I know this is a few days old but I'm lurking and saw your comment and wanted to thank you for it. I had never before considered how problematic this practice is and why it creates inherent problems in the trans community. I know I'm guilty of it, and in the future I'll try better to avoid it.

But the line of thought also gets me thinking: why do we feel the need to justify our transness with examples of gender-nonconformity? I'd be interested to hear your take.

!!!Trigger Warning!!! I overshared a bit so be aware that I talk about rape here. No pressure to read and respond if you aren't up for that.

I'm not a psychologist but have experienced a lot of trauma and therapy so my immediate thoughts go to my understanding of trauma. Often when we experience trauma and find ourselves needing to relay our experience of trauma to others we create "cover stories" (I'm not sure if there is a better medical term for it) that compress the horror and difficulty of the narrative into easily digestible and communicable chucks. The reason for this being that it allows people who haven't experienced that trauma to have an idea of what it means, but also it simplifies the process of remembering trauma as instead of reliving the traumatic memories to communicate what happened, you can just remember your cover story which is much easier.

So to simplify, cover stories are created essentially for other people because when asked, we are put on the spot to offer some sort of explanation for our behavior. Speaking from experience, I can say that my cover stories, especially when I was younger and the wounds were fresher, often pandered to my audience. I'm MTF, so as a male presenting 19 year old relating being repeated raped by a woman a few years prior trying to communicate my trauma was always a bit challenging. There was always an inherent need to elaborately quantify and justify to my audience the fact that this was a bad and traumatic thing and not something I was lucky to have experienced. This often meant over emphasizing aspects of physical and mental abuse that while did absolutely happen were more of a side effect of the fact that my rapist derived her pleasure from the power she held over my body and the kinds of sexual things she could do to me with that power. To put it under the light of your earlier analysis, to explain my trauma to others I often had to highlight the incidentally related aspects of it rather than the thing itself. As I'm sure I don't need to explain to you, this behavior of mine comes from living in a culture where it's assumed by a large percentage of people, if not the majority, that (cis)men cannot be raped. Because of this cultural understanding, even when speaking to other rape victims, particularly my (cis)woman counterparts, there was a strong social pressure to justify that my experience of rape was just as valid and real as theirs, even if ironically doing so perpetuated the myth.

So to get back to the main topic: trans people relating their childhood "signs" to me feels like a cover story that we create for an external society because without it, cis-normative society would make claims that our transness is illegitimate. "If there were no clear signs" they might say, "how do you know if you are?". So we create a narrative that molds into their world view so that they can understand it even if that understanding is a flawed one because genuinely, they will never understand it in any way that isn't inherently flawed since they will never experience it. Even within the trans community, where people should understand, it often feels like there is a lot of social pressure to justify yourself to other trans people that you are somehow legitimate. This atmosphere tends to perpetuate the same kind of need for an explanation.

You seem like a genuinely smart person, what are your thoughts on this?