To anyone who's trans/taking HRT following me or sees this;

[sabremc@bark.lgbt]

@jihyn
Seeing this a bit late, but it's...been a journey in discovery, I suppose

I knew I liked dresses and dolls as a really young puppy, but that wasn't all that weird; both of my parents were hippies, and I -also- liked action figures, transformers and "boy stuff" so it was fine for them, then that all kinda got pushed down

Fast forward and I recall being like "I mean I wouldn't mind having x, but I'm fine being a guy too" and "I like cross dressing because it's hot but I also just really like it, I guess? It's not that much of a kink it just feels nice."

I got the usual school bullying of misgendering but it felt weird whether they called me a boy or girl. That came to make sense when it finally clicked that I'm non binary; it took time pressure, ADHD medication and still some introspection to realise that though

It wasn't until I started to see myself really aging into a man that l realised "oh no I need to do something about this right fluffing now"

So it took a lot of shocks to my system because I was oblivious to myself, and it's less that I always knew and more that I (eventually) discovered that I always was :3

[jihyn@bark.lgbt]

@sabremc I forgot to reply!
Thank you I think I'm coming to the conclusion that I need to go on with this, and see where it takes me

[hazel@shrimp.starlightnet.work]

@jihyn you cant know you're trans if you don't know what trans people are, for example for me trans people weren't a thing in my view of the world until like at least 10-13 years old probably

[hazel@shrimp.starlightnet.work]

@jihyn also it can be very taboo in some families or communities to even think about gender as anything else than binary - much less changing one's gender, so there's a social pressure here too

[strongsand@booping.synth.download]

@jihyn@bark.lgbt when i was in preschool i used to love wearing dresses and princess stuff. i hated puberty but i just kinda had to accept being a boy and i was too depressed to care for most of middle school. i always really hated my body hair though. then in high school i started to identify as a femboy bc it felt nice, then slowly came to terms with being a girl

[clover@akko.wtf]

@jihyn@bark.lgbt

I always felt weird about being called a boy but I didn't feel too 'bad' about it.

someone who lived all their life with a pain in their foot might come to think that it's normal or just a bit uncomfortable

getting "euphoria" or relief once you get rid of the "pain" tells you just as much as someone else that has more direct pain/dysphoria that they can feel

[airtower@woem.men]

@jihyn@bark.lgbt Essentially, I didn't. I was lucky enough to encounter trans people who made it clear the "real trans people always know from childhood" narrative is garbage, often implicitly (because it didn't happen that way in their story).

I think I was in a similar position as you, when I was a child everyone (family, school, church, …) around me treated gender as binary and determined by genitals as such a matter of course that the thought to question that couldn't really occur. I sure felt I didn't fit in with the boys, but didn't know why. I was in my early 20s when I first (consciously) encountered trans people online and very, very slowly opened up to the possibility of being one.

[jihyn@bark.lgbt]

@mitsunee goddamn are you me lmao
I have this same problem. Thanks

[gwenthefops@transfem.social]

@jihyn@bark.lgbt my solution is that I am just following what makes me feel best. You don't have to know the answer, I certainly didn't when I started. All I knew was that going by fem pronouns and wearing fem clothes made me feel better, and that was enough

Just like when you were a kid, ad you didn't always know what you wanted your profession to be, or maybe you did and turns out it sucks and there's something better out there. You can actually change your mind and follow what feels good

[immy@equestria.social]

@jihyn Society discourages questioning your gender and others trans people at every step, it it comes no surprise that I didn't know that I wasn't my AGAB

[lunadragofelis@void.lgbt]

@flamecat @jihyn yeah, I also only really started to have transgender thoughts when puberty started, and didn't question my gender before. My social gender was effectively "loner nerd" anyway. I also failed to recognize the transgender thoughts as such as they came mixed with transspecies thoughts. I didn't just want to be a girl, I wanted to be a (furry) *catgirl*, and as I knew catgirls aren't real, I mentally filed the whole thing as "just" an autogynephilic fantasy.

It took me until age 18, when I've had Twitter for about a year, and slowly had drifted from Splatoon twitter to queer twitter, to realize that cishet human guys' catgirl fantasies are about having sex and/or a romantic relationship with the catgirl, not actually *being* the catgirl.

Also I too have more body dysphoria than social dysphoria.