Mine is very similar to Eva Marie's!

It was a real puzzle. I've always preferred female friends. After I got married, that made my social life unsatisfying (really hard for a married guy to make female friends). Eventually I had to figure out why I couldn't be friends with men.

I examined my life and noticed how I prefer women's movies, books, music, etc. I wondered whether I was androgyne. I joined Susan's and a local support group, where I learned all about transgender. When I told my support group that I'd always wanted to be a woman, they told me that's how a lot of them felt too.

But it wasn't until I did a thought experiment, that I was convinced.

I tried to imagine if I could never again be a male, how would I feel? Answer: It would be strange, but I could deal. What if I could never again do the things that got me in touch with my female side? Answer: I would feel like a piece of me had been cut off.

That's when I realized I was a woman at the core.

I didn't get the inkling that anything was wrong until I was 18 or so and I didn't really start to put the pieces together until I was probably 23.  And even once things started falling into place I doubted myself until I was about 27.  A big part of my problem is that I have many gender neutral and feminine traits but not many overtly masculine traits.  It made me think that I must not be trans since I like to bake and garden and sew and I don't like to watch football and could care less about cars.  I still have to get over that sometimes, that it's okay for me to be a feminine guy.  That's just who I am.

I actually started to realize what was really going on when I started hardcore video-gaming and roleplaying.  I came to realize that I had more fun playing male characters, which seemed odd.  I discovered that I liked when people thought I was a guy, I felt happier and more relaxed.  I didn't know anything about trans people.  I didn't even realize that women could transition to be men.  But when I did(thanks wikipedia), something just fell into place in my mind.  It still took years for me to work up the courage to start my transition.  I'm turning 30 next month and I'm not where I wanted to be at this time of my life, but I'm further along that I was at 25.

I both envy and feel bad for the young trans folk.  It's nice that they can get a jump on their transition early and not waste so many years, but at the same time they have to deal with permission from parents and opposition from school and peers.  If I came out as trans in high school, it would have been horrible.  My dad is supportive now, at least more than I gave him credit for, but if I wasn't an adult I'm sure he wouldn't have allowed me to take HRT and I'd have been kicked out of my Christian high school most likely.

i'm diagnosed with a rare condition concerning my skull and nose and nature gave me this, the rather unique thing is 99.99.99% of the women are affected in a genetic way, i'm one of the rare people being a man... Judiana was hidden all my life, but until 2008.. she emerged from the deep...

in that time i've read, and read a lot... until 2012 i became stuck with my feelings and i've searched help and found it... now i'm discovering all the hidden feelings and so on....

well for me, i didn't know ftm's existed. the idea of ever being a man was just not a possibility to me.

it wasn't till about a year ago when i even stumbled across the term and it took me some time to accept i could do this and now that i've come to terms with how i am im rather fine about being trans and persuing transition.

i suppose I never geled with my body, as a kid i was fine with it, my genitalia don't bother me it was always the secondary characteristics. once puberty hit i did everything in my power to hide my boobs. they aren't big which is why i wasn't SUPER dysphoric about them, i'm a A, but just knowing they were there made me dress in baggy clothing and do everything i could to deny there existance. i didn't even know i was doing it subconsiously till i noticed i was going through extra effort to hide them.

it wasn't till later when i tried to picture my future, being told i wanted to be a mother and settle down i couldn't picture it for me. i wanted kids but i would never want to be pregnant or fill the mother role, i wanted to be the father. my job i always pictured myself in a suit i didn't like seeing a woman in a skirt or dressed in formal clothing that wasn't a suit and that bothered me. and really it wasn't until last year i realized there was another step my subconsious was telling me would happen. that this being female was temporary, there was another step for me to become a man and i never realized what that step was.

I became dysphoric once i started working out to gain muscle mass. I wanted big muscles. the biceps teh abs the pecs, the back all of it. I was using p90x which really helped me pack on muscle but my father was very insistent i stop upping the weights when i got comfortable with 25lb dumbells, saying it's doesn't look good when a woman has big muscles and i shouldn't keep trying to get bigger. this upset me deeply, i ignored his advice but i soon realized my muscle growth didn't resemble males at all. it was lean and hardly defined and i was working hard, i did the whole program why didn't i get the results like the men. and then I really realized, this is the wrong body, i would never be a man. it wouldn't happen magically through diet and exercise it was in my DNA. if I wanted muscles and to look like a man I had to change myself on my own terms.

that summer was hard because I was trying to figure out why i couldn't just magically be a man, i was looking for any excuse that made me closer to masculinity. my PCOS i realized upped my testosterone lvels a bit so i stopped taking my birthcontrol bpills and it helped, my boobns shrunk a little, less tender. i cut off my hair, which was liberating, i felt fantastic. and i realized teh more i brought myself closer to a masculine thought and appearance the better i felt about myself. when people said i looked manly (being 5'10" and broad shouldered for a girl it was easy for people in high school to say that of me) i took it as a compliment i never corrected them.

it was the summer my senior year i came across the possibility to transition. it seemed far fetched and risky to me. but the thought i wasn't male and never would be weighed so havily on me and i was so afraid to tell anyone. my father noticed ( i live with him, he's very open minded he doesn't care what i do) he saw i was being reclusive and epressed, i'd lash out sometimes and he finally just cornered me and asked what was wrong and i spilled and soon after i was seeing a therapist about it. the therapist asked the hard questions for me. and soon i came to terms with what i wanted and realized i only got this one life to change it. i can put it off or just get it over with and i've decided to just get it over with, there will never be an easy way to transition and i've just been coming out to people and i relaize everyones got some support for me that im around and all has been well, i didn't have anything to be scared of. I'm lucky in that regard.

tl;dr

I didn't know i was trans because the possibility didn't exist for me. once i found out it still took me some exploring but eventually i just came to terms with it. screw the world it's my life i gotta live it the way i want.

I started having thoughts like "I wish I had been born a girl" when I was in seventh grade, although it wasn't until 9th that it clicked for me that I was trans.  I spent a long time having the "but I didn't know when I was four so it can't be that" argument with myself before I accepted it. I started transitioning as soon as I was sure I was trans, and even after that I still had moments of doubt. I'm still not so sure about my gender, but I know for sure I'm not cis and I'm very happy about transitioning so I figure that's all that matters when it comes down to it.

I'm almost 30, ~1 week away, and still figuring it all out. I never would have imagined any of this until a couple of years ago. I had been crossdressing since 7-8th grade, if not earlier but that's the time that sticks out, and messing around with lipstick, makeup etc around the same time, in private ofc, and things just sort of kept progressing from there. I had many near misses, almost getting caught, but that didn't slow me down. I did get caught a few times, and played it of like wtf you talking bout, as if that would work right? lol, but still kept doing it. The turning point for me was when i somehow found a drag store (idk if that's the proper term) online that was located kinda close to me, and I went there. Hate shopping for guy clothes but loved shopping for female clothing. Bought breast forms there, put em on, and hated them because they looked so fake and unreal. Another day of random web surfing and I learned about herbs to grow boobs. The next day, I ordered some, didn't take me anytime at all to decide about it, I knew I wanted boobs that much. I figured I'm getting scammed, no way it's gonna work, but thought w/e, I'm gonna try. Still doing that, and now I gots me some small little boobies  . It wasn't until I found this site that I learned I am probably trans. I learned that my story had a lot in common with other members here. Last week, I finally talked to someone about this, my academic advisor at school, and she recommended I go talk to the therapists at school, and offered to help me with anything else I might need anytime; I go see them Tuesday. I told an online gaming friend about all this this wkend, never met her irl, and while she thinks this is just me being super depressed, I found out that the more I talk about it, and think about it, the more I realize that I am a girl and wanna be one. Anyways, that's my story, hope it helps you.

-Kelly

Confusedhuman, I am in a very similar place. I have spent maybe the last 20 years feeling like I had no identity. Like I didn't know myself. I stood for nothing, lived kind of on autopilot, and followed other people around. The last time I felt in touch with myself was in high school, and only in the past 2 months did I remember that I spent about a year passing as male. I always tried to emulate the guys that had money and dressed well.

That thought suddenly hit me, one night, and it felt like opening a flood gate. That night I gathered up all the dresses, skirts, and super girly lingerie that my ex insisted I buy but I could never make myself wear and gave it all away. It felt SO good. Then I gave away more, the blouses and girls shoes and felt even better. I bought a pair of men's shoes and felt suddenly a lot more right. I realized that no matter what kind of clothes I bought, they would never fit right because I giant boobs, so I bought a compression shirt. It wasn't tight enough, and I was so crushed, but the feeling of being so crushed told me that I was truly onto something.

I don't know how far I will go with it, because like you said, my mind is split in two. I argue with myself, and am trying so hard to figure out those questions. My life right now is not conducive to me transitioning completely, and I just don't know what I will and won't be able to do. But I am DONE living as not-me.