln exhibit. Somehow, don't ask me how, this caused me to go to the doctor to get my T levels checked. Nothing came of it because my T levels looked fine. The doctor failed to check my DHT levels. Fastforward three years and I started to do some self-reflection. Suddenly feelings I had from puberty made sense. Went to a new doctor who checked all my levels and discovered I had 5 alpha whatever its name is, doesn't really matter, and wasn't making any DHT. A few months later I started HRT.

Before I was 19, I thought I was normal. Don't most guys want to menstruate? Why would anyone want to touch their penis? What do you even do with it? Besides urinate.Yep, all thoughts I thought were typical for guys. 

I think that it was somewhere around 16 years old and high school when it came sharply into focus for me. I never fit in but don't remember thinking too much about WHY I didn't fit in until my later teenage years. Access to resources was sketchy (there wasn't an interweb back then) so I didn't figure out exactly what was going on until I was about 45.

at age 4/5 my mom made me wear a beautiful dress she had sown for a friend. I was soooooo happy to wear it I kept dancing around the house and moving around in it. She then jokingly told me that you should have been a girl. That's when it hit me that I was not in a girl's body and I was in the wrong body. Till date I have always had a lot of feminine mannerisms even when I tried to live in denial and try to be man which I am not.

Growing up I have always preferred spending time playing with girls/around girls and girly games and masculine games usually bored me, except for soccer/football.

Around guys I was just an uncomfortable mess and silent and quiet most of the time.

I even got teased and bullied and sometimes even sexually harassed a lot in school, growing up in an all boy school - luckily though, 2-3 years before I could leave school the school became a coed and I was immediately paired off and grouped and asked to sit with the new girls to join our school - at the time there was just 5 girls - with me probably the 5th ;)
Although now its a proper coed with a lot of women/girls in that school. No-one would even realize/remember the hell it once was.

edit: growing up I never stopped wishing that when I woke up I would be a girl or if I tried hard enough my junk would fall off.

As I have said before, I lived a pretty androgynous childhood.  There wasnt any strong female or male influence, both my parents are very calm people.

In terms of clothes and stuff I didnt really care, was just picky.  I always had a feminine energy, ya know hindsight is 20/20 but never the kind that made people hate me.  I was well liked...

I was different,  I felt I was and knew I was but at that age I didn't understand gender. I slowly started to repress myself in an attempt to be what everyone expected me to but I was never like the other guys around me... but no one seemed to care. 

It wasn't until the onset of puberty where things started to spiral out of control and I started understanding myself on a deeper level.

I'm kind of the same as Rita. One of the reasons my mom has had so much trouble accepting what I'm telling her about my identity is that I didn't really express any desire to wear or do stereotypically "girls" things when I was young. The thing is, I don't think I had a strong sense of gender identity before I hit puberty and it started becoming a big issue. I grew up as a geek, liking geeky things like science fiction and video games, and I had geeky friends, both male and female. It just didn't make much difference.

Honestly, I'm still much the same way in a lot of respects. The thing is that at some point puberty hit and that was when it became really clear that my body was turning into something I just wasn't comfortable with, but deep down, beyond my sense that my body ought to be female (or at least more female than it is now), I don't feel like I fit into the stereotypical gender roles one way or the other. To some extent, my real gender is "geek," which I think there's a good argument for recognizing as a gender (or at least a flavor of gender) in its own right.

I guess in some sense I'm really more "genderqueer," but I'm reluctant to phrase it that way because I'm afraid others will use language like that to invalidate my identity, refuse to call me by my preferred pronouns and question me going on HRT.

At four years of age, I felt everyone else was 'alien'. Everyone else seemed to be following a preset of commands and etiquette that I found indecipherable. The boys I always found incredibly aggressive. A friend of mine, who I knew from kindergarten, recently described my behaviour at that time as otherworldly. Even today, I find most people appear simply as automatons following a rigid set of rules, almost Stepford Wivesque.

Quote from: agfrommd on September 20, 2012, 05:55:00 PM
I always knew I was "different" but didn't think it had anything to do with gender until I was 50.

Same with me except I'm 24.

Probably since I was about 12-13, you know when you first start thinking about things other then the sand box or crayons.  I have had this sense about me that there was just something a little bit off kilter, like I was an alien, or a superhero, or a girl.  Well, I have not herd back from the mother ship and I have not had to pick up my cape from the dry cleaners...so that just leaves one more option.

Quote from: TessaM on September 21, 2012, 12:58:36 PM
I was 4 years old. I always watched sailor moon. I always sat to pee. I identified with the "girl" characters in cartoons. I really knew I was different on my first day of pre school. The teacher instructed the boys to go on the left side of the room, and the girls on the right side. I went on the rightside because, I am a girl. the teacher "corrected" me. I cried. I was traumatized. It clicked that very day that I was "different."

Ha, I was in a sailor moon club in elementary school, and the only "boy" in the group xD. Well it wasnt really a club club but it was close enough.

I had so much fun trading VHS tapes and the such ^.^ and I was part of the mailing list as well.

Now that I think about it, I was lucky no one made fun of me xD

well also after watching Jem and the Holograms that really sent me headed in a womanly direction. You have to understand this was recent for me, I wonder why I never had any real desires to be a girl until after puberty, seems like all of you have felt this before that. I only briefly did, and its only now at age 40 that I want to transform...from Jerrica into Jem heheh

For me, I remember first having confusing thoughts about my gender identity at age 8/9. Throughout the next 11 or so years I fought and repressed these feelings for fight or flight reasoning. Eventually during my junior year of college(this year) I finally realized and fully accepted that I wanted to transition. I am extremely happy with the progress I have made already and looking back, my only regret is not figuring it out sooner and starting earlier.

I was raised as a girl for 5 years, then my parent decided that a girl couldn't get into med school at that time. So she changed me to male. I knew what I was as soon as I was cognitive, age 4 - 5.

I was in daycare at around 3 and accidentally walked in on someone changing a boy's diaper.  And I was all, "Hey, that's what's missing!"

I wouldn't learn what trans was until I was about 16, but I played a lot of MMOs for several years and would always make my characters male, never wore bras my entire life because they made my boobs look bigger, and wore baggy clothes all the time to hide my figure.  At 16 when I started to figure out what being trans meant, I kind of freaked out and started wearing a bunch of makeup and frilly clothes to deny myself.  About a year later I decided that even if I was trans, I didn't need to transition, and I could just be a tomboy.  But the longer I thought about it the more it bugged me and at 18 I just gave in to it.

There is no surrender  ;D  @ Above poster

When I was a kid I had severe behavioral problems so I drowned them out in video games
When I played video games I always chose female characters
When I chose female characters my dad would be a bit weirded out but didn't care too much.


It wasn't until I was 8 or 10 that I wanted to wear my moms clothes but I was deathly terrified, I only tried it a couple of times. Makeup the same way, I guess I was unlucky I didn't get caught earlier on because I didn't bother coming out under a few years ago. My mom has been super cool with it, my dad died back in 06' but when I was 13 he told me "if you are gay or anything else just let me know, I will love you regardless" i wish I would have told him sooner. Then again I didn't know much about it other than I wanted to be a girl. It seems silly now honestly. All that hiding I did.

When I was 13, I just assumed I was a very hard core tomboy up until then and that it was normal for a tomboy to want to actually be a boy.

When I was 13 there was a day when I wondered why I kept thinking about my female best friend so much. Then it hit me that I fancied her, but I couldn't understand why if I liked a girl I felt so strongly I was straight. I felt 'lesbian' and 'gay' didn't fit me at all but 'straight' did. That's when my brain just said 'because you're a boy, you're trans' and I nearly died lol.

Should I be concerned that my desire to live as female came later than some of you? Do you think that makes a difference?

Should I also be concerned that part of me thinks like a male and part of me thinks like a female when I compare myself againts other people?

Quote from: Shawn Sunshine on September 24, 2012, 02:16:02 PM
Should I be concerned that my desire to live as female came later than some of you? Do you think that makes a difference?

Should I also be concerned that part of me thinks like a male and part of me thinks like a female when I compare myself againts other people?

Not at all, it doesn't come out all the time as bluntly.  I am sure hindsight has been 20/20 for you but there has not been any real CONNECTION until recently.

I think my generation has less of a hard time coming out younger.  Society has changed signifcantly.


@ above above
I always considered tomboy to be a lady, that was just interested in more boyish things but in ways still act and identify as a woman.  You can be girly tomboy, or boyish tomboy. 

To feel like a boy and want to be a boy in more ways than just simple feeling is what made you a boy  ;D  I do believe there can be femine FtM's that would fit the girly side of masculinity as much as there is the omg brutish manly man side as well.

Most of us start in the middle and slowly steer towards one direction without going too far.

My theory is there are actually 3 parts that make us who we are.

The first part is obviously the gender we identify with, the second part is our sexuality, and the third part is where we land in our gender identitys spectrum

For girls

|------------------------|------------------------|
Girly Girl                  Tomboy                   Butch


For guys

|------------------------|-------------------------|
Effeminate man      Todays geek             Manly Man

Quote from: Rita on September 24, 2012, 05:20:22 PM
Not at all, it doesn't come out all the time as bluntly.  I am sure hindsight has been 20/20 for you but there has not been any real CONNECTION until recently.

I think my generation has less of a hard time coming out younger.  Society has changed signifcantly.

Plus its talked about a lot more. Had I not stubbled across it when I was 18, i'd most likely still be none the wiser today. Still drifting through life thinking I was a girl but it would have been better as a boy.

it doesn't really matter whether you are effeminate/ girly or masculine/ Butch what matters is how you see yourself

you need to respect and love yourself when coming out and when realizing we are different even then things like age, ability, knowledge , money and other factors would always affect when we transition

I guess I must have been 15-17 when I came out and have no doubt in my mind that my life would be lot more different if I had the support , knowledge and the courage/ conviction to insist on who I was and how people should treat me

sometimes you really just need to believe in yourself and who you are - but that's probably the most important thing

I must have been around 7 when I really started feeling like I was different. I never really understood it for a very very long time but I started experimenting with my moms clothing when I was around nine or ten. I tended to repress a lot of my childhood and so it's difficult for me to pin point exactly when it was. Finally managed to come to terms with it when I was 32. I've never looked back since I started living full time June 1st 2010.

Quote from: Shawn Sunshine on September 24, 2012, 02:16:02 PM
Should I be concerned that my desire to live as female came later than some of you? Do you think that makes a difference?

Should I also be concerned that part of me thinks like a male and part of me thinks like a female when I compare myself againts other people?

Nope, it's all circumstance. When I was a kid I had cable, it helped show me that there were trans out there, I also got sent to a alternative school where there was a trans girl there. Hell I still think like a male sometimes. It's not that I am, it's just that I've been there. Etc. comparing yourself against others is the quickest way to depression. I know that all too well *hugs*

I dunno. My memories are pretty fragmented in some ways and I don't trust them very much.

I know I spent my first day of kindergarten with everyone thinking I was a girl. But I don't actually remember the day anymore or how it happened or why. My mum just knows that happened because she corrected the teacher when she came to pick me up.

I remember discovering that most boys think it's better to be a boy and being really surprised by that when I was about 8. I'd always kind of thought it was better to be a girl, and being a boy was like taking black in chess. It sucked, but someone had to do it. I guess that's when I realized I was different.

I started getting picked on for being girly when I was 11. But I didn't really understand why. I was raised to believe that boys and girls were basically the same except for our physical forms. That our brains are the same and work the same. So the whole thing was super confusing.

The only time I ever really dressed up as a girl was for Halloween when I was 12, and nobody knew because I was dressing up as a girl who dressed like a boy.

And then of course the dysphoria hit when I started puberty at 13. That was the definitive "something is really not okay" moment.

I didn't find out about the option of transition till I was 21. Before then I'd thought trans people were basically just crossdressers and I didn't like dresses or skirts or makeup so it didn't seem to have anything to do with me. I just knew I was broken.

Quote from: Shawn Sunshine on September 24, 2012, 02:16:02 PM
Should I be concerned that my desire to live as female came later than some of you? Do you think that makes a difference?

Should I also be concerned that part of me thinks like a male and part of me thinks like a female when I compare myself againts other people?

Well, my desire to live as female didn't really crystallize till I was 21. And I'm still not sure I really like it. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it isn't. It's sort of just a by-product of changing my body and legal status in society. I mean I'm happy I'm not lying to everyone anymore, but dealing with gender police is not super fun on either side of the barrier. Transition and dysphoria are much more physical things for me than social things. I'm super happy with what I've done with my body.

I'm not sure what thinking like a male or like a female is exactly. I think like a person.

I guess I have a weird relationship to this stuff. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of looking at transition as a monolithic whole. If you change your name, it should be because you really, really want to change your name because it will make you feel better about yourself or you want the social changes that will bring. If you go on hormones, it should be because you really, really want to go on hormones because of what the hormones are going to do for your body (and possibly your mind). Etc.

Making those decisions based on "am I female?" seems... odd, to me. You don't have to see yourself as female to go on hormones or to change your name (or have various surgeries or change your gender markers or...). I don't really see the relevance. Maybe it's because I think like a person and not like a female.

For me this is really difficult to figure out, since I have only been having active thoughts about me as androgynous for 1-2 years.

Somewhere deep inside it feels like I've known about this as long as I can remember. I was really unsure before, but nowadays I get more and more realizations about this. The way I've always used my facial expressions really vividly trying to look more like a girl (well-trained facial muscles do miracles). Or how I once tried to by some teenage girl clothes and people started to comment about how I can't pull them off.

I know I've always gotten the feeling I don't fit into groups of boys or girls. My typical friendships have been with ladylike girls and me being protective over them. I always thought my friends were so feminine that it was no wonder I didn't feel like a female. Since the beginning of school (in my country from the age six) I've felt that girls are something different from me - but that boys are, too.

I don't feel trapped in this mostly female body of mine, but I would like to be much more fluid in my appearance. On the happy days this seems like a really rewarding process towards being more like the person I feel inside, but there are setbacks too, of course.

I remember when I was 4 years old wondering why my brother and I were both boys, but he had a p*n*s and I didn't.  I couldn't understand why we were treated differently (him as a boy and me as a girl).  Growing up I knew the female gender did NOT fit me, but I grew up in a very small town, not very gay/trans friendly (although they have gotten better) so I didn't know anything about Transgender until I was in college, but even then I still didn't come out for a couple of years after that.  Not many people were really all that surprised by my coming out. 

I should also add I was OBSESSED with Mulan and the song "Reflection"...and yet NOBODY figured it out hahaha

About 5 for me.  When I first went to school and started interacting with girls, I began to realise that I was really crap at being a girl.  I just didn't get it at all.  It was like they'd all got some kind of a manual and I hadn't.

Growing up, I was really clear in my own mind that I was a boy, but with the body of a girl, but in many ways it wasn't a big deal.  I'm an only child, and that meant my parents treated me as their default son.  Additionally, neither of my parents are very gender-conforming and they didn't expect me to be.  I knew the stories about Odin and Loki taking female forms at various times, but they were still themselves, so I was actually pretty comfortable with the concept of a male having a female form, and I've never felt like I had to have a male body to be male.  I've been pretty lucky in that respect.

Age 6 was when I realised I wished I was a girl.
Age 13 was when I realised that there was something that could be done about it, but it seemed way out there and too radical at the time.
Went through my teen years playing a male sock puppet.
Buried my GID for 10 years, had a bad therapy experience, put it away for another 3 years.
Age 26 had therapy, decided I was genderfluid.
Now in late 30s, on low dose HRT to keep the noise at bay.

If I had been more honest to myself and with my family, I would have possibly have started transition in my late teens.