I’m somewhere between them both
The first time I had ever heard of transitioning was from my half Thai friend at 10 years old. I considered transitioning because I was deeply insecure, but realized none of my insecurities were related to my sexual presentation.
Which is to say, presented with the chance to change their sex, non-trans kids pretty easily surmise that it’s not the thing for them, while trans kids do. The rhetoric around trans people inducing transness is has been about as ridiculous as any other pearl clutching panic of the last 70 years.
Thank you.
No, thank you! The world is a pretty shitty place, but empathetic people make it worth living in!
I agree! I lost sight of kindness multiple times, and when I was shown some or talked to someone empathetic, it was enough to make me cry! We all need more love because it’s too damn easy to hurt-
Agreed, it’s so much easier to break than to fix. You’re my favorite sort of person, the kind who recognizes that a social ape like us thrives on positivity. I hope you have the best day!!
I hope you do as well _ may everything go perfectly for you!
I sleep in a racecar! Do you sleep in a racecar?
I sleep in a big bed with my wife who didn’t sign up for being married to a trans woman when she got married to me but is still supportive so far.
I blocked out large parts of my childhood instead. Anytime i questioned my gender i put it out of mind, or told myself thats not a thought i should have.
I didnt feel dysphoria 95% of the time, because i didnt allow myself to feel dysphoria. In an unhealthy way.
Real.
Sounds a lot like me.
I had different problems in my teen years, so it didn’t cross my mind or at least I don’t remember. I remember actively repressing everything about my past and every time I got a negative thought I would just punch myself. Maybe now that I am better I’ve had time to notice.
You guys have memories from your childhood?
Did I even exist until last year?
Ha I was just thinking like oh yay I have no bad memories :3 or good ones 3: hmm why is that
Yeah. My earliest one’s go back to about 5 or 6yo. A lot are vague memories like sorta kinda remembering what a building looks like, but some of those might be partially based having seen videos and having stories told and inventing memories to match. But some involve me remembering my own thoughts, like remembering being sorta jealous that one of my kindergarten friends was playing with another person or feeling like a couple of my closest friends (both girls) in 2nd grade didn’t really see me as a boy, which are things I would have told no one.
I had dysphoria all along, but could only identify it in retrospect. I didn’t think I was depressed all the time, it was normal. I was just like that.
When I had a single digit age, I have a memory of basically inventing the concept of being nonbinary from first principles. I thought it would be great to be neither a boy or a girl, to be something that’s neither. Then I dismissed the idea because it wasn’t a real thing, because as far as everything I had heard at the time, it wasn’t.
Its good that gender is something that is much more talked about, and that many young people know about this sort of thing. I would have been spared multiple decades of literal torture if I knew about trans and nonbinary people in my early years.
I remember being a pubiscent teenager discovering my body and fantasizing about or wishing for switched genitalia. That never really stopped though.
I also remember browsing through fashion mailorder catalogues and being intrigued by or drawn to women’s clothing. I didn’t think like “Oh, I wish I could wear these” or something (but that is indeed the case today), I just thought those items to be generally more interesting (though to be fair, that is not hard to achive when you compare it to basic men’s fashion. But even curve-cut girlie shirts are more interesting than the same shirt in straight cut).
Unfortunately I didn’t realize transitioning was a possibility until much later. I mean, I had heard of transvestites and sex change surgery, but to uneducated young me those were rare occasions and totally out of the question gor myself.
So now I’m in my early to mid thirties with much more baggage and being unhappy with my body for totally unrelated reasons trying to make sense of things I wish I had wondered about fifteen to twenty years earlier. And not even being sure if all that counts as dysphoria.Dysphoria in it’s most broad definitions is simply a feeling of incongruity between your agab and yourself in any way. Imo, it all is part of dysphoria, but the first part seems pretty unambiguously to be dysphoria to me by any reasonable definition.
Trying to sift through your thoughts after literal decades of training your brain to repress and deny things sucks. Hopefully you can work though it.
I’d heard of trans people, knew most of the details about medical transition and deeply wished that could have been me, if only I was trans and not just a pervert who liked girls so much I wanted to be one.
I figured it out eventually.
i haven’t heard about the concept of being trans until i was around 16?
up until then i had dysphoria, but had no idea those feelings were dysphoria. i would hate my birth name and try to pick a different one, but i only looked at girl names (because people told me i’m a girl, so i had to) and none of them felt right which bummed me out. and i had that empty feeling in my chest like there was a black hole sucking all the joy out of me. and of course there was this deep and fierce hatred towards my body when i had my period
even after i learnt what being trans was in theory it still didn’t get through to me that it was an option i could take until i met someone whow as trans in real life when i was 17
Mood, except a decade later
I grew up wishing I didn’t have balls and thinking it would be cool to be a girl but have also always been very into women as far as partners go. I didn’t know I was a trans lesbian until I was 40.
Doesn’t count if I didn’t understand what dysphoria was so I didn’t know I was dysphoric? It’s fine, everything is fine.
Sorry I don’t get it. Is that a thing, having no dysphoria until 30 and then discovering you are trans? Or is that the joke because Homer is stupid?
It’s a thing. People can discover they’re trans without childhood dysphoria, or the understanding of what it is.
I hadn’t the slightest clue I was trans until I was almost 30. But saying I didn’t have dysphoria all along would be wrong. That said, when I first realized I was not cis (I didn’t quite think of myself as trans immediately), I thought I didn’t “really” have dysphoria. Chronic dissociation (DPDR) can hide a lot of those feelings. Still in retrospect, I feel pretty stupid. There were some extremely obvious and unambiguous signs going back to at least puberty (I didn’t know what trans was back then though, so I didn’t have the words to describe how I felt).
It’s a bit weird for me. I knew and always consciously thought of myself as a girl since I was a kid, which really intensified my dysphoria because it wasn’t until I was 20 that I found out the pain it’s causing me is real and valid, and that I could just transition.
Knowing made me like hyper-aware of how often I’d be gendered masculine by others and how much I detested every instance of that, as well as how uncomfortable the social situations I was put into were (like my school throwing me into an all-boys class for dance instead of the co-ed dance class 😔).
I’ve always wondered how many others have experienced something similar to this. I imagine those who’ve had their egg crack but couldn’t quite start their transition for some years until they’re somewhere safe, or were gatekept medically by waitlists and such (happened to me and I didn’t know about DIY) were in a bit of a similar boat. 🤔
hey same, almost,
i had a very sudden realization when i was 27, with no conscious thought of it before then
