Here are some that I haven’t noticed in this thread yet:

1. all through K-12 I always covered up as much skin as possible and wore baggy clothes, even in extreme heat and when the clothes were impractical. I’m talking wearing a winter coat on a school bus that had no air conditioning during the heat of the summer in the South.
2. when I was 5 - 6 years old I distinctly remember thinking I was supposed to be born a girl and that there had been a cosmic mistake (I didn’t think I was a girl, just that I was supposed to be a girl, but that I was a boy by accident).
3. something seemed “wrong” about my genitals when I was young; growing up I thought it was due to circumcision that I felt this way. It wasn’t that I felt I shouldn’t have a penis, just that I constantly thought there was something wrong with my penis, even before the introduction of social pressures about size or performance, etc.
4. I always blamed my wanting to be a girl on my sisters, thinking it was because I just wanted to be closer to them (not realizing other boys with sisters didn’t usually feel the same)
5. when dark hair started to come in when I was 13 - 15 years old, I secretly shaved my legs because the hair bothered me, despite feeling insecure in my masculinity and worrying about being bullied for being less physically mature than other boys (basically there was a theme of insecurity about not being as physically mature as other boys, but then hating every time my body progressed towards manhood - I was worried and insecure about my testes dropping and my scrotum being “longer”, I worried about my penis not growing or developing, I worried about my lack of facial hair, etc. - but when any of those changes came in, I hated them and did what I could to erase or hide them, despite actively wanting them to appear to fit in and not being abnormal).
6. I loved Disney movies and female-coded things, and my girlfriend in high school was interested in me partially because of her preference for a boy who enjoyed female-coded things
7. I picked out a female name for myself and tried speaking in a female voice at times, though like any other “gender affirming” activity, this just made the pain worse and trained me to never do this again.
8. I tried organizing a “girls night” with a female friend of mine, I wanted to go out dressed as a woman with her and her female friends (it fell through, and it resulted in word getting leaked to my workplace about me being this way, which killed my trust and friendship and led to bullying and discrimination at work)
9. I told my boss I wasn’t a gay man, but that I was kinda gay because it was more like I was a lesbian, but on the inside - like I felt like a woman attracted to other women. My boss was a lesbian, and she didn’t understand, so I just dropped it, but I always felt frustrated being viewed as a gay, effeminate man - I was just trying to explain in the limited way I understood how I felt, and that was the best way I could put it. This still didn’t make me think I might be trans.
10. I idolized women and thought men were basically subhuman, I developed extreme views about gender. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be a man, I thought it was simply rational and obvious that being a woman was superior. (I don’t endorse these views now, btw.)
11. Starting around 11 years old I felt a strange sexual need to penetrate myself anally, and it just felt right.
12. Starting around 8 - 10 years old I experienced my first orgasms and developed sexually by reading stories in Cosmos magazines, preferring to rub my genitals like a clit rather than stroke it like a penis.
13. By 15 - 16 years old I was aware that I wasn’t interested in penetrating women or topping, but wanted to be topped by women and be a receptive sexual partner.

And compared to your experiences:

1. Regularly thinking that girls got all the cute clothes

I’m not sure I had this explicit thought, I was so repressed I didn’t want to even desire cute clothes directly, but I did actively feel restrained in the clothes I was permitted to have, and while I didn’t extend this to overt jealousy over women’s clothes, I did live vicariously through other women by helping them with fashion choices, as well as taking their hand-me-downs and exploring women’s fashion as much as I could.

2. Buying female clothes (skirt and some underwear) for “cross dressing”

✅ Yes, this happened - if you asked me why I did this, I would have no answer for you. Or rather, I would have a host of rationalizations that varied from “historically men actually wore skirts first” to “it’s just more comfortable” - but none of this explains why I was roaming Belks and buying skirts I felt were cute … I was clearly uninterested in kilts and male versions of things, I didn’t want to wear “man-bags”, I only ever bought or wore women’s purses, and so on. But I wasn’t self-aware about this behavior, or its significance.

3. Feeling physical pain when having to put off bought female clothes to go outside

If you asked me if I felt physical pain from not being able to wear my dresses and skirts outside, I am fairly confident I would have downplayed the distress I felt. Nonetheless, there was clearly frustration and upset that I couldn’t dress as a woman in public (or rather, that I would be perceived as a cross-dresser if I did so, which didn’t feel right to me either).

4. Imagining yourself as the women in porn (that’s why I at first though I was “just gay”)

I didn’t do this all the time, so I didn’t think it was that relevant or dominant - I always assumed it was just about the novelty of perspective taking, but at some point I did realize most of my pleasure from a scene was about the woman - and it became complicated for me when I thought about that enough. That’s actually part of how I figured out I was bisexual without in any practical sense being attracted to any men or boys IRL.

Despite not usually directly or consciously imagining myself as the woman, I did have strange (relative to my peers) preferences to be a passive, receptive partner in sex - I wanted a woman to be the top, even if I was technically penetrating. I also was strangely drawn to being penetrated, but it felt taboo and didn’t find the same kind of expression as the preference to be the “bottom”.

5. Being sad when thinking about trans people and realising I couldn’t transition because I’m not trans

I never felt this way, I was strangely aversive to trans people and hated gender and thinking about gender, and in my mind trans people were gender-obsessed and were not generally successful at transitioning to be the opposite sex (probably you could say I had some reflexive sense of them being a third gender, no longer being their assigned gender nor successfully being the other gender - I didn’t know any passing trans people as far as I knew, so “trans” always meant “non-passing trans”, which I never wanted or felt jealousy towards).

6. Absolutely suppressing every form of thought when thinking about “the trans topic” (in a way that sometimes I reflected myself and thought that I may be trans, but I 100% suppressed those thoughts knowing damn well, that this wasn’t that much of a good strategy. This also included the thought “acts trans, looks trans, probably is trans”, that crossed my mind after taking LSD for the first time)

✅ Yes, I suppressed thoughts about being trans, and every time the thought that I might be trans came up (and it did come up on occasion - more than a few times), I always went to the DSM definition of gender dysphoria and ruled myself out of being trans by not checking the boxes - I didn’t experience enough distress, I didn’t have a strong sense of my gender identity (wanting to be a woman was not the same as feeling I am a woman), and so on … (I didn’t even read the full DSM V criteria, because there is even a category for people who don’t fit the exact criteria, so part of this was on me for failing to read carefully - tbh, I would have just found a way to rationalize my way out of it regardless).

Even if I thought I was trans, I wouldn’t have agreed to transition. I was very stubborn and against such things, it was too indulgent, selfish, awkward, etc. The way I thought back then, I thought it would be like throwing away my whole life because I liked to wear skirts in private …

7. Dissociating kinda regularly. Happened usually when reading fantasy books. Didnt realise it was dissociation until like 3 weeks ago

I didn’t realize I was dissociating, but yes, I dissociated a lot. To whatever extent I was aware, I attributed it to PTSD (I would have never thought it was gender related).