@spycrab my answer will probably not be super helpful since I don’t fully remember how it started

I knew I wanted to be a girl from before I have solid memories, a lot of my earliest memories that I can recall include feelings of discomfort with regards to not being allowed to go play with the girls or being told I shouldn’t do things that are for girls etc, I grew up somewhere with extreme levels of gender segregation

I assume these stuck out to me as memories because they carried more emotional weight

though none of this was “realized” if you asked 7 year old me if I was a boy I would have answered yes, because that is what I had been told, even if it for some reason felt weird

when I was a little older I was praying to God to let me wake up as a girl the next day every night and stuff like that

though once again that isn’t a realization of what I am, if you asked me what I was I would’ve said a boy, I did want to be a girl, but that didn’t change what I was to myself, because I was not aware of what the concept of being trans even was

after that I went deeply into denial about it and “stopped wanting to be a girl” and tried really hard to be a man correctly for like 4-5 years

that obviously didn’t work work and I mostly found refuge in reading fiction where characters get their gender swapped and such

and through that type of stuff I started slowly learning about femboys, and trans people and such

then started out just wanting to be “more feminine” which turned fully into wanting to be a woman again after a while and this was the point where I started learning about what trans people actually were and gender stuff and such

so I would say, the answer is, a deep seated discomfort with having to pretend to be a boy/guy

I say “discomfort” but that’s a bit of an understatement since it made me suicidal as a 12 year old all the way up until I got on estrogen at 22