My transition journey doesn't match the classic narrative, am I still valid?
Hi everyone,
I'm coming here looking for answers, or for people who've had a similar experience to mine when it comes to transition.
Quick note before I start: I use she/her to talk about myself, even though I'm describing a life that was lived as male for a long time. It reflects where I am today.
I was born AMAB. As far as I know, I always lived my life as a boy , I mean, I never wanted to dress as a girl (except once to try it at age 8), I never played with "girl toys," my friends were mostly boys, even though to be honest I always had a hard time connecting with others throughout my life because I was seen as very different... (who knows, maybe a neurodivergent thing? I can't really tell.)
However, from a very young age (well before adolescence), I had this feeling of seeing girls as superior to boys. To me, they had this luck of being girls , something I couldn't have because life had decided I was born a boy. In my head, I had a lot of frustration about it, but at the same time I accepted it because that's life and I had to be a boy like everyone else. Being a girl wasn't something I was allowed to be since it wasn't my birth sex.
But on the other hand, I was attracted to girls. I was always a "straight boy." But there was always something that made it hard for me to date girls or even build friendships with them: I was attracted to girls, but at the same time I dreamed of being like them...
Sometimes I'd also see cartoons on TV where characters would transform, and I loved watching that from a very young age. I'd imagine what if it suddenly happened to me too and I ended up transforming into a girl... (Is that a fantasy? A fetish? Or really something else?)
As I grew up, I accepted this thought of loving women + wanting to be them at the same time. I told myself that maybe I wasn't the only one thinking like this, that other boys might also have these thoughts of wanting to be a girl, so I learned to live with it and never talked to anyone about it because it was way too personal. I was too afraid of being judged if I brought it up. Instead, I tried to perform , having romantic relationships with girls and/or getting socially accepted , which was already something very difficult for me.
I grew up in a Catholic family that tried to "protect me" from the non-heteronormative aspects of society. You especially had to avoid talking to a trans person, because for them they were "transsexuals" and it was associated with sexual perversion. Homosexuality was against nature in their eyes, and people who cross-dressed weren't normal people in their minds.
These are not my own thoughts, but that's how I was raised. So naturally, I think it reinforced my belief that I couldn't be anything other than a boy. When you're little, I think you try to align with what your parents tell you is normal , especially when you already struggle to be accepted by others socially.
As I grew up, I was more focused on pleasing others than pleasing myself. I was overweight for a long time, but when I eventually lost a lot of weight, I took care of my appearance and had a physique that was quite attractive to women.
Around 20, I came across a video of Kim Petras, the singer, who at the time was making a lot of noise / controversy because she was the first girl to transition that early, at 13, so she'd gotten a lot of media attention. And that's when I understood there was a side completely opposite to what my parents had taught me: that this girl had always known she was a girl inside, and that it was very far from the "perversion" angle my parents had taught.
From that moment on, I became almost obsessed with trans identity. I spent hours looking at transition timelines, personal stories, existing treatments, dosages, risks... to the point of knowing the subject inside out without ever daring to take the leap. I was also too ashamed to accept it myself and to talk to anyone about it, so I internalized it as a private thought.
I kept seeing this disconnect: "I dream of being a woman too, but not like this , I would have wanted to be born a woman... So I'm not a woman?! But inside I feel like I am. But I can't allow myself such a thought because I was biologically born male and on top of that I'm a 'straight guy,' I'm only attracted to women and I have zero feminine traits in my daily life, socially I've always lived as a boy with no visible signs..." It was 15 years of mental torture and indecision since I was 20, to be honest.
I even tried getting into fitness to try to like myself better. It worked because I got really fit and was very attractive to girls, I was surrounded by friends, but deep down it only kept my mind busy enough to stop thinking about the wish to be a woman.
For years, I did DIY hormones but only for very short periods , a few weeks to one month each time. It was quite compulsive but it was linked to mental saturation and major bouts of depression and frustration. I always stopped for the same reasons: guilt, shame, fear of making a mistake, fear that the whole life I'd built would collapse.
And finally, in 2024, I started hormones again but this time in a thoughtful and deliberate way, and all my mental saturation disappeared within a few months. It's now 2026 and that mental fog has never come back since the beginning, so I'm aware that estrogen was probably the best thing for me.
On the other hand, I've never had feminine social codes and I've never rejected my life as a man either. I don't know what it means to behave "like a woman." I feel like coming from me, it would be performing a feminine social role (in voice, mannerisms, clothes, makeup) that doesn't belong to me.
So even now, after 2 years on hormones, I still go by "he" in daily life, I live socially as a man, I dress like a man. However, I don't hide my transition from anyone anymore and I talk about it openly with the people around me (work, friends, family...) and I am taking steps to change: I'm growing my hair out, I've done laser hair removal, and honestly even after 2 years people absolutely do not see a woman when they look at me. I think that partly blocks me from going further with my appearance. I've recently started booking consultations with surgeons for FFS.
But what really strikes me today, and where I feel very alone, is that my transition journey seems very opposite to the experiences of many other trans women I've listened to.
They had signs from childhood of feminine gender expression (wanting to wear makeup, wanting to be treated as girls, playing with dolls or girl games, romantic attraction toward boys because they already felt like women deep down), and I didn't experience any of that...
And I know the trans community can be pretty harsh sometimes within itself. I've already seen TikTok lives where trans women judge each other as soon as you don't fit their vision of trans identity, so I don't really know where to talk about all this without getting judged , hence coming here, a message in a bottle...
My view on trans identity is: we say we're transgender in society, but gender is a social construct. If I can't embrace the social aspect of being trans, then am I not legitimately a trans woman? But still, I have this deep pain of not being born female, just like the trans community in general. So what makes me different from them? Is my experience less valid because it doesn't fit the classic narrative?
I've read many scientific studies suggesting that trans identity has a biological component, including differences at the brain level. Personally, that's how I experience it in my case: something deeply rooted, biological, not just social. The feeling of being born female inside, in a body that doesn't match, without necessarily expressing it socially...
I hope I'm not being too clumsy with my words and that I won't be burned at the stake 🤣. I absolutely don't want to offend anyone , I'm trying to be as precise as possible about my thoughts to get genuinely constructive answers.
Thank you 🙏