I’ll go firstt:
1: Regularly thinking that girls got all the cute clothes
2: Buying female clothes (skirt and some underwear) for “cross dressing”
3: Feeling physical pain when having to put off bought female clothes to go outside
4: Imagining yourself as the women in porn (that’s why I at first though I was “just gay”)
5: Being sad when thinking about trans people and realising I couldn’t transition because I’m not trans
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)
7: Dissociating kinda regularly. Happened usually when reading fantasy books. Didnt realise it was dissociation until like 3 weeks ago
Probably missed some stuff but those are the most significant ones. Quite a lot of stuff are signs that appears around the last year or so.
More comparisons to others’ experiences in this thread:
🚫 I didn’t have dreams where I was a girl or woman that I can remember. I did have daydreams where I was accepted as one of the girls, but this still imagined me as a kind of boy, just one that was a de facto girl (but without any body changes).
🚫 I knew nothing about HRT pre-transition, tbh.
🚫 I was certainly fascinated by some trans women, but not usually jealous.
🚫 I never felt I could imagine myself as a girl, it felt too forbidden or maybe painful - I was very repressed.
🚫 Nope, nothing like this - I did sometimes feel stricken by fear about transitioning because I was worried my breasts would look bad or would cause skin rashes from sweat accumulation, and so on.
✅ Yes, absolutely.
✅ Yes, though I didn’t realize I was dissociating. I sometimes thought I did that because I was trying to just last longer, it helped me to sorta “leave”, I could last a very long time that way. After transition I realized I had always depersonalized when penetrating, that I always derived pleasure from feeling my body was someone else’s. And yes, sometimes I imagined being the woman (maybe more than I realized0.
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I never knew what this meant, but after 6 - 8 months on estrogen I stopped being able to recognize photos of me from pre-transition, and I certainly have memories from puberty when I would spend a lot of time looking in the mirror and struggling to see “me” and feel comfortable with what I was seeing. Sometimes I would try to change the way I looked to make it better, or take photos, etc. - but everything I did made me look closer and feel more, so I learned to stop looking at myself as much and to ignore how I looked.
I avoided cameras in an extreme way and have very few photos of myself from pre-transition.
✅ Yes, I often feel depersonalization and derealization. It’s been quite helpful at times for dealing with physical traumas, but it has also made me more willing to take risks that might result in bodily harm. It was hard to recognize this as related to gender dysphoria, since I had “adverse childhood experiences” as well as PTSD.
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✅ Mostly true, I was very neglectful of myself.
I could have taken them, but chose not to. People in my life would have preferred if I had sought medication, though.
Never had a form ask this, so I couldn’t say.
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✅ I think my depersonalized way of relating to sex allowed me to enjoy it, but I also never had romance or sex as a goal, I actually explicitly wanted to avoid having a relationship and would have been happy to be completely asexual.
✅ So true, I hated when my life overlapped with my dad’s. I knew strongly that I never wanted to be like my dad.
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✅ Though I sometimes felt scared to be seen as a soft man, so at some point as an adult I started to try to appear more big and hard, I grew out a beard and started wearing more masculine clothes so I wouldn’t be seen as effeminate or a boy anymore. (Strangely sometimes the narrative experiences I have read of trans men of struggling to be seen as “men” and perpetually stuck in boyhood matched my experiences in my 20s fairly well.)
✅ Yes, but at some point it was “fine” if I just ignored it.
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✅ I had a similar experience, but it was from a physical labor job. At one point my shoulders had become so filled out and broad, and I couldn’t fit some of the women’s clothes I liked to wear. I hated the way I looked and felt, and like you I had no idea why.
✅ Same, I loved doing nails, I was always curious about makeup (but hated it because it made me very aware of how masculine I was, and it never looked good - seeing a man or boy wearing make up in the mirror made me want to cry, so I assumed I just didn’t like makeup). But I also sought any other feminine-coded activity, I happily learned to bake, cook, clean, sew, iron, etc. growing up. Those were activities I took a great interest in despite them being domestic labor that most people didn’t value.
✅ I did avoid being nude a lot, but not as extremely as you. I hated my body, and I always wanted to cover it up by wearing long sleeves and pants, even in hot weather. I didn’t wear shorts until I was in my 20s (despite growing up in the South). Like you, I thought I just hated that I was chubby, but when I transitioned I realized that being fat and chubby in a feminine pattern doesn’t bother me the way fat distributed in a male pattern does …
✅ It’s not a coincidence I only dated bisexual women … and I certainly felt a comfort and certain amount of affirmation in dating women who were interested in me because I was feminine.
✅ I didn’t learn about HRT, but I did enjoy ContraPoints in ways that probably had to do with the trans content she created.
✅ Yes, I sometimes felt like I was a lesbian on the inside, this was the closest I came to some amount of awareness about being a woman.
🚫 I didn’t really look at transition timelines before I transitioned, and if I did I think I would (wrong-headedly) feel confused about why trans men would want to become men, and probably feel strangely critical of trans women for not being feminine enough. Probably all related to my own dysphoria and discomfort with how masculine my body is.
✅ I didn’t want to be trans, but this is close to how I felt - I “knew” I wasn’t trans, but there was a sense that being trans would make sense of a lot 😆
🚫 It worked the other way around for me. While I wanted to start HRT to test and know for sure whether I was trans, I was so afraid I would go back to denial before I had access to HRT that I forced myself to socially transition first so that I had a sense of public accountability and wouldn’t fail to socially transition later.
🚫 I never had a bra or panties, only skirts and dresses - but those were very much mine, and even became “male coded” in my associations, so I just coped and rationalized in a slightly different way.
✅ Yes, I usually preferred to play a female character if I could get away with it (i.e. if I wasn’t going to be bullied or teased for it). Sometimes I thought this was for sexual reasons, but it didn’t make sense because it rarely fulfilled sexual desire for me - it really was more about identity. For example, my Stardew Valley character was a woman …
✅ Didn’t feel this way about dating in particular, but I was a very vocal feminist and had very negative opinions of men and the way they treat women.
✅ Yes, I was never masculine and never liked masculine things. Never wanted to be a father, never wanted to be a man or boy, tbh. It always felt wrong on a “cosmic” level - it felt like the universe made some mistake.
I liked all kinds of porn, including trans porn - looking back the porn was related to gender issues, but I am not sure how I would have figured that out at the time based on how broadly I consumed everything on the internet.
What I will say, though, is that my earliest sexual experiences were not from visual depictions of sex, but rather about romantic and sexual stories - I remember reading a Cosmos magazine when I was 8 that had stories about women who had sex with their boyfriends and husbands, and one story about a couple getting caught in the rain and then partially stripping and having sex while still wet was the earliest example of media that served a prurient interest for me. It was actually years before I took any interest in porn, and it was always side-by-side with erotica, though eventually porn became economical and more frequent, erotica was always more fulfilling and “better” in a sense. I don’t remember this being true for any other guy I knew, and now I think it makes a bit more sense.
✅ See above about being a staunch feminist.
✅ Yes, a good way of putting it - with guys I was always on-guard. Guys were typically violent, and I always had to be vigilant around them. They were also inconsiderate - if I had guy friends over for a sleepover they would trash my room and place and leave the next day without helping clean up. Women were always more considerate and never would do that. Guys were generally more selfish and prioritized their needs and desires. Other boys stole from me, bullied me, physically and verbally abused me, etc. Meanwhile I rarely was mistreated by women, and I always felt women were more mature, more considerate, and certainly safer (girls and women were never physically violent with me).
✅ I generally had straight-As in school, but I always made a C in gym class because I refused to strip and change clothes in the boys’ locker room. It never felt right, and I couldn’t explain why - I rationalized that it was just body dysmorphia, that I was too fat, etc. But other fat kids changed who were ashamed of their bodies, I was the only one so frozen by it. Likewise, I never liked taking my shirt off when swimming, being topless always felt wrong. I always wondered why I felt this way, I wondered if maybe there was sexual abuse I just didn’t remember or something. It didn’t make sense.
🚫 Never dated a trans woman, no. I was strangely curious about and attracted to trans women, though.
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I even identified as nonbinary IRL, but in general I opted for an agendered identity as much as I could.
I avoided haircare and skin products in general, I neglected my body completely.
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🚫 I didn’t experience this, nor did I ever particularly desire a vagina. After 3 - 6 months of estrogen, I realized I really felt a need for bottom surgery to help my integration as a woman both personally and socially - I wanted to have the “right” body. But even then it was hard for me to feel the kind of direct desire for bottom surgery you have expressed.
✅ Strangely I had a similar experience - when I was around 16 - 17 years old I learned about eunuchs in the context of The Gate to Women’s Country and actively wished I could be a eunuch so I could be accepted among women as a man.