TRANS PEOPLE

Totally unscientific survey of transition demographics on the fediverse, for transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse people.

What year did you either come out, begin transition, and/or have your egg crack?

2023 - present
2020 - 2022
2016 - 2019
2015 or earlier
Poll ends at .
Please boost above! And please check above poll if you’re following #transgender #trans #transfem #transmasc #nonbinary #enby #TGD #queer
For clarity, the idea is to capture when you began your current gender journey/endeavors, and what trans cohort you feel the most belonging to. I know a lot of folks don’t fit easily into one or the other, and that’s great too! Just limited options for this poll.

@mallory_sinn well there's a toughie ;)

first egg crack: 1989
second egg crack: 2006
final egg crack: 2020 <- i voted here
came out: 2023
started transitioning: 2024

:D

@brooke yeah, I am kind of assuming people can decide what makes the most sense in terms of their “beginning” since we may have several false starts or not be able to live as ourselves for a while even after an initial egg cracking.
@brooke did you just ignore or deny your egg cracking moments before? Or was it something else?
@mallory_sinn denial's not just a river in egypt :D

@mallory_sinn (so...)

as a 10 year old kid staring down the wrong puberty i didn't feel i could do *anything* about it at the time, so i just packed it deep down and told nobody

in my 20s i experimented privately with crossdressing and knew Something Was Up but didn't know what to do about it and stuffed it back down

in my 40s i had a crisis of burnout and depression and knew i needed to start facing my shit. i put in the work on my emotions and gained the psychological safety to come out

@mallory_sinn for folks with trauma or personality/mood disorders who have STRONG EMOTIONS and have trouble handling their shit: DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is fucken great
@brooke @mallory_sinn yeah, I kinda first experimented in like 2014, but then got distracted by life and didn't think about it until 2017 and didn't transition until 2021

@mallory_sinn
I've started using ungendered pronouns etc just since Covid started.

My son transitioned shortly after his high school came out of the first round of lockdowns.

@mallory_sinn hmm i picked the earliest one but i didn't think i was going to pursue any medical transition for about five years and since instead of an egg crack i had a slow drip of molasses for many years before that, i picked the year i found words for it and came out
@forestine slow drip of molasses is a great metaphor! That was me 2012 - 2019, until a full on egg cracking and no going back. Like, reading about Laura Jane Grace coming out…it caused something to click in my brain that slowly dripped and pooled. Then my roommate came out, and bit more dripping. And just small things building ever so slowly to finally get through to me
@mallory_sinn I started transition and hormones in 2014.
@Melezioh I had actually wanted to do one more option for 2010 - 2015 because I think that’s another distinct cohort (but the poll only allowed me 4 options here). That’s the cohort a lot of my favorite trans writers and artists come from, and it marked a change where trans people started socially hanging out and going out together more, from what I understand. It’s a period I think a lot of newer trans folks don’t understand as being so pivotal to where our community is now.

@mallory_sinn @Melezioh *fucking dies of old age*

as a 2010–2015-er, the trans writers & artists who were most formative to me came out in, like, the 70s and 80s?

I feel like the 2010s were really kind of a turning point though. e. g. trans lit getting mainstream attention

@nev @Melezioh hehe, sorry to make folks feel old. And yeah, I of course enjoy a lot of the folks from then too (Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, Julia Serano, Susan Stryker, etc), but I was talking mainly about folks like Casey Plett, Torrey Peters, and Laura Jane Grace, who were so pivotal to me. Exactly that Trans Lit cohort you mentioned. That, and key people on a trans twitter and in person like Caitlin Spice, Mags, and others.

There were some really big changes in trans subcultures and communities that I think a lot of people transitioning post-2020 are completely unaware of. Like…no one was around for the discourse of Detransition, Baby and letting the cis know about trans sexuality, or the Baeddels or any of that kind of stuff.

@mallory_sinn mmm

well, cracked on new year between 2021 and 2022

begin transitioning - eh, depending on the definition late 2022, mid-2023, or even 2014-2015

come out - depending on who it is, can be 2022, 2023, any later date or never

didn't vote anything because none of the choices fit
@alice yeah, just aiming for beginning of the journey here, whichever comes first
@mallory_sinn well, that's the thing here - I don't know

like, I started modifying my appearance to lean fem way years before I cracked and without necessarily realizing it was fem
@mallory_sinn It's not as simple as that with me. Back in 2012 I had a shrink interview and a formal diagnosis, but I didn't transition and didn't get the trans pathway info. I got onto that pathway in 2022 and completed transitioning in 2023 ... so I could tave ticked three different boxes!
@mallory_sinn Hm. I am sorta in the always knew cohort, but the "oh, that's a thing i can do" moment was in 2017. Which is my vote.
Committed to it by 2019.
And several technical derails later, started HRT in 2022.
Don't have a general coming out date - it was a gradual process of accreting new friends who only knew the new me, and episodically updating the old ones.

@mallory_sinn

Cracked in 2019....
came out to wife a few months later

Came out to my parents 2024 .. started transition in 2024.

@Millie glad you’re fully coming into yourself now 💜

But also hugs offered because I imagine five years of living with the knowledge and being unable to fully embrace yourself yet must have been hard 🫂

@mallory_sinn

Those 5 years were a lot harder than I dare admit...

:)

But so very glad to be here :)

@mallory_sinn

~2003 - first questioned if I might be trans
2021 - said out loud that I was trans and started transition (what I chose)

Somewhere in between, I think it became clear to me that I probably was trans, but I don't know when, and there was always some part of me that clung to denial and avoidance.

I've been thinking about this recently because the fifth anniversary is coming up

@mallory_sinn

"2015 or earlier"?

Eureka moment: 1984/5
Start coming out: 1988
Begin transition: 1991

@mallory_sinn two egg cracks and one coming out all pre-2015, so that's what I selected. Didn't start transition itself until 2021 tho.

@mallory_sinn

My egg cracked in 1997.
I started transitioning in 2019.
I publicly came out in 2022.

So... three out of four? 🤷‍♀️

@mallory_sinn See, my egg cracked long before I got HRT. If we're going by egg cracking, I've known I was trans for a decade longer. I don't think people realise just how much of us knew when we were children but had to bury that shit deep and suffer in ways that scar us for the rest of our lives until the second the clock strikes midnight on our 18th birthday.

I figured out I was trans in 2009. I got on HRT in 2017. I'm not even sure if I had accepting parents at the time if I could've started in 2009. I sure as fuck couldn't now.

@mallory_sinn I picked 2016-2019 because that's when all three was true. I'd been out "full time" for six months at that point.

I also feel it's worth pointing out nearly every person I know who "hatched" recently has later told me they started to remember even earlier signs they were trans. Who woulda thunk that the human brain famous for blocking access to traumatic memories would block out the number of times their parents said shit like "I'ma beat your ass if you keep doing this queer shit" about expressing potentially being trans.

@disorderlyf that’s why I’m trying to focus on those more specific moments, because we almost always go through a process of reconstructing our personal narratives reintegrating or reframing things with our new insight. Because we mostly don’t really “become trans” when we transition, per se, but have been going through dysphoria or disconnects most of our lives. Cause it really is a thing.

Also, yay tor another 2016 - 2019 person! I’m realizing there are a lot more of us around here than I thought and I need to become closer friends with all you wonderful people 💜

@disorderlyf I imagine those must have been some really fucking rough years to know it and not be able to transition 😢

And I feel you on that. If I had figured it out as a teenager, I don’t think it would have even been an option to transition in the early and mid 00s where I was.

@mallory_sinn started transitoin further back from 2015 than today is to 2015.
@mallory_sinn oooooh this is hard to answer because it's an ongoing thing for me, and I definitely went through steps. But I guess I started questioning around 2021? Later I came out to some people and I haven't started transitioning in any meaningful way yet. My egg cracking moment might be somewhere there? I'm not even sure I can claim my egg cracked. The jury is still deliberating, kinda.

@mallory_sinn Back half of 2015, right at the very end of WPATH being the shitty transmisic Benjamin standards. Counting that because that HRT and my first *intentional* social moves happened simultaneously.

But I depicted myself with a cunt in art as early as '08, and was unknowingly kinda flagging since 2000.

@mallory_sinn

I knew when I was a kid but I only began actually transitioning recently

@burnoutqueen go with once you began transitioning then. The idea is to capture what transition cohort people are a part of
@mallory_sinn This is one of the reasons I love Mastodon polls: the "View Results" button. I'm not trans, but I am definitely interested in the results of this.
@mallory_sinn This poll makes me wonder what you think the age demographics of the #Fediverse look like.

@gcvsa from the polls many others have done, 30s - 50s are the majority of us I’m pretty sure, with some folks in their 20s and of course great friends who are also in 60s and above.

But this is kind of regardless, since I’m trying to get a sense of, for example, how many people are part of the COVID cohort and that stretches across all ages.

@mallory_sinn
Could have figured it out way earlier¹ if I had known about trans and enby people but I only really understood trans-identity in August 2021… and promptly² understood that I couldn't deny it anymore.
First CO on TDoR³ 2021 to the only trans girl I knew as such offline.
Changed GP in August 2022 to one known to be trans friendly (she even had stopped taking new cis patients) and told her I wanted HRT right from the start.
But because I was still so unsure (what if I was faking it to have a reason to say I'm queer⁴? What if taking HRT doesn't help⁵? etc.), I only actually started in November 2022. And had to stop two days later 🫠 Resumed 3 weeks later and haven't stopped since (switched from gel to injections in January 2026)

1: I think I started wanted to be reborn as a girl in 2004 or 2005, although I thought I would be as bad at being a girl as at being a boy 😅 I don't have much memories from before ~2003 so can't talk to my relation to gender prior to that.
2: it "only" took a bit under 2 weeks and going through the GDB (thanks, Jocelyn! (Twipped)) with a highlighter 🙈 Funny enough, I only realised *afterward* that I had been putting myself to sleep for a few months by picturing waking up the next day as a woman and what I'd do 🤭 then I started remembering the previous times I had wanted to be a girl :') (there were no signs!)
3: either worst or best day to do that.
4: my dad is gay (and, I suspect, a transfem in deep denial) and my mom is bi, so I thought I only wanted to belong amongst queer people.
5: it did… applied the first dose of gel in the evening, was already feeling better the next day 🤭

@koalou @mallory_sinn

> Funny enough, I only realised *afterward* that I had been putting myself to sleep for a few months by picturing waking up the next day as a woman and what I'd do

I used to fall asleep fantasizing about how my life would have been if I'd been born a girl

@eruonna
I was doing that in middle school, and kept thinking about it while awake…
In 2021, it was either waking up the next day in my bed as a woman and having to handle it (getting new clothes, convincing the government to update my papers, etc.), or¹ getting reborn in another world (with magic!) as a girl².

1: I had forgotten when writing the previous message.
2: is it obvious I was reading too many mangas at that time? xD

@mallory_sinn

@koalou

I went the other direction. First, I fantasized about what if I turned into a woman, but dealing with it all seemed like too much hassle (and also dealing with the assumption people would likely have that this change would be upsetting to me), so eventually I just settled on the always been this way solution. I suppose yours is a slightly more realistic picture of transition.

@mallory_sinn

@eruonna
Funny enough, it didn't occur to me that people around me would have an issue with it, only the government x) Waking up with a different body, without paperwork to prove who I am would be a huge issue, especially with how often we have to show an ID… the only thing I can think of that'd help would be for my fingerprint to still match the ones in my passport's memory.

@mallory_sinn

@koalou @mallory_sinn

I'd seen the scenario enough in fiction that I got the idea that you were "supposed" to be horrified, so I figured that everyone around me would assume I was

@eruonna
I don’t think I’ve seen it much in fiction 🤔
Actually, I can only think of 1 story: 1⁄2 Prince, and "she" clearly likes being a guy in the game x) although, I think I read it in 2014 or later, way too late for it to influence me as a teen.
I probably read other things that I simply can’t think of right now, but that would have been as an adult, I think.
(I’m not counting Ranma 1⁄2 as I only started it a few months ago then decided it wasn’t for me)

@mallory_sinn

@eruonna
Also, for a while after accepting I was trans, I was picturing being sent back and living my teen years again, but knowing that I was trans, this time (plus keeping my current knowledge to be less bad in class 🙈). Well, I hope that never happens, really don’t want to live through it again, even if I can avoid the depression by knowing what the problems are xD

@mallory_sinn

@koalou definitely no signs, total normal cis thing to go to bed each night dreaming of waking up as a different gender 😅😅😅

I say this as someone who did a lot of that in my tween years. And I think actually knowing about trans people, and then actually knowing what transness really is are the big thing here. So many of us had the vague notion of wanting to change gender/sex, and may have even had some idea that there were people called “transsexuals” but had only misinformation or skewed representations to go on. And heck, I learned what transgender really meant in the mid-10s, but didn’t understand non-binary until 2018/2019, and that’s what cracked my egg finally.

@mallory_sinn
I don't think I even had misinformation or heard about "transsexuals". I don't know if it wasn't really spoken about in France at the time, or if it was simply not something I was exposed to.

I wonder if I met trans people as a kid when my parents were organizing the local Pride from our home. But with how clueless my mom was when I came out to her¹, I don't think there was anyone openly trans among the organizers.

1: my dad is transphobic and enbyphobic, no plan to CO to him any time soon. He'll know at some point but I don't want to deal with that for now.

@mallory_sinn Egg finally cracked October 2014; began HRT 30 June 2015; came out 8 January 2016.
@mallory_sinn 2017 to crack the puzzle and be in a position mentally, financially and socially.