Hey everyone...I have a question. For a good  hunk of my life (except when I was 5 or 6) I was okay with my body. I went through puberty fine and it didn't bother me..but at 18 now I can't stand my body. I can't look at my breasts without cringing or think about my downstairs area without nearly panicking. Is this just late onset transsexualism? Why is my body bothering me now? If this helps I'm 18.

18 hardly qualifies as 'late onset.'

I didn't even really realize I was transgender until way after puberty. I believe it's because when we are younger, boys and girls do not outwardly appear all that different. After puberty, the differences between boys and girls are very apparent. On some level, maybe you see your body and know that when other people see them, they see female parts. At 18, your body is fully developed.

Oh, I didn't start detesting my vagina until I was 24!  There's nothing abnormal about you no matter what stage your body or ideas about your body start changing.  Everyone is different, has experiences at different times.  Don't stress out!  And again, this isn't late at all. 

Good luck, good luck, and and I hope you find satisfaction and peace in  making your body more like the one you want to have.  Everyone here can help!

it's not necessarily all about your body. you could've had feelings of identifying with males better than females earlier, but since you're fully developed now, it's different for you. i think most mtf end up figuring it out sooner, but ftm may end up figuring it out later. society permits alot of females to have some masculinity, so it's easier for them to think they are fine as they are. while society as a whole does not permit males to have femininity at all, so many times it ends up being easier for an mtf to figure it out.

i remember wanting to grow up a woman just like my mother (about 12 or younger) , but i didn't knew about why i felt that way until a few years ago, just after puberty

Quote from: pyradraconia on January 22, 2011, 01:04:39 AM
i remember wanting to grow up a woman just like my mother (about 12 or younger) , but i didn't knew about why i felt that way until a few years ago, just after puberty

most of us don't know exactly why until later. i've had these feelings for as long as i can remember. it wasn't until i was 11/12 that the phrases "why can't i be a girl?" "i wanna be a girl." "i should've been born a girl." started becoming daily thought processes, so for the next year or two i ended up becoming very depressed, withdrawn, anxious, and just not even interested in being alive. a therapist told me when i was 13 about who i was, and then at that point i felt so shaky and weird. like something huge was just taken out of me.

I wouldn't say I was late(er) in coming to the conclusion that I wanted to be a female, it just wasn't until puberty that I truly hated the body I was in.

I knew the (then used as a derogatory statement from my uncle) concept of sex change when I was young, but didn't know the theory of GiD or anything else until I was 20ish.

As telka had mentioned 18 is still young enough, there's even a post floating around here asking if 35 is too old to start (not including our... um... tong in cheek... more mature members of the forum).

It's just all based on timing I guess, I'm in my early 30's and probably wont be able to do anything about how I look for a while if at all. Maybe someday soon I'll finally get sick of myself enough that I wont care what happens to the rest of my life. Maybe I'll be able to live the rest of my life the way I am and wont have to change anything at all.

who knows.