For those harsh moments of lucidity that break through the armor and pierce your heart.
For me, the cute moments of playful experimentation couldn’t quite penetrate my denial, but they did weaken it enough for the strong hits to make it through. I would quickly try to block and repair as best I could, but the structure was compromised and couldn’t hold like before. All these hits came from myself; from actually considering that I could be trans
😭
When I was a teenager still I was buying women’s clothes, trying to arrange a girl’s night with a female friend of mine, had picked and used a feminine name, and even painfully explained to my boss at the time (who insisted I was a gay man) that I wasn’t a gay man but actually it was like I was a woman on the inside so I was maybe a gay woman. Never did the thought even cross my mind that I might be trans.
When the idea came up later that I might be trans, I ruled it out easily. Trans women knew they were girls when they were three years old, and they were in medically significant distress from being in the wrong body. I had gone through childhood as a boy without any such self-conception as a girl, let alone severe distress. As far as I could tell, I experienced no dysphoria. I couldn’t have been trans, the DSM made that clear to me.
It was over a decade later before I learned that gender dysphoria can look like what I experienced, or that I actually had fairly common and stereotypical trans experiences, like dressing in my mom’s heels as a four year old and continuing to “cross” dress throughout my childhood and into adulthood. Oops.
I fully believed I was a cishet boy for my entire childhood. I never once considered that I could be, or even wanted to be a girl. I legit didn’t know; the reveal was a total surprise 😰
The only good gender reveal
Same for me, too. Although on reflection, certain things like practicing tucking to resemble female genitals, offering to present a school event in drag, and praying to wake up as a girl, may not have had entirely cis motivations.
I also assumed that my complete failure to fit in at an all-boys school was just due to being a nerdy kid.
I really didn’t have obvious signs, as most of my symptoms were attributed to autism. I didn’t like going shirtless, although I wasn’t sure why. I hated going into men’s locker rooms and didn’t fit in well with most boys, except the boy with long hair. I was jealous of him and always wanted to grow mine out, but my mom would constantly tell me that I wouldn’t like longer hair because it gets heavy and hot.
However, I never once felt like I was a girl or felt like I wanted to be a girl. I was fine with feminine things, but many of them are too much trouble to get too invested in outside of special occasions. I want to know how to walk in heels, but I rarely want to wear them (not to mention I’m already conscious about my height 😖)