These are similar to my personal answer, I felt something was wrong with my body, not I felt like a guy. To me there isn't really a way to "feel" like a man. I saw myself as a man, when I was a kid I saw myself growing up to be a man, it was an issue of my body not my interests or feelings. I felt it was wrong that my body didn't become (and never was) male.
It seems like this is a question I get asked a lot and I never really know how to answer it. It used to be simple enough to say, "I felt/feel male," in response. Now that seems to be followed with a lot of questions about how I "feel" male. Since the trans community has become such an inclusive/umbrella kind of thing it seems harder and harder to explain to people outside of our community how I feel and why I identify as a transsexual. Heck, sometimes it's even hard to explain to people in our community.
I don't see the community growing as a bad thing but I do see that it has grown from being just those of us who are what the medical community consider to be trans (meaning someone who's body and mind have different/opposing genders). With that growth there is now this need to confirm my transsexuality to other people when they have questions. Like I have to explain to them the difference between transsexual men and (for example) someone who was born into a female body and is genderqueer.
With the inclusion of other identities it seems harder and harder to make people on the outside understand the differences. Once I get into explaining some of the other types of identities it seems like they suddenly have a million more questions about what makes me as a transsexual different from the people in our community who share some of the same terminology to identify themselves but are clearly not actually like me (once again meaning people who identify as trans but aren't medically trans). Then I get asked things about how do I feel about other people using the term trans if they aren't transsexual, how do I see the other members of the community, etc. And it's all very confusing, even to me. I don't have a real answer for them, it's hard for someone to grasp that a trans person can be or not be trans and still be part of the trans community.
I don't know. Maybe I'll have more to say later, so far though I am enjoying the responses, it's good to see how other people tackle this kind of thing with themselves and with other people. It seems like every time I explain myself to someone I now have to explain a million of other people, their identities, how those identities tie into our community, why we accept those identities, etc. I kind of miss just being able to say I'm trans and having it be a clear obvious thing to strangers that doesn't need a million qualifiers for them to understand what type of trans I am.
Any thoughts on how to explain non-trans trans people in the trans community? Also as a side note, I'm not trying to use the terms non-trans as an insult or exclusion, I'm just trying to keep things worded as simply as possible and with all of the different identities in our community it's easier to use one term for the purpose of this thread than to attempt to include every possible label so my apologies in advance for any hurt feelings, not the intention at all.
