These days, more and more teens are being allowed to live as their real gender in schools. I'm happy for them. The period between fifth and 12th grades are crucial to the development and fitting in to their correct gender. Our personalities are being formed at that age and you don't get another chance to relive it.

Maybe I have no business saying this, but I wouldn't advise a teen or preteen telling even friends that they are transgenders. If you have been living as your true gender rather than what your chromosomes say, and are blending in, I'm afraid that telling someone else will change the way you are treated. People are more liberal about that, true, but its a subconscious thing.

Because girls and boys are  segregated in locker rooms starting in fifth grade, if you are a transgender male but can't stay with the guys in stealth, all the behaviors, inside jokes etc. will be lost. Those things are important even though they may seem that they aren't. when the split came, and I had no idea of what was going on, I was forced to be in the girl's locker room and wear a little gym suit rather than the shorts and Ts the guys wore. I faded into invisibility from fifth grade to highschool graduation.

The result is an arrested development. I know how I'm supposed to act and talk to an extent, and some of it comes naturally, but there is a whole gap there that is gone forever.

When you do start going into councelling before HRT, and get the ok to move forward, its like a high greater than any drug. I was twenty six and thought I had everything under control. At the time, having an inexperienced therapist and surgeons seemed like a gift because I didn't have to go through the long time in therapy. Had I stayed, most likely I wouldn't have wound up going forward so quickly and trying to make my life as normal as it should be. I probably would not have gotten married. My emotional position as far as the years I had missed would have been worked out. I guess the point is that if you are going to a therapist, stick with it even though you might feel like you don't need it. The thing is, you probably do. You'll never be completely prepared for living as your correct gender, and some of that just has to be experienced, but you will have had more preparation and be less apt to rush into things.

sam1234

I am about 10 years before you in treatment and my story reads much like yours. In my case, the time between 13 and 30 was pretty much arrested social development. I understood at age 13 what my life would be like and I understood the harm it would cause others if I married so I never went so far as to hold hands romantically. I entered therapy at age 23 but therapy hadn't evolved enough to handle me, It took almost 4 more years before I found a program that was constructed much along the lines of treatment programs today where I was able to start the real transition process. All of those things people do in there teens and early adulthood, I never did.
Sometimes it may not be possible to be stealth as a child, but an effort should be made to have a full childhood where you are with others your age and you share common experiences. As accepting as people are today children should be able to have what we missed out on even if the truth is known.

Quote from: sam1234 on August 08, 2015, 02:29:47 PM
Maybe I have no business saying this, but I wouldn't advise a teen or preteen telling even friends that they are transgenders.

I can't even begin to think what it would do to a teen's psyche to have a high-stakes secret that they can't even tell their closest friends. Teens are under so much stress as it is.

Quote from: suzifrommd on August 08, 2015, 03:53:52 PM
I can't even begin to think what it would do to a teen's psyche to have a high-stakes secret that they can't even tell their closest friends. Teens are under so much stress as it is.

And yet , many of us did have to carry that secret even beyond high school. The telling, in my case, would have been much worse.

Obviously high schools and middle schools are more liberal today than they were when I was there, but I'd prefer keeping a secret to the jokes and possible further isolation that telling others might cause. Kids can be downright vicious and I'm sure everyone has seen that at one time or another. They don't really have the ability to understand the long term consequences that their teasing might cause. That doesn't make them mean, just kids.

It may be more difficult for an xy female transgender to  get through that period. Those first bursts of testosterone cause some pretty strong urges. At 26 it was hard not to think of girls all the time, and I was an adult without the equipment to get an erection. A teen, not yet allowed to take hormones, may have trouble hiding a spur of the moment, uncontrolled erection through a skirt or stretch girl's pants or what ever young girls are wearing today. Thinking of some cute guy or daydreaming is going to cause physiologic results. I'm sure there must be a way to hide that though.

I agree that those eight years are a pressure cooker, but with the faculties help, a young transgender could get through it. Most teens do have secrets. Sexual preferences, eating disorders, psychologic disorders etc. Secrets may be hard to keep, but being a prisoner in your own body and the outside attacks from being different can cause scars that last a lifetime.

sam1234