Before we start, some context. I am AMAB, ~20, living in red state with no friends I trust IRL to talk about this kind of thing for fear of them being transphobic.
I am pretty sure that I am transgender. There's so much shit that I look at my life and see as clearly being trans, but there's things that make me feel like I am not trans enough. The archetypal trans woman story is the I knew all along, I only liked feminine things, only was friends with girls as a kid, feeling 100% massive dysphoria over every single thing, and is basically the "perfect" trans woman. I on the other hand can't say that about myself. I don't mind being around/friends with men, I like many masculine things like guns and metal music for example, I don't literally want to kill myself out of dysphoria, and in retrospect earliest sign that I can remember as something that I see now as "holy fuck I'm so trans" is when I was 13 ish. I am not the 100% gender role compliant woman and so I feel like claiming myself as trans would be an imposter, an insult to those "real" trans women.
So what things I see as early memories that in anyone else I would see as them being trans are as follows. In 8th grade my school did a weekend trip to a language immersion camp thing(yeah,yeah i am bourgeois pig i know), and a friend of mine thought it would be a funny bit to use female words(it was a language with grammatical gender) and call me by a feminine version of my name as a joke. And you know what, I kind of liked it. This is so obviously trans, gender euphoria from being addressed as she and a woman's name how the fuck did I wait until now to accept myself. This was before I even knew what transgender was even a thing you could be. Friend who did this came out as gay, then non binary so clearly they weren't being sexist/homophobic as joke as was all too common at the time. When I was younger I used to not want to show my chest in public for shame reasons and would wear a swim shirt at the beach and in the pool or lake. That is not a thing cis men feel. Same thing in gym locker room changing was anxiety causing as hell. Male puberty with growing beard and chest hair specifically I can remember feeling just absolute dread over what was going on. This is gender dysphoria clearly. Another memory I have that is not cis from around this time was wishing that I would wake up as a girl and thinking elaborate plans of what I would do, how I would talk to everyone. Another thing was once I knew of trans people being a thing that I can explicitly remember was a scenario of some freak accident that resulted in the removal of testicles and so I could have an excuse to start taking estrogen hrt and transitioning. How the hell did I not start seriously questioning my gender years earlier?
Unfortunately, I kind of know why. My politics started with becoming disillusioned with christianity after having my brother go to a christian school that said the earth was 5000 years old so he couldn't make a project about dinosaurs. From there I found my way to r/atheism(yeah). With some of my other interests being video gaming and firearms, and being a young angsty white "male" I was basically the prime candidate for alt right radicalization. I never fully fell down that rabbit hole thankfully, except for on one specific issue: gender. Ignorant past me saw right wing claims of "auto gynephilia" and the idea that trans women are disgusting subhuman perverted male abominations, and combined that with some uninformed idea of feminist thought that maleness was inherently sexually predatory, and looked at my trans thoughts mentioned earlier and made the wrong fucking decision. This dumbass attempted to perform self conversion therapy to become the right wing incel idea of masculine. I was a bad person then but I'd like to think that the brain worms from that time about other people are gone. Unfortunately, being a communist in my views about everyone else does not prevent me from being internalized fascist to myself. Imagining myself as trans I see myself as this hulking man-creature with sasquatch-like body hair, voice deeper than the bassiest bass sound, 5 oclock shadow on face. Any other trans comrade I do not see this way, but I can't extend that acceptance and love towards others to myself? What is wrong with me?
Reasons why I am reconsidering this now is because even though I managed to push myself back into the closet for a while I can't keep it any longer. I remember after I had somewhat deradicalized myself of fascist ideas on gender that I thought that since I don't want to kill myself over dysphoria that I would just take the path of least resistance and live as an unhappy man and it would be fine. Society is transphobic, family is transphobic, friends are definitely not accepting by any measure, so transitioning would just ruin my life. It's a huge decision and I struggle to decide what to make for dinner, let alone accept myself as trans. The inciting moment was when a non binary friend of a friend was going to start on testosterone that I thought "why would anyone want that, to become masculine" and it has spiraled from there. I try convince myself that I don't have dysphoria but if thats true then why do I spend so much time every day obsessively trying to shave my body and feeling raw disgust over a single missed hair. Why do I look at pictures of myself with the face app gender swap filter and feel loss over who I never would have been. Why did i ask my parents what my name would have been if i was born a girl. Why is the only way I can masturbate to mentally dissociate it from the fact of my own penis being what is being touched. I just want to know if I am trans or not but I can't look into my own brain see "am I trans" pop up as a variable isTransgender=True;. I don't even know how to be feminine because all my friends and siblings as a kid were male or at least I knew them as such at the time. What the fuck should I do here.
Sorry for all the rant, this is the first time I have ever put this feelings out to anyone at all ever. Can some one just please tell me I am trans or not or where I go from here. I want to be a woman but I don't want to have to be trans(because internalized transphobia) and I don't know what I am supposed to feel here.
No woman actually fits the 100% feminine gender stereotype. Can you imagine if we held cis women to those standards? I mean, I guess some chuds do, but they’re obviously ridiculous, right?
Same thing applies to trans women. Nobody fits perfectly into that 100% stereotypical girl box. Lots of women out there, including a shitton of cis women, have male friends and enjoy metal and guns.
Can some one just please tell me I am trans or not
I hereby declare you trans. My word is law :pathetic:
(but srsly I can’t actually decide that for you. But if me ordering you to be trans made you feel relieved or some other complicated emotion, then you’re probably trans)
You'd be shocked how many times I've heard trans women say, "I used to think my dysphoria wasn't severe enough to be valid." Honestly, your story sounds a lot like mine.
If you've made it this far: Congratulations, you're trans.
Give a quick look at this website. It'll only take a minute or two.
https://turn-me-into-a-girl.com/index.htm
Haha isn't it crazy how such a simple little game can give you such a rush?
Not trans, but chiming in anyway with positive vibes. Also I like Metal and Gaming and Rockets and other masculine things.
But I'd also spend my whole life in extremely expensive and frilly historical dresses if I could, I like domesticity (though I'm admittedly not good at it), and to the person on the street appear pretty femme.
As others say, no such thing as a conforming Gender. Gender is "real", but in the same way "Honor" or "Justice" is real. We all know they stand for actual behaviours and institutions, but what those are are highly variable and contingent on place, time, class, individual etc etc. A judge may have a very different conception of Justice than the Anarchist he's trying for derailing a coal train does.
Sex is in fact almost the same, a many-faceted interplay of genetics, hormones, environment, appearance, upbringing, and society.
Try things out; maybe you're trans, maybe you're a guy but you like feminine things. Maybe you're a girl who wants to live a traditionally masculine lifestyle. Maybe you're neither. Maybe you're both. Maybe you'll decide the entire concept of cis and trans and gender makes no sense for you.
You're already whatever and whoever you are, you may as well find as much out about yourself as you can, because you need to live with them for the rest of your life.
Maybe you’re neither. Maybe you’re both. Maybe you’ll decide the entire concept of cis and trans and gender makes no sense for you.
This is where I ultimately ended up. I hate that TERFs have claimed the post-gender ideology because on a personal level, I feel that abolishing gender - and as a consequence of such, patriarchy - should be the end goal. We don't get there by strictly reinforcing the gender binary or biological essentialism, however. We get there by making space for such a wide range of gender identities that the whole idea of categorizing people in this way becomes untenable.
OP, if you find gender to be a useful tool for expressing your identity then that is totally worth exploring. If not, that's okay, too. The important thing is that you find a way to be comfortable with yourself, regardless of how you get there. Your 20s is definitely the right time to be experimenting. Maybe visit a college campus or somewhere safe like that and introduce yourself with female pronouns to see how it feels. Get dressed up in some feminine clothes that make you feel confident. And then if it turns out you were wrong, so what? We are all learning and growing and changing every day. Maybe today you're a girl and tomorrow you're a boy and the day after that you're something else entirely. It's all good.
Hmm, nothing I write is going to be as good as this so you should read it. The whole thing - the whole site! It might give you some answers and reassurance. https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/am-i-trans
Edit: oh I see someone already linked it so I'd better come up with something more substantive. Okay, how about this? "Being transgender" isn't really a threshold that carries a world of weight. It's a label. You can sort out these feelings if you want, and never tell a soul, and you would still be you. You can decide you're trans, or not, and nothing has really changed. Experiment with presentation, try to figure out what feels right for you. The whole hierarchy of trans legitimacy is turbocringe and hurt me a lot too; try to forget the labels if you can and try to be an adult about pursuing what you want without the high school drama of whether you're in some toxic in-crowd. Or buy your self-respect by going through sufficient suffering to convince yourself, but that's really not necessary. If you were tall and buff and hairy with a beard and basso voice and suddenly blushed and whispered your story into my ear, I wouldn't bat an eye for a millisecond at you describing yourself as a woman, because it's such a super common story. That's just mechanically how transing genders often happens. I don't know, I think there aren't really any shortcuts here in terms of giving advice like this. We can show you that you're loved and accepted, but in the end this seems like a contest between your brainworms/fears and your slowly-building Krakatoa of dysphoria. It's kind of a living hell to be squeezed like that, but at least in my case it eventually provided clarity when the pain got so bad that I couldn't keep avoiding taking the steps that would help me. I'm sorry, that's probably not what you want to hear. Who knows, maybe in your case you can manage it. Everyone's different... oh jeez I'm messing it up, just read that site, it's written by people who know better than I do!
Cis man around your age. Sounds like you're trans. There's a lot of things about women that I like but I don't wonder what it would be like for me to be a woman, and I enjoy feeling like a hot dude, secondary sex characteristics included.
FYI, I think any way you realize you're not cishet is probably confusing. For instance everybody in the late bloomer lesbian sub seems to have been through similar conflict. (And even ignoring cishet socialization, change is scary for everybody. You're looking down the barrel of a new wardrobe, voice, friends, and/or body.) I'm sorry the world is so hostile.
I believe you can be a tall, intimidatingly pretty girl (if that's what you want). Sending good vibes.
Afab person here who owns multiple firearms, has a huge, super nerdy space tattoo, a giant comics collection, is obsessed with Coheed and Cambria and watches at least a couple full baseball games a week. Gender isn't your personal tastes, it's the one thing critters are right about. Why that has led them to go full calipers and chromosomes we'll never know.
i always stick by the egg prime directive (= not telling questioning people they're trans), but damn these are some extremely trans things to say comrade :trans-specter:
no, seriously, all of that sounds really typical for a young, questioning trans girl. like, all of it. it sounds as if you're in a difficult position to explore your gender due to family, society etc., but here's the thing: You're just in your early 20s. You're already through puberty, but still so young that hormones would work real well. so you've got all the time in the world to find yourself. and you know several NB people already, so it's not as if you're completely disconnected from the trans community, either.
i'd say take it slow, take steps you're comfortable with in your current environment. Grow your hair out maybe, try a few things you can safely do in your room. Nail polish on the toes, some feminine clothing, small things like that. See how that feels. Maybe get more in touch with the NB people you know already. You also mention that you're a bit on the bougie side - maybe try finding a therapist that's queer-inclusive, there's lists for that online, there's also online counseling services. sometimes it helps to talk this through with a gender therapist.
not trans enough
No such thing. There can be a little bit of transness or a whole lotta transness and both are fine.
If you feel at home there, then you can continue. If not, then no harm no foul, you explored something and decided it wasn’t really you.
This is the realization I finally came to after many many years of denial. That if I wasn't in denial, giving it a shot shouldn't be such a big deal! (Hint: it ended up being a big deal)
This isn't far off from my own experience; luckily, you're questioning this stuff while you're still pretty young, and not middle-aged and married with kids, although it's never really too late. That being said, I definitely have been wrangling some of the same inner demons re: cis male thought patterns and frustrations feeling predatory, and part of questioning my gender identity has included questioning whether I want to reject masculinity altogether, or just de-toxify those problematic elements. I still don't have an answer.
I'm still picking through this, but maybe it will help you if you haven't already seen it: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en
It's a little lacking on the questioning/non-binary/genderqueer side of the discussion, but at least it's a start.
I've read through this before and can attest that all this is true.
years-long impostor/not-feminine-woman here. The feelings of unbelonging clear up with time, and healing, and living. The dysphoria lingers a little more but that too grows smaller with distance.
Also; while 'if there was a button would you push it' can be useful in deciding to get the ball rolling, it's very much a process and decision that can largely be undone if you so choose, before you even get very far at all (or later!)
It seems heartwrenching and world ending until you do it and then ask yourself why you didn't make the jump earlier. It carries as much or as little weight and meaning as you want it to.
no one can tell you what you are except yourself, but you sound trans to me
