Hi guys, what does everyone here think of retroactive pronoun changes? I'm talking about like asking people to refer to your past self as your chosen gender. So, for example, in my case I asked my family members to refer to me in the past as a girl. It feels right to me because in my mind I never really was a guy; I was just forced to live as one.

    I'm not really sure what to think of this though. On the one hand, it feels amazing to 'rewrite' my past like that; it kind of erases some of the pain that I have been carrying around with me. On the other hand it seems like asking kind of a lot from family members. Not to mention it feels a little deceptive (maybe it's not lying exactly, but you could think of it as splitting hairs).

    I'm not very active in the trans community or anything so I really don't know what the 'official' stance is on this issue. It seems like it kind of depends on the person in question, but the polite thing to do is apply the pronoun changes retroactively in most cases?

    Anyways, what do you guys think? Am I overthinking this?

It's not something that I would get worried about. 

My wife does this voluntarily.  She will say, "When Kathy and I got married", even though I wasn't Kathy at the time.  And I tend to avoid talking about my younger self in male terms.  I will say, "When I was a kid", rather than "When I was a boy".  I tend not to say "When I was a girl", because I never had that opportunity. 

I can't actually think of another situation where someone would be talking about my younger self in the third person.

I am just happy if they get the pronouns right to my face, and when talking about me in the present tense.

I've had several people ask me how they should refer to me when talking about me the past, so I've spent some time thinking about it myself, and my preference is that people use my current name and pronouns.  From my perspective, coming out and transitioning didn't change my identity; it revealed it.

When I was little, I was a girl who was actively missing out on a lot of the 'girl stuff' that the other girls I knew got to experience, and that often made me feel sad and frustrated and left out, even if I didn't fully understand why at the time.  I don't personally feel that using my current name and pronouns to refer to my younger self is 'rewriting' my past or being deceptive, nor does it really erase any of that pain - I'm just speaking from my own perspective about how I've experienced life, regardless of what other people might have assumed about me or how they treated me. 

Just for the sake of minimizing any potential issues, if I'm talking to someone that I'm not out to and who I worry might not be a good ally, I'll be vague and generic about my past with things like "when I was little", "when I was younger", etc.  If I'm out to everyone involved in the conversation or it's otherwise a 'safe' environment though, then I have no problem referring to my younger self as a girl and I just ask them to follow the same rule that I do as best they can, and to just be generic about it or direct people to me if they're unsure.

Using a person's current name and pronouns when discussing their past seems to be the most common preference among the trans* people I've interacted with.  If it's someone I know, I'll ask how they want me to refer to them and in what contexts, and I use whatever they prefer; otherwise using a person's current name and pronouns seems like the most polite approach.

I think you overthink it. Especially if you english speakers - there isn't gender markers except some kind of direct statement like "I was boy/girl". We're not so lucky and have gender markers in any verb, adjective, participle and etc haha, it's real challenge to speak neutral

And I suggest don't look at "official stance" and do things how you feel it better for you (as long as it related just to you and not to other transpeople)