If any #trans or #enby folxs out there had stories to share about your egg cracking ,(figuring out your gender) especially if it was a long or drawn out process id love to hear them.
(Had a day if going back and forth about whether or not im deluding myself in even trying. The versions of yall in my head were very good at dissuading me of that notion with kindness)
(Remember privacy settings if you need to, and boost if youd like).
@EverBeyondReach
So I didn't know that trans was a thing you could be for a while, and then I thought it was just something that people did to be on TV talk shows, but I remember one day reading about those TV talk shows and someone saying, "Men who want to be women who are lesbians? Why not just stay a man?" and realizing that I totally got it. Of course gender and sexuality aren't the same thing. But I didn't want to be a girl, did I?
So then I spent a long time not being a girl and being really terrible at being a boy. And I'm huge. I'm a giant of a man. Broad shoulders, strong, tall, thick of thew and everything. And it didn't make me happy. I felt distinctly unmanly.
And my social agenda suffered because I felt so trapped by masculinity. I tried being straight and I couldn't do it. I tried being gay and got really worried because while I didn't dislike other guys, the idea of being sexually attracted to them was utterly foreign. I thought I was a bigot.
1/
@EverBeyondReach
I thought I was secretly homophobic. And I did a lot of theater in high school and college, so I was around a lot of gay guys, and I liked them a lot, so that made me feel incredibly guilty.
So I basically retreated from the sexual world. No dates, no dances, no parties. But I was incredibly sexually frustrated. So I trolled chatrooms online looking for I don't know what. And I found that "pretending" to be a woman was a good way to get attention from men. So I did that.
Except I made friends with people in this female persona, who was good at talking to people, sexually or otherwise. Who was okay with her sexuality. Who was okay with a lot of stuff.
And so I passed online. For years. Decades.
2/
@EverBeyondReach
But I thought I was just, I don't know, doing whatever I had to to be social. It wasn't all about sex anymore, but it was still social. And anyway, I was lying. I was catfishing these people with whom I'd become friends. Good friends. And I felt terrible about that.
Meanwhile I'm still lousy at being a man. Not just a stereotypical man. And I was learning more about transgender people. I would joke about making an ugly woman though, so no one had to worry about me transitioning.
At some point I read that tweet that cracked a thousand eggs and it made me think, "Huh, I guess most men don't go around worried that they'd make ugly women." But it didn't crack my egg.
I met my future spouse and they, she at the time, were patient enough with my hangups that we were able to become romantic, but sex was still kind of weird. Good, but weird. And gender... their previous ex had been closeted trans. It broke up the marriage among other reasons.
/3
@EverBeyondReach
At that point I was still lying to myself and them. Still passing secretly online, but unwilling to consider it as such. And I love them and didn't want to hurt them, so I just disassociated. Made it go away.
Then my spouse came out as ace. And NB. And I met some trans people and just got strange happiness about them being their authentic selves. And I investigated myself and discovered that, holy shit, I was trans. I mean, come on, look at the signs I had been ignoring, right?
But it wasn't one moment, and it's still a process. Coming out to my spouse was a big step. Choosing a name was one too. But I still have good days and bad days. I'm still mostly closeted offline.
I hope that extremely long-winded reply was of help to you. Thanks for listening.
4/4
1/ Personally I can't say I ever "knew" from a young age. I didn't. I knew I was different. I was a tomboy. I liked to play with boys. I liked the games they played better than the games girls played.
When we all entered elementary school and play became more segregated, I was lost. When boys chased girls, I didn't run but also didn't chase. I tried to run the boys off. Didn't know who to hang out with so I was mostly alone.
It stayed that way until my preteen years when things started to change again. Lines between hangout groups became less divided by gender. I found the nerds, the drama kids, the outcasts. The people who would later realize they were nuerodivergent, queer or both.
@EverBeyondReach 2/ By high school I knew I was bi. In my mid 20's I started experimenting with BDSM and polyamory.
I still didn't really see myself as anything other than a woman tho. I was bad at being a woman. I have PCOS so I had too much facial hair, too many zits. I wasn't patient enough for most feminine costumery. I liked the color play in makeup but not the texture or the time consuming process of putting it on. I was overweight which meant most pretty things weren't going to fit me. I was depressed. I didn't know how to be an adult, an employee, a partner, much less a wife. I thought I wanted kids but I think now I was trying to find something to make me feel competent. It's probably a very good thing I never had them.
@EverBeyondReach
3/ So there I was, fumbling around, trying to figure out how to survive. I made a lot of mistakes and to be fair, not all of my troubles were gender related. A good chunk of them definitely had to do with gender dysphoria but I didn't see it at the time and I was also struggling with living overseas, a failing marriage, trying to finish college, and undiagnosed AuDHD.
I had a lot on my plate.
So gender questing wasn't on my radar, except as it related to others, until I read somebody else's story online in my early 30's. They IDed as non-binary and what they shared about their childhood resonated with me. I wondered. Was I non binary? It was a passing idea that kept echoing back in the following years.
4/ I listened to trans people, to enbies online. I had one friend come out irl and she began her transition while in jail. I tried to be supportive but I was mostly just confused. I remember wondering how likely she would be to find other women who wanted to date a trans woman.
Fortunately, I mostly kept those thoughts to myself. I read. I listened. I learned. I approached the idea of trans people the same way I was taught to approach people of color or from another culture. Eyes/ears/mind open. Mouth shut.
By 35, I had personally decided I was non binary but I didn't really know what to do with that. I changed my hair from long to short, then asymmetrical. I thought about they pronouns but it felt like too much work. Same with a name change.
5/ Seeing/Hearing from other transmen is when things finally began to click for me. I wanted to look like them. I wanted to think like them, not discarding what I have learned from presenting as a woman most of my life but not trying to fit the femme mold anymore. Being a feminist but as an advocate for women instead of as a woman myself. I didn't enjoy the woman lite spaces commonly shaped around the enby community.
I started dressing and presenting masc at 38 and the more I did it, the less I wanted to be anything else. There were moments of euphoria when I was perceived as a man or doing guy things but mostly I just felt so much better not pretending to be a woman.
6/ At 39, I started T and began using another name with close friends/family. I am still on low dose T today.
Not everything about being a guy is my favorite. I shave regularly bc I don't like facial hair. I have mixed feelings about binding. It's a necessary evil. I think trans masc non binary fits just a hair better than transman but I have no doubt things will continue to change as I continue this gender journey. That's ok. I personally am not so invested in a destination as I am in exploring what works and makes me feel more at ease in my skin. I want top surgery for instance but bottom growth is meh to me. I enjoy the way T makes me feel and my brain is so much happier this way but I still have feminine interests.
That's ok. I am just fine taking the rest of my life to figure this out.
You can too, if you want.
@EverBeyondReach it finally hit me that I was so sad because I wanted to have been the one in a wedding dress along with my former partner. I told her and she was (and still is) really supportive and I finally saw a therapist. I struggled for almost a year and finally started E just wanting to see if it helped (five years hrt last month) . It changed my world and I started Spiro three months later.
I took almost 8 months after that to be fully out.
tldr; it was scary at points and a long road, and with some hard things that have occurred iny life but at least I got to deal with them as me fully realized. For me transitioning was always what I needed to do and I love myself fully as the proud queer trans lady that I am.
@EverBeyondReach For me I feel like my cracking was a very different experience from what I see most people describe, and in some ways I feel like I'm still in the process of cracking even though I've been on HRT for 4 months.
I don't have much of a history of acting feminine, and I never had a hugely strong pull towards femininity. I had two older sisters, and I always had fond memories of the times they would dress me up in their clothes or put me in makeup and nail polish, but I suppose I always thought it was just that, fond memories of childhood.
For most of my life I didn't have any particular dislike of being a man, though I didn't really partake in most of the stereotypical masculine activities. I was just sensitive. Looking back I never really had any attachment to the trappings of masculinity, or even my particular anatomy. (Not that I *disliked* it, mind you, just mostly ambivalence?)
Through the years I would occasionally say to myself or others that I thought I'd be happier as a girl, or that I wish that I had a girl's body. Not a huge pull, just something that seemed nice. But I always discounted it as a "the grass is always greener on the other side" type thing so it didn't occupy my mind too much.
Because I had no particular attachment to being a man, I thought for many years that I was entirely genderless. I spent a long time insisting that I had no preference for pronouns, and I thought I didn't.
During the pandemic I got into writing fanfiction, and while I continued to insist that I didn't care about pronouns, when it came to picking a name to refer to myself as, I picked a female name. I played animal crossing religiously when it came out, and found myself drawn to the feminine clothing (I even set my gender to female in game even though it didn't make any difference)
And then late last year I joined the fediverse after being invited by an old friend. I found myself following almost exclusively trans people (they were the most interesting) and before long started seeing posts along the lines of "if you want to be a girl, you can just do that" and "cis people don't actually want to be a different gender". Then I started seeing transition timelines from a bunch of people and saw how happy they were and I realized that at least part of me really wanted that.
When I was linked to the gender dysphoria bible, I read it in one sitting and honestly didn't find much. However when I read the section on the effects of feminizing HRT, I found that basically all of the effects (even the ostensibly negative ones) were really appealing to me.
I started trying to present more feminine, shaved my face and legs, changed my clothes, and while I loved the way they felt, I didn't really like the way they looked on me. I didn't get much in the way of gender euphoria from any of that. Or at least what I did get was small.
For me though, I kept feeling drawn back to it. To the thoughts of what it would be like to transition. I found that the idea of being more feminine, to be referred to as she, to be seen as a woman felt appealing. Cozy.
I still have a lot of angst and doubt about all of it. I feel like neither my dysphoria nor my euphoria are sufficiently strong to justify what I'm doing. I feel like my history doesn't line up enough with most trans stories I see. But at the end of the day, I still think I would be happier as a girl, and I cannot explain why. So I continue forward into the unknown.
And if, perhaps, some future version of me decides that I've made a mistake. I don't think that that future me would begrudge the decisions I've made. There was enough energy, enough pull for me to try it, and I know not trying it would have only left me wondering and longing for the rest of my life.
I don't know if this made any sense, it was pretty stream of consciousness, but I wish you luck in your journey and know that you will always be accepted in this community no matter what you end up finding out about yourself. 💜
@EverBeyondReach Not having a strong pull one way or the other definitely makes things more difficult. Of course agender is a perfectly valid label (my current label for myself is agender demigirl), but there's no rush to pick on either. Best thing you can do is just try stuff and see how it feels.
Honestly one of the reasons I started HRT as early as I did was because basically all the changes are reversible within the first 3-4 months, and research seems to suggest that a truly cis person would feel terrible on cross sex HRT. (I've been feeling neutral to positive)
@EverBeyondReach back in 2016 for a forum thread game I imagined what my future self might be in a future world where anything is possible, and imagined myself as a woman (and a cyborg). Also in 2016 I imagined what if I had to take hormones for medical reasons but took the *other* hormones.
But I didn't start thinking "could I be trans?" until 2020 and then I never answered it cos I knew if I was I couldn't do anything about it cos of my parents. So I kept kidding myself until the latter part of 2021 until I finally did a deep dive on "how do you know you're trans?" and various variations on the "button test". For a day I thought maybe I was agender cos I didn't really feel connected to a gender but the next day I admitted that yeah a woman is what I want to be and tried out being called she/her in discord and wow the euphoria. So then I knew for sure (and also doubted a lot since!).
And at that point I'd also needed to be reassured that I don't need dysphoria to be trans cos it's the gender euphoria at getting to be recognised as my true gender that matters. But then after they I learned more about the different forms of gender dysphoria and realised my life had been packed full of it!
Social transition helped with some aspects of that, blocking testosterone helped with other aspects, and starting E helped with others. All of those were different but significant.
I still feel doubt sometimes but reminding myself how much I love how my body is changing (and would like it to keep going) helps.
I was in increasingly-desperate denial for way too many years because I was afraid, afraid of transitioning and telling everyone and...
I read Mae Dean's famous coming-out comics, and knew that my feelings were gender dysphoria... and continued deflecting it for a year and a half more. Told myself that I wasn't trans, I was just a feminine boy.
Eventually I read a tweet thread about less-obvious forms of gender dysphoria and one of them resonated strongly. I was still not ready to accept it, but after several days of low-grade panic I finally actually talked to some trans people about their experiences and that made it so much less scary.
Heck, I still felt like maybe transitioning was all a huge mistake even after I'd been on hormones for like three months. Now (one year and a bit on HRT) I can't imagine ever wanting to be otherwise, I am so much happier and healthier.
It's completely normal to feel uncertain about transitioning even if you are trans. It's a big change in your life.
@croisvoix pronouns are actually a really helpful place to start. Realizing that I preferred she more than he or they was a big sign at the start.
Something like a decade ago? I decided that I would basically give up on trying to be a guy. Looking back I've realized that I don't think I ever thought of myself as a "man", but I didn't consider myself trans either. I did always feel very proud of the things that I thought would mark me as not "one of the guys." Like how I found it easier to relate to female characters in fiction. Or how I would always play women in videogames when given the option. Or feeling a longing to make female friends instead of just guy friends.
@EverBeyondReach I think my problem was that I was under the impression that being trans was some sort of clearly identifiable quality that I was lacking (less charitably, I was seeing trans people as the Other). So I just ended up glomming onto the things that I thought made me an untypical "sensitive" guy to assuage my gender feelings, but still resigning myself being cismale since "I guess that's just who I am".
Then sometime in January I saw a link to the Gender Dysphoria Bible somewhere on Mastodon and started reading it, "to find out more about what's it like to be trans." I guess I found out, huh. It took me a few months longer to fully accept that being a girl seems like it would be really neat, if I can just pick anything. (2/2)
@EverBeyondReach At least for me, I think I still have that kind of internal compass? It's just so buried under years of repression that I can only access it indirectly.
But I feel you. Intellectually understanding that the rules are made up and we can be whoever we want to be is one thing, believing it is another thing entirely.
@EverBeyondReach It's hard to make a story out of it because there was a lot of compartmentalizing involved.
I must have been ~12 when I realized something like "I wish I had girl parts" (I think it was after experiencing it in a dream). From then on it was just something I knew about myself.
Similarly I first learned that transition was a thing when I was 18-19 and I saw a documentary. It was immediately obvious that I wanted to do it, and from then on that too was just a thing about me.
1/
@EverBeyondReach But I didn't think I was trans, or talk to anyone, until age 29. In those ten years the knowledge would slip in and out of different boxes in my mind.
Like around age 19 I knew I wanted to transition and was planning my future accordingly (even though the only path I could imagine was "get a high paying remote job so no one has to know what I'm doing" which wasn't realistic at all).
2/
@EverBeyondReach ...But I was also seeing a psychiatrist every week for depression stuff and I didn't even ask myself if I wanted to tell her. At those times I was just a cis guy and the knowledge didn't even exist in my mind.
Then around 22 my theory was that everyone has male and female sides and I was probably 50/50 so there was no need to change anything (which makes no sense yeah).
3/
@EverBeyondReach ~25 I wasn't leaving home anymore and I fully expected to die in a couple years when my savings ran out. So there was no point in thinking about the future. I was a disembodied mind on the internet, playing female chars in MMOs but using he/him pronouns because that was "normal". I'd lie awake at night thinking about getting reincarnated as a teenage girl and redoing my life right, or getting a sex-changing bite from a vampire. But I didn't think I was a trans person.
4/
@EverBeyondReach At 27 I was on social aid, working unpaid "reinsertion" gigs and living a full adult's life for the first time, and it wasn't that bad. There was a high from talking to people again and being treated as an equal, which made the required masks easy to wear. I got fit for the first time. And being a "guy" in manual jobs is nice because you can just stop thinking about your appearance - let your beard grow until you can't see your face, wear your work clothes everywhere.
5/
@EverBeyondReach At the same time the nightly daydreams were still there and would often turn into crying myself to sleep, because sometimes I just felt *so* lonely. And I'd been making good progress with my new therapist but we were getting to a point where I understood there was an entire personality I was constantly pushing down, and we wouldn't get much further until I faced it.
6/
@EverBeyondReach Also at the same time Youtube was introducing me to actual trans thoughts and philosophy instead of the usual canned story (I swear I didn't go looking for it it all started from trying to understand what the hell was up with gaming spaces post-gamergate). And that's the soup that made things start to change.
7/
* I found a (new to me) understanding of trans identity as something independent from transition. You're trans both before and after your transition, and there are non-transitioning trans people. That meant I could actually allow myself to think about trans experiences in terms of "us" instead of just "them".
8/
* I was in a position where people wanted me to get better, and that required good therapy, and that required me to be honest. So I was able to tell myself that I owed others introspection and authenticity. That was the complete opposite of what I'd learned growing up as an ND teen, that it was my duty to cut off every part of me that didn't fit in.
9/
* I learned a lot about trans subcultures, with many people writing about how their relationship with society at large might be complicated but at least in their own community they were completely accepted. The idea that maybe I wouldn't have to fit a societal ideal as long as I could find other people like me was completely new to me.
10/
* I had a good, trusting relationship with a therapist for the first time in my life. And my therapy was stalling because I was refusing to put some things into words.
So I first told myself I should maybe mention what I was thinking about, you know, in the interest of progress. Just to see what she thought about it.
11/
Then by the time of my next appointment that had turned into "I'm going to lie through my teeth if I have to, because god dammit I'm getting on HRT and I've learned enough about the system to make it agree".
Then she listened to me with an open mind, and I didn't actually have to lie, and sitting on the bus home thinking about my upcoming diagnosis (yeah we still have those) and contacting an endo was the first time I realized, wait, this is it, I'm a trans woman!
12/12 phew
@EverBeyondReach
I liked roleplaying male characters and writing "autobiographical" stories where the main character was male since I was in early elementary school. I also consistently had dreams in which I was male and I knew those made me happy. I also was fine being female it just didn't feel like enough.
Keep in mind that I also lived in a Very Sheltered Christian Area and this was in the 90's and 00's so I had no concept of "transgender", and if I did I would have thought it was a sin.
@EverBeyondReach one of the things that kept me from transitioning was that I didn’t think I could be happy even after. I legit thought that it was normal for me to be unhappy with myself, with my body and that this would be true no matter what.
Then I had an epiphany, that I could actually be happy if I transitioned.
So far, every little thing I’ve done to release my true self has brought me joy… and I think all of us should have that chance. ❤️
Estel
Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
Gwen the Trans Balrog
Kai 🦚
Kee Hinckley
Lifelong Weirdo
Binary Waddle 
Ms. Bee-Bop
zoey 
Sufficient Daisy
Linnea nsfw 
QuietBrooke 🏳️⚧️
croisvoix
Mara 
Sasa
Benjamin 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
Hope 🏳️⚧️
Tsutsuku (he/they)
SBrass