If so, were you envious of the things they had and were able to do? Or envious of the fact that they got to enjoy a proper puberty?

Well I have 2 brothers - one who is severely disabled and who is unable to speak or communicate understand much at all, and so I guess that isn't really relevant. My older brother and I were always fighting on account of him constantly calling me a dyke and things, so I didn't have much time to be envious. The only thing I was envious of was when he got treated as a boy and for some reason that i didnt get back then, i was really envious. It's really funny because this is me just realising this for the first time. So thanks for the question .. really... He used to get cool things for birthdays and Christmases and i would be stuck with all this junk i didnt want. The funny thing was really that he wasnt interested, so i got all this cool stuff he didnt want. My dad has always made me watch football and rugby with him as if i was the honorary son he didnt have but not in the way I felt I should have been treated. Pubery was awful as my brother loved to remind me that i now needed a bra and other things. I always hate him and we always fought but the more I write this post, I realise I did envy a lot of things he had...

The good thing about having brothers -- I have two, no sisters -- is that growing up around them teaches you about guy stuff. My brothers and I have never been much into sports, and although we all like robots and engineering stuff, we're also like cooking and musical theater, and we all know how to knit. I guess it must be harder if you have really "macho" or "jock" brothers, but my brothers were really accepting.

I have two younger sisters, no brothers.

Pre-puberty it wasn't much of an issue at all. We were all very close, would spend a lot of time playing together, and we all seemed to like the same things. There were any never issues over wanting what they had and what they were allowed to do at that point - mainly because we shared everything with each other and for the most part I was allowed to do what they were allowed to do.

Puberty made things more difficult. Seeing the things that were happening to my body, in comparision with the changes that they both went through, and knowing that what was happening to both of them should have been happening to me as well seemed like some special type of torture reserved just for me. We stayed close though - we still shared exactly the same interests, all had major anime obsessions, liked the same music, read the same books and watched the same movies over and over, and were obsessed with the same videogames. And we would talk for hours, about the stupidest things .

That closeness is gone now though - now both of my sisters treat me as if I no longer exist. Won't look at me, won't speak to me, completely ignore me if I try to talk to them. Like they've both decided if they just reject the fact that I exist in the way that I now exist, things will go back to the way they were before. I'm obviously not going to de-transition for their benefit, but I miss the way things used to be between us  .

Megan

QuoteDid you have siblings of your target gender?

Nope. But I sooooo badly always wished for a sister.

Which is why I married my wife. So in a way, yes.

Telling my wife that being intimate with her kinda felt like incest to me... probably one of those "honesty disclosures" I really shoulda kept to myself

~Kate~

I have an older sister, by 5 years, along with a younger brother, by 7.

When I was very small, my sister, who was very jealous of me (parents and grandparents favored me, I think, because I was male ) and abused me every chance she got.  I think this contributed to my early denial of who I really was - I certainly didn't want to be like her.

When I got older and started cross dressing, I'd steal stuff from her.  That didn't make her any happier with me either.

I was sorry I had a sister, many times.  We get along OK now.  Time will tell how accepting she is of my transition.

hugs & smiles
helen

Nero you got me on this one.
I have two younger sisters. One 3 year younger and the other 7.
Through therapy I found out that I was envious of the things they my sister had  and were able to do? And also how special my dad treated them.
Did that influence (help create) my gender problems or was it just one way that they (gender problems) expressed themselves?
I loved playing with my sisters and there friends. But that all stopped when I hit puberty. Didn't like playing with boys they were to mean and insensitive.
Jillieann

I have two sisters.  Then there was the step-sister.  And after that I met the step-brothers from hell.  I hated them, because they were so different from what I was used to.  One moment they'd be my friends, the next, they'd be setting me up for some brutal [stuff] (encouraged by their real dad, my step-father.)

I got along with my sisters and step-sister, though.  And because of that, I was blind to the real differences between the sexes.  When puberty happened, my stepfather-the-bigot started talking about monkey-nips and cotton-pony's, which upset my sisters, and upset me because I was just starting to be aware of what he was talking about.

With him in the house, being of male body held a special agony, as his Georgia-raised world-view saw me as a rival to his harem, and the femininity he recognized in me (even though I was in denial myself, trying desperately to dodge his notice,) only led him to focus special unwanted negative attention on me.

I didn't have much time after that to notice much else.  I was shocked, later in life, to hear of the other stuff he had done when he became bored with 'trying to make a man out of me'.

My sisters were siblings.  We still have that closeness, even now.  And, looking back on it, the stepsister, who I haven't seen since 1984, was a girlfriend.

I was really oblivious in that sense.

And the changes they got to go through were driving me crazy, but I quickly learned I dared not talk to  anyone else about that.  I sublimated, obsessing over whatever interested me enough to obsess over and cover over the -- yearnings...

Karen

QuoteTelling my wife that being intimate with her kinda felt like incest to me... probably one of those "honesty disclosures" I really shoulda kept to myself

I hear that totally, that's why i ended up going out with my best mate - turns out in the end we both felt like it was incestuous :\

I have an older brother, and yeah, growing up I was intensely envious of him. It's really hard to say how much of that was trans-stuff. He was encouraged to be a boy and freely given the props of boyhood while my being a boy was merely tolerated and I had to struggle a bit to get boy-toys and clothes, so I was jealous of that. But in my family, first-borns are treated special anyway, and I was jealous of that, too. My dad's brother feels exactly the same about my dad, my cousin the same way about her older sister, all of us younger siblings get the feeling that the older one was the very important person we were born to be a playmate for. Also, all younger kids envy the freedoms of older siblings. Plus, my brother is a really sweet-tempered likable person and always a favourite with just about everybody, while I was and am 'difficult.' Which maybe I wouldn't be if I wasn't trans. Certainly I'd have had the childhood friends I envied my brother for having if I'd been cisgendered. Anyway, tangled web.