Since you wanted some other opinions, yeah, as an AFAB person that kind of stuff really does make women feel shitty. To be honest, it's stuff like that that makes me question whether I can really identify as bigender because so many things about masculinity make me so uncomfortable, as well as having feelings of "am I betraying my sisterhood" etc. I guess I have some issues I need to work through as well, lol.Ok, the Goblin Slayer thread (and watching the first episode out of morbid fascination of it spawning from a DQ meme thread of all fucking things) has me thinking about how I feel about that kind of content as a trans woman, and... yeah, it really does bother me. But I also feel like that sort of content weakens my feelings of validation, if that makes sense? Like "would I really want to be a woman" and stuff.
It's... ugh, I need to chew on this, does this shit normally make women feel a bit worse about themselves?
Thought it was finally time to say hello, if only so I could share my story with someone else in the world. I'm a transgender woman. My preferred name is Aubree. I think I've always known I was supposed to be a girl going all the way back to my early childhood. I often wished I was a girl, and felt depressed growing up with my female friends and classmates, watching them develop in ways I just never would. I didn't even consider transitioning as a possibility at the time for a number of reasons. My family and extended family were ultra conservative, and transgender people both in the community and in the media at the time were often portrayed as psychotic or freaks (Ace Ventura, Soapdish, Silence of the Lambs, etc). I never felt like I fit in, and was terrified that being trans would make it even worse. And my family has a history of mental illness, which made me even more afraid of being seen as "crazy." So I suppressed my feelings, and tried my best to be "normal."
Flash forward many years later. I'm in my early 30s, and engaged to an amazing woman. She doesn't know the truth about me as I have only recently come to terms with it myself. I'm deathly afraid of losing or hurting her if I come out and tell her, and feel like I should just stay quiet about it like I've been doing all these years. It just feels like a lie. If I'm being honest with myself, if I knew she would be okay with it I would begin transitioning tomorrow. I've never been happy or comfortable in my own body or gender, and I've dealt with depression my whole life because of it. Which is another thing I've had to hide because my family didn't know how to deal with it, and I even had some extended family threaten me with violence if I didn't "cut the shit," believing a good beating would solve everything. Obviously I couldn't tell them why I was depressed, if that's how they responded to just the knowledge of me having depression.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. My life has been, and will probably continue to be, a confusing mess. But it's nice to get it off my chest a little.
Thanks for the welcome. How did your significant other take the news, if you don't mind me asking? I want to be my true self, but losing her would not be worth it.
Thanks for the welcome. How did your significant other take the news, if you don't mind me asking? I want to be my true self, but losing her would not be worth it.
I'm gonna attempt to come out as non-binary to my extended family today. Here's hoping it doesn't backfire horribly.
I'm out to a few of them and to my parents. My parents... aren't supportive and refuse to use my pronouns, but they SAY they support me so I think they'll just chalk it up to a "bad decision" by me if it goes wrong?
Wish me luck... here's hoping I don't chicken out...
I'm gonna attempt to come out as non-binary to my extended family today. Here's hoping it doesn't backfire horribly.
I'm out to a few of them and to my parents. My parents... aren't supportive and refuse to use my pronouns, but they SAY they support me so I think they'll just chalk it up to a "bad decision" by me if it goes wrong?
Wish me luck... here's hoping I don't chicken out...
Good luck and stay strong ...
So I got my name and gender legally changed a few weeks back..
Now I'm in the midst of getting everything i order, e.g. New ID, new Passport
At the end of January I have my consultation for SRS.
I chickened out, but on the bright side I was reminded that the family members I care about already know, and one of my cousins aggressively attempted to get my pronouns right. He kept screwing up and correcting himself, but it was super appreciated.
Welcome and nice to see another German Girl here :)Hello everyone, I want to introduce myself!
I'm a 26 year old (trans)woman from Germany and had SRS and FFS last year. Feel free to ask about those!
Looking forward to take part in this thread :)
For months now I've been mulling over my own thoughts about how I perceive myself to be honest I don't really know where I stand so I'd like to explain some experiences I've had over the years and also list some of my like and dislikes to see if any of these things may resonate with others and it may help to put things into focus for myself or not who knows, at this point I'm writing this mostly just to get it off my chest more than anything, so please forgive me if anything I write here is uninformed or could be construed as offensive.
To start off with my first experience with anything TG related was an episode of Farscape funnily enough, I remember watching this show as a kid and at this point most of it is a blur, but what stuck out to me and has stayed in my memories was an episode where some of the main cast were somehow bodyswapped, at the time I didn't really question why the idea of bodyswapping was fascinating to me and I just moved on with my life and put it behind me.
Fast forward a few years when I start to enter puberty (I'll put this in a spoiler tag so you can skip it if you wish, its awkward for me to write so I'm sure its awkward to read)At this point I did the normal stuff ( I suppose) at that age but at some point I remember some of my first sexual fantasies involved the body transformation ability from the animorphs books, I would imagine scenarios where I would have this ability and picture myself turning into girls I found attractive in school and in these fantasies I would find sexual release as a woman.
As a teen I rediscovered gender bender as a genre when I stumbled upon some Ranma 1/2 manga at my local library and I had an immediate interest in reading everything available to me. At this point I just continue on as usual not really thinking about why I was so drawn to gender bender fiction as a concept except anytime I encountered it moving forwards I would hoover it up immediately from other manga I found online to eroge visual novels, because honestly as a teen and even into my early 20's I wasn't really introspective, I just spent most of my time escaping reality through video games, books and television since I was either bullied or generally ignored in high school, of course I did have friend groups so it wasn't all bad but overall I was usually unhappy with my situation and I just didn't really care to think about myself all that much.
My world was very insular when it came to the idea of sexual orientation or the concept of gender, I knew what being straight was and had of course heard that people could be gay or bi in high school but any thoughts that there may be other orientations aside from those 3 basic things never occurred to me and the idea of gender identity wasn't even a concept to me.
To be honest I can't really pinpoint when exactly I discovered that even the idea of a transgender individual exisitng until some point in my mid 20's and even then it was just a word to me, something that I didn't really think about and when I heard more murmurings about it and had the vague concept of what it was I just frivolously attributed the idea that it was just people liking to crossdress (I'm sorry about this, I have learned that this thinking was and is offensive to others and am continuing to educate myself from my bone headed ignorance about those around me)
Moving into 2016, at this point I still had a love for the gender bender genre and would consume it in any form for general media consumption to it being straight up my favorite form of pornography. The concept of being transgendered was now a thing I was more educated about, but it was still a thing other people were, I still thought of myself as a person with, at most, a fetish for men becoming women and the situations they found themselves in.
After awhile Japanese gender bender stories (including GB online fiction) became tiresome since they were usually formulaic and hit upon the same tropes over and over again ,I finally had the realization that there must of course be transgender fiction that would approach the idea of these changes in a persons fundamental makeup would have drastically different reactions to their new situations, I did a bit of googling to find a good starting point and after that real TG fiction (mainly the sci-fi or fantasy based stuff to be fair) basically consumed my entire media world for about 4 months solid during the summer of 2016, initially when I first began to read these stories I was so affected by them that I would have nightly dreams centered around the concept of these stories, something that regular gender bender stories had never done to me, they had never effected me as deeply as actual TG fiction.
Now after all that TL;DR I approach my current predicament, there are signs that these things point out that I could be transgendered myself in some way, but I also worry that It all could just be a sexual kink and I just am attracted to the idea of a man becoming a woman in whatever form of media that takes and looking for some justification for it, I don't know.
Other things that stick out to me that is worth mentioning was that I distinctly remember jokingly telling my mother that puberty was one of the worst things I've gone through because of the hassles of male grooming and my general distaste of male body hair anywhere on myself. I don't know if this a a low tier sign of gender dysphoria because there are plenty of men out there that keep themselves clean shaven as well, right?
Other examples include that even as a kid of 8 or 9 years old I thought the concept of having a kid to take care of appealing to me, I remember distinctly having some "master plan" as an adult to one day adopt and care for a kid of my own.
I also have been a much more emotionally sensitive person, but isn't in spite of my parents but in part because of them, I remember distinctly as a kid my dad setting me aside and telling me that it was fine to cry and feel sad because it took a real man to show their emotions to others.
I generally avoid looking at myself in the mirror unless I have to get rid of my facial hair or brush my teeth or whatnot, and I haven't willingly let someone take my photo since I was 15, but this again could be attributed to other things such as dissatisfaction with my current weight and not necessarily anything to do with any dissatisfaction with having a male body.
Before I wrote this novel of a post, I wanted to confirm a lot of my feeling about what I wanted to convey, and had hoped others may have done that work for me already (sadly not the case because I was looking for specific experiences, and a lot of articles are very broad) and one thing that popped up multiple times was the thought experiment of "if you were to wake up and see that you were the opposite gender and everyone treated it as normal how would you react" my answer would be that I'd probably have an initial freak out over the cosmic implications of my situation, lol, but I would most likely eventually be fine with the change.
When it is all said and done I don't know really where I stand, I like the idea of a man becoming a woman and I wouldn't be too bothered if it some how magically happened to me but I don't have a burning desire to become a woman or to present as one.
When it comes to my body I don't love it or hate it, I'm neutral about it, its just there and always has been.
I don't really know what I hope to get out of this post, perhaps I just want to fit myself into some predefined box to label myself with because my feelings aren't strong enough to say "I want to be this" or "this is how I truly feel about myself" I certainly have a lot to say but it is a lot of rambling I feel and its just a bunch of wish washy half thoughts that I need to express in some way because they've been tumbling through my head for a few years now and I just had to get them out and let them be real in one way or another.
If you are not sure then you can explore this some more outside of reading fiction. And you can start small. Like how do you want us to think of you here? A man, woman, both, neither?
Another thing is you don't need magic or stuff like that to live as a woman if that's what you want.
Now we are 3!
Hi and congrats on starting HRT <3Now we are 3!
Also, I started HRT on Saturday, although I'm already talking blockers for 2 more weeks.
Now after all that TL;DR I approach my current predicament, there are signs that these things point out that I could be transgendered myself in some way, but I also worry that It all could just be a sexual kink and I just am attracted to the idea of a man becoming a woman in whatever form of media that takes and looking for some justification for it, I don't know.
I've been sitting here for an hour thinking about your response and your question to me and I've written and rewritten my response several times going over pros and cons, and whether or not I meet self imposed prerequisites for thinking like a man or woman.
Right now I'm kind of fed up with myself being so wishy washy, so lets experiment, I won't know how I feel about something unless I actually experience it, so just for now think of me as a woman and lets see how things go.
It's hard to make any sweeping generalizations at all, really. For example, what you describe about grooming isn't uncommon, but there are also people like me who let my facial and body hair hair grow out because any time spent taking care of my appearance was a reminder of how my body would "never" look the way I wanted it to--even though I wasn't entirely sure why I hated my appearance--and for a long time it was easier to just try to ignore things.
That's what I'm doing right now. I hate my apperance anyway,s o why bother?Thats the thing though, I'll pretty much wait the maximum amount of time I can before taking care of it, I usually only shave once a week and the rest of the time I just put it off and ignore it until it becomes an irritant that I can't ignore any further.
Now we are 3!
Also, I started HRT on Saturday, although I'm already talking blockers for 2 more weeks.
Thats the thing though, I'll pretty much wait the maximum amount of time I can before taking care of it, I usually only shave once a week and the rest of the time I just put it off and ignore it until it becomes an irritant that I can't ignore any further.
Also thanks for the welcome and response to both you and Amevila, at the moment its just nice to have finally been able to have my thoughts actually out there and not constantly internalized.
Thats the thing though, I'll pretty much wait the maximum amount of time I can before taking care of it, I usually only shave once a week and the rest of the time I just put it off and ignore it until it becomes an irritant that I can't ignore any further.
Also thanks for the welcome and response to both you and Amevila, at the moment its just nice to have finally been able to have my thoughts actually out there and not constantly internalized.
After all this now I'm just sitting here wanting to berate my younger self for for not being more curious or questioning about my own sense of self, but I can't really since it just so happened that I grew up with just the right coincidences to keep myself satisfied enough with the status quo that when I started to notice I was generally unhappy I could just rationalize the sources of that unhappiness to be something else.
Welcome! Don't beat yourself up, I've been pretty aware of transgender as a concept for many years and yet I didn't realize I *am* trans until late last year. There are a lot of powerful mental blockers to having such a realization about who you are at your core, and a lot of sociological programming that encourages binary, hetero-normative thinking.After all this now I'm just sitting here wanting to berate my younger self for for not being more curious or questioning about my own sense of self, but I can't really since it just so happened that I grew up with just the right coincidences to keep myself satisfied enough with the status quo that when I started to notice I was generally unhappy I could just rationalize the sources of that unhappiness to be something else.
But I really don't like being a constant downer with my posts, so I'll say that while I regret not having the self awareness earlier in my life, at least now I'm taking steps to talk about it and acknowledge my situation.
I knew a lot about trans people (at least compared to most people), but it still took me forever to figure it out.After all this now I'm just sitting here wanting to berate my younger self for for not being more curious or questioning about my own sense of self, but I can't really since it just so happened that I grew up with just the right coincidences to keep myself satisfied enough with the status quo that when I started to notice I was generally unhappy I could just rationalize the sources of that unhappiness to be something else.
But I really don't like being a constant downer with my posts, so I'll say that while I regret not having the self awareness earlier in my life, at least now I'm taking steps to talk about it and acknowledge my situation.
I agree dwelling on what I could have done in the past doesnt help matters much, for now at least speaking about these things is enough.I knew a lot about trans people (at least compared to most people), but it still took me forever to figure it out.
In any case, what's done is done, focus on the future instead.
The road is long, but it's worth it
Congratulations 🎊 it is such a great feeling.Just popping in to say that my partner got his name legally changed today. No more deadname. Extremely happy for him.
Just popping in to say that my partner got his name legally changed today. No more deadname. Extremely happy for him.
How can one tell if they're actually trans or if its just a fetish?
(Most versions of the button test add the caveat that it's irreversible, to help better assess the seriousness of one's feelings.)
Long and embarrassing story time:
Several years ago, I had originally thought that I was bisexual, but after dating a few girls and struggling pretty badly with intimacy, I eventually realized that any "desire" I felt for women was really just a mixture of admiration and envy, not actual attraction. On the side, while I do find men attractive, the thought of actually being with one sexually (or romantically for that matter) does nothing for me. While I don't find the idea of another man topping me or giving him oral off-putting (at least compared to doing anything with my own dick which is a massive turnoff for me) I do not find it arousing at all either. Same thing with the non-sexual aspects of relationships. I simply cannot picture myself dating, marrying, or raising a family with another man, at least not as myself. Nor do i have any interest in dating women.
However, all of that flips in an instant if I instead imagine myself as being a woman in a heterosexual relationship with a man. These fantasy scenarios where I am a woman are the only times I ever really feel I even have a sexuality. And it's been that way for as long as I can honestly remember. Imagining myself as a woman in sexual scenarios is the only way I have ever been able to get off. Back in middle school I first stumbled upon gender transformation fiction (some erotic, some slice of life stuff) and I've been obsessed with it ever since. I remember reading this manga in high school and it was like the ultimate fantasy wish fulfillment scenario for me. But in the end its all just fantasy, in reality I really, really hate my body and I always have, and it just completely ruins the thought of any kind of intimacy. At this point I think the only relationship I would even want would be with an asexual person who is just seeking romantic and emotional companionship.
I haven't bothered with dating in over two years now and I'm not sure if I ever will again. Ultimately I don't know if I'm just a gay person struggling with internalized homophobia, or if I just have a bizarre fetish and severe body image issues. Or all three.
Everyone whose trans wishes there was a perfect solution. Yet most of us end up settling for what IS available (HRT/voice training/relevant surgeries) because they still make us feel better than just "dealing with it." And you never really "deal with it" as it is, unfortunately. Yeah, the idea that I couldn't do it "perfectly" was a way I rationalized it away, but it just won't cut it forever, and better to transition now while I have some youth than kick myself for waiting longer only to come to the same conclusion anyway.I mean if we're talking purely fantasy scenarios, I would definitely press such a button (although tbh I would rather have a button that would let me restart my life from the beginning but as a girl). IRL though I don't think I'd really want to transition given the limitations of current technology.
I guess the big issue I have is that these feelings didn't really start until adolescence. I can think of a few vague instances when I was a young kid where I wanted to be a girl, but it didn't become a major obsession until like age 13 or 14. Hence why I've always believed my feelings to just be a bizarre kink in my sexuality.
I half expected the highlighted link to be to Ranma 1/2. I must be getting old if that's not even the go-to anymore.
Yeah, the idea that I couldn't do it "perfectly" was a way I rationalized it away, but it just won't cut it forever, and better to transition now while I have some youth than kick myself for waiting longer only to come to the same conclusion anyway.
There are people that started transtioning that were over 80 at the time, so I don't think you are too old.I think that's part of it for me too. If I were 10 years younger but with the same awareness I have now (I didn't really know about actual trans ppl back then) it would be something I would consider, but I feel that even if I was trans its way too late now to really do anything about it anyways.
There are people that started transtioning that were over 80 at the time, so I don't think you are too old.
Starting early makes things easier, but it's never too late, espically because the negative feelings only get worse over time if you don't do anything.
I'm 27 and just started taking hormones, one of my friends started with 25(she is now 27) and she looks beautiful.
Well, when I say "some youth" I mean I'm in my 30s. I'm GUESSING you're at least a decade younger, and I'm also guessing in a decade if you don't do anything you'll look back and go "why didn't I just transition then?" Or at least think about that "what if."I think that's part of it for me too. If I were 10 years younger but with the same awareness I have now (I didn't really know about actual trans ppl back then) it would be something I would consider, but I feel that even if I was trans its way too late now to really do anything about it anyways.
Well, when you get down to it, if people can teach children how to "grow up as a girl" why can''t you as an adult learn those same lessons, what is it that a girl is taught that is now out of your reach?Its not so much physical as it is social. Even though I'd rather be a woman, I don't think of myself as one, because I was raised and have lived my whole life as a man.
Like going back to the hypothetical button test, yeah I'd press it, but even if I became a woman physically, I'd still feel like a fake or an imposter on account of not growing up as a girl.
I think that's part of it for me too. If I were 10 years younger but with the same awareness I have now (I didn't really know about actual trans ppl back then) it would be something I would consider, but I feel that even if I was trans its way too late now to really do anything about it anyways.
Other, older people have done it before you and it really isn't that hard anywayIts not so much physical as it is social. Even though I'd rather be a woman, I don't think of myself as one, because I was raised and have lived my whole life as a man.
Like going back to the hypothetical button test, yeah I'd press it, but even if I became a woman physically, I'd still feel like a fake or an imposter on account of not growing up as a girl.
I have to agree with what the previous posters said.I think that's part of it for me too. If I were 10 years younger but with the same awareness I have now (I didn't really know about actual trans ppl back then) it would be something I would consider, but I feel that even if I was trans its way too late now to really do anything about it anyways.