Wow, so many stories!
I have no idea where I fit because I feel like I fit in both camps. It's weird. I don't know how weird, but probably really really weird. I have no idea why but I've been having this desire to tell my story somewhere for years, but I'm too afraid to do it. Once I start the whole thing will probably come out and that's going to end up being novel length. It's too complicated and embarrassingly insane and I can't see why anyone would want to read that *bleep* anyway.
The short version is that the first time I encountered my genitals in a personal way an accidental convergence of imagination and ignorance led me to sincerely believe that this thing between my legs i had always assumed would just fall off eventually was in fact some kind of massive evil worm that had laid eggs in me that would one day hatch out millions of worms to eat me from the inside out. I spent like a month in mortal terror of my dick. Then repressed the hell out of it to survive.
I was a pretty normal kid in terms of gender, I think. I liked legos and airplanes and origami, and playing house as well. My oldest friend swears I used to try to play dress-up her and my sister and get them to put make-up on me all the time but I don't remember that at all, which is pretty odd for me.
I knew I was trans at the age of eight, the moment I first saw my aunt. It was not welcome news. My father is particularly homo/transphobic and we were involved in a very conservative religious cult of some sort as well, so things got weird fast. Weirder than you probably think, actually (there were extenuating factors). So realizing I was the same meant I was going to become an "abomination unto the lord" and go to hell. It felt like doom or fate, I don't know, but I locked myself in the bathroom that day and began to pray like I never had before. For whatever reason the thing that worried me the most about going to hell was the idea that in my path towards becoming an abomination I would be dragging down a lot of other innocent people into hell with me. The only thing I could think to do was kill myself, but I didn't want to die and I didn't want to go to hell. But right then if I'd had a sign that said I'd be forgiven for it I was convinced I'd do it without hesitation. But I never got a sign, and so I figured maybe I could avoid it by totally ignoring that other face I kept seeing in the mirror and living a super godly life.
I managed to repress the idea, and remain in denial even as i began cross dressing after I moved out on my own, but I think I had very severe GD and it came out in another way that tortured me every day of my life and got much stronger every time I had to do anything masculine. But I was totally unable to really do anything feminine because of the situation, so I lived in this kind of depressive hell, particularly once puberty started and I couldn't recognize myself at all. I didn't want to be a girl in the slightest because I felt I needed a certain amount of power to survive.
Definitely not, except, you know, always. Except it was always about body and it never even occurred to me that it had anything at all to do with gender or sex even as i'd be pining away, wishing I were like one girl or other. But to me everyone was just another people.
I remember the first time someone pointed out my bulge, and how bad I wanted to hide under a rock. I was too large to tuck, so long shirts were the thing. I went from homeschool to highschool and everyone seemed to think I was gay. It made zero sense to me, but it just never stopped. In retrospect I think it was my body language, because trying to act like a male always made me feel like a stone golem and I'd forget to do it at times.
Over and over I'd hear people talking about how they felt like men and it just made zero sense to me. I kept thinking that maybe when i grew a beard, or pubic hair, or whatever masculine milestone was next, THEN I'd feel like a man and get it. Meanwhile, the backstreet boys in my headphones. Meanwhile, puberty had brought with it an aversion to being touched that just kept growing until one day my mom hugged me from behind and it messed with me so bad I almost socked her on reflex. Nothing felt right, and the more I got the things I thought I wanted the more I felt like something was wrong. I thought I knew what that something was, and it was a lot more impossible than becoming a girl so I had to just stay alive.
Couldn't take it any more at 16. Decided to end it, but mom is kind of psychic and forces me to go with her to church on that day. I realize how much pain I'd cause them, and so i promised id never do it and then mostly dreamed of death for the next eight years. I got into drugs, nothing specific and never became addicted to anything except not feeling like me. I always held down a job or went to school until it was too much torture to stay and then i'd make some drastic change. I changed my major four times, my college once, moved something like 23 times in ten years, and had sixteen jobs. I only felt okay-ish during transition periods.
at 19 I gave up on religion. It wasn't working and too many people were contradicting each other with the same passages.
At 28, I learn for the first time that my body actually can respond to touch... if I'm touched like a female. I don't want this to be the answer, but I've always known it's true.
It took me three more years and developing some unknown and supposedly incurable chronic illness to finally realize that if I didn't at least try HRT I might not live long anyway. I was just losing the will to live. Not eating. Life just hurt too much.
So I start a week ago, and it improved life better than any medication I've tried in the first hour. I'm 31, totally broke, nowhere near as disabled, and finally feeling like I've got a reason to live. The future feels like it actually exists, and like there's time in between now and dying. I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to afford FFS, but I think I will, somehow. Doing my own electro.
So I'm kind of both early and late onset. The crippling sense that my body was WRONG just pummeled me every day, but I was so trapped by all this fear in so many opposing directions that I couldn't even let myself think about it.
