Bored and feeling too nauseous to do much atm while recovering from surgery. So i wanted to hear about some of your experiences. I think mine was quite uncommon because i never identified my personal discomfort as dysphoria and rather found out through lying about my identity online (for anonymity purposes) that being seen and addressed as male felt incredibly euphoric and just right. Through that the discomfort in my day to day life becoming more apparent till i eventually had to consider the possibility of being trans and everything else kinda started from there. I was 15-16 during that time. The dysphoria i felt in younger years for me back then was just something i assumed is normal if youre a teenage girl
TL/DR experiencing gender euphoria for the first time made me realise I’d been living with crushing gender dysphoria my whole life).
Convinced myself for years that I was just an ally. Convinced myself that there was some magic certainty available to “real” trans people that I didn’t possess. I remember a dear friend (trans girl, probably carefully trying not to break the prime directive) asking me “if I’d ever had any gender feelings?” and I said (with a straight face my dear reader) “not really…I mean I hate everything male and masculine about myself but…”.
That same year I watched “I Saw The TV Glow” and i cried almost throughout, like broken down ugly crying. Particularly the third act. I didn’t even realise that it was a trans film until later. I remember turning to my friend who was watching the movie with me (a sweet cis man), as the credits rolled, and said to him, through buckets of tears, “that was amazing” and he was like “yeah it was alright”. I wondered for a few months why the fuck i reacted that way to that movie.
Fast forward a few months and I was going to a queer event and I decided to put on nail polish, you know for fun, and it gave me happy feelings I couldn’t explain. Slowly started playing a bit more, jewellery, makeup, and it kept making me feel good in a way I couldn’t explain.
So then I was up late one night googling “am i trans?” (you know that normal question that all cis people have googled a a few dozen times), and came across the gender dysphoria bible. Well, that was what finally smashed the egg. The “oh my god, THAT’s what gender dysphoria is, and wow do i have a whole lot of it” moment. From then I let myself explore more with clothes, styles, etc. Let myself imagine what it might be like to be seen as a girl, let myself imagine what it might be like to have the physical effects that came along with HRT (which of course, I knew everything about already because I was a very well-informed cis ally).
It eventually got to the point where the doubts just didn’t make any sense any more. I’m currently in therapy with a nice older trans lady, and awaiting a spot at free clinic to get my bloods checked so I can start HRT.
Some other missed signs:
The list goes on.