I feel that I should preface this by warning questioning people that looking for signs is generally not a good way to find out if you’re trans. Different people experience being trans in different ways.
Thank you lady_scarecrow for the above disclaimer. Very good advice ❤️
Up until I realized that I am trans, I always felt really awkward going into the men’s restroom. I would always check the signs like 5 times and then I’d go in, see the urinals, and still feel like I was somehow in the wrong place.
I also hated having my top off, and I rarely swam until I discovered rash guards. In middle school we were required to do swimming for gym and they didn’t allow me to wear my rash guard and I felt so embarrassed the entire time.
I relate hard to the men’s restroom feelings. To the point I avoided going in public at all costs.
Over the weekend was actually the very first time I used the woman’s restroom. I would of held it but damn does Spiro make me need to pee, lol.
I waited till no one was in there and it was both exhilarating and relieving (more ways than one, hehe!). Had the added bonus of wearing a face mask to better blend in. Looked up in the mirror while washing my hands and saw a woman. I saw me ❤️
Congrats on using the women’s restroom for the first time! I know it takes a lot of courage, and the first time I did my mother and sister went with just in case there were problems, and it was still quite nerve wracking because there were a lot of other women in there too.
Spiro is indeed a bitch sometimes lol. I appreciate that it blocks my T, but damn does it makes me have to piss a lot. I can’t wait to get an orchi some day lol.
I was constantly thinking “damn I hate masculinity and I want to have as little of it as posssible, very normal cis thing”
Sometimes I feel like this is basically my gender 😂
An entrance exam for some psychiatrist thing as a kid asked if I wanted to be the other sex/gender (idr the wording). I cried and took a while to answer that. And then I forgot about it for a decade.
I remember I went to school mental health counseling sessions in 7th grade (Christian private school. Yuck.) and the counselor asked me “do you wish that you were born as a different gender?” (I have no idea how that even came up) And I replied “uhhhh I don’t care, I wouldn’t mind either” trying to play it cool and in my head I was like “holy shit I want to be a boy” but immeditely felt this weird shame and fear about it.
Yeah, I lied too
I could never explain why I always wore long sleeves and pants when I went to school. I don’t think there was a single day where I went to school in shorts, and not a single day I went to school without long-sleeves (some days I would wear short-sleeve shirts but I would bring a long sleeve shirt to put over it). I felt exposed and uncomfortable otherwise. I was a good student, but the only class I did poorly in was gym because they graded you based on whether you dressed according to dress-code, and I refused because it required changing into shorts and a short-sleeved t-shirt in a locker room full of boys. I tried it a couple times but just couldn’t keep doing it. I think the teachers thought I was just defiant or something, but I was meek and just uncomfortable.
I remember being in third grade and wearing a literal winter coat to school every day in the heat of summer (this being in the south). I remember being extremely sweaty and uncomfortable on the bus rides especially where it was crowded and there wasn’t AC, but I never took that coat off.
I never understood why I always felt ashamed of my body and wanted to cover every part of it. Before realizing I am trans I thought maybe I had a repressed memory of sexual abuse or something, but now it makes more sense to me why I had that kind of relationship to my body.
This was me. Oh my god I always needed my clothing to cover as much as possible. Always hated shorts because I thought my legs were disgustingly hairy (not really) and I needed to wear a hoodie everywhere. No matter how hot it was.
Strangely I hid my legs before the hair started coming in, but I do think it got more intense after that.
I guess that’s another memory / thought that didn’t make sense until after transition. When hair started to come in on my legs when I was a teenager, I really didn’t like it and started shaving it, despite also feeling insecure about my masculinity and wishing I were like the other boys in my puberty (which was coming too late and too weak to keep up). I wanted to be normal and that was more important, but I still hated the changes that came with male puberty (though I didn’t think of it that way, I didn’t really contextualize it, I just instinctively shaved it until I felt I couldn’t keep getting away with it).
I did the same thing basically. Also started shaving my arms for a while because they got to a point where they seemed “too” hairy. Stopped and had to play boy when I got made fun of for it. 😓
I (mtf) used to have the classic embarrassment about going shirtless as a boy, took me years to somewhat overcome. Still somewhat feel it these days but I begrudgingly deal with it anyway because my area is warm as heck.
Also always thought being a man was meh and women were fucking amazing and interesting in pretty much every way but that was totally because I was attracted to them and respectful, still totally cis though!
A particularly sad/hilarious one is the intense and euphoric recurring dreams about being a girl followed by inevitably waking up devastated, that’s totally a thing everyone has, right? Right, guys??
THE SHIRTLESS NIGHTMARE! I forgot about those, I got them so often. Now I want to know how common it is in cis boys.
I didn’t know about the shirtless thing being a sign. I did have a time like that but I had assumed it was because I didn’t like my fat body and later puberty body hair. It might have been more complicated that that 😅
I may have done something similar about the women thing too. Can’t say about the dreams though.
Haha yup, I didn’t connect the dots until I heard some trans folks bring it up a while ago, seen it mentioned a few extra times since. I definitely had some of the body image thing going on too but in hindsight there was some big, unknown discomfort I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time. I legit couldn’t put into words just how deeply weird it felt to have my chest exposed and it bewildered people nearly as much as it did myself lol.
I forgot until later that somewhere nearish to that time I also felt weird about it because I thought somehow everyone messed up at my birth and thought I was a boy, but I wasn’t and no one knew but me. 😂 I was young enough to not know enough anatomy, but the thought still 😅
A common trope in my history is, “Why do they get it and I don’t?”
Lots of envy regarding feminine folk.
I remember telling my sister when I was around nine “I wish I was the son he never had” (referring to my dad). She scoffed and said that was a stupid thing to say. Little did we know…
She is very supportive of me nowadays. We were kids then and she didn’t know any better. I got pretty lucky in the sister game.
I remember asking my brother something like “if you could come back and live another life after this one, would you want to see what it was like as a girl?” he was like “noo??” I was like “oh…” and years later it was like “OHHH!”
“I am not trans, I just wish I was a gender different than what I was assigned. That’s normal, everyone feels that way sometimes. Sure wish I could transition, but too bad I’m not trans. Did I say I’m not trans?”
“Maybe I’m not a guy but a girl”, says me in primary school, “but no, it’s not possible”
Rediscovered this memory a decade and half later, a whole year or more into questioning my gender. Big “oh fuck” moment.
Laying in bed willing my body to become feminine. When they said blow out the candles and make a wish, or wishing in a falling star, always wishing I could just be a girl.
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Wag that bum
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I feel that I should preface this by warning questioning people that looking for signs is generally not a good way to find out if you’re trans. Different people experience being trans in different ways.
Having said that… There were so many signs. Daydreaming about being a girl. Being uncomfortable about being shirtless in public. Feeling a deep admiration for women. Nearly only relating to female characters. Never falling in love for gay men despite being attracted to men.
I remember when I was playing the sims. I made a female character and the game was so much fun. Then after my sim died, I decided to make a male character, and suddenly I lost interest in the game. It was the exact same game, but being a woman just seemed so much more fun… I should’ve known.
I feel that I should preface this by warning questioning people that looking for signs is generally not a good way to find out if you’re trans. Different people experience being trans in different ways.
What is a good way to find out if you’re trans?
As I see it at least, the one thing that actually matters is finding out if you’d be happier living as a different gender than the one you currently live as.
I put that disclaimer there because I’ve seen many posts from people saying they think they might be trans, “but I didn’t have any childhood signs”, “but I don’t see myself as [insert gender here]”, “but I don’t have dysphoria” (very often they do, they just fail to recognize it as such). My sibling in Christ, none of that matters. If you know you’d rather live as a different gender than the one you’re living as, just do it.
Thank you for that. And you are absolutely right! Questioning people looking for signs is not a good idea because it all comes from within. It is self discovery and not something other people can put on you.
Do you mind if I use your first paragraph as an actual preface in my post? I will of course give you credit.
Feel free to do that.
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As an enby trans person, it was checking in my early teens for surgery scars of sex determination assuming that I had been intersex and that my parents chose a gender and being disappointed that there were none but still hoping that it was too early to have developed noticeable scars.
I had thoughts of what it would be like if I was a girl and dreams of myself becoming a woman, I thought that it was my curiosity and that everyone did the same thing from time to time. Also, for a very long time I was interested in gender swaping stuff and switching bodies (and wished to experience something like that), I thought it’s just a weird fetish. Now that I think about it it’s kinda odd how long it took me to actually start questioning my gender.
I don’t think that’s odd, that’s just what no trans visibility and no exposure naturally leads to: eggs taking way too long to consider that possibility for themselves. I didn’t even know it was an option until 3 years ago, and it only took 2 years (and browsing trans subreddits) after that for me to finally crack.
