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33 comments

  • I can't be trans, I just spend 8 hours a day thinking about whether I'm trans or not for the past 5 years

  • I just wanted to deny it because being trans is kinda scary, even after accepting myself there is still some doubt from time to time that I'm just faking it (I know this is normal thing for trans people so I try to ignore it).

    • That's a good point and it resonates with me. Being trans can be scary! And it's scary mostly because of the thoughts and actions of others.

      None of us "choose" to be trans. Who would choose to paint a big red target on their back that society is oh so happy to fire at.

  • "It's just a weird sex fantasy, not part of who I am."

    *proceeds to live in denial, despite the persistent nature of those feelings, 'til the term "nonbinary" finally reached my ears *

    • Unsure if I'm nonbinary (who cares I guess, gender is made up), but it was incredibly useful for me to inch along the gender spectrum and experiment at my own pace rather than feel forced to make a sudden jump.

      • That's entirely valid!

        My experience involved months of roleplaying in chat rooms in the late 90's and early 00's, experimenting with how I felt about various ways of being and being perceived. I learned that I was most myself when seen as the weird sort of inbetween gender that answers "Yes" when someone asks if I'm a boy or a girl, but enbies were almost entirely unknown back then so being myself felt more like a fantasy than a realistic goal.

    • That's me

  • "This would be the finishing blow to my pathetic career, who would hire/contract a weirdo like me?" Yeah turns out it didn't hurt my career in any way and reasonable people only look at results.

  • "I was born a male, obviously that means I'm a Man. What else could I be? Obviously feeling disconnected from manhood and masculinity is normal"

  • My egg cracking as far as I remember started as a very sudden out of the blue thought of "You're a girl" while I was just sitting in class and that thought just kept repeating constantly in my head for weeks. It was so loud I could hardly think of anything else.

    I was very confused and afraid about what it meant but I didn't push it away and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and experimenting with my gender and about 1 month later I accepted myself as a trans woman.

    I don't remember thinking that I couldn't be a trans woman, but I remember slowly edging towards it, and I first considered myself to be a femboy, then a demigirl, and then finally arriving at trans woman.

    • I had a similar trajectory of trying out different "labels"

      I went from questioning, to non binary, to some sort of femme non binary, femboy, demi, trans woman.

      Sometimes we need to inch closer and closer until we realize we finally know who we are.

      Plus I find it generally gives us a little more empathy for all types of identities. Even if they weren't the "right fit" for us, doesn't mean we can't empathize and celebrate those folk who find themselves elsewhere on the spectrum :)

  • Hard to tell, but considering this video is what caused my egg cracking, the video hit the nose on all the excuses I was using.

    The main reason I thought I wasn't trans before my egg-cracking is that I didn't know what dysphoria looked like, and I didn't think I experienced adequately severe dysphoria or that whatever gender in-congruence I felt was "clinically relevant" enough to count as trans.

    I would read the DSM-V criteria and think "that doesn't match my experiences".

    What helped change this (besides those Transition Channel youtube videos) was reading The Gender Dysphoria Bible, reading Julia Serano (esp. Whipping Girl and Sexed Up), reading Mia Violet's Yes, You are Trans Enough, and reading peer reviewed journal articles, like Dick Swaab's work (e.g. this 2008 article).

33 comments