@EverBeyondReach my egg cracked at 33, though I suspect it cracked earlier and I just ignored it. I grew up in a small town, less than 2k people as an only child. My mother and father were hoarders and alcoholics and high school sweethearts. Growing up was living with my mom putting away a handle of vodka a week, while mom and dad had screaming matches and threw things, and of course, I acted out and misbehaved a lot. When I was a kid they said I had ADHD /1

@EverBeyondReach and I suspect *now* it was also autism, based on self-diag, so I was stuck with the disabled kids, even though I was above them in reading level and writing and had above average IQ. Anyways, I never really thought about gender, I remember learning that boys and girls had different parts and that blew my mind but also I think I might have been vaguely disappointed? I was very young so it's hard to remember. Keep in mind I didn't have many /2

@EverBeyondReach friends, nor would my parents tell me much, they'd swing between being nice to me because I was a kid, to tolerating me, to screaming and throwing things at each other, so I'd hide in my room a lot. I still have a scar on my hand from when my mom swung at me at nicked me with her wedding ring. Anyways I can think of a few signs I never thought about, like being misgendered for having long hair, and my dad was mad about it and I couldn't /3

@EverBeyondReach care less, or constantly having body dysmorphia when puberty kicked in, or not liking masculinity but wanting to be an adult so people would listen to me, or liking feminine outfits but being dismayed I couldn't wear them because they weren't for me, or wanting to play with my grandmother's Barbies and not allowed because it wasn't for boys and being handed gi Joe's instead but not being as excited about them. I have a cousin who is like /4

@EverBeyondReach a sister to me, and even as the elder I looked up to her. She got a barbie for her birthday and popped it's head off and after the fact I remember thinking that "I wouldn't have done that". I remembered that scene the other day and started sobbing HARD within a second, so I assume that memory is accurate and not fake. I could never talk to my parents about these feelings because dad had clearly been homophobic to the point I remember dad/5

@EverBeyondReach threatening me that I dare not be gay or a fa***t, so telling him anything like that was a no-go. Anyways, by highschool I got access to the internet and manga and came across gay hentai and did not particularly enjoy it, even though I would be called gay or queer or f-word, even though I always dated women. I did like the feminine boys, but in a now city where my graduating class had 142 students, I didn't know any nor was too afraid /6

@EverBeyondReach so I kept it to myself, and eventually went to school in Boston, I didn't go out much, I was too busy being depressed, and busy with school work, my circle was nerds, and later PAX. By this time I knew a few transwomen, but this was something *they* went through, it didn't apply to me. I was just a weirdo who liked women or sometimes transwomen in porn, I didn't want to be them, at this point I started thinking thoughts like "I'll never /7

@EverBeyondReach look like them, better to be an average guy than an ugly woman" which is just internalized transphobia now, but also isn't cis. I knew a lot more transmascs, because most of my friends were women. I asked for women doctors, for women therapists, and I just felt more comfortable around women, but I couldn't tell you or myself why, I just did. I didn't know it was a problem. I had male friends, but I did always feel like I was performing for/8

@EverBeyondReach them, but I still didn't understand why. At this point I had broke up with my gf, my mother died from liver cirrhosis, I had contemplated sui* many times, and I was back in my home state, doing bare minimum wage, dating no one and getting into drugs. In 2015 I had been high on shrooms and I felt very feminine at one point and I can't remember most of it, but I remember wanting to feel like that forever. I wrote it off as being high. I /9

@EverBeyondReach still thought, almost every time I looked in the mirror I hated myself, I cursed my life that I was born a man, I wanted to be hotter and more feminine, but I was so heartbroken that I couldn't do anything to fix it, I was stuck this way. I started dating this one woman who was also a narcissist and emotionally abusive, got married, and got divorced when she cheated on me. I started dating this other woman and online told people "I play /10

@EverBeyondReach women in video games because I can't do so in real life" 2020 "and the technology just isn't there, so I have to suck it up". I had been thinking it for years and said it with my full chest, thinking it was a normal thought. I didn't care if someone thought I was weird, they already didn't like me. One or two people tried to hint it to me, but they weren't forceful enough. I needed someone to shake me and sit me down, and no one did.Since/11

@EverBeyondReach I was in this more stable relationship with the woman I'm now dating, I was finally able to think of myself more, instead of constantly being the guardian of other's emotions, and I got really jealous of F1nnster and other trans on TikTok, eventually finding the button test, saying "I'd slam that button so hard it would turn to dust" and someone goes "I also thought that, when I was cis" and it took a day or two, but I kept coming back to/12

@EverBeyondReach that, like it was a secret code I had unlocked, if only I could understand its meaning, what did they mean??? "When you were cis"? I took to the forum I had been on since I was 17 and explained everything to them, and they all unequivocally explained that people who are cis did *not* question their gender this much, and this prevalently. I spent the next two weeks not wanting to leave my bed trying to argue myself out of this discovery/13

@EverBeyondReach and I couldn't do it. My gf came back from dogsitting around this point and I wrote it down on paper because I couldn't trust my verbal skills, and I handed it to her and she said she was supportive and would help me, though she isn't attracted to women, so that's a story for another time. I'll save you all the new issues I'm dealing with now. Anyways thanks for reading 💕