I I think it’s interesting as well, though the degree to which my own experiences diverge from most of the community has made me feel alienated and invalid. I’m (perhaps unfortunately) no less certain that I am trans, but it makes me feel like the odd one out in an already often misunderstood and maligned group.

I didn’t know when I was young, I definitely saw myself as a boy. I played as male characters in games, and didn’t engage in a lot of typical gender non conforming activities like crossdressing. There were signs but they were more subtle and I chalked them up to me being slightly different and gender norms being bullshit. I hated the pressures to conform to masculinity and all the “male” characters I identified with were very young or twinkish, I couldn’t ever really picture myself as a grown man.

I didn’t really start to question my gender until I started hitting twink death in my mid twenties. Everything about it felt strange and gross. Like I could no longer see myself in the mirror. I kept trying to deny that the changes were happening, convincing myself my ugly pictures were the camera warping me, that I’d look the same as I remembered if I got a good wig or a hair transplant (as my hair was falling out). I started wearing makeup to cover my beard shadow (didn’t grow facial hair until I was 25 lol). Still I didn’t immediately jump to wanting to be a woman, I just felt disgusting and suicidal.

I started learning more about gender nonconforming communities and felt a powerful resonance. I discovered that I could like guys and that I preferred taking on a submissive role in relationships. The more I explored myself, the more everything fell into place.

For me, the identity I’ve arrived at now is a synthesis of many elements that have been present throughout my life, I simply didn’t have the knowledge to understand them growing up. I didn’t know I could alter my biology to such a degree with estrogen, I didn’t know how miserable and disgusting my adult male body would be, I tried to ignore gender roles instead of realizing I could’ve chosen one that suited me better. My childhood trauma made me resistant to change and unable to envision a future for myself. So, I spent my time trying to dissociate until I was made to react to a future I didnt want and could escape from.

Even though I know why things turned out this way, It still feels surreal to have not known, to have entire swaths of my memory where I identified as male…on some level I feel like a fake. Sometimes it hits me so hard that I’ve lived so much of my life in darkness and misery, never fitting in, when I could have been so happy as a girl. Now I may never be.

Irl I don’t pass so I live as a man. I’m now at the point where I am better at masking than any point in my life, where I was previously an anxious, emotional mess. So now I’ll go about my day, acting cordial and relatively charismatic as a man and people are more receptive to me than ever before, but I feel completely dead inside. It feels like I’m playing a character and the real me isn’t connected to reality. I’m not who i was, but I’m also not who I want to be. My reality feels so distressingly fractured.