It was just after 1am on a warm summer morning. My wife was told after 25 hours of labor she was going to need an emergency C-section. We were terrified as baby’s heart rate kept dropping in and out of normal range all labor and he was struggling to move down the canal.

Nurse: Dad, this is the time to get your phone out and take babies first photo!

Me: She’s not talking to me. I’m not a father. I’m not even sure what I am…

Nurse: This is it! Time to see if it’s a boy or girl!

Me: Oh it’s a boy we found out with the ultrasounds

Nurse: Are you sure? Those aren’t always accurate. You never know! Nope, definitely a boy…

My son was born and I spent the first hour of his life alone as my wife had complications after the c section. We did skin to skin, him on my chest… Cue identity crisis.

Months of not grasping the concept of how I could be a father. Why did I feel more connected to the idea of being a mother. I googled “how to know I’m trans” and came across the Gender Dysphoria Bible that smashed my egg wide open at the tender age of 29

Being raised in a very conservative environment, I wasn’t able to even articulate what a transgender person was until I was an adult. Before that, crossdresser was the closest thing in my vocabulary. I always knew I would rather be a woman and preferred feminine things, but after hearing, “boys don’t do that,” enough times I took a hint. When I learned more about what it means for someone to be transgender, it just clicked. “Oh, I guess I am transgender. Too bad that’s a sin™.”

Since then it has felt like I’ve spent most of my life trying to piece the egg shell back together, rather than seeing it crack. I gave up on putting the egg back together though.

I don’t even remember, funnily enough. It was a slow process that happened over time.

I cracked my best friend’s egg, as it was kinda obvious for years since a few months after we met, and realized I’m an egg, too. Before that I jokingly bought a skirt and stuff due to reddit memes, liked it, but just thought I was a femboy.

Currently we’re on the last day of school of graduating class and today’s Motto is gender swap. As I’m not out, that was my excuse to wear a skirt to school etc., and it does feel a lot better and more natural.

My non-binary at the time friend, now partner (!!!) convinced me to let them apply makeup on me. I had already been seriously questioning my gender for a year now. Looking in the mirror afterwards, I thought it looked a little weird but it made my brain very happy. They also changed my name in their phone to Emily after I told them I had picked it out in high school “just in case”. I decided to try transitioning and never stopped, and I’m happier than ever.

I thought r/suddenly_trans was a odd funny subreddit, and one day someone linked to egg_irl in the comments and guess that’s how I finally understood what being trans could mean - that was a very long weekend with a lot of thinking about all the signs that I didn’t see :D

i found r/egg_irl. assuming that’s not enough already, i found celeste there and look where that got me.

I found myself scrolling through egg_irl far more frequently then I used to just cause I related to the memes. then eventually I saw one the said cis people don’t relate to egg_irl memes and I was like oh shit. then I stayed up all night researching transitioning (every single piece of info I could find on hrt, grs, individuals experiences, etc) and the more I read the more I realized this is absolutely something I want to do

I knew “Something went wrong, I should have been a girl/woman” from before I hit puberty, and so I suffered for decades, not knowing and then not believing that transition was something I could do. I even did the whole “I wish I was trans so that I could transition” thing.

My egg cracking came about from a work mate at my workplace coming out and transitioning. He showed me that it really is possible, and that my workplace is accepting.

After processing that, about 12 months later, I stopped thinking “I should have been a woman” and accepted that I always have been. It was a literal moment, standing in my bedroom door. And that was that. The egg was gone.

After denying previous cracks in my teens and twenties as just a part of me beeing weird; I will list my curent final round that lead to loosing my denial:

1. Actually… playing Celeste. I don’t even remember what it was, but it somehow it brought my mind to think that I have to process something I surpressed and since then it didn’t leave my head. That’s also why my chosen Name is a homage: Madlaine

2. A year later a psychologist (unrelated issue) put me on the right way to find out that I’m actually a veery high masking autistic person (CAT-Q 148…) and the negative results in my youth are wrong because my symptoms in earlier assessments don’t match the symptoms of a male autistic person but of a female autistic person. And back then (and still today…) it was in many doctors minds that autism is clearly gender-specific. This realization that I’m actually allowed to be different and don’t have to actively fit in (my parents denied the possibility of me being neurodivergent because the tests were negative) gave me the energy to rediscover myself. And the gendered test-result were forshadowing

3. While already seeing myself as genderfaer (enby-fem genderfluid with only very rarely masc-parts) a few weeks later, I still was in denial. I’m autistic so enby is kinda okay. But binary-trans? Me? naah

4. After a while I discovered that my gender identity can rather be described as “sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes 0 but never anything else than femme”. At this point I already wear some feminine clothing at home and outed myself to my gf.

5. < crack > GF was away for the weekend and I bought my first makeup to try to get some euphoria to get over a depressive phase. And seeing myself without that weird beardshadow and with some contouring and some accessories… wow… I discovered what was wrong all these years.

6. <crack crack> I never imagined my own wedding. I just couldn’t imagine myself at my own wedding in a suit. Which is weird. I love suits. I love women in suits. My next suite will be tailored feminine, but I will still wear suits.
   But one evening, I suddenly see my wedding. I’m in this fabulous mixture of a violet suit and dress. I’m a women … so that was why I could never imagine myself as husband…

7. < final cracks > telling my girlfriend my name. I’m Madlaine now. She calls me her girlfriend now. I will one day become her wife <3

8. If all goes well, HRT starts in December. 30 by then, but well, it’s never to late I was told.

I wrote about my experience here if anyone is interested in reading. The short version is that Life is Strange got me to actively question whether I was trans, as a result of me being absolutely obsessed with it and trying to figure out why I related so much to characters that were nothing like me on the surface. In all honesty, if it weren’t Life is Strange, it would have been something else. But that sure did speed up the process a bit.

It took me 3 years after asking myself directly if I was trans. I felt the need to figure things out independently for some reason. Partly out of shame and internalized transphobia I suppose.

I’ve been wanting to write more about it too - particularly about the weeks following that realization, which consisted of multiple revelations/epiphanies from recontextualizing things that had happened in my past under this new lens of understanding.

I always new I wanted to be a girl, I just never imagned I could actually get there, learning about other trans people and their storys in general helped me accepting who I am. It’s not spactacular but the consequences were… But I’m doing great now!

This is going to need some preamble, methinks.

I was a precocious little kitten from the get-go, and my parents encouraged this. They started teaching me to read over a year before I started kindergarten and instilled in me a voracious appetite for literature. I grew up with an analog childhood, so I exhausted our local library’s kids section and moved on to young-adult novels while I was still in elementary school. When one of my friends called me in terror and confusion at having his first erection, I gave him “the talk” when I was only 9 years old.

One of my earliest memories is of asking my mother why the hero always gets the girl at the end of a bedtime story, so I think I’ve always known I was different. But back in the 90’s there was basically no queer representation available in Texas public libraries, so despite being very mature for my age, I still didn’t understand what made me feel so different from my peers.

That changed very quickly in my 11th year when we got dial-up internet, it was only a matter of hours before my first forays into the information superhighway brought me the knowledge that gay, trans, and gender-nonconforming people exist. I felt a kinship with these queer folks and soon after I was pretending to be 18 so I could join adults-only chatrooms. That environment gave me the safe space I needed to introspect and the context to understand what I was learning about myself, but I repressed the realization that I was nonbinary because that simply wasn’t an option in Texas. Even a binary transition required jumping through hoops like “Living as your preferred gender for a year” before one could qualify for hormone therapy. So I dismissed my feelings as mere fantasies, to the detriment of my mental health as puberty took its course.

Things began to change in high school, I went through a couple of awkward first relationshps before falling in with a couple of guys with whom I am still in a polyamorous relationship to this day. Their affection was unconditional, so I was able to admit to them that I enjoyed crossdressing in private. But it was a ladyfriend I met in college who most encouraged me to embrace the parts of myself I had been holding back.

Still, I couldn’t allow myself to internalize it. I couldn’t be a weird inbetween gender in Texas and I knew I wasn’t a trans woman, so I must be one of those fey pansexual cis dudes, right? Fast forward to the pandemic, when the Texas legislature started pushing abortion restrictions I knew it was past time to go. So I took the first job I could get in a blue state, we packed up all our stuff, and got out of there. A few months after settling in to the new place, a visit from that college ladyfriend reminds me of how nice it feels to be pretty, and I dig out the box of dresses and skirts I hadn’t worn since before the move. The D-cup breastforms I had felt awkwardly large, so on a whim I bought a pair of silicone A-cups.

Putting those on and looking in the mirror was the final crack that shattered my egg forever. I saw myself in the androgynous figure looking back at me and immediately broke down in tears. In that moment I realized the part of me that I had been suppressing was the truth, and the fantasy was the notion that I could sleepwalk through the rest of my life as a man without regrets.

That was about a year ago now. I started hormone therapy just a few months later.

A bad trip on shrooms after years of frequenting trans spaces online “to learn more and be a good ally”.

Two of my acquaintances had come out as non-binary the week before, and it took drugs for me to unpack why, despite me being extremely happy for them both, I felt a bit of resentment and jealousy.

Years of memes that I understood a liiiittle too well, followed by (after abandoning reddit for half a year) joining Lemmy and reading conversations and reeeeeally thinking about it.