How do you tell people that being trans isn't a choice you made all at once, even if it looks that way from the outside, it's a culmination of hundreds of tiny realizations over the course of a lifetime?
It's being eight years old and convincing your friends to call you Sam until their dad catches wind of it and makes them stop. You don't know why it's such a big deal. You just think the name Sam is cool.
It's being eleven and seeing a picture of a woman with a pixie cut and realizing for the first time that women can have short hair. You ask your mom if you can get yours cut like that and she says that you might want to wait a while to make sure you actually want it that short. You go progressively shorter and shorter every haircut. You have a pixie cut by the time you're thirteen.
It's being twelve and hearing your name out of your teachers mouth makes your skin crawl and something in your stomach do a slimy flipping thing and you're not sure why. You don't ever mention it, but it never goes away.
It's being thirteen and wearing a t-shirt and basketball shorts and the old man at the tiny whole foods store goes on and on about how much you look like his grandson. You don't know why this makes you so happy, but your mom seems to think it's funny, so it must not be too awful a thing to happen.
It's being fourteen and suddenly you have boobs and you've gone up two pant sizes, seemingly overnight, and you stand in your room trying to physically push your hips back in because this is *wrong.* You start wearing jackets all the time and you don't know why. Later, you get out of the shower and pull a towel tight across your chest and catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and suddenly the boobs are gone and you look like yourself again. You make plans to make a company when you're older that sells boob squishers because surely everyone else feels this way and you can't believe they haven't been invented yet. Congrats on reinventing binders.
It's being fifteen and becoming obsessed with personality tests and you find one once that's called "what gender is your brain" and feeling vindicated when it says you have a male brain. You take twenty others just to be sure.
At this point, you've never heard the word transgender. You know that people who transition from one gender to another exist, but you've never seen or talked to one. You just think you're kinda weird.
At sixteen your best friend starts making attack helicopter jokes. He doesn't really know what it's about, he just found it online somewhere and thought it was funny. You unironically laugh along because you don't get it either. Identifying as something else is a cool concept, though, as silly as the jokes seem.
At seventeen you hear about trans people properly for the first time. You hear about their relationship to their own gender and the struggles they go through to live as themselves. You're impressed and intrigued, you find these people admirable for their strength, but you're not one of them. You would've known, right?
At eighteen you read a story from the point of view of a trans person, written by a trans person who is pulling from their own experiences. You find yourself reflected in the main character, parallels with things from your childhood that you had always thought were just you being a little weird. The story describes dysphoria and you recognize it as the squirmy, crawling feeling you get sometimes when your clothes fit just a little too well or a stranger calls you young lady.
You didn't tell anyone about any of this, it was all just you being a little weird, so there was nothing to tell. From the outside, it looks like you heard the word trans and suddenly decided that that's what you are. You tell your parents and they say "how do you know?" and "that can't be right, there would've been signs." The problem is that there *were* signs, it's just that neither of you knew how to read them. There was a whole collection of moments that you remember where you would've said "I think I'm trans" if you'd had the vocabulary. There are probably hundreds more that you don't remember, little things that don't mean much individually, but all together paint a pretty clear picture.
