Some know from about age 3 or 4, which coincides with the age that humans typically begin to develop a sense of self (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness#Infancy_and_early_childhood), so it makes sense that this would be the first time any gender misalignment may begin to manifest itself.

That is not to say that everyone does though.  Other than hanging out with girls as much as (if not perhaps a bit more) than the boys, and spending many hours sitting on the couch watching my favourite film The Little Mermaid with my friend Cassie, when I was about 8, I was otherwise fairly gender-blind.  I grew up in the kind of family where I was allowed to just be me.  As far as I was concerned, I was never made aware of being either a "boy" or a "girl", I was just *ME*, and for one reason or another that never collided with anything in the world that made me aware of it.  Maybe it was there in the background, maybe it wasn't.  There's just nothing I can point to which definitively shows I had signs of being female at that point.

It wasn't until I hit my teens and high school that I started getting stick for being feminine.  When the girls started hanging out with other female-borns and I found myself being lumbered with the guys (although I still managed to maintain a fair number of female friends).  It was at this point that I started to realise that I didn't really belong with this group that I was being lumped in with, but obviously I didn't have a name for it at the time.  I thought I was just weird, and of course ended up hanging out with the outcast groups (which in my case were the geeks/gamers, and the rockers / alternative crowd)

it wasn't until I was about 14 and I met a pair of guys called Lee and Steve. They were rather anarchy-minded, and one of the things we enjoyed doing together was skipping down the street with flowers in our hair (literally! we stole them from peoples front gardens lol) and basically acting all girly. It was an act of liberation / rebellion for us, but while it was just a bit of fun for them, I took it a lot more seriously, and spent many nights working out ways that we (or really *I*) could basically pass as female.  I didn't know about ->-bleeped-<- at the time, and when this phase eventually passed after a few weeks, I just passed it off as a "silly phase" and moved on.

This of course was not the last time I'd have fantasies of being female - just a year later, I had a persistent role-play fantasy I would act out after my folks went to bed where I was in a future where gender roles had been reversed (i.e. guys would behave like girls, and girls would behave like guys).  But this phase with Lee and Steve at 14 was the first thing that I can remember where I had definitive "I'd love to be / have been a girl!" thoughts that I can point to.

Despite this and numerous other similarly obvious phases / thoughts / fantasies etc, it wasn't until I was 27 that I linked all of this to being transgendered.  I'm now 29 (soon to be 30), and the past couple of years has been about learning and understanding what this all means.  I'm nearing a point of full acceptance, and hopefully soon I'll have manoeuvred myself into a position where I can actually *FINALLY* start to do something about it! (other than the basic prep-work I've been doing already that is lol )

So yeh, 14 was the age of my first definitive trans-thoughts, and 27 was the age that I finally put a name to it lol

Signs of it around 5-7. By 8-10 I knew for sure. But by 13-14 I suppressed it, blocked it out. By 20 it all came flooding back and I knew I wanted to transition. By 27 I started HRT.

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Well, I'm one of those who knew since earliest memory.  I recall learning dates from a kiddie TV show December 1959 - I was age 3.

My sister and I bathed together until I was age 7 and she was age 9.  I always thought what I had would fall off - or something.

I went through nasty phases of what was called 'feminine protesting' - tantrums - 'I AM a girl, Dad!', 'My name is Sharon, Mom.'  My arguments persisted until I began transition.

Teachers had no problem with me using the girl's room during Kindergarten and 1st Grade; I had to sit because I could not do it standing up.  I only got in trouble once - that was when another girl friend and I were caught making wet toilet paper wads and throwing them at the ceiling and walls to see what would stick; you've heard that expression.  Change to Catholic school beginning 2nd Grade; I got in big trouble with the nuns when I tried to use the girl's room.  I did not know why.

Most my best friends while growing up were girls:  Mary Lou, Dawn, Debbie, April, Janine.

I frequently wore clothes from my sister at least beginning age 3 through age 14; my parents scolded me when I took her clothes without her permission (fair enough), not when I wore them.  I experimented with make-up from older cousins; they liked it when I played dress-up with them.

I had no clean white shirt for Catholic First Communion so I wore my sister's white blouse.  Suddenly that was okay.

Divorced parents and my sister eventually resided with our mom and I with our dad.  It was walking distance between home and school; I went home for lunch, changed into my sister's clothes, ate, then changed back when I returned to school.  Oops, nearly got caught when I forgot to remove my bra on the way to school one day during 8th Grade; I had learned how to take it off without removing my shirt.  I wore my sister's clothes when I got home from school.

My mom was an alcoholic and beat me and my sister when she was drunk.  My dad hit me to beat the female out of me; the worst was February 1971.  Beatings from either parent never took my female from me.

A small child lacks that adult knowledge and perspective but knows there is a big mistake.  I certainly did not have the same appearance 'down there' as other boys; they teased me for it.  My doctors finally agreed to examine me while I was in transition; sure enough, they determined that my mal-formed female anatomy was mis-identified and that I was erroneously assigned as 'male' at birth - I'm female inter-sexed.  Yes!  Yet gatekeepers still made me jump through all the same hoops and prove that I could re-claim my true gender and sex before a surgeon corrected me at age 26.

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I was a tomboy, and generally hung out with the boys and mostly played with boy's things and wore boy's clothes. But I didn't start to feel that there was something wrong with me until puberty. Suddenly my body had completely and utterly let me down in every conceivable fashion, and I was expected to conform to its whims and dimensions. That's when I started to feel increasingly out of place. I didn't have a word for it until I was about 16.

Thomas

I hoped/wished/prayed that I'd wake up as a girl starting around age 4. Not long after that time I got the clear message from mom "Boys do not wear girl's clothes" when I put on my sister's school uniform to go to kindergarten.

I took on the trans beast for real at age 50 after a few false starts starting in my early 20's late teens.

Denial is a river in Eqypt 

By the time I came along all my 1st cousins had gotten married I was the age their kids are .my 2nd cousins were girls we played together.I had the signs of wanting to be female just wonder of they picked up on it or not.

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I started figuring out that I was a girl at 13. I went into denial for about two years, and after some really harsh self-discovery, I'm now going in for it, at age 17.

My mom and dad knew i was different at the age of 3.. I knew i was trans when i hit pubity. Hated the way my body started to develope. 

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4th grade I told a girl friend of mine that I wished I was a girl.

Didn't let it be fully realized though.....was somehow able to suppress it until I was 28....then it all came out and there was no going back

My mother spotted the first signs that I wasn't the cute little girl I looked like when I was 18 months old.

I first noticed that I was very different from the girls around me, and that their behaviour was baffling to me, when I was 5 years old.

I first heard the word 'transsexual' when I was 19 and I immediately knew that it applied to me. It was just a shame that whilst there were a few MtF role models back then, there were zero FtM role models so I stuffed myself back in Narnia until I couldn't stand it any longer.

That was at age 40... I'm now 3 years into my transition and I finally feel much more at peace with myself.

I felt like a girl when i was 12 or 13. I dreaded seeing my body become masculine at all. It was not an aversion per se, but still dread. I really did not know about transgender people at all before high school, so i had nothing to label it. Remember hearing my mom on the phone with a relative saying that she was worried about me, and that although i was "super smart" i was timid and lacked "boyishness" Yeah mom no kidding.

I started to wear feminine items around then, with a little support from my sister but hiding them from mom. (i came out to her in my late teens and she accepted it). My success as a football player put some of the negative questions about my femininity on the shelf. I was voted all conference, all state and offered two scholarships to play post HS, to many that was confusing given the way i presented myself off the field.

Then when i learned about transgender people, it was 90% negative stuff of the times ( drag queen comedy, wrapping it all up in "gayness" etc.). So applied myself to being both male and female as much as i could, the former in sports, relationships etc, the latter in my long hair, hair color and more private things. That dual nature continued into my adult life. My first realization that i was definitely different than most was likely in my late teens and i began to research it all by my early 20s.

I was 12 when I realized what I was, though I probably should have known earlier. When I was 4, I would put on some of my mom's curlers and tell my parents I was <girl name>. I just didn't really think about gender as a construct until I was 9-12 years old. That was also about the time I first got online and was able to find there were others like me.

Quote from: bchigdon10 on November 29, 2015, 06:31:24 PM
How are you supposed to know at a single digit age?I think for some it comes later.

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I think Peep made a good point as to why some know it very young - gender roles. I never really thought about my gender too much before I hit puberty. By the same token, there are others who had strict gender roles pushed on them before they were even out of diapers, causing them to explore the question of gender at a young age.