Hi all.
I have a question to ask you all. More of a pondering, actually. It seems to me that a lot of us discovered ourselves in our fifties and sixties. I did at the tender age of 62. That seems to me to be a pattern. I'm just curious if anyone has an idea as to why we would wait until this age to make such a huge discovery. Any thoughts?

Camille,


I have no idea why there are many who might be not identify themselves as transgender until later in life.  We may have insufficient data to make a statistically significant informed judgment.

We can speculate and you may see some replies soon where we speak of ourselves personally and not collectively.

For me, I cross dressed since college.  Then in graduate school I realized that I might be transgender.  I got gender therapy for clarification.  I have never had any attraction to males.  I had no extreme traumatic life experiences and I was never abused in any way.

It is what I call common horse sense that a person born with a penis is medically defined as male.  However for some reasons that does not fit for some and they are actually women. 

Perhaps it takes years for some to arrive at the conclusion they are actually women with the wrong body.  But that is okay.  There is no timetable that needs to be followed.  A corresponding situation exists for FTMs thinking that they are in the wrong body.

Some things remain a mystery.

Chrissy

Society has become more accepting of transgenders.
There are now commercial establishments that are openly accepting of LGBTQ+ patrons.

Let me propose this: Few of us recognise dysphoria from incongruence from an early age, and our lives are so busy that we just don't take the time to analyse the times we feel down and frustrated. We generally put it down to other things in life. As we enter our 'Golden Years' we slow up, and pay more attention to what is bugging us. By this time we are also more life smart, having experienced most things, so we are better able to analyse ourselves.

About this same time, our hormone levels begin to change. Our dominant hormones reduce, and this allows our secondary hormones (we all produce both Testosterone and Estrogen) to be more effective. This changes our perceptions a little. All these things combine to make it more likely that we can connect the dots over a lifetime and realise they were from incongruence.

Hugs,

Allie

I agree with Allie Jayne.

In my younger years, I was just too busy. I joined the Army right after my 18th birthday and served almost 15 years. I got married, had kids, got divorced, remarried, and was focused on raising a family. I got injured and went on total disability, my wife got sick and passed away, and I was struggling to make ends meet. I married a third time, started some small businesses for income, and continued to be busy. It wasn't until I divorced wife #3 that I decided to move to South Dakota. I decided that I would no longer have to worry about jobs or family or what anyone else expected of me. I was going to do what I wanted to do.

Since my hectic life had finally calmed down, I was able to focus on taking care of myself. I got into therapy to try to understand why my life followed the path that it did. It was in therapy that I learned that I was transgender. Combining that with other discoveries (I am an asexual introvert) really helped me understand why things happened the way that they did. Being retired gave me the time to invest in examining myself that I never had before.

As we get older, we have more time for reflection and examination, so it makes sense that we would make these discoveries later in life.

Humans are a lot tougher than we give ourselves credit for.  As children, we are told who we are, and we are programmed to believe our parents.  So we spend decades trying to be who we were told we were.  It takes a long time to realize that (a) it isn't working, and (b) it's not because we aren't trying hard enough.

By the time we have passed through middle age, we have enough life experience to be able to analyze the situation properly and figure out that we were misled.

I read somewhere that the most common age to come out as MTF is 35-55.  The most common age for FTMs is much younger, something like 15-30 (though I forget the exact numbers).

There is a lot of self denial too.

It is like the we think we will have a hard time being accepted, so we deny, deny, deny to possibly avoid being outcast.

I do not understand why gays, previously very much outcast, are more mainstream now and we transgender people are not there yet.  (Nothing against gays when I say that.)

I conclude that they have transformed the thinking of society that they are very much just people like many who are not gay.

We have not done that as well. 

So. . .  Maybe people get the nerve to come out as transgender later in life  - being fearful of what that disclosure may do to them as they are younger adults.  That is simply speculation. 

Note that they may realize that they ARE transgender much earlier than when and if they come out as transgender.

Quote from: Camille58S on April 26, 2025, 07:22:38 PMI have a question to ask you all. More of a pondering, actually. It seems to me that a lot of us discovered ourselves in our fifties and sixties. I did at the tender age of 62. That seems to me to be a pattern. I'm just curious if anyone has an idea as to why we would wait until this age to make such a huge discovery.

It's only recently that transgender has been a widespread concept. Before that there were just the occasional news stories (always sensational) and so older generations grew up feeling confused about gender but without the words and concepts to understand that they were.

I'm in my sixties too and more or less had to go to medical school in the 1970s to find out what was bothering me :-) It sounds crazy but it's not that much of an exaggeration.

On top of that, a lot of people operated denial and used hyper-gendering to 'scare off' the dysphoria because of genuine worries about acceptance. Go back to the generation born after the 1914 European war and I'd bet there were numbers of trans people who never realised they were trans because they had no idea what trans was!

Something that occurs to me is it depends how strong your dysphoria and how binary you are will also determine how early you'll present. If you have a strong 'born in the wrong body' dysphoria, then I can see why you'll  present early, especially if you were AMAB. If your dysphoria isn't that strong, then it's easier to compromise with it, especially if you were AFAB, because gender policing isn't so strong for women. And if you are non-binary, as a third of 'new' trans people are now, you find yourself in a liminal zone where there aren't any signposts.

Quite a few late presenters I've encountered have turned out to be non-binary. Couple that with lack of available information and you'd be as lost as I was to begin with.

Conversely, the more society pushes gender norms during your childhood years, the more deeply they're embedded in you. One thing I've noticed with late presenters is they've often had very conservative parents or grown up in very conservative communities. Even today, that's a barrier to coming out, but sixty years ago, escapting that situation was like crossing the Berlin wall.

I'm one who found herself in her late 60s. I think there's much to Allie's ideas. Our generation was culturally bereft of acceptance of gays, let alone having any understanding or tolerance for someone feeling as if they were not gendered properly. I went into the military and buried myself in being the best man that I could and it wasn't until I retired from the Army that the beginnings of dysphoria began to seep through. As I slowed down, and perhaps as my hormonal balance changed, the desires to reflect femininity in my life took hold and grew over several decades. As the dysphoria strengthened my depression deepened until it all came exploding out of me a little over 2 years ago. Honestly, had I not opened up to my wife at that point, I'm not sure I'd be here today. Depression can lead you into some very dark places that become not scary but warm and inviting.

As much as I sometimes wish I'd found myself earlier in life, I would not trade the love of my family or the two amazing careers I've had. I'm living my life forward.

We each have our own stories.  None are identical.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 27, 2025, 10:43:56 AMIt's only recently that transgender has been a widespread concept.

Just to clarify, Transgender has been a concept under different names for millennia, but it is only in recent decades that there has been western society wide awareness of the term transgender.

I knew in 1958 that I had an incongruent gender identity, and so did 2 other children in my street, but we didn't have terminology for it, and we had to hide it for our survival. I'm sure many other people recognised incongruence, but denied it. Back in those days, it was seen as a mental disorder, treated by shock 'therapy', so very few people admitted their incongruence.

Even now, I don't believe we have the terminology correct, and in 50 years I would expect we will have a different understanding of our condition.

Hugs,

Allie

I had no idea I was non-binary until I started dreaming about a woman in my early sixties (about a decade ago). It took me several more years to realize that I was the woman I was dreaming about (which explained why I never could see her face). Before then, I assumed I was a mentally ill pervert who liked to dress in my wife's clothes. In some ways, the awareness was liberating. In other ways, knowledge was terrifying: once I understood my dreams, I was forced to confront them. It's been a rocky road since then. But I believe I am finally on the road I'm meant to follow.

Quote from: April Marie on April 27, 2025, 01:55:25 PMI'm one who found herself in her late 60s.

Did you have any suspicion at all that something was off when you were a child?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 27, 2025, 07:51:01 PMIt took me several more years to realize that I was the woman I was dreaming about (which explained why I never could see her face).

People discovering their gender identity isn't what they thought it was in later life hasn't been researched to more than the most minimal level. Almost every single person I've ever dealt with directly (which was about a hundred give or take) had had some kind of suspicion around in early childhood that something wasn't right. Some of the older clients I worked with who had suspected their transness late had spent years or decades in either denial or suppression, the trauma from which was usually apparent in mental health issues, multiple relationship failures and addictions, before they accepted they were trans.

I'd been signed up to the idea that most people suspect they're trans when they're children because that would make sense if our gender identity was mostly innate (as in inherited/genetic) but more to the point, that it was fixed. In other words, that we're trans from the moment we're old enough to think about gender identity and realise we don't fit with the gender identity we've been assigned at birth.

What you, Camille, and April Marie are saying is that you didn't suspect anything when you were children? If you all lived quite normal lives until you began to suspect you were trans, it would suggest gender identity can drift, which would make it like fluid sexual orientation, which is well accepted now, particularly so in women.

If there are other members of Susans who've only begun to suspect they were trans late after living lives free of any signs of mental health issues which could be linked to supressed gender id, then this is something that has gone under the radar in the scientific literature!

I've just dug out the latest report on what's called the Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria (ACGD) study because I half recalled it had numbers that backed up what I've seen (which very clearly isn't everything, what a surprise). The ACGD started in 1972 and has been continuously updated, and by 2015 had 3838 trans people on its books.

The last year of data the 2018 report captured was 2014, but there was 42 years of data there and they had 1444 people who had started HRT on the records. All are adults because of the way the system works in the Netherlands but there was no upper age restriction on who the clinics would accept as a referral.

The youngest AMAB person they record as starting on gender affirming hormone therapy was 25 and the oldest 47. That's odd because I'd expect to see at some people beginning transitioning late since the clinics were okay with it, but we're not seeing those referrals in their numbers and the ACGD is one of the most well maintained, open and comprehensive studies around.

So either AMAB people presenting as trans post 47 is a post 2014 phenomenon in the Netherlands at least, or something has changed. The question is what?

One data point in the ACGD that might give a clue is the AFAB people have always presented to their clinics a decade earlier than AMAB.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 28, 2025, 02:32:05 AMDid you have any suspicion at all that something was off when you were a child?

A slipped into my mother's closet a bit when I was a child but my father made it known that I was to be as tough as him - a Korean War Marine so those thoughts got buried quickly. I was always fascinated by the female body - not from a sexul standpoint but from the perspective of "how wonderful it would be to have a body like that. But, again, I never let those thoughts mature into and real substantive thing.

Quote from: April Marie on April 28, 2025, 04:01:05 AMA slipped into my mother's closet a bit when I was a child but my father made it known that I was to be as tough as him - a Korean War Marine so those thoughts got buried quickly.

Okay, that would fit with what I heard from the AMAB people I worked with. Only a handful didn't recall wearing their mother's or sister's clothes when they were around four to six but there were many who had been subject to the kind of hostility/reprisals that made it easy to understand why they hadn't acted on it. The thing that struck me was I never had to dig around for that memory; everyone who had it could easily recall it and that's significant because we don't remember much from that age.

Out of sheer professional and personal curiousity, I've had more people in my head in terms of psychologists and analysts than maybe any person alive and I've got a variation of the same pattern you have. Right down to a father who was in an elite armed forces unit.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 28, 2025, 04:16:14 AMOkay, that would fit with what I heard from the AMAB people I worked with. Only a handful didn't recall wearing their mother's or sister's clothes when they were around four to six but there were many who had been subject to the kind of hostility/reprisals that made it easy to understand why they hadn't acted on it. The thing that struck me was I never had to dig around for that memory; everyone who had it could easily recall it and that's significant because we don't remember much from that age.

Out of sheer professional and personal curiousity, I've had more people in my head in terms of psychologists and analysts than maybe any person alive and I've got a variation of the same pattern you have. Right down to a father who was in an elite armed forces unit.

I also have vivid memories of those times but I was a bit older - more in the 8 to 10 years old range. I have a picture of me at age 8. I had to take trash outside and was in my underwear and t-shirt. When I got to the door, I slipped into a pair of my sister's heels and grabbed her coat to throw over m and went outside. It was a subconscious choice because I had shoes and a coat there, too. My sister had seen me and grabbed her Brownie camera and snapped my picture as I came back into the house. Of course, we laughed about it then. But, I look at it now and realize it's the earliest chance to see the beginnings of my true self peeking back at me.

Quote from: April Marie on April 28, 2025, 04:52:24 AMBut, I look at it now and realize it's the earliest chance to see the beginnings of my true self peeking back at me.

Memories like this are almost universally in trans people. I had clients come to me in their forties and fifties saying they suspected they were trans for the first time, but when I asked if they had memories like yours from when they were children they were reliably there. Those memories must have been powerful, because they had lasted, but they'd been discounted. Or suppressed, because they didn't fit the gender narrative the person was trying to live.

I'd be interested to hear the stories of anyone here who didn't have early memories like you and I do, especially members who weren't part of families or communities which were strongly anti-trans. Even the hint that such people exist is intriguing.