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
… realizing you’re trans at 15 - 16 through euphoria is not an usual path at all, and I think the vast majority of trans people don’t recognize their dysphoria is dysphoria until much later, so just so you know, you are in the majority (not unusual at all)
Thanks for the insight, you hear a lot about people always being tomboys or masculine and rejecting femininity which never was the case for me (i was winning at gender roles) so it feels rarer than it probably is ^^
it’s just as common (esp. in a transphobic social context) to lean hard into practicing your assigned gender as well as you can - e.g. some trans women will go into the military to “toughen up”, or get really buff and into body building because they feel something is wrong with their body but they don’t really understand (or have repressed) it’s a gender issue.
but yeah, I know a trans guy who is currently repressing, but is a gay man and is very effeminate (which … makes his gender presentation complicated, esp. because he’s hurt when people see him as a girl, but he hasn’t socially or medically transitioned, and he always has sparkly girly earrings and nail polish on, etc.).
but yeah, there is a wide variety of trans experiences - more than the mainstream narrative usually betrays (which is usually like “they knew as soon as they could talk and they immediately refused their assigned sex” kind of thing - which, maybe I would have done that too, if I hadn’t been threatened with physical violence for even doing gentle gender exploration as a young child that is common even among cis children - my dad was unusually sensitive and controlling about my gender, and I can only speculate as to why).
Oh yeah, that’s not super rare. On the transfem side there’s the denial beard phenomenon. And for y’all guys it’s somewhat common to have had a period of heavy femininity before acceptance. Basically doing the gender roles really hard because that’s what you’re supposed to (and maybe then you’ll actually want it if you do it right)