As young as I remember, the idea of 'acting like a girl' or even 'acting like a boy' seemed fucking dumb to me. I was a 'me', I acted like a 'me'. I'm not a girl or a boy.

It's a shame there was no word for that back then other than "Oh you're just a tomboy!" so it took me reaching my thirties to realize that most tomboys don't want to wear a binder.

It also took you guys having pronoun tags for me to realize that I suddenly felt euphoric being referred to as they/them. So thanks for that.

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I had been real eggy since I was a kid and confessed that I felt at least nonbinary to a shitty friend while we were both drunk at 16 lol, but I didn't actually realize I was trans until I kinda dumped all my gender feelings onto a friend who asked me if I wanted to get surgery about it.

I don't remember what I said but that question definitely woke me up into the "fuck, I'm trans" mindset. I told the person I was dating, who immediately and entirely rejected the idea, then that happened with the next person, and then I ended up majorly repressing it and presenting hyperfemme, basically telling myself I was an actor in drag the whole time until the pandemic hit where I realized I didn't want to die with people thinking I was a woman.

I started very slowly socially transitioning, then got on HRT about a year and a half ago. Nothing has ever felt more right.

I thought I was a cis woman who just hated men seeing me as a woman due to being objectified by them, until I realized I felt exactly the same way about straight women seeing me as a woman (gross)

It's hard to say, really. My memories of the questioning stage are really murky for some reason. I do remember that I started to get really uncomfortable being referred to as "she", but for awhile I thought I just hated being referred to, especially since I would mostly hear it from the students I was teaching, and usually when I had said something unclear. I also remember being extremely, viscerally uncomfortable every time I would remember that I had a uterus and could get pregnant. For a long time I just chalked that up to being extremely childfree, but looking back I do think there was more to it than that.

I also had some conversations with my partner and my mom about gender and learned that most people actually do feel comfortable with their gender. My mom's only slightly relevant anecdote was about how much she hated having small boobs in high school, and I was like, wow, what I wouldn't give for small boobs. My partner (a cis man) has kind of a soft face and a high voice and he used to get misgendered some amount, especially as a child. Hearing him talk about those experiences was pretty wild. His immediate reaction to the misgendering was always a sort of "wow, those people are extremely wrong", whereas when I tried to put myself in his shoes, I realized I wouldn't have felt the same way if people had "mistaken" me for a man.

And then I began to realize just how much of my "style" was because I was performing femininity. I had long hair and I hated it, but I didn't want to cut it because "women have long hair", even though I knew women with short hair. I wore skirts occasionally, hated them too, but couldn't figure out why. I had precisely one fancy dress that I would wear to every wedding, funeral, what have you, and I couldn't imagine buying another one.

Just a bunch of little things, each meaningless on its own, but together, well, I'm extremely trans it turns out.

Once I was old enough for people to start referring to me as a woman, it always felt incorrect, but I wasn’t sure why. I considered that it might be internalized misogyny, but that wasn’t it. I also had terrible dread about the fact that I could get pregnant, which I now recognize as dysphoria. (this capability has since been surgically removed )

As a separate realization, I found out that I really enjoy it when people are unsure how to gender me.

Eventually, I came across some video essays by nonbinary people. When I heard someone say they didn’t feel like a man or a woman, they just feel like themself, that’s when I knew I was nonbinary because that’s how I feel too.

Phantom penis always let me know something was up, then I really hated the whole woman experience and found others didn't have that as I got older. It was more finding the correct terms than finding I was trans, if that makes any sense.

So I can't speak for their full experience but my friend's realisation came when he was having a screaming match with his misogynistic then-husband while they were both extremely high on acid. He was accused of something like being a terrible wife and responded that he never even wanted to be a woman, never mind a wife.
And then he had a bit of a breakdown because he'd just realised he's trans while extremely high on acid.