Ask me about how I transed my genders (NWS/NMS)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about how I transed my genders (NWS/NMS)

Ciaphas: Nov 20, 2005; > BEWARE, COWARD

Greg12 posted:

What does it feel like to realize you're trans? To be trans before you realize it? Before you know trans exists? How do you know, and how's it different from just thinking that parts or all of the gender role assigned-at-birth don't interest you?

thank you i'll take my answer off the air

i realize this's kind of an old post to reply to at this point, but i'd like to answer with my own story. it's a bit long so feel free to mash this here link to skip to the next post instead if you want. or just scroll, i ain't gonna judge. anyway, tl;dr:

"What does it feel like to realize you're trans?" absolute terror!
"To be trans before you realize it? Before you know trans exists?" a whole lot of unrecognized depersonalization!
"How do you know, and how's it different from just thinking that parts or all of the gender role assigned-at-birth don't interest you?" it came from deep within after testing hormone replacement for a week! (this answers both)

The Before Times: What does it feel like to be trans before you realize it? Before you know trans exists?

before coming out, i didn't remember much from before I was 13 or 14. i've since recovered a fair number of those memories with therapy & time; i won't go into details, but long story short some were of me expressing the idea of wanting to be a girl to friends & family and being extremely rebuffed by both in no uncertain terms (it was the early '90s, so, yeah). never brought that up again, and by the time puberty came along it was all walled off in my own head & inaccessible

from high school onward, if anything like those feelings bubbled up from my subconscious, i'd rationalize it away as some kind of insane sexual fetish, or a random misfire from a brain plagued with depression, anxiety disorders, undiagnosed ADHD, & undiagnosed ASD; and think nothing more of it. i'd also started to look in the mirror and see... this is kinda hard to describe very well, but i wouldn't see me, but an ugly, fat sack of meat & bone carrying me. just didn't care about my appearance at all anymore, save for being socially appropriate - orderly hair, clean clothes, and all that

so that's how it felt to be trans before i realized it was a possibility, before even conceptualizing the idea of being transgender: a barely-explicable degree of constant ennui and self-disinterest that i at-best misunderstood, and at-worst hated myself for.

The Penny-Drop: What does it feel like to realize you're trans?

fast forward to late 2022. by then i'd been in therapy for a couple of years; the question of gender was touched on tangentially in a couple sessions, but never directly or more than surface-level, and when it did I'd deny any feelings of the sort. i remember thinking along the lines of "yeah it'd be cool to be girl, but i'd be a seriously ugly one, and anyway i don't have any of that dysphoria stuff" (lolllllllll). maybe a week after one of those was the fateful day when i idly browsed social media and somehow stumbled right into That God drat Twitter Post:

https://twitter.com/TransSalamander/status/947522372315369472?s=20

i was stunned after reading that, and i really mean stunned; i did nothing but sit there unfocused, breathe normally, and think or quietly say "_{^{... what?}}" for like fifteen minutes. i guess my subconscious saw its chance and took it :v:

after that, i started searching the internet & reading with more focus than i'd ever felt in my entire life. at first i was looking for just information: what being transgender really was, what dysphoria was, posts in places like r/asktransgender, worryingly-relatable memes (i guess "image macros" doesn't roll off the tongue anymore, huh?); anything I could get my hands on. by the end of several hours, i was specifically searching for some method of definitive proof - but it wasn't proof of being transgender that i was looking for. No, by then I was desperately grabbing at whatever straw I could conceivably twist around to prove to my by-now extremely insistent subconscious that I WASN'T transgender, that i wasn't living a lie, that i wasn't hiding something so fundamental from myself for over 30 god damned years.

so, what does it feel like to realize you're trans? my answer was deep, all-encompassing, and horribly abject terror. Transition would mean upending my entire life, risking lighting my few relationships on fire, losing my job and maybe never getting another one, having to start anew of after 30 years of learning to live & act as a male, how inconceivably awful I'd look... and for what? to not have to deal with men's locker rooms? to have boobs??? what could I possibly gain from this blatant madness?!

Internalized transphobia, it turns out, is a real son of a bitch.

The Epilogue: because i already answered the questions but couldn't stop myself writing the rest of this poo poo anyway

some few weeks and considerably more therapy later, i was more or less back on balance - i'd started on bringing to light all those internalized negative feelings and letting them go, but I was still full of doubt. was it a depression response, wishing for another different life? did i really want the physical attributes of a woman, or was it a kink gone out of control? if i were trans I would've realized a lot sooner, right? i felt i had to find some kind of proof, something more definite than "mere" introspection & soul-searching, before anything else

by then I'd done a lot of research on the medical treatments available; for example, i knew the effects of HRT typically brought no physical changes, or only reversible ones, for the first month or two. so i figured, why not come at this a bit backwards, and just... try it? see how i felt after a month and re-evaluate then? i knew not all trans folk went for HRT, but... hell, why not? thankfully, my endocrinologist operates on informed consent: I could get HRT without any gatekeeping, like living & presenting as a woman for a while first or getting letters from mental professionals or whatever, as long as I understood what I was getting myself into & signed paperwork saying such. And so I did, coming home with a filled prescription for estradiol (estrogen, more or less).

not much happened until roundabout day six. i woke up in a somewhat better mood than usual, showered, looked in the mirror and saw... again, this is hard to find the right words for, but i saw me. not the aforementioned squishy sack of organs carrying me, but me. and i knew exactly what that meant: my gamble had paid off. that was the moment I knew, from deep, deep down, that i'm a transwoman, i always was a transwoman, i would transition, and i was never, ever going back.

since then there's been a lot of bad days, anxiety, fearful social encounters, battles with insurance (oy vey), and so on, but y'know what? the year+ since has been the best part of my entire life, and it's not even remotely close. And so she lived happily ever after~

Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Mar 12, 2023