i will be completely honest with you, i remember barely anything about my life before my egg cracked other than being sad and hurting everywhere.

i think i did what you did as far as just kinda shutting down any part of my brain that wasnt the perfect masculine man.

anyways i have been on E for almost a year and a half, have a supportive partner and life is so much better than before

How did you "feel" your gender dysphoria?

I didn't feel it, that's the thing. It manifested as disassociation. I never felt present in my body. I only felt present when I was online reading and posting and playing videogames.

Did you feel "connected" to your body before your egg cracked?

Nope.

I can relate strongly to what you describe. And during lockdown I started to notice that I could feel good and present with a feminine presentation that I never felt with a masculine presentation.

Then I fell into a trap of asking myself "do I feel like a woman inside tho?" and thinking no. Whaddya know, once I took estrogen and told people to treat me like a woman, then I started to feel like a woman.

While some trans people were always aware, other try to ignore gender like you're describing. Do you think you'd rather be a woman or something else?

If you want some more info about what gender dysphoria is like, try reading this https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en

Its honestly hard to remember what it felt like before my egg cracked. I remember being generally completely miserable in life. I remember looking at women and wanting them. I mistook this for sexual wanting for a long time I feel like. Or wanting to be them because they weren't depressed... but never feeling the same about happy men. My own gender definitely felt unimportant... just something I did because of expectations and how I was raised. I definitely didn't always know.

@peanutbuttercupola@hexbear.net tried to link this but its a bit broken for me, https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en was also quite helpful for me back then.

Looking back, I just played my assigned gender as best as I could while I lost my sense of identity. I never experienced much dysphoria, just a lot of fatigue from performing all the time. Only in intimate relationships did I really experience dysphoria because it felt like my partner loved someone who wasn’t me. At the time I didn’t have the words to describe it though.

When I was still doubting whether I was trans I just went for it since I felt like I didn’t have much to lose. I knew that if at any point I would start to feel regret about transitioning, I could just go back. It helped that I felt very empowered by the idea of getting to choose my own gender. I was finally able to loosen the restrictions I had put on myself to perform my assigned gender perfectly, and allowed myself to just be as comfortable as possible with my presentation and how I interacted with people. It feels liberating and prideful. I love being trans.

My experience was that I always knew, and also that I didn’t know that I always knew until after I found out. Repression is weird. Idk.

I've understood that I'm agender for a long time, I just thought that's how everybody is and I had to play along with what I saw as fundamentally conservative bullshit. My egg cracking was realizing that gender is a real thing people feel and not just genital astrology.

Like, I always saw gender as something “unimportant” to me. I just presented masculine by default because society told me to and I went along with it.

That's how I felt before cracking. I once called myself "technically cis" because I didn't think I was trans, but I did not identify with being male at all. I specifically was confused how other autistic people were trans because I mostly felt like gender was BS and never had seriously considered I might be trans until I was in my late 20's (in retrospect, its absurd how obvious I was trans). Even after realizing I was trans in some form, it still took forever to do much because I wanted some "objective proof" that I was trans and being in a sea of dissociation makes it hard to realize how much of a prison it is (even 2 years after cracking, I started HRT as an experiment and wasn't sure if it was for me... until being on it for like a week).

I think if you are feeling like you'd want to be interpreting something as a sign, then your desire for it to be a sign is a sign. If you aren't sure if something is for you or not, trying it out is the best way to find out (where reasonable; unfortunately something like surgeries, for example, can't be treated like that)

How did it feel?

Literally felt waves of pain in my teeth like I just got kicked in the mouth, tears tried to well up, sudden nausea. Weirdly, I'd feel the nausea radiating into the nerves of my teeth, like there was a live wire connecting them.