For those harsh moments of lucidity that break through the armor and pierce your heart.
For me, the cute moments of playful experimentation couldn’t quite penetrate my denial, but they did weaken it enough for the strong hits to make it through. I would quickly try to block and repair as best I could, but the structure was compromised and couldn’t hold like before. All these hits came from myself; from actually considering that I could be trans
or maybe you were never allowed to think about any of that ever because your parents were abusive and you just wanted to be left in peace and now it’s difficult to want anything except for life (aka the misery) to end? yeah me neither, no idea how that thought came to be
You can’t live without the suffering, but you can live without the emptiness and hopelessness. You can escape misery, even if there is still pain.
I am a person without financial and social capitals for transition, who therefore settled for as much gender non-conformity as socially allowed.
But thank you for asking 🥹
Oof. Regardless of how much you’re able to do, you would still be considered what you wish you could be
You didn’t have to stab me straight in the face like that.
Teehee (≧ω≦)
I remember getting pissed that I didnt consider myself femine and wanted to be, also people around me wont let me be feminine
I hope you can surround yourself with more accepting people soon 😢
It took me a while to understand this comic when I first saw it, but I get it now.
For the longest time I just dismissed the possibility of being trans, because obviously I wasn’t. Would sure have been nice to have been born a girl, though…
Fortunately even the strongest denial eventually withers after hearing Actual Trans People talking about their experiences which were exactly like mine. Gee, funny that.
“Obviously I’m not trans! Those other girls are lucky enough to be born trans, but not me. I’m unlucky to have been born cis” 😔
trans²
The endless cycle of “not trans2 enough to be trans2”. (Echoes of What the Tortoise Said to Achilles for the math geeks)
Not trans^ω enough to be trans^ω
i’ve found cracks recently
cracks very similar to these
a hefty dose of imposter syndrome, of how fucking DARE i cheapen the trans struggle i root for so many people through by even considering that i might be worthy of it. I can’t be a girl! That would be so HARD and I am SO LAZY! Surely I’m just making it up, and if I ignore it, it’ll go away, right?
…right?
and i worry that if i actually try to talk to my friends about it–EVEN the ones whom are trans themselves!!–they will try to “supportively” reassure me that i am cis
and the thought of that … the thought of hearing them say that … nauseates me.
…possibly almost more than the implications of my life being turned upside down. Or rather, acknowledging that it may in fact have been upside down all along and having to face the grueling, excruciating hardship of what it’d take to turn it right-side-up for the first time in my existence ._.
Ah yes, imposter syndrome over not only being a girl, but over being trans. I’d champion trans rights till the day I died, but I clearly didn’t deserve to be more than an ally 🙄
exactly D: how the fuck is this even possible that i can root so hard for the people i love, assist them with transportation, research for paperwork, covering expenses, but when it crosses my mind that i find myself wishing that i could do for myself what i do for them … i feel guilty??? what the fuck…
i feel like i’m out of line just writing this, questioning if what i’m feeling is legitimate even as my eyes are literally filling with tears as i type
Don’t worry! I’ll never “reassure” you that you’re cis. You’re not out of line. You’re not stealing any valor. You’re just you, and that’s ok 💖
Come here! 🤗
😳😢😭🫂😔😌
Oh my, I don’t know if you can close this box. I doubt the genie will fit back in. It might be more trouble trying to find your way back than to move forward.
I recently realized that the transition itself wasn’t the hardest part for me. I wasn’t brave for transitioning, as I only went through with it when there was nothing left to lose. The part that really took courage was accepting myself. That was more scary than any of the struggles I’ve had trying to transition. Having the courage to love me was harder than fighting for treatment, dealing with political anxieties, and learning how to be fem. I want to fight for myself now, but working up the courage to do that was the toughest battle.
owch xP
😭
When I was a teenager still I was buying women’s clothes, trying to arrange a girl’s night with a female friend of mine, had picked a feminine name, and even painfully explained to my boss at the time (who insisted I was a gay man) that I wasn’t a gay man but actually it was like I was a woman on the inside so I was maybe a gay woman. Never did the thought even cross my mind that I might be trans.
When the idea came up later that I might be trans, I ruled it out easily. Trans women knew they were girls when they were three years old, and they were in medically significant distress from being in the wrong body. I had gone through childhood as a boy without any such self-conception as a girl, let alone severe distress. As far as I could tell, I experienced no dysphoria. I couldn’t have been trans, the DSM made that clear to me.
It was over a decade later before I learned that gender dysphoria can look like what I experienced, or that I actually had fairly common and stereotypical trans experiences, like dressing in my mom’s heels as a four year old and continuing to “cross” dress throughout my childhood and into adulthood. Oops.
I fully believed I was a cishet boy for my entire childhood. I never once considered that I could be, or even wanted to be a girl. I legit didn’t know; the reveal was a total surprise 😰
Same for me, too. Although on reflection, certain things like practicing tucking to resemble female genitals, offering to present a school event in drag, and praying to wake up as a girl, may not have had entirely cis motivations.
I also assumed that my complete failure to fit in at an all-boys school was just due to being a nerdy kid.
I really didn’t have obvious signs, as most of my symptoms were attributed to autism. I didn’t like going shirtless, although I wasn’t sure why. I hated going into men’s locker rooms and didn’t fit in well with most boys, except the boy with long hair. I was jealous of him and always wanted to grow mine out, but my mom would constantly tell me that I wouldn’t like longer hair because it gets heavy and hot.
However, I never once felt like I was a girl or felt like I wanted to be a girl. I was fine with feminine things, but many of them are too much trouble to get too invested in outside of special occasions. I want to know how to walk in heels, but I rarely want to wear them (not to mention I’m already conscious about my height 😖)
It took a long time to realize the shirtless and locker things weren’t just because I’m fat :/
Long hair is super worth it tho
Maybe not obvious, but those all sound like signs to me! But that’s the thing about denial, right? I’d put everything down to intrusive thoughts, and if you asked me any time up to the day my egg cracked, I’d have been convinced that I’d never wanted to be a girl.
I’m not trying to suggest that your experience was anything other than you say, of course. It just sounded very familiar!
I know what you mean, and you are correct about those being signs. The main challenge was how my suspected autism got in the way of me recognizing it.
Despite definitely being autistic, the doctors that could’ve diagnosed me as kid, didn’t. My personal theory is that it’s related to the underdiagnosing of cis girls with autism. Although it’s often attributed to girls being socialized differently, I have met a number of transfems who, like cis women, weren’t diagnosed with autism until later in life. It’s like the doctors expect a male gendered type of autism in AMABs, so they underdiagnose us too -_- (again, just a pet hypothesis that I’ll never get to test)
Anyhow, I was always very unhappy about my social existence, feeling out of place as I tried to hang out with boys. Kinda like the stereotype of boys finding girls mysterious, I did not understand dudes at all. However, I also failed to realize the gender differences because I felt pressured to only hang out with boys. I was a goodie-two-shoes who always tried to do what was expected of me without being asked. I needed to play as a boy character because I was a boy, end of conversation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When it comes to signs, I still discover new ones whenever I think about my past. I always did suck at finding the answer when I had no idea what it should look like 😭
ah, I remember wanting to be a girl growing up - but I thought I just tragically wasn’t a girl. Unlike “real” trans people, I didn’t insist that I was a girl. When I was like 5 or 6 my family told me this story that a psychic consulted before my birth predicted I would be a girl, and I remember thinking the psychic was right in some deep sense, that I was supposed to be a girl, that the universe meant for me to be a girl and that there was just a mistake. I didn’t know what to do with this information, I didn’t think it mattered that I wanted these things - I thought they could be entirely normal and reasonable. I have no idea if I shared it with anyone, but I know my family would have not taken seriously such desires, especially from a young child. My favorite Disney movie at this time was The Little Mermaid, which I never thought was significant but now I wonder if little boys enjoyed the princess movies as much as I did growing up.
My attempt to wear heels when I was four was met with literal violence from my father, so I knew it was very bad to do. I also didn’t know about “trans” as a concept growing up, the closest I had was Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura as examples, and in both cases it felt like those people were “trans” because they were evil. I didn’t ever think that idea was connected to the feelings I had, wishing to be a girl wasn’t related to “trans”.
I grew up with sisters and I didn’t like the way gender separated us - I wanted to be included, and for the longest time I assumed this is why I wanted to be a girl or felt I should have been - because the cosmos demanded it (as the psychic knew), or because I wanted to be close to my sisters.
It was actually really hard for me to ever overcome this rationalization, that there are brothers who don’t want to be a girl and accepted as a girl so they can be closer with their sisters. This idea feels foreign or made up to me, like of course all boys would want this. My model of boyhood and masculinity is based on my own experiences, which has been difficult to undo.
The only good gender reveal
