Hey guys, my name is Avery. It's my first post, so here's my story. AMAB, but I identify as a trans woman, trans tomboy to be more precise. I say tomboy because I really like tomboy fashion for one, but also I've never had any interest in make up or dresses or other super femme clothes and I just generally feel more comfortable with that term because there's a degree of gender freedom with it that I really appreciate after being trapped by masculinity for so long.
I've had gender dysphoria since at least elementary school. I'm an atheist now, but I got really desperate towards the end of elementary and tried praying every night for months to wake up as a girl the next day. The prayers went through various modifications, slowly withering away in magnitude as they spiraled down through various levels of desperation as time went on.
Eventually I just gave up and figured nothing could be done (trans people had pretty much zero exposure ion the media at the time, so I didn't even know what trans was), so I ignored the dysphoria the best I could. This meant tens of thousands of hours in video games, plus more time spent obsessing over various other hobbies over the years like skateboarding, guitar, and foreign languages.
Usually this would be enough to get by, but the problem I repressed would just come out in other ways like when I was in middle school and I would sometimes sit on the bathroom floor with a pair of scissors wishing that maybe certain things weren't in their present location. A lot of shows and movies I liked also tended to be gender benders of some sort, either gender or body swapping or even just a girl who has to pretend to be a guy like in the Korean drama Coffee Prince.
It wasn't until college, when I was on a documentary binge, that I stumbled upon a documentary on the history of transexuality. That was the first time I got an honest depiction of what it means to be trans with actual trans people talking and not just some reporter going out on the street and asking people what they thought about some trans story. Also, importantly for me, it was the first time I found out that SRS was even possible. I had seen trans women before on certain sites, but they always had that male part still there, so I think that gave me the impression that it wasn't even possible to go "all the way", which, for me at least, includes downstairs.
I wasn't ready to accept being trans back in college though, so I kept running from it until I turned 30 about 7 months ago and realized I couldn't just keep running from it or I'd end up dead like one of my best friends growing up who died a year earlier or my grandpa who died shortly after that. Now I've come out to several people, I've been growing out my hair for 10 months or so, I've been doing laser and HRT for 3 months and when people ask me how I am, I can actually say that I'm doing good. =) It's probably been 10-15 years since I was able to say that.
