Have you shared stories about how you learned you were trans? Is there a tag for these? I realize it's a really personal journey, but I really want to hear from others so that I can figure out what I'm feeling. I hope I'm making sense, is been a long day and my words are dunk
It’s cool! I don’t know that I really have a huge amount to say on the matter, though.
I know that by high school I considered myself… less than masculine. Like, I was pretty aware that I wasn’t going to successfully perform Maleness or whatever any time soon. At this same time, I pretty regularly fixated on thoughts along the lines of “I know women objectively have it harder on the whole, but boy I sure wish I had been born a girl.” None of this stuck out to me as especially noteworthy because I was a tremendous dumbass until, like, age 19 at the earliest.
I figured it out in college, basically. At the time, I had a part-time job where the co-workers… weren’t the best, shall we say… and the thing that sticks out to me in retrospect is that when one of them said some stupid racist shit I got into a brief shouting match with him, but when stupid sexist shit frequently came up I clammed up. At the time I was just like “ugh, I’m such a coward asshole,” but turns out I was just worried about my own well-being, lol.
That being said, I can’t really say whether that moment actually played a huge part in the realization. More practically speaking, what did it was 1) being on tumblr and actively seeing people say “hey, you can just be a girl/a boy/neither if you want to” and 2) critically thinking about my consumption of TF/TG porn (which… y’know. I could write a whole paper on sublimation of anxiety and non-sexual desire into kink stuff, but for right now I’m leaving it at “life is messy and tho it can be uncomfortable to dwell on it, fact is, that’s how a lot of people have come to terms with Gender Shit if only for lack of a better way of doing so”).
I eventually settled into a roughly nonbinary space, but that didn’t feel quite right; by summer, I was strongly considering at least the possibility that I was a woman. I bought a skirt at a thrift store on vacation and thought about my body from that standpoint - both made me feel a lot better about myself. From there I just figured out where exactly I wanted to be with my presentation and identity.
