u/Uisleiy

Firstly, this text is being translated from Brazilian Portuguese to English, so there may be some translation errors, please excuse them.

I (M19) will be turning 20 at the end of this month and I'm having a LOT of thoughts about my own sexuality. I've spent my whole life identifying as a man, but I haven't really stopped to think much about it. Now, for the past few weeks, I've been questioning it and I'm unsure if I'm a trans person or not.

Some questions came to mind, such as the fact that I hate being called a man, or that since childhood I've had a constant thought that I wish I had been born a woman (or would be happier if I were a girl), having grown up in an environment almost 100% composed of women (my grandmother, my sister, my aunt, and my mother) since the men in the house spent almost the entire day away working, and I've always been curious about using makeup, clothes considered feminine, and toys that my family wouldn't let me play with because "it was a girl's thing."

For most of these things, I always had answers in my head, like hating being called a man, since that phrase was always used as a "shut up, annoying kid," and wanting to be a girl and wear things considered more feminine. I always thought the reason for that was because I was basically raised only by women and had little contact with the opposite gender during childhood, outside of school with my group of friends.

I define myself as bisexual because I've always felt attraction to both men and women, but I've also recently noticed that the attraction I feel for men is different from the attraction I feel for women. I see the male body as attractive and that's all, but I'm attracted to the female body almost as if I admire it, almost as if the attraction I feel is actually an internalized desire to be like that.

I am VERY afraid of being trans, not because of prejudice, far from it, but, as was somewhat obvious in the title and warning paragraph, I am Brazilian (the country that tops all rankings for the MURDER of trans people in the world) and my family is somewhat homophobic. To this day, I have never had the courage to tell anyone that I am bisexual (except for my sister, who is the closest person to me in my family), but I don't feel comfortable having a conversation about gender with her, because besides not even being sure of it myself, I also don't know how she would react to the idea of ​​me being transgender.

At my job I also hear a lot of transphobic comments, not necessarily directed at anyone specific, but somehow it ends up being a recurring topic there. I don't talk much in that place; 90% of the time I just stay quiet doing my job, but hearing so much crap there makes me feel really bad. I don't know if I can find an exact answer as to why I feel so bad hearing comments like that, so this was a trigger for me to have these questions about my gender.

[SPOILER ALERT OF THE END OF DIGITAL CIRCUS]

Finally, there was one last instance recently, with the end of Digital Circus and the revelation that Jax was a trans woman. That really affected me, because he was the character I identified with the most in the entire cast. I saw myself 100% represented in that character in every aspect (in fact, I've never identified with a character as much as I did with Jax in my entire life). And the scene of him crying in Pomni's arms made me cry too, because the day before I watched the series finale I had a very similar conversation with my sister. I won't go into details now, but I'm going through an extremely depressive phase of my life and I've almost given up on everything many times. So I think that's it, maybe that damn rabbit made me come out of the closet to myself.