Hello everyone, sorry for the lengthy post and possible english mistakes in advance, english is not my first language so I hope you can bear with me :) I hope I don't come across as rude or disrespectful, I'm still fairly new to the topic gender identity in general.
Context For almost 2 weeks I'm actively questioning my gender identity, after i watched some trans youtuber. Some of their feelings resonated with my and at several points I thought: "huh, that sounds familiar..." I'm 27 years old and AMAB, I've never really questioned my gender actively (Exclamation on "actively"). But in the past 2 weeks many memories I had almost forgotten resurfaced. But many of these experiences are from the time before my current 7 year relationship. So I'm not really sure if could trust those "distant" memories or if I am just warping them to fit my current interest. I hope you get what I mean. When I was a child I had been diagnosed with ADHD and from time to time i fall into a hyperfocus where I'm extremely interested in specific topics. I think i might suffer from a mild case of imposter syndrom. I have many accomplishments i should feel proud of (I have a fairly decent bachelors degree in mechanical engineering and am almost finished with my masters degree), but I always have the feeling I don't deserve them or am just more lucky than my peers. With these things out of the way:
Here are some of these experiences, with my instinctive responses These are in no particular order and I have even more saved in a .doc file :D
- Whenever I play a game i choose female instinctively, sometimes I don't even play a game if there's no female character the game is much less compelling to me.
- I think that's true for many cishet men, atleast 3 of my close friends tend to choose female characters too.
- I draw, but when I'm drawing characters I always want to draw women
- I guess that's also true for many cishet men (?)
- Eventhough I like to draw women and always wanted to draw myself as one, there was always some kind of barrier which prevented me from doing that...
- Last week I finally did it and somehow the picture gave me some... "interesting" feelings (almost like a longing?)
- When I have the feeling if another player in a mmo assumes that i'm female, it always feels kind of nice
- could be a roleplaying thing but i dunno...
- We have a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying group in which I'm playing a woman. Whenever I'm spoken to with female pronouns, referred to with her given name or if my character receives a compliment it feels really nice
- This year we had a murder mystery party where I played a women. I burrowed a nice dress from my girlfriend, put on some clip-on earrings and wore a pair of 6cm heels. I've felt surprisingly confident even more after i received some compliments from the female players for my appearance.
- Maybe the confidence boost came from the heels lol
- I've remembered in my last middle school year I went during the costume week in a dress from my mother and received some compliments then too and had similar feelings (11 years ago i think) and also felt weirdly confident
- I guess everyone likes to receive compliments?
- During high school my favourite manga which I read several times was a genderbender manga where the protagonist trasformed into a girl. I was kind of envious of the protagonist and was sad that I could never experience something like this. (8 years ago)
- That's a normal feeling among adolescents right?
- During my apprenticeship (7 years ago) one of the other apprentices said to my drivers license picture "You look like cute lesbian". In that moment I felt complimented
- Why would you even say something like that?! :D
- 8 years ago I played in the youth club of our local theater. Someday one of the others came out as Transmale. While always referred to him as male and respected his decision my instinctive thought was: "Why would anybody want to be a boy, they have nothing going for them".
- Later this year when I watched some trans women on youtube about there coming out stories my instinctive thought was: "Yep sounds absolutely logical! I get why you would want to transition"
- If I had the option to change my gender in an instant without any consequences i would do that.
- I guess that's quite the telling point, but the thing is, while I had these thoughts often during my time in school. Since my relationship the thought never (I think) came back to me. But my response to the question is still the same. Maybe it's just curiosity?
As already said, there are some more points, but I don't want to draw it out even further. I've also did my due diligence and read the gender dysphoria bible (which is fantastic open document imho) and there were a few points I could very much relate to, especially at the imposter syndrom chapter and the euphoria chapter... But the whole situation leaves my rather restless (and sleepless). Yesterday I confessed to my girlfriend about these feelings and she's been really supportive and awesome, which calmed me down a fair amount.
You almost reached the End! If you have any thoughts about any of these points please, please share them with me! And also, when did you "realise" you were transgender, were there points in your live where you didn't even thought about it or was it more of a constant nagging feeling? I can't even really tell why all this confusion surfaced like this with such strong emotions. Maybe because it never occured to me until recently that changing your gender is an active and possible choice you have, but maybe its just my ADHD lol.
Thank you very much for reading!
TL;DR: Got complicated feelings about resurfacing memories and am questioning my gender, please share your stories :)
You've already got a ton of great advice, and it sounds like your next steps are lined up, so I'll just throw in some words of encouragement and further reading in case you're interested.
Since I had my moment of realization, the mindset I've tried to stick to is "the only way out is through." For me, at this point, that means transition, but it doesn't have to - that's up to you. The reason I bring it up is because it's very easy for this kind of thing to be derailed by the complexities, distractions, and dramatic events of regular life - especially if you turn out to be repressed and looking for excuses to kick the can down the road, like I was. You will likely benefit from sticking with it, in the sense of really engaging with this question and carrying through until you find a satisfying answer for yourself, whatever that answer will end up being. If you are transgender, delaying it will only mean coming back to it later in life, after having suffered needlessly. And if you're not, there's no harm in having taken the time to know yourself a bit better.
I'd also like to share some links that were instrumental to me getting through the questioning phase to the other side, in the order I encountered them.
Hope some of that helps, or is at least interesting.
Thank you very much for the links. At the moment I only read the article about "tranbians" and parts of the article about depersonalization. There were definitely parts I could relate to alot.