As of late, I have had a bug in my mind that has been just eating away at me. The feeling that my somewhat atypical experience makes me feel fake. The accusations of us users here being "fake transfolk" is not exactly helping matters for me either. It really boils down to a few bullet points that I can hopefully outline in a coherent fashion.
I have moved with incredible speed throughout my transition thus far. I am in my mid-30s. I started questioning my gender in mid-late 2019. My egg finally cracked in June 2022, at the age of 32. I started HRT a short two months later in August of 2022. Since then, I've changed my legal name and gender. I have also started the process of bottom surgery and am currently scheduled to have the procedure in April. That is 22 months from egg cracking to bottom surgery.
I never really questioned my gender during my childhood. I read a lot of stories about transfolk who have known for a very long time. Like, most seem to fall into the realm of having known since prepubescence or somewhere in the years of puberty. Now, I had a very...special...time as a teenager where I don't remember a godsdamned thing about any of it. To put it in short, I was thrown out of the house at 15 and was forced to take care of my dementia laden grandparent. Either way, I'm pretty certain that questioning my gender in any manner wasn't a part of it.
I honestly just feel like any and all signs I had pointing to the fact that I was trans all my life feel fabricated on my part cause I feel like I'm chasing a fad so to speak. Trying to fit in with my friends and my family. This thought isn't entirely unwarranted. I'm pansexual and came to realize this back in 2007. I knew this, yet still exclusively called myself gay at the time because I thought it would help me find friends. I just wonder if this is another of those cases.
I will post some positive reinforcement at the very least. As noted, signs did exist of me being trans dating all the way back to the age of 4. I used to pretend I was pregnant alllll the way back then when playing with my sisters. Something I did quite often if my memories serve me well. I never really cared for toys as a child as I preferred video games back then. I did, however, want toys geared towards girls back then, like Polly Pocket. Even to current me, those things were dope as hell and I wish I had one. Moving past the dark years, I wanted to dress in skirts in my late teens and try walking in high heels. I played girls in video games starting in my mid-20s. I openly wished to have breasts shortly thereafter. I m also on record at the time of saying "Y'know, I wouldn't mind having a vagina. I don't think I'd care that much if I lost my dick."
Ultimately, I feel as though maybe I'm just psyching myself out because I have a major life change coming up in a scant couple months. Even with all this on my mind, I still think it was the best decision I ever made for myself as of current. I can't imagine a life where I would go back to being a man. I can't imagine losing all that I've gained thus far. My body, my voice, my emotions. All of it. I don't want to lose it. At the end of the day, I'm just afraid I'm going to look back at all of this in 10 years and say "Boy I sure made a colossal mistake right there." My experience being atypical makes me think that maybe I am just riding a fad so to speak. After all, I never came to this realization until recently, so late in my life.
When it boils down to it, I'm not really looking for validation or any of that. I get enough of that from my partners. What I want is a raw opinion and some discussion into the matter. If you feel as if you wish to respond, feel free to ask me any questions you so desire. So long as they're not identifying, I don't mind sharing most information about myself. I'm an open book. Either way, thank you for making it through this post. It is greatly appreciated that you took the time out of your day to read me rambling on in a word salad only fit for a big trough.
TL;DR I'm extremely insecure about my transness due to atypical life experiences compared to the community at large and am scared of making a big mistake.
You say its atypical, but I'm in a similar cohort, with a similar trajectory (though I had been closeted for a while longer) I held off on transitioning because I felt just had too many other obligations.
For me being ace and trans really made me feel like I didn't fit in when I was younger, I didn't even have words to describe what I felt, or wanted. I just wasn't into bars, hookups or even being perceived and that made it pretty hard to relate to other queer people in my college years.
I've known I preferred being seen as a girl as a child, but it was always something that I wrote off as 'impossible' especially in that era there was just no examples of trans-ness aside from horrifying transphobia bubbling up to the surface in popular media. In that time I always more into video games where I could be escapist.
For what it's worth you're younger than me and further along. We bottle a lot of shit up (for many reasons) and it doesn't really start to make sense until we've had time to process it. It's certainly never too late to start,
Thanks for replying. I don't really see or speak to many people of a similar age as myself going through transition, so your perspective is very appreciated.
I probably did bottle a lot of shit up when I was growing up. I know I always hated my body, but I could only guess that it was for one reason or another. Never really could put a finger on it. I posit that it was just dysphoria growing up, but I couldn't possibly really know since all of the memories are so faded at this point. But I grew up sheltered. A non-bigoted idea of even a gay person didn't even cross my mindspace until I was 17, when I started to realize that I was attracted to just about anyone. That was due to my extremely bigoted stepfather who is well out of the picture now, but that's beside the point. I had zero capacity for introspection as a child. It took graduating high school and talking to folks in the alphabet mafia for me to even consider that I may be part of it. Beyond that, I don't think I encountered a trans individual until like 2016 (aside from my wife, but she never spoke about it and didn't start transitioning until I decided to.) The media, as you mention, made transfolk out to be a sort of joke at the time. You never saw a trans individual in any other context rather than the butt of a joke. So it never really parsed to me as something that people actually did for the longest time.
Know what the worst part of this is? This is a very clearly logical thing to think, but then my brain follows it up with "You're just making excuses for yourself." Gods, I am fucked right now. I'm starting to wonder if this isn't entirely hormonal.
Either way, thank you a ton for the response.