Sorry for asking but I am a cis male teenager (well, I thought I was.) but lately I have realized I think I might be a trans girl? I am very scared to drop my masculinity. How did you find out you were trans if that’s okay to ask?
Of course it's ok! I am always happy to help someone who is questioning their gender. However, this is actually a pretty loaded question, because while there is a lot of talk about "when my egg cracked" in trans circles, figuring out you're trans isn't always attributable to any one singular event. Some folks might crack through and emerge from their egg in one swift motion but that is not true for everyone, it certainly wasn't true for me. Sure I could tell about the moment the first crack in my shell appeared, but a single crack in the egg is a far cry from actually breaking out. For many it's a process that can involve a series of revelations and tends to require lots of self reflection and learning how to love yourself. So, there is no quick and easy answer for this. However, I think my story will have a number of different lessons relevant to your question.
Before getting into all that though, I feel I must point out that cisgender folks rarely ask themselves these kinds of questions and when they do entertain these thoughts it's brief and comes with very little agony. The fact you have gone so far as to reach out to trans woman for advice, the fact the you are clearly worried by the prospect of being trans, is a pretty clear indicator that you probably are trans. Regardless of whether you actually are transgender or not, I want you to know that either way, it's ok. You will be ok, no matter what conclusions you come to.
Now, the story of how I figured out I was trans. Bear in mind, the first “aha moment” was 20 yrs ago and things were very different back then. I was about 17yrs old at the time and the term transgender didn't have the currency then that it does now, there wasn't the robust set of terminology that we have today, there were far fewer resources to turn to, no social media, and the overall public opinion was significantly more hostile towards anything LGBT. Anyway, more below the cut.
I didn't follow the typical trans narrative of the time in the sense that, as a child I didn't really care about my clothes so long as my favorite cartoon characters were on 'em, I liked toys typically marketed towards boys, I looked like a boy and everyone referred to me as a boy. So I thought I was a boy. However, I do have a vague memory from early childhood, somewhere between the ages of 4-6, of sneaking into my mother’s room and stealing a pair of her satin underwear and trying it on (it surely would have been too big on me but I remember liking the texture of the fabric) and hiding it under my bed. This memory has since been confirmed during my adulthood by my brother who shared a room with me at the time and had apparently found the hidden stash.
From an early age I was explicitly shunted towards masculinity. I was regularly told to “stop acting like a girl,” and “quit crying like a girl,” and even at one point to “stop walking like a girl,” by my peers and one of my brothers. By the time I was a teenager I was doing my best to be as masculine as possible going so far as joining the highschool wrestling team, a sport that is as homophobic as it is homoerotic, and I hated every minute of it because being manly didn't feel natural to me (and it definitely didn't stop the bullying). It felt like I was trying to ice skate uphill. I fit in but only imperfectly for I was merely acting.
I was also very confused about my sexuality. I thought maybe I was gay or bisexual (turns out the latter) but that didn’t really explain what I was feeling. Around 17yrs old I got curious about transsexuals, thinking maybe the answers would be found there and hoped on to the early and oh so clunky internet. Now I knew of transsexuals conceptually but I didn't know anything about them. Sadly, pornography was really the only reliable way to actually see what a trans body looked like back then. I was stunned because the women I saw did not look at all the way I expected. I was blown away by how so many of them, genitalia aside, looked indistinguishable from cisgender women. And they were all absurdly beautiful. I felt an immediate attraction but there was something else I felt too, envy. And that realization was the first crack in my eggshell.
After that I couldn't get the thought of crossdressing out of my head. So, I dug through a box of my mother's old clothes and took a few items she no longer wore, an old white tennis skirt and a very very 70s sleeveless orange blouse. I was so comfortable in those clothes and when I looked at myself in the mirror I felt good, really good. So, I continued exploring, shaved off all of of my body hair, went to department stores that were open late at night to buy girl clothes (deathly afraid someone would recognize me), I would stay up late at night to watch HBO because at midnight they would occasionally air stuff about trans people, (I remember two documentary shorts in particular and the movie Soldier’s Girl) and I scoured the internet for more information. The internet search brought me to a website called TG list (at least I think that’s what it was called, this was 20yrs ago after all) which was a directory of resources ranging from The Breast Form Store (which still exists!), a myriad of gender identity quizzes (I took nearly every single one), and Susan’s Place.
Susan’s place was one of the few reliable places to hear from actual transgender adults. Unfortunately, while Susan's Place had a lot of useful information the forums there were full of horror stories, a never-ending supply of all the things those women had suffered. So needless to say, there was little to no positivity around transness to give me hope. I was afraid to call myself trans as a result, afraid of what it meant for my life, my future, and my physical safety (you have to remember that back then Mathew Shepard wasn’t old news, his tragedy was practically current events). So I called myself a crossdresser but for reasons I didn't understand at the time I deeply resented that label. I think deep down, no matter how much I tried to deny it and bury it, a part of knew I wanted to be a girl. So when I came out to my parents as a crossdresser and explicitly told them I wasn't trans, that I didn’t have any desire to transition to female, there was that lil voice at the back of my mind calling me a liar. That voice would follow me until my late 20s.
Coming out was a real struggle for me because not only did I think my life would literally be in jeopardy, I thought everyone would think I was making it up, having not followed the stereotypical models of transsexuality. When I came out to my parents they didn't disown me or anything but they were noticeably uncomfortable around me when I was in girl mode. At a certain point I needed their help (credit card) to buy a gaff for tucking and that was when my parents, out of a misguided desire to protect me, pushed me back into the egg. Because of their rejection I spent the rest of highschool and most of my college years trying to hold the egg together with even more denial and by doubling down on masculinity. While I did have some fun during my college years, on balance I was miserable and depressed. I chafed at my male costume and I knew I was lying to myself the entire time, and I hurt myself a great deal.
During my senior year of college I started privately dabbling with crossdressing again, the desire had been nagging at me incessantly. A short time after graduating I met my wife who accepted that side of me and she introduced me to the BDSM/kink community, and the overall culture of nonjudgmental acceptance there cracked the egg for good, because is provided spaces besides my own room where I felt safe being a girl. From that point on I slowly but surely came out of the egg, first calling myself a crossdresser, then genderfluid for awhile, then GENDA passed in NY making me an explicitly protected class and for the next 2 yrs I presented as a they/them genderqueer woman 100% full time without HRT (I was still reluctant to call myself a woman).
I wrestled a long time with the choice to go on HRT. Ultimately that was always a big stumbling block for me. Therapy had gotten me pretty far but I was still afraid of so much and was unsure I would be happy with the changes because my parents had initially rejected me as their daughter in very paternalistic fashion I struggled to trust my own instincts. I still struggle with that sometimes. Eventually, I befriended a trans woman in my neighborhood who pointed out HRT works very slowly and that it takes a long time for any permanent changes to take root. So, she suggested I give it a try and if it didn't feel right I could stop.
I was also taking gender identity quizzes again. Now most of these claim to be diagnostic and those ones a generally misogynistic garbage (they ask stupid questions like, “are you good at math?” and assign a gendered value to the answer) but I happened upon one that started with the disclaimer that it wasn't diagnostic and instead only offered questions that are good to think with. Two questions in particular were very helpful. The first asked, "If you could take a pill that would allow you to wake up tomorrow as a girl, would you take it?" My answer was a hesitant yes, but that yes was bolstered by the next question, "If you could take a pill that would allow you to wake up as a man, in your current body, but without any dysphoria or desires to be feminine, would you take it?" My answer was an emphatic no because that would have felt like killing an important part of myself off. I then at the age of 33yrs old started HRT and 4yrs in I am incredibly happy. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Now, I know that was a lot of fucking text to read but I wrote all of that because I know the prospect of maybe being a trans girl feels scary to you right now but I want to assure you that as daunting as it may seem there is so much about being a trans woman that is full of beauty and joy. I love my trans womanhood and despite the hardships, I wouldn’t give it up for anything. In fact the opposite is true. Knowing what I know now, I would give up almost everything in order to be a woman. So if you feel like you want to give girlhood a try, do it! You can take small incremental steps and you can always stop if it doesn’t feel right, either way you will gain a degree of self knowledge most cisgender people lack completely and that is absolutely priceless! Plus, unlike me when I was a teen, there’s all kinds of resources and information available to you now and an entire community of people ready to help you, and unlike the women in the forums from my past, we aren’t all gloom and doom.
As for your fear of giving up masculinity, don’t let that fear lure you into the denial trap like it did me. Denial is like quicksand, once you’re in it becomes hard to get out, the more you struggle the deeper in you go and it is so very suffocating. And the thing is, you actually don’t have to give it all up. Back when I was presenting full time as woman without HRT, I felt like I had to be ultra feminine all the time, full face of make-up, dress, heels, the whole nine yards. Now that I’m 4 yrs in with HRT I don’t feel that pressure anymore and have since reclaimed certain aspects of masculinity I actually liked. I sill like presenting high femme from time to time but these days I mostly rock a soft butch aesthetic, flannel/t-shirt, jeans and the only makeup I wear daily is just a lil bit of blush. At certain point you become comfortable and realize that gender is just a sandbox to play in and experiment. Masculine and Feminine are just concepts, they aren’t real! so regardless of being cis or trans, don’t let those mere concepts box you in! Just do what feels natural and right to you!
I hope all of that was helpful to you anon, and that at the very least you walk away from this knowing you don’t have to have all of the answers about yourself right now. Now, I don't no the particulars of your situation, so I’m happy to speak with you further if you have follow up questions, just send another anon.
