It would have been about 1958, around the age of 9, when I first heard about Christine Jorgensen and that started my quest. By the mid-1960s I knew surgery was being done in Morocco and Belgium but the cost was astronomical - about the annual gross income of a white collar professional. It wasn't until December of 1973 that I heard about Dr. Biber and 4 months later I was GONE!

I'd say around 1978-9, when I was 9 years old.

1988.

I think I was 10 or 11. I was watching a rerun of WKRP in Cincinnati where one of the characters slept with a woman who used to be a high school buddy of his.

I asked my mom about it and she explained quit compassionately how some people are born with a condition where they were in the wrong body and that they could get an operation to fix that.

At the time I didn't say anything because I thought it was like anything else medical and the doctors would tell me that I needed a "sex change".

What? I just learned on this thread!

I found out when I was about 7. A school friend told me that a transsexual had moved into town and what that meant. Unfortunately I never asked my mother about it and developed a prejudice that lasted until well after a friend of mine came out as trans. Apparently I was railing against what I feared the most about myself.

Kia Ora,

And thank you to all those who have commented so far....

It's interesting to see how long some of us have carried around this knowledge, but failed to act on it for quite some time...

I guess in a sense, subconsciously it was comforting to know it was actually possible to physically change ones sexual characteristics ....

Metta Zenda

It was comedy fodder back in the 80's, I was born in '77, then I was certainly aware of it at a young age. It was many years before I connected that it was something I could, and then I should do. My dysphoria was present and self noted around 6 or years old('83), I was closeted and hiding when I was 8 due to transphobia in my family. It was a long time before I gained enough independence to really consider possibilities in my 20's.

  About 1964 when Christine Jorgenson was in town being interviewed by a local prime time talk show host.  My mom told me and my sibs that she was not gay. 

  Joelene

1999, when I was 30.

I went looking for porn & found ->-bleeped-<-s ... which led me to the AnneLawrence website & a TS chatsite.

Ever since then, every time I went looking for porn, I found myself reading forums & other websites about TG &/or TS.

And I still didn't figure it out until 2013 ....   doh!

Quote from: TessaMarie on January 22, 2014, 10:16:14 AM
Ever since then, every time I went looking for porn, I found myself reading forums & other websites about TG &/or TS.

I had a very similar experience.  I always wondered why I wasn't into porn like a lot of other guys.  I figured it was just my religious upbringing...now I know that my lack of interest was because I wasn't really interested.   

Since finding in library and reading Mirror Image circa 1979 . . .

Around 20 years ago, a freshmen in high school.
That's when I knew I should be female.

I read an article about transsexualism and plastic operations in popular science journal when I was ~13 y.o. (yes, I was reading science journals at that age ). It mostly focused on surgical part of the issue (chopping some parts off and buffing other parts up ), it did not mention either GID, hormone therapy, transition and psychological-mental impact on life. From that moment onwards I knew that I was a transsexual. Unfortunately, article did not say that this will never go away - I wonder if I knew that, if I would have done things differently.

I believe I first found out about it when I searched something about being a boy on the internet and it came up. I had very little knowledge on what 'transgender' was so I read up on it and I knew that's what I was and having sex reassignment surgery sounded great to me.

For me it was around '89 ish. Family sitting around and somehow a conversation sparked up and my uncle looked me right in the eyes and said "well you could always get a sex change" and then laughed in a snide way as if it was a foolish idea. I clearly remember the laugh, and hearing my other family members laugh along with him.

It was mind blowing and soul crushing all at once in the span of about 3 seconds.

I can still hear the laugh when I think about talking to family members about how I feel.

I read about it in a magazine when I was around 14-15 years old, which would be around 1996-97. It felt like all the pieces finally came together; I had kind of accepted that I was biologically male despite hating it, because I thought it was impossible to change. But even before I was done reading the article (in a hospital waiting room), I heard people commenting on how "wrong" it was - it was on the front page, so it caught their attention. Needless to say, I closeted myself immediately, and tried to repress everything for more than 15 years. Which of course was disastrous. Now I just wish I had read that article alone, where people couldn't have influenced me.