Obviously the cracking happened over time, but the shattering happened on an LSD trip alone during the pandemic while i was reading NigthlingBug’s tweet chain dressed in my most gender affirming clothes (which were not my style and didnt really fit at all)

I was a particularly eggy femboy

Turns out femboy don’t tend to be disphoric and want blockers

i found r/egg_irl. assuming that’s not enough already, i found celeste there and look where that got me.

It was just after 1am on a warm summer morning. My wife was told after 25 hours of labor she was going to need an emergency C-section. We were terrified as baby’s heart rate kept dropping in and out of normal range all labor and he was struggling to move down the canal.

Nurse: Dad, this is the time to get your phone out and take babies first photo!

Me: She’s not talking to me. I’m not a father. I’m not even sure what I am…

Nurse: This is it! Time to see if it’s a boy or girl!

Me: Oh it’s a boy we found out with the ultrasounds

Nurse: Are you sure? Those aren’t always accurate. You never know! Nope, definitely a boy…

My son was born and I spent the first hour of his life alone as my wife had complications after the c section. We did skin to skin, him on my chest… Cue identity crisis.

Months of not grasping the concept of how I could be a father. Why did I feel more connected to the idea of being a mother. I googled “how to know I’m trans” and came across the Gender Dysphoria Bible that smashed my egg wide open at the tender age of 29

This is going to need some preamble, methinks.

I was a precocious little kitten from the get-go, and my parents encouraged this. They started teaching me to read over a year before I started kindergarten and instilled in me a voracious appetite for literature. I grew up with an analog childhood, so I exhausted our local library’s kids section and moved on to young-adult novels while I was still in elementary school. When one of my friends called me in terror and confusion at having his first erection, I gave him “the talk” when I was only 9 years old.

One of my earliest memories is of asking my mother why the hero always gets the girl at the end of a bedtime story, so I think I’ve always known I was different. But back in the 90’s there was basically no queer representation available in Texas public libraries, so despite being very mature for my age, I still didn’t understand what made me feel so different from my peers.

That changed very quickly in my 11th year when we got dial-up internet, it was only a matter of hours before my first forays into the information superhighway brought me the knowledge that gay, trans, and gender-nonconforming people exist. I felt a kinship with these queer folks and soon after I was pretending to be 18 so I could join adults-only chatrooms. That environment gave me the safe space I needed to introspect and the context to understand what I was learning about myself, but I repressed the realization that I was nonbinary because that simply wasn’t an option in Texas. Even a binary transition required jumping through hoops like “Living as your preferred gender for a year” before one could qualify for hormone therapy. So I dismissed my feelings as mere fantasies, to the detriment of my mental health as puberty took its course.

Things began to change in high school, I went through a couple of awkward first relationshps before falling in with a couple of guys with whom I am still in a polyamorous relationship to this day. Their affection was unconditional, so I was able to admit to them that I enjoyed crossdressing in private. But it was a ladyfriend I met in college who most encouraged me to embrace the parts of myself I had been holding back.

Still, I couldn’t allow myself to internalize it. I couldn’t be a weird inbetween gender in Texas and I knew I wasn’t a trans woman, so I must be one of those fey pansexual cis dudes, right? Fast forward to the pandemic, when the Texas legislature started pushing abortion restrictions I knew it was past time to go. So I took the first job I could get in a blue state, we packed up all our stuff, and got out of there. A few months after settling in to the new place, a visit from that college ladyfriend reminds me of how nice it feels to be pretty, and I dig out the box of dresses and skirts I hadn’t worn since before the move. The D-cup breastforms I had felt awkwardly large, so on a whim I bought a pair of silicone A-cups.

Putting those on and looking in the mirror was the final crack that shattered my egg forever. I saw myself in the androgynous figure looking back at me and immediately broke down in tears. In that moment I realized the part of me that I had been suppressing was the truth, and the fantasy was the notion that I could sleepwalk through the rest of my life as a man without regrets.

That was about a year ago now. I started hormone therapy just a few months later.

browsing egg_irl in my (1 week long) femboy phase, sent a meme to a friend without thinking and he asked “are you trying to tell me something?”

needless to say there was a lot of thinking going on after that

I found myself scrolling through egg_irl far more frequently then I used to just cause I related to the memes. then eventually I saw one the said cis people don’t relate to egg_irl memes and I was like oh shit. then I stayed up all night researching transitioning (every single piece of info I could find on hrt, grs, individuals experiences, etc) and the more I read the more I realized this is absolutely something I want to do

Abigail Thorne coming out helped fully crack my egg after years of questioning. Abi ftw <3

Well … I think I always knew, but just like it never seemed possible, so I ignored it. Then I had a dream one day, and in it a relative told me I was trans, and I guess from then on it seemed so obvious

I don’t even remember, funnily enough. It was a slow process that happened over time.

Being raised in a very conservative environment, I wasn’t able to even articulate what a transgender person was until I was an adult. Before that, crossdresser was the closest thing in my vocabulary. I always knew I would rather be a woman and preferred feminine things, but after hearing, “boys don’t do that,” enough times I took a hint. When I learned more about what it means for someone to be transgender, it just clicked. “Oh, I guess I am transgender. Too bad that’s a sin™.”

Since then it has felt like I’ve spent most of my life trying to piece the egg shell back together, rather than seeing it crack. I gave up on putting the egg back together though.

I thought r/suddenly_trans was a odd funny subreddit, and one day someone linked to egg_irl in the comments and guess that’s how I finally understood what being trans could mean - that was a very long weekend with a lot of thinking about all the signs that I didn’t see :D

My egg got its first cracks when I stumbled across r/traa. I scrolled through that sub for HOURS, found way too many relatable memes there, and realized I had a lot of introspection to do >.<

A bad trip on shrooms after years of frequenting trans spaces online “to learn more and be a good ally”.

Two of my acquaintances had come out as non-binary the week before, and it took drugs for me to unpack why, despite me being extremely happy for them both, I felt a bit of resentment and jealousy.

My egg really cracked when I realised I didn’t have to be alone and I found somewhere to talk about what I was experiencing: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/5765509