Hello everyone! The name's Todd, and I'm a femme trans man.
I've actually been a little lurker for some time now since I've been using this website since high school. I found it when I was googling a few questions relating to transmen. I forgot what I initially put in the search bar, but I found a few threads that seem to answer them and everything else was history.
I'm a very private (and paranoid) person, so I feel like if I share my story, it would be very easy for someone to recognize who I am, so I'll give a few vague details about my own life story:
I never truly identified myself as a female, but I have felt ashamed by identifying as male for various reasons. Many of which ranged from "your body is a gift" to "you're only trans because you want to be better than women". Mostly the latter because most of my friends were feminists. I've actually only got those kinds of comment from ONE person that I outed myself to, but I've quickly learned that the others had the same opinion in regards to other people like me.
So far, I have outed myself to my parents in September and I'm happy with the results. They didn't get angry or go full-bigot mode that I thought they would. They're pretty calm about it, but still, it's obvious that they haven't fully accepted yet. They say that they don't care what I am just as long as I'm happy, but still pressured me to go to a therapist to make sure that I wasn't confused, and they're highly against HRT treatment (but not Top Surgery).
To be fair, I'm a little scared of HRT myself but I really, really want to go through with it. Preferably, I want to get on it after surgery because then I wouldn't have C-cup breasts hanging out while I'm on it. Though I have been reconsidering it since I've read that most therapists prefer the other way around, and since HRT is a long process, I don't think I'm going to have any noticeable changes for a while, and Double-Incision top surgery is very expensive in my area. So it'll be a long while until I get the money for it. For now, I'm still trying to plan everything out and go through college.
So obviously, I'm pre-everything. I'm going to visit the therapist in a few weeks, and I hope things go well with her because she's literally the only one I can access through Kaiser.
With all that aside, I finally joined this site in order to have a safe place, and have a few people to talk to for advice and help guide me. And even though I said I'm a lurker, I'm still new to this community so forgive me if I screw up every now and then.
Nice to meet you all!