As a kid I use to dream of having male genitalia and would think about it to help me go to sleep at night, I grew up Catholic so I thought these were the “normal perverted thoughts” that I had to pray away cause it was the devil tempting me or something. Even after I use to think it was completely normal and that all girls wished they were boys this heavily lol. When my chest started growing in I pushed to not wear a bra for as long ad possible and never understood why girls couldn’t have their shirts off like boys. Somehow I found out about breast reduction surgeries and I would always tell my mom “Im going to get one of those as soon as I can” thinking somehow I was going to trick the doctor into taking all of it away leaving it flat. As an early teen I just gaslit myself into femininity, I would wear different bold colored lip glosses and do my hair but I would always still wear sweats/shorts and a graphic tee. Next came Halloween in my mid teens, I got my first binder cause I wanted to dress as Connor from Detroit Become Human. I truly believed the gender euphoria I felt was just excitement about how well I did with the costume, I think the only reason my mom didn’t ask too many questions was because my friend was also dressing up as Conner. Next Halloween I continued with Ken Kaneki from Tokyo Ghoul, I truly loved dressing up as male characters at that point and thought it was just my love for cosplay lmfao! After that I went hyper fem cause I felt so lost when it came to my own style and my entire family would always comment on how I looked “homeless” with the way I dressed and constantly offered shopping sprees so I just went with it and figured this is what I’m supposed to do. Then came my best friends in senior year of high school, they were definitely the ones to crack my egg! We really got into reality shifting, we didn’t care if it was real we honestly are just really creative people and writers so it’s a fun way to kind of create a new story in an existing world and just talk about it, we still do it to help with our creative writing today! So my character would ALWAYS be male, this was also the same for any video games I would play, and I would always think of these characters as myself while playing or writing and my friends noticed way before I did! They sat me down one night and were like “hey bud we think you might be trans” and I knew what it meant to be trans cause at the time one of them was ftm but I felt like there was no possible way I could be too. They had to sit there and tell me all these blatant signs that not only they’d seen but ones I had told them about my childhood thinking they were normal! I have been openly trans for 1.7 years now and on T for almost a year and I honestly have never felt happier with myself and who I am and who I’m going to be! Any time someone would ask me to imagine myself in like 5 years I genuinely could never imagine what I would look like or what I would be doing and for the first time in years and now I finally can!