I am currently going through a lot of gender questioning, and I want to know how you all discovered your gender identities, or if you are still questioning yourself. I think that I am probably not cis, but as we all know, gender isn’t black and white. I’m identifying as non-binary right now, but I have had a lot of times throughout my life, including now, where I may have wanted to be more feminine, or even a woman. Especially after lurking on this site and looking at the trans megathreads, I find myself relating to a lot of what is being said. Overall, I recently feel like I have either hit a wall or just opened up a part of myself that I thought I had already solved, so I think that the experiences of others might help me figure myself out.
P.S. I don’t know if this is the appropriate comm, it made a little more sense than the trans comm, since it said it was more of a meme comm, and this is not a meme. Mods, please take it down if it’s the wrong comm; I’ll repost if I need to.
I agree with the sentiment in here of don’t worry about labels too much. Just try out different stuff and play with it until you find what fits for you.
Personally, I’m a 35 year old trans woman. When I was growing up trans women were only the butt of jokes in shows and movies. I didn’t think people actually were trans so I wrote off a lot of my obvious feelings as “everyone feels this.” I had a tough time identifying it because as I aged, masculinity didn’t feel right but I’m autistic so nothing ever really felt right.
It didn’t all click for me until I was watching a trans youtuber’s coming out video. I can’t find the transcript for it, but the line that just SHOOK me was something along the lines of “I looked in the mirror and I saw myself aging into an old man and I was terrified”. I had those feelings before and then the rest of her experience really clicked into place for me and all the egg-y shit I had felt and thought really came into focus. It took a while to actually publicly transition, but in the meantime I would dress in feminine clothes at home to try and find my style. And expressing my gender more just resonated deeply with me and I ended up having to publicly transition.
As an aside, I think the book Whipping Girl really helped me understand my gender better, but that might just be because the author’s experiences lined up with mine really well, my cis wife says it really helped with understanding her gender too.