I’ve been questioning and curious, and I wanted to talk to some people about my experience, who know more about being trans than I do.
I am almost 30, I’m bisexual, and I was assigned male at birth. I was raised in a very Catholic household (and went to Catholic school from elementary through high school), so it wasn’t exactly an environment that was going to give me the language to understand who I was, or encouraged to explore my sexuality and gender identity.
I was always more emotional than my peers - my parents put me in wrestling and karate during elementary and middle school to “toughen me up”. Although that may have had to do with my RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria) from my ADHD.
I never really enjoyed sports like wrestling or football - I ended up liking volleyball and distance running. I preferred hobbies that are more traditionally feminine, like baking and sewing. Don’t get me wrong, I also liked camping and stuff with Boy Scouts (not that camping and hiking are inherently masculine) but I definitely never felt like a super masculine as a kid.
I would get in trouble for growing my hair out as long as I was allowed to, and then some, and I got in trouble for wearing more jewelry than a Catholic school was appropriate for boys too (too many rings and necklaces). I was made fun of in middle and high school for wearing pink, or liking things that were too girly.
About 5 years ago, I started to identify as nonbinary, as I learned more about queerness and started to find the language to describe what I was feeling. When my wife came out to me as bi, I finally felt comfortable coming out as nonbinary to her. And since then, I’ve started to feel more confident expressing my gender differently, mostly in small ways, like growing my hair longer and painting my nails. I’ve still only come out as NB to a small handful of people, and day-to-day I probably present more as “eccentric guy” than anything else.
The thing that I’ve noticed, though, is that the less masculine I look, act, and present, the more I feel like myself. I feel like men’s clothing is so limiting, and I always feel out of place when I’m in a group of otherwise all guys.
I feel like If I had been born as a woman, I would prefer that to having been born male. And if I could flip a switch and instantly be a woman, I would. But I don’t experience the sort of revulsion at my genitals that I hear some trans people describe (although I do hate being so hairy).
All of that said, I don’t know what exactly it feels like to be trans, or be a woman, so I don’t know how to compare my experience to how I “should” or “shouldn’t” feel.
And obviously right now is a scary time in the US to be queer of any kind, so there’s a part of me that’s very scared about what if I am trans - what that would entail in terms of how people/my friends and family would react and treat me.
Anyway, I’m not trying to presume anything about the trans experience, and I apologize if anything I said seemed ignorant. I guess I’m just confused and looking for some insight and support, since there aren’t many people in real life that I can talk to about these things (wife and therapist aside).
Obligatory “Only you can decide who you are and who you want to be.”
The trans community is usually very cautious not to tell other people who and what they are, because that’s the negative experience that most of us made: Other people told us who we are and/or who were supposed to be (assigned gender and all that) and it went badly for most of us.
For me personally, I also lacked the language to express my gender feelings when I was young. I was a precocious, sensitive kid that had more female friends than boys usually had. Yet I did not reflect on my gender very much.
Only during puberty did I realize that something was off. I realized that I did not want to grow up to be a man and desired more than anything to be female. Yet I also lacked the language to express myself. I grew up in a small city with no visible queer scene, so I did not really know how to express myself and ultimately surrendered to grow up as everyone expected me to.
But it never felt right. “Maleness” was like clothes that did not fit me, no matter how hard I tried. I often felt like a “fake man” and that I had to perform maleness as much as possible, because people expected it from me and I was not good enough at it.
Meanwhile my desire to be female also never went away. Looking back I now understand that this was gender envy, but in the moment I experienced it as a constant yearning that pulled on me and while it got weaker from time to time, it never fully went away.
My only outlet were games and virtual spaces wherein I usually played female characters. The easiest way for me to lose interest in a game was if it forced me to play as a man.
My egg finally cracked when I realized that my gender envy encompassed trans women too: Why could they have a transition while I did not? Why could they take estrogen while I could not? Why could they wear female clothes, etc. These kind of thoughts ultimately led me to realize that I am trans myself, because I wanted to change my gender so much and I was the only one who could make that happen.
Ultimately my transition was not only an embrace of my own femaleness, but also a rejection of maleness.