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