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
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 😭