Hope I write this correctly just that I am curious and would like to know. How many people actually transition online before going full time IRL? I had a long spill about my story but my allergy medication made me much to chatty so I back spaced it all. Two years after I was intro the net I went male online, chat forums social network, chat rooms, message boards for role players the whole nine yards. I did this for two years before deciding that living two different lives was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Personally it was the best and hardest decision that I have ever made. One would think that spending all that time on the net I would have found others life myself. Trapped in the wrong body, well I had no clue it was not until two and a half years ago that my doctor who had always been open about sharing this week called me on it. Lol I still remember getting pissed at him because he had asked me a question that I have spent the better part of my life trying to hide from others. I did not like being a "freak" and having "weird" thoughts. Six months after speaking to him about it I stopped lying to myself, I have been happier ever since.
=/ Still long winded, any I was just curious about it. I know some people do not count the people online as part of their IRL lives but I do. For the sheer fact that if it had not been for the net I do not think I would be here today. ((Hope that isn't too emo-ish even if it is the truth.))
I lived a weird double online life since about the age of 10...I had separate MSN's, forum user names and everything. One for the girl me and one for the boy me.
Aged 18 when I came out, I deleted all the girl personas and just used the boy ones.
Well...it's complicated, for me. I was male in some contexts online from the very beginning; when I was 12, back in the Stone Age of the internet when parents weren't quite so terrified of leaving their children alone with it, I was hanging out in 'adult' chatrooms as a boy. And anywhere where my gender didn't matter, I just let myself be perceived as male, that being most people's default assumption when they meet me. My characters in online games were male.
But there were some online contexts - ones where I interacted with family or real life friends, and political activities where my real life experiences were relevant and I didn't feel like inventing an alternate life or excluding myself from discussions of feminism - where I took on a female identity. And my current online gaming is in a guild that I joined through my online political activity, so I was female there too. So I had to go through the 'coming out' and 'transitioning' process in those contexts (thank God WoW allows characters to have sex changes!) It actually felt really good to do that, though...now my online persona is the one part of me that isn't living a lie.
Runescape also allows sex changes.
I've always been a guy online for as long as I can remember.
I remember a certain situation in 5th grade where my friends and I went through a huge Neopets stage. I'd signed up as a boy, and when my friends called me out on it, I said I accidentally clicked the wrong choice. I have no idea if they believed me or not, but they never said anything about it. XD
So yeah, I made my transition online before I even knew what being transgendered meant. Heck, I haven't even started transitioning fully in real life yet. But being male online is the next best thing, and it brings me comfort.
Quote from: Espenoah on May 07, 2010, 03:32:10 PM
I've always been a guy online for as long as I can remember.
I remember a certain situation in 5th grade where my friends and I went through a huge Neopets stage. I'd signed up as a boy, and when my friends called me out on it, I said I accidentally clicked the wrong choice. I have no idea if they believed me or not, but they never said anything about it. XD
So yeah, I made my transition online before I even knew what being transgendered meant. Heck, I haven't even started transitioning fully in real life yet. But being male online is the next best thing, and it brings me comfort.
haha I did this too, man, Neopets, that brings back memories
I always had male screen names and used to get a lot of grief for it on some websites when I told them I was a girl. And then there were other times when I purposely told people I was a guy, especially on forums where being a girl would get you treated differently.
Quote from: Jeatyn on May 07, 2010, 03:45:54 PM
haha I did this too, man, Neopets, that brings back memories
Lol, my Neopets have probably died years ago due to starvation.
Well, here is where I've pretty much presented as male. Other sites, (don't use many forums or anything) nothing's been said so I assume they're trying to figure my gender out. Or assume me male.
I always had unisex names online but my gender was always marked - female. My older brother was at the home, so he was using my computer, but also I didn't care too much those days. After he went to the college, I changed some of the stuff - gender, names in some forums... And now in a couple of forums everybody thinks I'm a guy.
However, I'm not outed in real life, so I live a double life.
I have different email addresses, MSN's, Facebook profiles... :-\
And I have to say - that sucks...
I also lived two lives :D It started about a year ago, and I was male over MSN. I had some really good friendships with quite a large group of people. This was carried on for about 6 months (I felt really bad :( cause I was majorly lying...at the time I didnt have my hair cut or anything and still wore girls clothes) I later came out to my parents, and a month after that I told my online friends the news :o
I was expecting all the worst since they were a bunch of 12-15 year old kids. Actually they were nice over the whole thing! Very supportive! :D Just 3 days after that I was so excited, cause I was able to meet them in real life!
Wow you could have been talking about me. I spent years online presenting as male - I will go to my grave saying that it's made me much more self-confident about who I actually am. The online life gave me IRL confidence, and helped secure who I 'really' was. I was able to be myself, I suppose. It helped in ways since I was perceived as male, and my mindset adjusted completely to that - so when I got offline, to have people such as my family still refer to me as 'she' etc. (I'm in the closet with them presently), it was shocking and I suppose it left me depressed - a downside of it all.
Kinda did that. I spent 3 years on WoW so I could RP females.
I refused to get ventrillo because I didnt want to be outed. Then they got the ingame voice-chat and I gave it up.
Now that allergy meds are not gripping me and I can think much clearer, I was a neopets kid too though there I was just male. Also did habbo hotel as a mail and MVO Runescape though Runescape I tried as a female for a couple of levels but it felt so so wrong. What I left out earlier was that when I was in voice chats and talking to people even if I had girlish tags counting really only one. Lol my first yahoo tag was sk8girl4relz It was so so stupid but even with a name like that and me talking in chat vent I was yelled at for pretending to be a girl. One comment I had which in truth stopped me from picking female as an option was "Stop acting like a girl give your balls a couple of years to drop and you should be fine." =/ I was 15 at the time.
My rents did not allow me to be online alone period not in fear that I would break something expensive. But as soon as I went into foster care I would hang out at the library in boy mode when to a tech school where I became a paige in the library and even entered a poetry contest where I presented as male. Now the kicker is that I had done this letter exchange in junior high school found at the person was already into Role Play. They liked playing female characters so I automatically felt more confidant playing male roles with them. ((Yes we snail mail role played. Massive multi-para))
I have only had one instance where I felt the need to out myself I was 19 finally living on my own and not in group homes or campus life. At that time I had been living in and out as being male online though on chat and role play boards. This was a chat room setting the resulting issue was this guy had been constantly hitting on me. We voice chatted gamed and rp'ed together for months before he up and said the L word. Mind you I felt no such thing for him but felt I owed him the truth. In my circle of friends it really did not matter as long as you were not breaking the rules of our group. This guy had seen my pictures ((As an adult I dressed in men only clothes mostly skate grunge or something closer. I was small enough that without binding nothing showed.)) I told him and he decided that the chat room in general deserved to know I was filthy and well his account got hacked shortly after it. I remember of the lead group chat leaders at the time yelling at him over mic about so f#$# up he has more balls then you.
Lol even without medication my posts are winded I am sorry I like to see myself type. Maybe because I do not talk much in person. Thank you all for sharing your stories about this.
One more question :D Did you feel guilty at all for living the double life online?
Okay two questions: Did it help you become stronger for later IRL situations?
Ssshh I did neopets too. blame my girls for it. It really was a girl thing.
if I may ask...what in the world is neopets?
A neopet is a virtual pet. You go online and play with them and feed them and send them to school and lead them and have them play games, etc.
oh...ok.
I kind of the same thing, but not for very long.
PS Neopets rules.
Quote from: MuddyFrog on May 07, 2010, 06:35:00 PM
One more question :D Did you feel guilty at all for living the double life online?
Okay two questions: Did it help you become stronger for later IRL situations?
I never felt guilty about it unless my friends noticed and questioned about it. They rarely ever did, but it kinda made me want to crawl into a hole when it did...
As for making me stronger...I did feel a lot more comfortable in my skin afterwards. I think in the long run, it helped me come to terms with myself.
This makes me want to go play Neopets again...
Edit to say that I just checked my old account. I was a big fibber online when I was younger. I surely never lived in Japan...
Quote from: MuddyFrog on May 07, 2010, 06:35:00 PM
One more question :D Did you feel guilty at all for living the double life online?
Okay two questions: Did it help you become stronger for later IRL situations?
Maybe a little at first. Got over it real quick.
I guess I got more used to it or whatever.
I'll start by saying... I still play Neopets. >D
But besides that, I had in a way lived a double life since when I first got on the internet about... 8 years ago, I signed up to mostly everything as male. Long before I even knew about what being trans was. It made me feel better and now I know why xP I never really felt guilty until I was recently outed and people made me feel like what I did was wrong or something o.o It's strange when I get off the computer and everyone shouts 'she' at me (I'm not out to anyone in my family), so it's nice to go online and just.. escape from that.
I wonder if that made sense. xD; I'm half asleep.
1. I did feel guilty about it when it was an issue (i.e. - people wondering why I never wanted to let them call me or why I'd never call them, people wanting to meet me IRL). I guess the guilt wasn't really an issue 99% of the time because I really saw it as being myself - it was just that I wasn't transitioned, and so I had to make up lies about why I couldn't talk on the phone, etc. - THAT was where the guilt came from.
2. It made me stronger in that I'm more aware that people like the real me - and that I am accepted as male. I will do much better when I start T and can actually see some physical changes - right now it's always shocking when I speak to people because I expect a male voice to come out of my mouth, and not an androgynous one.
Before transition I was always male online. It never occurred to me to be anything else.
The "real name" (ie, the one that was not a handle) I used online way back then is what I legally changed my name to years later :laugh:
But, you know, things were different back then. At least over here it wasn't quite as normal for online and offline to be so interconnected.
I've also never had anyone want to meet, talk via voice, see pics, know my real name or anything like that.
I was just being who I am without the baggage of other peoples existing perceptions. I never thought of it as a double life, and it's never been something I've felt guilty over.
Hell, I don't feel guilty now about not disclosing my past to people I know offline. The past is in the past, and it's now that matters.
ditto
i've been female online since i can remember , and i think most (if not all ) trans people do , because .. before your out ,or before you realize it,the negativity and feelings cannot be held inside . and i never felt guilty about it before i see al these women here that has made it to the end ,weird i know . and it did help in real life somehow , although i'm not out yet :-\
Thank you all for sharing and answering my questions. As to those who played neopets Lol the only reason I stopped was because I found other things online to do. Then years later someone text me about a rare plushy I had. I can't remember my pass or even the e-mail I used at the time but I started my game hording then. Lol like in WoW I have to have all the mounts and companions.
:D I did the same thing with Neo I stopped going because I was banned, In some online communities they've known me for a long time and don't know me as anything else other than female.
When they wanted to know my real name I gave them the female name I gave myself. When they wanted to see a picture sure I showed them a picture of me. Either they were begin kind but nobody has accused me of begin a guy. I've spoken to a couple of them on the phone again I can't tell if there just begin kind.
dude, neopets is so much more than a virtual pet. its a casino for children. i never fed mine or battled it. I just made 20 accounts so I could buy scratch lotto tickets and play card games. hahaha
i was a male online for long time too, also in a stage where i didnt consider myself trans.
at 15, i actually was a bit unfair to this girl i knew only online, as I convinced her i was male "for the fun of it" and we had a fake online relationship that i wrote off as a joke because i was embarrassed. :(
but yah, forums, email accounts, etc - gender: male :laugh:
You gender your email?
I think I had always kept my online accounts female as I was scared that if I put them as male other people might find out I was a girl. I used to go on Habbo Hotel as a girl for a while but then later created another account as a male and it was fantastic. It was a wonderful feeling having people on there see and treat me as male. On my ps3 everyone assumes that i'm male. I have a headset but theres a voice changer option and if i lower it a bit i actually sound like a man!! So I can talk to people as a male and its amazing. ;D
ive played on line games as female and chat rooms as female for me it was a sanity issue it allowed me to me breifly without the fear of hatred.
Dude, Neopets...
I started playing as a guy on Neopets at around eight or nine. I always felt more comfortable, but, didn't know why.
This was me as well. I've been a guy on-line for years even as I went back and forward with the idea of transitioning in real life. It was mostly my parents that stopped me but I learned not to give a ->-bleeped-<-. I did feel guilty from time to time. Worse when I used a fake picture which reflected my mental image of myself.
At this point I am out to most everyone that I talk to on-line. Looking back I really had no reason to feel guilty, I was telling the truth as far as they knew. To them I am just a screen name that is attached to my brain which is male.
I think it did help me realize how much more comfortable I felt in a male role. However as some of the previous posters have said it was difficult leaving that world and going out and being called, Ma'am, Miss, and Her. I realized how much I wanted to stop living the lie of my female existence and start being who I really am.
Woah. I did Neopets and Runescape as a guy, too, since I was... ten, eleven, maybe? Runescape was tougher for me because I was really involved in a clan there and everybody knew me as my male name. I never thought of feeling guilty - I've always kind of been of the opinion that it's nobody's business what your sex is unless they want to sleep with you, and, well, as for gender... I IDd as genderfluid back then, so I didn't really feel like I was lying.
I'm on a few Star Wars forums and such where I tell people I'm a guy. One site I'm on, while not predominantly aimed at trans folks, has a large and active trans community, so I've got my gender set as male there but don't try to hide my sex.
My online identity is difficult for me because I barely understand my gender expression myself. So many sites don't have a genderfluid, third-gender or even intersex option, and that's what I'd be more comfortable with at this stage - in light of my parents finding my account. Nonetheless, if the choice is between identifying myself as male-sexed or female-sexed, nine times out of ten I'd choose male.
I doubt there's a lot of other people who pay attention to whether the two boxes are labelled SEX or GENDER. ^_^
Yeah, I was male online. Only told two people that I'm technically a transman. In real life, I used to dress in a rather masculine style and wear a feather in my hair and I'd tell people I was half or quarter Native American because of my long hair. It would get wrecked when someone would come up and address me by my birth name in front of new people.
I started playing as a guy on Neopets when I was 9 or 10, probably. Made an account with my gender set to male, came up with a male identity, went to insane lengths to prove that I was male. At one point I took a picture of my arm hair and said "does that look like a woman's arm?" It didn't, but the fact that I was so damn obsessive about proving to them that I was male...? Very odd indeed. I actually sort of changed identities very often; identified with characters, with people, always men... Different names, different stories, always the same personality. But I was having trouble coming to grips with who I was.
That was the first time I ever felt good about myself. I remember feeling, over time, that I was becoming more like my online self as I started to wear masculine clothes and present as more male... I remember feeling a great relief and comfort about that. My "online self" was a representation of my "real self", one I apparently knew subconsciously from a young age.
The fact that I was always putting off meeting or talking to my online friends (and still do, with some of them) until I "transitioned", which was a very vague but expected part of my life, just kicked me into action. It was always there; the knowledge that one day, I'd get a sex change, before I even knew the logistics of it. I didn't ever see it in popular culture, I just knew that there had to be some way to make my body male and I knew I'd have it done some day, and I started putting everything off until it one day happened. Having those friends and those experiences made me realize that I needed to start living, really living, as me.
Lol...I keep hearing my own story on here over and over!
Online I've always had one email that was for family (although it's a latin word conjugated in the masculine...though
they don't know that! hehe), and everything else was whatever persona I was trying to be at the time.
I, too, played Neopets as a boy. I didn't know I was transgendered at the time, but I always felt sort of...invigorated...by clicking the 'male' button. :) I always signed on as a guy or a male character in chats or rp games too.
Now I play Warcraft, and all my characters on there are male. One of my mains is a male blood elf with a soul patch who I like to wishfully think I could resemble someday. :icon_workout:
Quote from: MuddyFrog on May 09, 2010, 08:57:33 PM
Lol like in WoW I have to have all the mounts and companions.
Hehe...me too! Rivendare's Deathcharger...you WILL be mine! Hahaha!
Quote from: Kes_Wolf on May 17, 2010, 05:36:51 AM
Lol...I keep hearing my own story on here over and over!
Online I've always had one email that was for family (although it's a latin word conjugated in the masculine...though they don't know that! hehe), and everything else was whatever persona I was trying to be at the time.
I, too, played Neopets as a boy. I didn't know I was transgendered at the time, but I always felt sort of...invigorated...by clicking the 'male' button. :) I always signed on as a guy or a male character in chats or rp games too.
Now I play Warcraft, and all my characters on there are male. One of my mains is a male blood elf with a soul patch who I like to wishfully think I could resemble someday. :icon_workout:
Hehe...me too! Rivendare's Deathcharger...you WILL be mine! Hahaha!
Gah okay listen to this my GF had the DeathCharger drop for her first time in the place. And she allowed one of her idiot guild leaders to whine about how long he has been trying to get it. So she contacts a GM and he transfers the mount.... A year later mount still won't drop again for either one of us and said GM has done this in wrath loads of times just to get sets he wants to role play in.
My current envy that phoenix bird.