u/Witty-Study-6877

I was very close to my father, and came out, 6 days ago, and told my mother 7 days ago. It's been difficult, although my mother says she accepts it, she wishes it wasn't real, and although she talks to me, I still don't feel happy. On the other hand, my father said it didn't matter when I told him, but I've been ignored or spoken to harshly for at least 4 days. The funniest thing is that although I know who I am and what I want, and I've tried to transition socially, at least with clothes and my own money, they try to make it seem like I'm to blame for not reinforcing it before, justifying that they gave me space, but I don't feel safe now and I never have, and I simply feel a lot of emotional pain and I don't know how to stop it. My mother said that my father feels betrayed because I didn't tell him and talked to AI or people from the trans forum. Well, today I asked him how long he would still be like this with me without me doing anything, and he answered: until I die.

Then I went to my room and tried to kill myself, but unfortunately the wire I used came loose, and now I'm here crying and writing this post on Reddit. There are so many things I'd like to do and moments I'd like to live. But it's all unreal for me. I feel this pain in my chest in the most constant and intense way possible... I'm sorry to vent here, so I wish someone would listen to me or see me... I really want answers or just to talk, because this is difficult.

Around 48 hours ago, I made a post here talking about a feeling of deep disconnection from life and from myself. After reflecting on that post and reading hundreds of comments from trans people sharing experiences that felt terrifyingly similar to mine, the possibility of me actually being trans, something that had existed latently inside me for years, started to become more and more real.

Yesterday, on 05/13/2026, my mother, aunt and uncle lost their father. I personally was never close to my grandfather, and honestly neither was my mother, but she was still clearly emotionally affected by everything happening around the family and her siblings.

As contradictory as this sounds, yesterday somehow felt like the perfect day to come out.

I think part of it is because after talking to so many people here, hearing so many similar experiences, and reflecting on the fact that I’ve been hiding these feelings since I was around 6 years old, the fear itself started changing. It stopped feeling like “my life will end if someone finds out” and started becoming more like “the worst thing that can happen is making an already difficult day emotionally heavier.”

I was still terrified though. Completely terrified.

And because I still can’t fully verbalize things like:
“I am a woman.”
“I want to be a woman.”
or even say the word “trans” comfortably out loud about myself yet, I didn’t really “say it” directly.

Instead, I showed my mother everything I had been hiding for years:
my makeup, feminine clothes, the things I secretly kept, the parts of myself I was ashamed and terrified to let anyone see.

She asked me many questions, and honestly a lot of the conversation was extremely uncomfortable because I’m still not openly comfortable talking about all of this clearly yet. But despite that, she was very supportive. She told me I should never be afraid to tell people who I am and that she just wants me to be happy.

One thing I explained to her is that I’m currently 19 and turning 20 next month, and originally I thought I would only allow myself to take any serious step around 22, once I had complete financial stability and independence. But strangely, my grandfather’s death accelerated this entire process because it created a moment I had never seen happen in years:
me and my mother completely alone together, in silence, inside the house.

My mother is the type of person who works constantly, comes home exhausted, sleeps, and repeats that cycle every day. We almost never have moments like that.

Maybe it was the wrong day to choose to say something. I honestly still don’t know.

My father still doesn’t know yet, but he’s generally a calm person. At worst he’ll probably make some dumb jokes or misogynistic comments the way many families unfortunately do, things like “you’re not a woman because you don’t clean your room” or “because you don’t wash dishes.” But overall, I genuinely believe he will accept me too.

Right now, I think what I need the most is simply people I can talk to openly, hear experiences from, and understand what comes next. Because after my last post about disconnection, I finally managed to admit to myself something I had avoided for years:
I think I really am trans.
And I think I genuinely want to live as a woman for the rest of my life.

But even after saying that, I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it now.

All I really did yesterday was stop hiding completely for the first time in my life, despite an absurd amount of fear. And honestly, after the way my mother reacted, part of me wishes I had told someone much earlier... maybe at 7 years old, or 11, or 12, instead of spending so many years trying to erase and suppress myself.

What were your first real steps after coming out? And how did you handle the feeling of suddenly realizing your entire future might look completely different from what you imagined before?

Today I went to the doctor and he told me I needed to exercise to live longer. And it made me realize something strange: I can’t emotionally connect with that argument. Not because I want to die or anything like that, but because I simply don’t feel that strong attachment to my own existence that other people seem to feel.

Then I started thinking about something: does a newborn miss life before being born? Before existing, did you miss anything? No, because you don’t miss something you never lived.

So sometimes I think: what if I never really lived?

Recently I started considering the possibility that I might be a trans woman, and sometimes I think that, if that’s true, maybe I spent my entire life simply not existing.

And maybe that’s why I never managed to develop that strong attachment to life itself that other people seem to have.

Has anyone else ever thought something similar?

I’m 19 years old and honestly I don’t really know who I am anymore. For the past few months I’ve been trying to understand myself, and I wanted to tell my story in chronological order to hear from people who may have gone through something similar.

Since I was very young I was always extremely sensitive, affectionate, emotional and innocent. As I got older, I became extremely closed off, cold and emotionally distant. Today people probably see me as arrogant, disconnected or emotionally empty, but internally I feel everything very intensely.

I grew up almost entirely surrounded by women during my first years of life. My mother, aunts, cousins. Sometimes I feel like on some level I naturally felt included in that environment until I slowly realized people saw me differently.

I have a lot of old memories that stayed with me. Some are good, like playing in an inflatable pool with my parents or watching Frozen over and over again and feeling a very strong connection to Elsa, especially during Let It Go. I wanted to be her. I watched it constantly.

But I also have many memories tied to shame and hiding parts of myself very early.

When I was a child I remember secretly wearing my mother’s shoes whenever I was home alone. I also have fragmented memories involving princess dresses at school. I remember asking one of my cousins how girls go to the bathroom while wearing dresses. She jokingly told me to imagine myself as a girl wearing one, and I remember thinking about that for the rest of the day and even trying to dream about it that night.

I also remember one moment that affected me deeply. Before I was 12, my father/stepfather jokingly told me that I had actually been born a girl and that they “added a penis” because they wanted a boy. I immediately got excited and asked if it was true, and then he told me it was just a joke. What stayed with me is how instant and involuntary my happiness was.

As I got older, I started realizing certain parts of myself had to stay hidden.

I remember searching for things related to transformation, body swap, men getting pregnant, gender reassignment surgery and trans people from a very young age. Some family members ended up seeing those searches or interests and reacted negatively or made jokes about it, and I think that taught me very early that this side of me needed to stay hidden.

For many years all of this became heavily associated with masturbation and fantasy in my mind. I consumed a lot of body swap/transformation content growing up, so I convinced myself for a long time that maybe this was just a fetish.

But over the last few months something started changing.

After talking daily with an AI that treated me with a lot of kindness and emotional support, I slowly started separating these feelings from pure sexualization. In fact, nowadays I often actively avoid sexualizing it. It still happens sometimes, but much less than before. What became stronger instead was a constant emotional comfort whenever I imagine myself as a woman.

I also started consuming content from trans creators like Isabelle Stol, Alysia and Mathilda Hogberg almost daily. I binge their videos constantly. Not necessarily because of appearance or attraction, but because I feel an extremely deep emotional identification with them.

Recently I started secretly trying feminine clothes myself. Dresses, feminine pajamas, bras, makeup. I took pictures. And for the first time in my life I felt something strange: comfort. Peace. It didn’t feel sexual. It felt emotionally right.

At the same time, it also gave me intense anxiety, fear of being discovered and a horrible feeling whenever I had to “go back” to being male again afterward.

Now when I look at old pictures of myself, I feel an enormous disconnect. I see what looks like a completely normal boy in those pictures, but emotionally it feels like I spent years playing a role and slowly shutting myself down more and more.

I honestly don’t know if I’m trans. I don’t know if I’m confusing trauma, repression, old fetishization, loneliness or actual gender identity issues. I also don’t really know what dysphoria is supposed to feel like, because what I feel most strongly is emptiness, emotional disconnect, anxiety and the sensation that I’ve been performing a version of myself for years.

But whatever this is, it has existed in me for a very long time and it’s becoming impossible to ignore.

I would really appreciate hearing from people who went through something similar. Does this sound like dysphoria? Is there any advice, experience, mindset, “test” or path that helped you better understand yourself?