Bored and feeling too nauseous to do much atm while recovering from surgery. So i wanted to hear about some of your experiences. I think mine was quite uncommon because i never identified my personal discomfort as dysphoria and rather found out through lying about my identity online (for anonymity purposes) that being seen and addressed as male felt incredibly euphoric and just right. Through that the discomfort in my day to day life becoming more apparent till i eventually had to consider the possibility of being trans and everything else kinda started from there. I was 15-16 during that time. The dysphoria i felt in younger years for me back then was just something i assumed is normal if youre a teenage girl
I had a lot of trans thoughts growing up but like you I had no framework to understand it, so it wrote it all off as daydreaming an just general normal thoughts.
I think the first crack was a video by a youtuber called vihart about how she didn’t initially get all the gender stuff, and then later realizing that just because she doesn’t get something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I think she also talked about how she might possibly be agender or something to that effect, and it resonated with me.
Still, I didn’t really get the content fully and I didn’t connect it to anything in my life beyond a vague notion that something gendery was going on. I also didn’t really know yet that even if I was trans or anything that I could also do something about it. That felt like something for other people that weren’t “normal” like me. I didn’t really hang online in spaces where gender was talked about. Her video was the first true introduction to the concept of gender and transness I had.
Many years later I noticed that people on reddit were talking a lot about trans people. It also seemed people in the US were getting increasingly incensed about the topic. There seemed to me to be a pattern where anti trans people were largely motivated by finding transgender people icky, while pro trans people seemed to be motivated by freedom of expression and sometimes science. I was upset that I couldn’t really argue for or against anything, so I decided to sit down and read some stats. Learning that anti-trans shit is all made up nonsense and pro-trans stuff saves lives made an impact on me, but it didn’t crack my egg.
Memes did. I was subscribed to 196 on reddit, and the many trans and femboy memes for some reason I found very compelling. I later found egg irl and that comm also spoke to me in ways I couldn’t put into words. At some point I also decided to read this site, and that really was what did it. I found it funny how relatable it was, and then memes kept saying very very specific things I had experienced myself, and I started panicking :P
I kept rereading the site over and over again and I took quizzes and I kept remembering things in my childhood that fit, and a month or two later I was fairly certain that I was trans. It was weird to have an existential crisis while hanging with my family and pretending like nothing hehe. A short while later I decided I was gonna get HRT and I started looking into that. I needed it as a final confirmation that I was truly trans, to remove all doubt. I knew I was never gonna be entirely certain if all I did was question for ages.
I at first identified as non-binary because I felt sort of like I was intruding or like I wasn’t allowed to be trans or a woman, but I identified increasingly as just a woman until voilà! Here I am.
Bit of a long one :P Wish you a speedy recovery from your surgery!
Thank you!