just curious if your need to accept your self as  female is coming from some primordial innate subconscious mechanism or combination of primordial and analytical , analytical in the sense of how your true self can be best integrated into society as it presently exists. I think I'm a collage of both.

I have no rational reason, in fact it was my analytical side that kept me from transitioning for so long.

I always knew about the urge but my analytical self and observations of society and how they treated trans people kept me from transitioning until I was in a position where I could proceed without hurting my family and friends.

The need is primordial but it all used to get filtered through the analytical engine, I guess the way to be happy is not having to worry about every little thing you do or say. Now I say what I mean and do what I want the way I feel like doing it and I can be totally honest.

I was actually thinking about this today, going through childhood memories.  Growing up, I was very socially isolated - I am naturally a bit of an introvert, and we lived on the end of a rural road surrounded by not so friendly people, and after halfway through 4th grade I was homeschooled.  It sounds dreary, but I had a pretty awesome childhood all told - until puberty hit anyway...

When I played as a small child, I liked to dress up as a girl more often than not.  I preferred books with female protagonists for no apparent reason.  I found myself comparing my body to girls on TV.  I even used to sit on my genitals so that they wouldn't be visible.  The interesting thing is that I did all that before puberty, and with no conscious thought... I didn't feel dysphoria at the time, I just did stuff.  I was by myself, or with my parents who loved me - I had no reason to feel wrong about anything, because everyone in my life was my family.

After puberty hit, I knew something was wrong, but I had no clue WHAT it was for years.  I started to get very depressed and very angry.  With no frame of reference, I couldn't go "I'd rather be a girl, that group looks more like how I feel inside" because I didn't know what girls were or did on anything more than an instinctive level.  I didn't realize what was really going on until I started playing games and MMORPGs as a female, and got some social contact.  THEN I did some research.  But I didn't act on it.

So, I would have to say that it was always a primordial and innate subconscious mechanism, which I simply did not understand at the time.

I transitioned when my innate need to do so began to outweigh all of my reasons not to transition.  I waited as long as I could stand to, but that's the thing with GD- it just gets stronger over time and one day, down came my wall.

I too was also thinking about this recently. I definitely feel like it was something I had always known, that really became apparent during my high school years. Growing up I never really outwardly showed any signs (although my dad and my aunt said they had always thought I was way more feminine) but always played as the female character in video games and enjoyed books and movies with female leads. I always felt like something was off as far as how I saw myself and how others saw me, and would just try and bury it because I didn't know anyone else who felt the same way and I definitely didn't want to bring it up. Throughout high school I tried to be as masculine as I could, playing sports (which even if I was a girl I knew I would have played sports) and keeping my hair short and pushing away anything feminine even though it really killed me to do so. So I guess it was a purely innate primordial need that just kept getting stronger as I got older.

Great thread!  I think it is an innate thing that is heavily related to how I identify with myself.  How do I perceive myself when I am allowed to be myself.  I certainly do not do guy things much on my own.  I think sexuality plays a role.  What roles do I enjoy the most during sex?

When it comes to deciding what to do about the whole situation, the analytical side seems to have the ability to both create and tear down barriers related to this. 

Before I discovered that I was transgender, around 15 years ago, I thought that maybe I was gay.  The problem with this was that I found myself much more attracted to woman than men and never thought about men.  This had me thinking that I couldn't be gay, so I went on with my life thinking about how I could pursue a woman.  Although this is true, sexually I almost exclusively prefer to play the role of a woman.  With these facts in mind, where the heck could I fit in?  The answer, which I learned at around 20, was that I was transgender, that I needed to find a female partner who understood this.  Yes I had times where I tried to repress it and be a man, but this NEVER worked.  At this point I began to experiment and seriously consider having a male partner.  It became clear that I needed a partner who was mentally more masculine, somebody who would be attracted to me and would initiate intimacy.  Eventually I decided I wanted to be with a woman who had this mindset.

Before puberty, things were not so obvious to me at all, but there was obviously something very different about me.  For the most part, I just didn't fit in anywhere.  It was hard for me to make friends with other boys, and girls seem repelled by me because I was a boy.  I was also a very small with a bone structure that is strikingly female my entire life.  If you combine this fact with how my brain worked, being masculine and pursuing females was basically impossible until I became much older.  I've even had times where females pursued me, which totally confused and befuddled my emotions.  Middle school and high school were a pain.  Most of it was just not really fitting in anywhere.  Eventually, in high school I made friends, and I began to barely fit in somewhere; however, I was repressing so much that I didn't feel my self.  Instead, what I felt was that I was some form of result, a product of my environmental pressures.  What happens is that you try very hard to be what the environment pressures you to be, unhappily without being able to reveal it.  It sucks because I still have to experience this on a daily basis for the time being.

I like that you bring up MMO's because I definitely learned a lot about myself by playing female characters.  It is pretty clear that there are different roles available in life, and that a person usually has a clear preference for one of those roles.  In an MMO, you are given the freedom to choose what role to play and to experience it without any fear.  I pretty much hated playing male characters and loved to make female characters.  I always find it interesting that other people like the opposite or even maybe something inbetween.  I'm glad that this is how it is because it means that everybody is different.  It makes me happy to think that I could be very happy to play a cute female character while somebody else is very happy to play a character that I would be unhappy playing.   

A very interesting question.

There seems to be - for me - some primordial need to transition. Something is wrong; I can feel it.

But it took the analytical side of me to figure out exactly what was wrong. Before, I was just floundering around, unhappy, abusing substances and family, generally being a terrible person. I knew there was a problem, but I don't think I wanted to admit what it was. Things got bad enough that I was forced to be honest with myself and accept what I knew was wrong.

The analytical side has been both a friend and an enemy. It too held me back for far too long; it's a difficult road to travel, and logically it would have been more efficient to stay as male and suck it up.  (Yeah, right...)  But once I accepted who I am, the analytical side has been a strong motivator to push forward because the end result is inevitable and why waste time and energy fighting it anymore.

When I was in elementary school, I much preferred the company of girls.

Years later I noticed that at holiday gatherings where the men and women split up, I always ended up with the women.  I've been a member of the League of Women Voters for 20 years.  I go to water aerobics where there are typically 18 women and 2 men.  Church groups, Civic and arts groups..... I'm always with the women. 

I dress like a man and everyone knows I have a wife and daughter, but somehow nearly all women realize I'm not like other men.

My female relatives text me and call me regularly, I've never heard from the men.  Women friends confide in me and unconsciously tell me things they would NEVER tell a man.

On the other hand if I were to go to a sporting event or a bar with a group of men I would feel VERY uncomfortable.  Actually I would never go.

After years of worrying about gender identity, I came to realize that not much would change if I transitioned to a more female presentation or indeed if I transitioned.  I've really been a woman all along.  I just look and dress a bit differently.

I've always had this primordial under current , but like everyone else I had to fit in society and cover up the under current, which caused a lot of problems.

The totally rational engineer, mental chess player, queen of "What if'ing" things to death side of me can come up with just as may reasons, if not more,  why I am not trans. I've played that game too many times. Making lists, pros vs cons; why yes, why no. Even if I apply weighting factors, they why not still wins out on the purely logical rational arguments.

At the end of the day, One thing and one thing only, wins the argument. I feel genuine.

  Definitely innate or primordial not so much as a need but just a feeling that I was different from others since around 5.Kept it stuffed all through the service and my life due to having a good job and working towards a decent life when I retired. When I hit the wall everything changed for the better and I have never been happier and my SO supports me totally.

For me it's definitely a deep down primordial sense and feeling that my analytical mind just kept trying to suppress the more I tried to suppress these feelings. The stronger they became along with the dysphoria, it just got to the point where I had to do some about it. So I am

I really love this thread is that had me thinking about why am doing this and it truly is a deep down inbeded and feeling for as long as I can remember. I no longer want to suppress those feelings. So here I am following the yellow brick road to hopefully a few years down the road. I will find a wonderful Wizard of Oz (surgeon that is) that will magically transform everything I know this is a long and winding road that has many ups and downs, but I'm ready to face it head-on.

Hugs to everyone,

Melissa Ann

Primordial for sure. Rational me would say sacrifice to keep up appearances as I've been doing for so long.

I've also always gotten along better with my women relatives. The male ones mostly shunned me or really weren't interested in hanging out. The female ones warm up to me and we did a lot of things together. I had a ton of platonic girlfriends. I was totally cool in the friend zone. In fact the only reason I managed to get married twice was that each wife advanced on me. I never pushed it far. It also happened quickly.

Quote from: stephaniec on September 19, 2014, 05:47:31 PM
just curious if your need to accept your self as  female is coming from some primordial innate subconscious mechanism or combination of primordial and analytical , analytical in the sense of how your true self can be best integrated into society as it presently exists. I think I'm a collage of both.

Actually I'm fascinated by the fact that I can actually feel the part of my brain urging me to see myself as female. It's like a piece of my mind I can't change. Every other part of my brain I have a lot more control over.

So I think, for me, it's wired in.

Quote from: suzifrommd on September 20, 2014, 01:35:15 PM
Actually I'm fascinated by the fact that I can actually feel the part of my brain urging me to see myself as female. It's like a piece of my mind I can't change. Every other part of my brain I have a lot more control over.

So I think, for me, it's wired in.

I was so young when this started I have to be wired.

For me it took over 30 years of hardcore drug use to keep a lid on it, and at 19 years of not using the lid blew off.  Dani

I'm pretty sure I'm made that way and it was my "rational" brain (that was actually rationalizing, not being rational) that tried to convince me otherwise.

First off I consider myself a realist which kind of does not fit idea to transition and perhaps been ever analytical.  However being analytical I have learned what trans is then decided to come out to mother and my 2 closest friends.  What I have learned from that experience is that they knew I was a girl long before I accepted it.

Long story short being analytical it seems I have rational reasons about something that I have finally realized that is innate about myself.  Now if I could have only been more aware of this sooner but cant change the past so now to look to a future which I know will not be easy but nothing easy is worth doing either. Yet some days I feel maybe I am totally delusional and waiting to try HRT as proof to self as to what I really am or is it who?

Primordial.

Basically I say this because I did actually think that maybe my problem was just society, and how there was no way for a man to be beautiful, or for a man to be cute, or a man to wear body-revealing clothing, or any number of other things, but pre-transition I basically tried being exactly that, and standing in defiance of society, but it still wasn't enough. I still wanted to be a girl, both physically and socially. I still hated my body hair, my bulky uncute face and frame, my male sex-drive, how testosterone affected my brain, and certain genital anatomy, in addition to hating the social connotations of being male.

So no, for me it's not about the rational reason that I fit in better as a girl to our imperfect gender binary. Even in a world where the genders were identical socially, I'd still want a female body, and that's not rational, it's just what my brain is comfortable with, and what it expects to be there.

I still have doubts about the social part of it. But then I remember that going back to being male would mean getting hairy again, and losing my head hair again, and dealing with the male sex-drive and the male hormonal soup again, and I'm immediately like "HELL NO!"