Susan's Place Transgender Resources

I see many people say they've know since the age of four. I knew when I was four. What is it about this magic age where these epiphanies come that follow us the rest of our lives?

Probably because we don't have the faculties before that age to do much reasoning. Or remembering. The only thing I remember from being age four is being stung in the armpit by a bee!

I don't know, but I think we've all noticed it. It's why I'm so adamant about people controlling their language around here, so the youngsters can use the site.

its pretty difficult to remember beyond 4

I think by the time you get to age four, you're more aware of the world around you...

I've seen this in my own kids.  Here are a few things I've noticed and learned over the years (my wife and I have 6 kids - 2 girls and 4 boys).
By age four:

• Your brain is capable of understanding the basics of sexuality and knows the primary differences between boy and girl.
• You become more interested in singing, dancing and acting.
• Kids want to be liked and to please their friends, they may have a best friend which could be of either sex.
• By this point play becomes more cooperative.  Kids want to play with other kids.
• You have a vocabulary of more than 1000 words.
• You can begin to express yourself using sentences.
• My sons tended to gravitate toward trucks and building things.
• My oldest daughter (youngest is only 16 months old) tended to gravitate toward dolls and playing house.

Don't get me wrong (like most kids I've seen) my kids all play with toys cross-gender, meaning the boys play with dolls and the girls play with trucks and they each have a collection of stuffed animals (large enough to fill the a large zoo).  What I have noticed is that when my kids cross play they have done so but still kept their cis gender traights during the play time.  For example, my oldest daughter tended to use the trucks to help build a wonderful town for her dolls and animals to live in and then use the blocks and legos to build all kinds of things from houses, tables (for barbie tea parties) and various animals.   The boys, on the other hand have all played rough with the dolls, in fact when they have played with my daughters doll house it's always to drive their toy firetrucks over with screaming sirens, while spraying lots of water from the trucks, in order to put out massive house gutting fires (pretend of course), while the firemen, policemen, spies, army men etc. do their best to save pour little Sally from being eaten by TRex who happened to be in the area smashing everything else in sight that my daughter(s) have built.

Thinking back to when I was four, that's about the earliest that I can remember playing with the other kids in the neighborhood.  My favorite were two neighborhood girls and my girl cousins.  Why?  Because I could go over to their houses to play with girl toys!  Barbies, various dolls, tea sets, doll houses I was in seventh heaven!
Mostly what I had at home were trucks and balls.  Although I did have one doll (got him when I was between 1 and 2) when I was little and I took him everywhere I went for many many years.  My mom loved it, my dad not so much but he let me take my doll everywhere.
My favorite toys growing up were (in order): my doll, my stuffed animals and legos.

Looking back, maybe I knew from the beginning (deep down) when I chose my doll as my favorite toy, however I don't remember understand it until I knew the differences between being a boy and a girl.  For me that hit between 4 and 5.  From that point on I wanted to be a girl so bad...

Disclaimer: no actual legos or dolls were injured in the writing of this reply!

My first vivid memory is my mom telling me to say "1982" because the year is 1982. Prior to that I have vague memories playing with the water shutoff at my grandpa's house and swinging in a cradle. These happened before I was 4. And 4 was when I tried on my mom's clothes and she caught me the first time.

I didn't have any gender related epiphany when I was four, but I definitely had a vague awareness of how awkward my perceived gender felt for me, for as long as I can remember. I suppose it could have started at four. Memories from that long ago are all jumbled together. I can't remember what happened at specific ages.

It was 4 for me also. I remember clearly because I have relived the moments from that age time and time again over my lifetime. Hell, I remember things from when I was 2 and 3 and I'm in my late 30s.

Quote from: Ms Grace on November 07, 2014, 01:22:47 PM
Probably because we don't have the faculties before that age to do much reasoning. Or remembering.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Although my first memory was when I was three. My birthday was coming up and one of my aunts asked me how old I was going to be. I said 'six'. I should have known right there that I was going to suck at Math (and I do :D). My second memory was in the summer following my fourth birthday. That one was when I thought to myself: 'Something is really wrong here', in regards to my gender.

Haha 4 for me too. Magic number

I've noticed a lot of others mentioning 4yo too :)

Personally I didn't start having any really clear and active gender-variant thoughts until I was coming up to my teens and started to realise I very much preferred the Spice Girls over whatever crap my friends were listening too at the time.  Before that, I was pretty much gender-blind.  I liked lego as much as I liked Care Bears (fyi, Lovealot was my favourite by a long shot...  I still miss her.. :( ), and I hung out with boys almost as much as I hung out with girls (although I think I was closer with my female friends now that I think about it..).  I do remember having conversations with both about why they wouldn't hang out with each other though because it confused me.  At that time, I wasn't consciously a boy or a girl.  I was just *ME*.  I liked the things I liked, I hung out with the people I enjoyed spending time with, and that was that.  There was never any real sense of "these things are for boys and these things are for girls and you're a boy so you're supposed to like this stuff" or anything for me.  I don't recall my parents ever enforcing gender stereotypes on me, which in hindsight is something I'm pretty thankful for :)  It wasn't until late childhood / early teenage years that I started getting bullied for that kinda thing and the walls started going up.  That's when my first thoughts of "hay, maybe I'm not supposed to like some of the things I like / do some of the things I do etc" started creeping in.  That's also 'coincidentally' (haha, *NOT*! :P ) the time some of my first (and certainly not the last) non-sexual RP fantasies involving being female started occurring, which naturally I buried and thought I'd take to the grave until about a year ago at 27yo. :) ♥︎

Yep, early teen years were when the vague sense of something being off turned into, "I would have been so much happier had I been born a girl," thoughts.

By the way, my earliest memory is being in the crib. Is that weird?

I was four when I asked my mother if I could have a girl's swimsuit and got the first of many lectures about "what is appropriate for boys".

Quote from: Jill F on November 07, 2014, 07:13:13 PM
I was four when I asked my mother if I could have a girl's swimsuit and got the first of many lectures about "what is appropriate for boys".

I had the same thing happen to me when I asked for a purse prior to my 5th birthday.

Human memory is notorious for its grandeur, wild imagination and it even makes up narratives that never even happened. Ask any policemen about reliable witness testimony. Have 10 witnesses, and you have 10 different stories. You'd be amazed how many memories were constructed out of thin air, simply made up by the brain that is similarly notorious in deceiving itself to justify something. There is quite a bit of science about this. I do recall childhood memories, snapshots. I knew nothing about gender. I did not even know the difference between boys and girls. I thought we were all the same, besides wearing different clothes. I did not feel male, nor female. I just did not know. I still can't, whilst I do identify as female.

Quote from: PinkCloud on November 07, 2014, 08:02:59 PM
Human memory is notorious for its grandeur, wild imagination and it even makes up narratives that never even happened. Ask any policemen about reliable witness testimony. Have 10 witnesses, and you have 10 different stories. You'd be amazed how many memories were constructed out of thin air, simply made up by the brain that is similarly notorious in deceiving itself to justify something. There is quite a bit of science about this. I do recall childhood memories, snapshots. I knew nothing about gender. I did not even know the difference between boys and girls. I thought we were all the same, besides wearing different clothes. I did not feel male, nor female. I just did not know. I still can't, whilst I do identify as female.

:D :D It's pretty easy to figure out the difference when you see a girl that is roughly the same age as you and she's running down the sidewalk totally naked. (Not to mention the screaming mother chasing her down with the girl's clothes in hand.)

I don't remember thinking about much of anything at age four. My entire childhood is a bare handful of solid memories. You know people who write autobiographies and claim they can remember whole conversations from years and years ago? Yeah, well if that's possible it certainly isn't for me.

For me at 4 I wanted to be a girl, first time I got to express the real me was age 6 at a neighbors house, her mum would buy me dresses so we could do tea parties together. Until my mum found out.


Kami

I think for me it was my earliest memories that something was off... also I remember my dad telling me not to stand like a girl or do this and that like a girl..  It does seem to be a fairly common thing for us.. and I belong to the group that goes back that far..  painful to think about too.. but it is the reality.  I blocked many of the early memories of many things in order to cope and pretend to be a dude.
Carrie

I remember many things around 4 years old like riding a bike with training weels beside a high way, painting fairies at the easels in a childcare centre and when I attacked my least fave body part with a barbed wire ( young and stupid). I used to look back on my barbed wire memory in wonder because I new most of the story line and the feelings with it but the memory was in pieces. I used my older brother who was there to fill me in on what I could not remember. It had my need to transition all over it.

I remember my 4th birthday party... and i remember my fav color was pink... and i loved to play house.. hmmm a sign of things to come.. at the age of 5 or 6 i did wonder what it was like to wear a dress.

Now that I am all grown up... I dont really like the color pink... my roommate finds this weird... a girl that does not like pink...

I have virtually no clothes pink clothes... ok do have clothes with a little pink in it as a lot of female clothing has pink in it..  I have a totally bright pink bra and panty set which my roommate bought me when i got srs done. she told come on.. try wear pink.. at least no one will see it.. i have worn it a few times..

I also have a bottle of a dirty/dusty pink nail polish.. which i sometimes paint on my toes.. i will admit i kinda like how it looks on my toes.

Quote from: Pikachu on November 07, 2014, 06:59:13 PM
Yep, early teen years were when the vague sense of something being off turned into, "I would have been so much happier had I been born a girl," thoughts.

By the way, my earliest memory is being in the crib. Is that weird?

I, too, remember being in a crib.  My aunt still has the crib, a cast iron one.

I was 3, in a pilot program for head start, turned 4 shortly after.  I still want that big Tonka fire truck and not the dumb doll.

I don't think I had much concept of gender at four. I was the little one in the family and My mum used to call me daisy. I think, looking back, that my parents raised me in a fairly gender nuetral way. I loved a lot of boyish things like Lego and visiting castles but I also loved nature and was very quiet and shy. I could spend hours just with my own imagination, or usually just drawing. My earliest memory was going to a farm to buy a cat, which my parents said was when I was around two. But it's just vague pictures, nothing concrete, and I have no idea how much my brain has made up to fill in that scene.

I didn't really realise something was badly wrong until around 10/11 when I felt society outside of my family started demanding I act a certain way. I was extremely emotionally sensitive (still am) and I remember high school being a real shock.

When people tell me they knew since four, I never know how to react. Part of me thinks that it's way too young to have any clear certainty about gender, but then I think just because its outside of my experience it doesn't mean it can't happen. I've heard it used as a bit of a badge of honour in the past and before I decided to transition it made me feel a bit like I couldn't really be transgender because my life didn't fit the narrative that everyone else spoke of. Nowadays I feel a bit less sensitive about it because I know this is right for me, but I do think we have to be careful not to put too much weight on when we first knew.

My earliest verifiable memories are from around 4 years old, the wooden floors at home which used to raise splinters all the time.  And being so close to the floor at that age...

My first gender discordant memories are from when I was seven, and I repressed them mightily until I was 25, when I finally hit therapy to understand who I was.  Yes, you're a girl.  And you like men.  Aaaaargh!

xxx
J

Four for me as well for my first gender memory.
Mama asked me to bring her slippers upstairs and put them in her closet.
Was completely in awe of all the pretty clothes and shoes and utterly jealous.

Also had a teary breakdown in my all boys school at five about not fitting in properly.
Really wished I had realised the true issue much sooner than I did.