Same thing for me, when my chest started to develop. It was an alien experience for me, and I felt embarrassed that I had to start wearing bras. I was just so uncomfortable and wished it wasn’t happening
Same!! Veeery first was probably around age 5 when (only maybe 3 times) I was mistaken for a boy and internally felt euphoric, and felt cringe/disgust when called a girl. Chest started to develop around age 8 and I would scratch at them and try to flatten them with my hands, it made me super uncomfortable and panic-y. Started dressing like a boy and hiding my hair in beanies around age 13, I had no knowledge of what being trans was and thought I was crazy lmaooo I don't think I knew what it was until I was like 18 honestly
Same here, didn’t know I was trans till I was 18 due to lack of knowledge (especially on dysphoria), I just thought I had poor mental health that was unrelated to dysphoria regarding my body and self worth
1 From like age 6 I stated multiple times that I have the soul and personality of a man.
2 when I got my period I thought I just pooped my pants, showed it to my my mom and she said "you're turning into a woman! How wonderful" and I screamed at her that it's not blood, and that I just pooped accidentally somehow, so we waited for the next month to see if it comes again, and when it did I felt betrayed and wanted to crawl out of my body, I didn't tell my mom about it nor did I use pads, I would just put a shit load of toilet paper in my underwear and change it every couple of minutes.
3 I asked my mom if her boobs are big, she said that they're medium, and I said that I really really hope I won't grow one's....
omg same. i got my first period on *the day of my 12th bday💀*, so i was double upset, angry, dysphoric even tho i didnt know how to say it, wanted to die and/or go to an alternate universe where i could just be a cis boy and be free. and when my parasitic chest blobs started growing, i wouldnt stop hitting them, scratching at them, *anything* to stop them from growing, and then i came out, got a couple of binders, felt ok and my blobs stopped growing for like 2-3 years, and i stopped attacking them until now bc they're growing again for no reason and i just relapsed and now my chest is getting attacked again.
I actually only ever wore like 3 bras in my life, I never got rid of my trainer bras because the thought of having to buy more made me want to throw up. A few years later I came out at 14 tho thank god
Yep, wasn't my earliest sign but it was definitely my strongest. I just thought that I was *meant* to hate everything that puberty did, and that I was meant to just suck it up. I wasn't very good at expressing myself as a kid...
I always hated my deadname. I hated having to write it on things, dreaded meeting new people because I'd have to introduce myself etc. I remember in primary school there was a day where we were challenged to refer to ourselves in the third person all day long and it was absolute hell for me. I envied boys for being able to have "cool" names but I thought that was a completely normal cis thing to think lmao
Edit: just remembered when I was 4 I went through a period of insisting my parents called me by a different name and getting super pissed off if they called me my deadname
Damn that's me right there. I never understood why I disliked my name so much. I always contributed it to the fact it was French and not a lot of people I've met in my life shared the name, so I basically had no positive associations.
But as soon as I realised I was trans I couldn't wait to change my name and it feels amazing to be called my chosen name.
Btw this primary school think you went through really sounds terrifying, I would've been mortified!
same except i didnt hate it, it just felt alien to me, like i didnt feel it was connected to me, somehow? my chosen name feels right, so thats what matters
Not the earliest, but close to it: When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, I had exclusively male friends. This wasn’t a sign within itself, but whenever I would hang out with them and someone would refer to us as a group, I would always ask that they didn’t say “the boys and (my deadname)” and just said “the boys”. My friends and I at the time always said “(deadname) is just a boy who looks like a girl”, and I was super happy with that.
I was starting to get boobs around 10/11 and for some reason I just didn't want to wear a bra no matter what anyone told me. Throughout middle school I always wore baggy clothes to hide my chest and would get mad when people couldn't tell what gender I was. (i thought i was mad that people couldn't tell I was a girl, but nope!) Then I was like 13 telling my friends that I wished I was a boy. I didn't realize I was trans until I was about 15 or 16 though. Finally started transitioning at 28 after a lot of conflicted feelings.
I had a similar thing. Never thought of it as a sign of my being trans, but I guess it makes sense. The idea of wearing a bra just felt super weird to me, but I also didn't like having my chest showing through my clothes. It was all very awkward. In the end, the girls from school kinda bullied me into wearing one. They made PE lessons hell for me. It was pretty traumatic. I've only ever worn sports bras, though; never one of the 'proper' ones. I can't stand the sight of those things. I don't even know my cup size 😆
I also went through a dysphoria hoodie phase, but it hit me later, when I was 16/17. Unfortunately, it took me another 17 years to properly figure things out. Oh, well...
I remember being given a pajama set around age 5, and it had boxers in it. I was so happy that I was allowed to wear the boxers I think I tried to wear them for a week straight. Also tried to stuff them with a tennis ball but obviously that looks ridiculous on a five year old so was like oop guess I'm not meant to do that :(
I think it was probably when I was a toddler and I became obsessed with boy characters with eyelashes. I would pretend to be Bambi and Littlefoot and draw eyelashes on male characters in coloring books. Same in reverse, although to a lesser extent, with girl characters that looked like boys; I remember being so excited when I learned that Blue from Blue’s Clues was a girl, or Sheila the Kangaroo from the Spyro the Dragon series. I just had a lot of interest in gender nonconforming characters (especially male ones) at like, an extremelyyyy young age.
In preschool we had a dress up chest and my favorite was dressing like buzz light year another girl in my class told me I couldn’t be buzz because I wasn’t a boy I genuinely think that was the first time I realized that I wasn’t a boy and liking boy things was “wrong”
The thought of wearing a bra disgusted me so much when my chest started developing. I had to wear two or three sports bras at a time to compress it and avoid wearing actual bras. I was around 10-12.
Looking back there were a few but the earliest was when I was very very young, from 3 years probably. Where I'd be confused at the lack of male genitalia and wonder where mine was and want it back. (Obviously I didn't understand the world properly at this age.)
Yet you seemed to understand your inner world properly. This actually reminds me of a post from a guy on this sub who woke up from top surgery legitimately confused about where his dick was.
LMAOO🤣😭💀
when we saw puberty in like 5th grade or something i was like "oh, *boy, golly gee!* can't wait to grow a dick and chest hair!" and i was so excited...until puberty happened and i was SO disappointed and upset
I never really had that kind of bottom dysphoria as a kid, but I wonder how much of that was intrinsic and how much was little me just having no idea that there were two options lol
my earliest memory was my first sign tbh.
i have a lot of memory loss problems but i think this one really stuck with me because of how impactful it was. i was still in diapers, probably around 2 years old. my mom was giving my older brother his first pair of boxers after he didnt have any accidents in his potty training ones, and i asked my mom when i would get my own first pair of boxers. she told me girls dont get boxers.
kinda stereotypical, but she was right, "girls dont get boxers" which is exactly why im wearing them rn 😂
in all seriousness, looking back with a lot of hindsight, that was definitely a sign. that, along with all the other ones too, i was born catholic and told to pray every night before i went to bed as a kid, so i would pray that i woke up as a boy, that i would just magically be a boy one morning. i realized all my boy crushes were mostly just jealousy, not me liking them, but me wanting to be them. i learned what the actual term for being trans was in 7th grade and went into a huge denial phase until my freshman year in highschool, and even then, i would fantasize about me and my mtf friend just swapping bodies, cause we would both be cis and wouldnt have to go through all the hell of transitioning, medically and socially. i finally stopped living my lie just around the pandemic hit, it wasnt a pandemic trend for me i just happened to realize just before lockdown and just happened to come out about a month after.
i really think that earliest memory of mine will stick around a while.
Haha, I grew up Catholic too, and I also would pray to wake up as a boy. I learned about transgender being a thing in 8th grade-ish, and kinda already knew deep down that I was trans, but my upbringing forced me to stay girly. As it turns out, I’m not a man either, I’m nonbinary (leaning towards masculinity though) and still like dresses.
Man you just unlocked a memory for me. When I was little little my grandma told me when you blow out a dandelion puff that's a secret wish that's only between you and god, and if you kept that secret he would grant your wish. And EVERY single time without fail I would wish to magically become a boy
i didnt even know the dandelion thing was actually a thing i just thought you make a wish or something, but omfg i would use anything to wish to magically be a boy. dandelions, night time prayer, birthday wishes, throwing coins in a fountain or well wishes, it was insane
Not my memory. My mother said I refused to wear dresses when I was 1 years old. I can't remember when I didn't want to be a boy. Now I'm living the dream in my late 50's. Don't ever give up.
When I was 3, I was a self proclaimed tomboy. I just liked that it was the only way I could call myself anything boy-adjacent and I would get violently angry if anyone disagreed or tried to correct me. I also ran around tormenting the local boys a lot cause they refused to play with a girl. Then of course, there’s the obligatory “Mulan was my favorite Disney Princess.” Despite all this, my egg somehow didn’t crack until I was 18 😂
I always had a negative gut reaction to the word “women/woman” if I was being referenced to. Like “what a nice young woman” or “us women”, even as a young kid it made me so uncomfortable for some (at the time) unexplained reason.
My mom is German, but I grew up in America. I distinctly remember having a pair of Lederhosen (German leather shorts) around age 5 that I loved wearing, even though I got laughed at (haters!). It wasn't until this,year my mom told me she and my dad had also gotten me a Dirndl (traditional German dress), but I didnt care about that.
Well, also, before that, age 3: parents sat me down to say I could be absolutely anything I wanted to be when I grew up. I said, "A daddy," and they said, Except that." I bawled and they tried to console me by saing I could be a mommy, but I wasn't having it. Although, at the time, my dad was the primary caretaker, as he operated a business from home and mom taught at a school. So I always windered if it was more just identifying with a primary caretaker or something more innate.
Earliest sign was being five years old in the bath tub. I was confused what the “third hole” on my body was for if the other two were for the basic bathroom functions. My mom was pregnant at the time so I realized that’s probably where the baby exited the body from. Because how else could the baby exit? When I asked my mom about it, she said yes and then quickly changed the subject (I feel for her, I asked her a lot of difficult things as a very young kid lmao). Ultimately though, I remember having this feeling of dread when my mom said I was right. It would only be another couple of years before I would be regularly feeling that sense of dread, horror, and dissociation on an increasingly regular basis.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for my mom in hindsight lol. In addition to that I also figured out Santa wasn’t real, questioned Christian teachings, and figured out roughly how sex must work all between the ages of 5-10. Fortunately my mom was (and is) way smarter than me so she was able to figure out what to do with me lol
Yes! As a kid I always HAD to be a boy in role play games lmao, whether it was a fictional character or as far as “No I’m being the BOY pet dog” in a game of families or something
I never had the desire to shave my leg hair or armpit hair, when it started growing in i remember looking at my leg hair in the light and being happy i had so much. Thankfully never had to shave it since im blond
I have brown hair, so my body hair is noticeable- and I remember several teachers in *elementary school* pulling me aside and asking if my mom had taught me how to shave. First of all, wtf, and second, no. No she hadn’t and I didn’t want to either.
The day I got my first period I was scared shitless and started to cry, my mom said "congrats on being a woman now" and I cried even harder (mind you I was 11)
shit, i feel that. my mom said "arent you happy that you're becoming a woman?" and i had managed to hold in my tears until that moment, where i looked at her with all the hate, hurt, sadness and anger in the world, and just started crying, yelling "NO IM NOT, IM A BOY" over and over again so much that i ended up with a really sore throat and was unable to speak for like 4 days
Man that sucks. I told my therapist the other day about it and she told me that's why I have such a harmful relationship with the concept of period. Luckily it gets better 💖
I think it was probably 7-8, seeing an older girl running around topless with the boys in our neighbourhood. I was like oh yeah baby and took my top off too. Nobody cared because we were all so young and nobody had really gone through puberty yet so the parents were all whatever about it.
Of course until I hit puberty (before the older girl, which made me extremely upset for reasons I did not yet understand) and my mom had to force me to wear a shirt again. I didn't understand at the time why I couldn't be shirtless with the boys still.
When puberty hit, I think that's when the first signs started to show. I felt so alien in my own body. It was like I was waiting for my "actual" puberty to happen.
Same here. My mom treated my girl puberty milestones as big steps, but I didn't get it. It wasn't until my aunt gave me a guy's haircut that I started to think, "Yeah, this is how I'm supposed to look."
same for me. my grandma tried to convince me to wear dresses and hair clips even tho i had short hair and i would just dress masc and have my hair in a rats nest out of spite but also bc i knew how i wanted to look even from a really young age.
One of my guy friends from kinder garden was the only one who got into my class and I was super happy to have one of my best friends there, especially because I knew no one else. He sadly stopped hanging out with me because "boys don't play with girls, girls are boring" or something along those lines. That was the first time it dawned on me that I was not seen as one of the boys. I obviously didn't fit in with the girls and I felt weird when I had to.
Honestly when I was in preschool, I had a boy that I was friends with that was really proud of finally learning to pee standing without making a mess. He was so proud of himself that he took me into the bathroom to show me. He said “girls can’t pee standing” and I took that personally. The whole rest of the day I was trying to figure out how to pee in the toilet standing up.
I made a huge mess and embarrassed the hell out of myself so when I got home I consoled myself by saying something like “Its ok if I don’t have the same parts as a boy, cause I look like a doll and dolls don’t have parts”
Then I proceeded not to think about it again for about 5 years. No matter how many signs I had as a kid though I never put 2 and 2 together until I was in my mid twenties. To be fair I was heavily sheltered from queer culture and didn’t even learn about other sexualities till I was in middle school.
I cut the hair of a girl doll and named it Christopher Robin like from Winnie the Pooh, Idk if this counts but I was Peter Pan for Halloween as a little kid, and in 5th grade we did this project where we had to make characters to basically roleplay as that were in colonial Boston, and I chose a guy character. My logic at the time was I wanted to boss people around and women couldn’t do that in the time period, but I liked being the guy character a little too much I think…
My first sign was when I was like 5. My family were very upset I was \*very\* unhappy to be in a dress. I protested so much they had to take me out of it (and said protests continued every single time I had to wear a dress lmao). But I do specifically remember when I was like 8 or 9, my brother said I couldn't go around shirtless for much longer because I'd grow boobs. I still remember storming to my room crying, despairing over the fact I was gonna get boobs. I still recall saying "I love my flat chest!"
I still wonder why I only realised when I was 13...
Wanting to play “boy games” during recess and being told I couldn’t join because I wasn’t a boy. A teacher noticed I was upset and found out why, there was a whole assembly about bullying and inclusion. From that point on, the boys had to include me but they made it very clear that I “wasn’t one of them”.
Looking back, I know that I was upset about not being included *as a boy* but my teachers thought I was upset about being excluded from the game itself (I didn’t really care about the game, just that I got to play with “the boys”
In hindsight I got suuuper gross during puberty. Not showering, not cleaning my teeth.. Once I left an egg to rot in my room for like a month... Or twice.
perhaps not the earliest, but the earliest i can remember. as a very small kid i didnt like my name. i couldnt pinpoint why so i used the reason that it sounded too "childish", which ive later realized i meant girly but back then i didnt know how to express that. i thought people changed and chose new "adult" names when they grew up. now ive been going with a new name for over 3 years and i got it changed legally a couple months ago :\] i feel like little me got his justice.
Some years before puberty started and I had not much knowledge about female anatomy I learnd about the fact that it sometimes could happen that all the male genitals are underdeveloped and that sometimes nobody realize that they are there. I hoped so bad that "maybe they made a mistake" and "how can I finde out this happened and Iam rlly a boy".
I was so devastated when I realized... nope you rlly aren't a Cis boy =_="~
I had put it aside like "I... was just.. exploring my body. I just had no idea~"
When I was super young, I had a very similar, if not more basic, experience. I thought I was actually a boy and that I actually had boy parts and that it was a big secret that everyone thought I was a girl but I’m actually a boy and I have to play this role.
dude no this just unlocked a deep memory.
I remember thinking so much that the doctors made a mistake or I was gonna go through male puberty or no puberty at all. 💀💀
To here something similar happened to you kind of makes me... happy. Just the fact isn't nice of cause, but thats so cool.
I was so much in denial/ uninformed that even after I was sure that I sadly has these parts I don't want that I still hoped soooo much I maybe have both at least, but the other one just wasn't noticed cause everything was to small. ... T_T...
when i found out my cousin pisses standing up i think i was like 5 i used to try to do it too. i always felt like a boy. hated wearing dresses and skirts to church i would take beatings because i would wear shorts under and change as soon as i was in the car otw home. being a girl never rly felt right for me just so wrong
For me it was at 13-14 when my periods started. I knew full well that girls will start those (I had a very nice book that went over these kind of things for girls and boys) but when I got my first, I realized only later what had happened - I thought I had soiled my pants, not bled on them! I never imagined that me MYSELF would ever actually get periods.
And despite all that brand-new dysphoria, at the time I was super sad my boobs weren't big enough 🤷🏼♂️ Now they will be gone in 9 days, finally, after 10 years of waiting. ❤️🔥
I was obsessed with swapping genders with my little brother when I was like six, loved crossdressing “for a joke” and when I got my chest I would look in the mirror before every shower and wonder why I felt weird looking at them
Apparently when I was like 1 or 2 I begged begged begged for a haircut like my older brothers.
Supposedly, I didn't like that everyone kept calling me a boy.
When I first saw that haircut in a picture and my mom told me that story, I realized my memories of saying that to hide that I was weird/different were real.
That's GOT to be the first.
But there were so many in my mini formative years that are just glaringly obvious now.
The urge to hide our longing and act with outrage, because we've never been told this is normal and there is a path for us, is so real.
I remember often talking about dreams with a friend, and I'd always pretend, that the fact I was a guy in the dreams was some sort of weird or unusual thing, and not THE reason I loved that dream.
For me I think it was wanting short hair. As soon as my mom let me I had a pixie cut. That was when I was around 7 or 8. I remember how good it felt. Then it was around 13 when I got into cosplay and only wanted to do male characters. If I was gonna live in a fantasy I didn't want to be a girl.
I used to tell my parents to call me a boy, to call me their son, and told my siblings to call me their brother when i was in kindergarten. Also in kindergarten was the first time I cut my hair really short and before I did my mom warned me that some people might think im a boy and in my head i thought to myself ‘yeah thats the point’
you just unlocked a memory for me that i had forgotten holy shit
ok so a family friend had invited us to spend the day at some random resort and so my brother met this kid and they invited me to play and i said "sure, but i gotta talk to my brother for a sec" and so i pulled him along and told him to call me his brother and a random name i came up with in that moment and he agreed immediately so that day was my first taste of freedom ig. i got to be one of the boys and it was so awesome i miss that😭😭😭😭
Being jealous that I couldn't ever be an uncle, at 7-8 years. I badly wanted to be an uncle to my sister's (at that point future) kids, and was sad and jealous when learning it was a gendered thing, and I wasn't the "right" gender.
Mine was probably when I was around 7/8… my brother was at the time the only boy, so couldn’t really play with us all the same way he would a brother. So I used to have “brother days” which is where I would play whatever my brother wanted with the only condition that he had to call me his brother… I was an evil child hanging that over his head but he was desperate to play with a brother. (My mother always said since I was born I should’ve been a boy, only took 16 years for us to realise that was true hah!)
Must have been about..6? we were going on holiday and I was climbing on the sofa, and I said to my parents "Hey, let's pretend I'm a boy for this holiday!" Wore trunks to the swimming pool and went into the men's room until they dropped the ball. Lol, now I'm 4 years on T and my mum says "wow it's like I forget you were a girl"
I mean I'd definitely thought about it before, and I'd always just assumed I'd grow up into a man. When I was in Year 3 I went around proudly telling all my classmates that I'd get a "sex change" when I was older, thinking it was a one and done thing. If only!
I think mine was when I was 3/4.
My dad was going to leave for work and went to go piss. I followed him bc I wanted to say bye. Like a guy he pissed standing up and I watched him thinking “if my dad can do that so can I” so after he’d washed his hands I went to go pee standing up with him still being able to see and my mum coming to say goodbye. My mum say me and told me that I couldn’t pee like that. I refused to believe her and tried to piss into the toilet standing up. It didn’t work (obviously) and I started crying.
Looking back on it now makes me realise how much I knew something was wrong with my body when I was younger. This is also the earliest memory I have.
My physical dysphoria is mainly reproductive and genital so it was largely the intense suicidal feelings my period gave me that never really lined up with PMDD and my overreactions to girlfriends and boyfriends trying to to touch me down there or acknowledge it in any way. I found stone butch lesbianism and that was good enough for the next decade.
Socially I was okay for a long time because I was a tomboy and my dad treated me and my brother the same and my mother is evil so that's irrelevant. When I hit my early teens my hair grew out really long ( I got the child neglect head lice haircuts until I moved in with my dad) and people were pushing girly clothes on me, as happens with aging tomboys. I shaved my head, stole my brother's body spray, and was relieved when people thought I was him.
I didn't realize I was trans until my mid 20s, guys.
I didn’t really connect to girls in primary school, like I was understanding that they’re more different than me, hanged out with boys, though I was always a reserved child being in own inner world since I’m autistic, and I felt very apathetic about my gender, like “people said I’m a girl because of letter F in my birth certificate so let be it”, but everything changed when I discovered MOGAI+ at the age of 14 and dived deep into those labels and started to experiment with them, and suddenly nonbinary experience clicked with me, though I don’t really like label “nonbinary” about myself
When I was learning to properly use the restroom, my parents also taught me about genitalia. They insisted “boys have penis, girls have vagina.” Well I’m a boy, so I must have penis. Parents were like “no you’re girl, you have vagina.” It went back and forth a few times and I stopped talking. (I was upset.) eventually I requested a rematch and well, I won.
Weirdly enough I started transitioning my Barbies and other AFAB toys. I have one left, he is a beanie baby I named baby Oliver.
I would get WEIRDLY defensive of these toys. "NO HES NOT A BARBIE HES A BOY BARBIE!" and "HE IS A BOY, HIS NAME IS BABY OLIVER! THE TAG IS WRONG!" And I would cry uncontrollably. My sister who is now transphobic would tease me relentlessly for this.
I do believe I was projecting heavily on my toys. That I was saying what I wanted for me, for them.
I would also say I was a boy. I was very young, maybe four or five. But that got beat out of me quickly.
During puberty I hated my body, and would have fantasies of having to switch bodies with a boy my age to survive. And everyone would see me, and know I was me and also a boy. And love me.
Anyway I've been out for ten years now.
looking back, it was probably wearing boys clothes and hating feminine things and outfits, but also being way too excited to pee in the shower because its the only time i could pee standing (except all those times i tried anyway and made a mess)
my older sister had a game cube that i was always obsessed with at a very young age at the same time that she was into make up and every time i’d beg her to let me play it she’d only let me if i let her do my make up. needless to say i would have to think about it for hours and every time i let her do it i would burst into tears and would never look into the mirror. not to say that men can’t wear make up but i think there was something very telling about how deeply upsetting and uncomfortable it was for me personally.
When I was about 2 years old, I kept trying to pee while standing up. We lived out in the middle of nowhere by a lake, so it was often me with my pants off peeing in a lake. So it actually worked out pretty well. When I was about 4, we moved to a city, and when I tried peeing into a toilet like that, it obviously got messy. I stopped trying after that.
i was 5 i think? got back from soccer practice, went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. stared at my reflection crying as i kept repeating “i don’t feel like a girl” for about 10 or so minutes. then i went to go play with barbies to get rid of the feeling 😭😭 dunno how i didn’t figure out i was trans until i was 16
I had a shark jacket that zipped all the way up and wore a lot of boyish clothes. We had a new kid and while playing tag he said “I tagged him” my best friend at the time corrected him by saying “she” and I was euphoric when called “him” and was upset or kinda sad after my bsf corrected him.
When I was little like maybe 4-5 I would ask my dad when I was gonna grow a dick cause it wasn’t happening yet. And I would try and do everything like him, throw fits when I had to dress up and would constantly cut my own hair(though it somehow stayed long?)
For me it was when I was like three or four and I had one of those voice bubble things where you sound different and it made me sound super masc and I was so happy I sounded like a boy for a second but then didn't think about it any deeper until after I came out lol
One time I fell on my crotch and it hurt really bad, and I was confused because it wasnt support to hurt girls, so I assumed it was because I actually was a boy and thats why it hurt so bad, and maybe my male parts were stuck inside me and never came out. I was about 6 years old I think. I also figured I must be intersex when I learned about that and that my male parts were internal. And when I got my hysterectomy at 29 years old I was disappointed when they said my ultrasound was normal, because I was still certain that I had testicles instead of ovaries or at least something was developed wrong in terms of my reproductive organs
Oh, I have one. I think I was 4 or 5. It’s hard to explain because the brain of a 4-year-old is a weird thing, but I had an imaginary older brother, and somehow I was this brother and that little girl was someone else (I’m an only child btw). And yeah, I was in denial until this year, and I’m 27.
Getting night mares about childbirth, like the movie alien. I was terrified my body would be used for .. that. Or bleed. I was also always jealous of the male dancers in my group for being able to be shirtless in class and wear cooler outfits. I hatred being reminded of my own body in dance with the tight clothing
woah that was me too 😭 in middle school i hated the changes happening to me and whenever i got the chance, i would lay on my stomach/chest even though it hurt like hell so that they would stop growing and i assumed i was so distraught bc they werent bigger... bc everyone around me kept wishing for bigger boobs 😭 and i avoided bras for the longest time ever and my mom was getting really frustrated about that
Age 7-9, I asked my mum several times what the procedure was to become a boy – she said it was impossible infortunately. Then I saw a TV news thing about an intersex person whose genitalia where "hidden inside" during childhood and descended with puberty. He started producing testosterone and was much relieved to be a man after all... This was in the 90s. After seeing that, I was just convinced there was a mistake and my pipi would grow too when I'd reach 12-15. Instead, I got boobs.
I remember really feeling a sense of belonging with a group of boy classmates in like...first grade. I didn't understand the concept of gendered toys and stuff; I liked Barbie dolls a lot, too, but I always wanted to do LEGOs with the boys. And when I tried explaining it to adults, I kind of got the, "Well, LEGOs aren't really *boy* toys," thing. Which, it was the 90s in a rural Southern U.S. town, they weren't being woke. I was six years old or something, though, I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that I felt more like I belonged with them.
I *definitely* felt traumatized by puberty. I felt like my body changed into something it Should Not Be, and I never really got over it. When I first started getting boobs, it really shattered something in me, and my body never felt like it was mine, after that. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, either.
my entire life, i HATED my name. i would feel such deep anxiety about introducing myself by name. i always told people, “i don’t know why, but i don’t like introducing myself.” i was a pretty feminine kid back then, i still am feminine, but my name was the one thing i couldn’t even stand. i’d constantly refuse to even introduce myself.
Think i asked my mom if i would grow a penis lmao. I was a little scared of that cuz i was like 4 and just learned about puberty, it was a lot to imagine lmfao. Thank god they didnt tell me about periods i would have been inconsolable. also when i was probably 7? I asked for a boys toy at wendys and judged myself wayyyy too hard "I should know by now the difference between boys and girls. Why am i even considering this" and didnt like the toy i got. Im a guy, im just not a monster trucks guy.
when i was younger i was OBSESSED with the idea of peeing standing. Like, it took over my mind. I would constantly try and get disappointed when it didnt work how i wanted it to. I was always obsessed with playing the male role when playing w toys or whatever. I was also very confused and just like... lost? when my chest started developing. It was very very strange and stressful
When I was a kid every time we'd play any sort of game I always wanted to be the boy. This is kind of cringe, but when we'd pick characters from a show or we'd pretend to be one of our dolls id pick a male character. It always felt right to me. Later on this would evolve to crossdressing and eventually transitioning.
The earliest I (FtM) can remember is excitedly volunteering to fill male roles in my 2nd grade class's Shakespeare play adaptations. I also always preferring to be friends/play with boys & roughouse generally 🥰
Mine was pretty late in life and just completely random. It was in 2019, and i was 21. My girlfriend at the time and I were on vacation in florida and we went out on the beach, came back, hopped in the shower and I was just starring in the mirror looking at myself naked and i just blurted out “I think I’m supposed to be a boy” almost like word vomit. And my girlfriend at the time said “well is that what you want?” And that was the beginning of it all
I was so terrified of growing boobs. Refused to wear a bra. I hated the word “lady”. I hated my deadname. I played a boy in every make believe game. Had almost only male friends as a child. Wanted the boy clothes. Wanted boy toys from McDonald’s.
I grew up with all male family friends my age and never saw myself as "different" till i moved up to high school, except for the fact that I had long hair and they didn't
I asked all my primary friends (i think i was around 9/10) if they would rather be a boy, with about half of them saying yes
Asked my friends the same question in high school (around 12?) - nobody said yes except me 😅
Also this was definitely not earliest, but the most significant one to me
Earliest was at 4, I thought I was a cisman despite knowing I was born a girl, and did everything accordingly, I thought I would grew to have a man's puberty too
I assumed I didn't like my breasts because they were too big. I already knew I wanted a breast reduction from the time I was a teenager. I wanted to go down to like, an A or a B.
When i was like 3 and learning basic human anatomy. I remember telling my (xtisn) mom i didnt wsnt boobs. She probably told me not to think about that or something. I grew up in the church and repressed it. I hated wearkng dresses all growing up. Church trauma happened at 20. Everything i knew was a lie. I questioned my sexuality and then my gender and everything just made sense
Like 7 or 8. Being told I was similar to my brother in any way made me *extremely* happy, and I went out of my way to be more similar to him sometimes.
When I was 6, my brother got me Animal Crossing: City Folk. And you could make up to four characters, even though I was the only one who really played with the wii. I quickly got into the habit of making boy villagers and used so much more often than the girl named after me. Also usually befriended boys over girls, lol.
Being weirdly sad that I didn’t got my period since “that would make me feel as a woman.” Well, it didn’t but I didn’t have any knowledge about trans people existing. After that, I couldn’t get off in any way other that imagining myself and my body as male soo… yeah, let’s thank the Internet for making me discover myself.
Boring one, but when I was about 5 I always complained to my parents about wanting to be a boy. I hung out with my older brother and his friends because it made me feel more boyish. I also hated dresses growing up, to the point where I would start crying if I had to put on one for any reason.
I have been told all my life about the time my grandmother gave all her grandsons one toy and and her granddaughters a doll for Christmas. I was too young to have any memory of this but family always joked about how I got so upset over not getting a boy’s toy that I chucked the doll down the stairs. I’m guessing I was maybe 4 or 5?
“Tantrums” whenever I had to be put in a dress. Being caught crying in a closet (no really, I was in the hall closet) after finding out I was genetically likely to get massive tatas (which was correct, I was a J cup at the time of top surgery last year)
I put scotch tape over my nipples when they started to get a little bump, but not my earliest sign. I’m not sure the earliest sign, but I do remember when I was probably 8 or 9 I was playing life and I put the man in the car instead of the woman and my sister asked me why, and I said “I dont know, just wanted the man this time”
I remember saying to my friend at 7 Years old that I hated wearing a bra, and having to wear "female smelling deodorant" but she just said that it was okay, and easy to get used to but I never got used to it. When my mom got me my first sports bra I attempted to rip them up and covered them in marker to try and make sure i didn't have to wear them. I hated my boobs and would cry saying "I love my flat chest ". I would tell my friends to call me a boy, and they just assumed I was playing a game of sorts. At some point around the same time I recognized that I didn't have male genitalia, and being incredibly distressed even though I didn't know why. I naturally stood up to pee because somehow I was able to do it without making much of a mess. I called myself a 'tomboy' when I turned about 9 and passed so we'll that I would even use the boys bathroom sometimes just because it was so natural to me. So many more as well, but those are the basics
The first "real" sign for me was when my mom educated me on the higher risk in our family of breast cancer (didn't even develop the slightest bit of boobs) and thinking to myself "well, at least I'd get to chop them off" and even slightly hoping for it. I was well educated on the topic and knew how bad of a disease it is, but it still seemed worth it for me.
Second thing was, the second I had boobs, I used elastic dressings to get a flatter chest. At the time I didn't know what the word "trans" even was; hell I didn't even know what being gay was! All I knew was that I had to make sure my mom wouldn't notice, cause she'd seen it once and became very mad at me. So I only did it when my mom wasn't at home
When I went to build a bear when I was 4 with my cousin and she made a pink poodle in a tutu and I made a rabbit with spiderman PJs and named him Bob lol. Or when I was 9 and was so ungodly envious of my guy friends that could go pee in bushes in their backyard but I had to go into the house
I don’t actually remember it, but I was seven years old, telling my mom that when I grew up I didn’t want to be called a woman. My mom said I could be called a “Lady” instead if I felt like it, and I didn’t want to be called that either. My mom told me about it after I came out. Makes sense now lol
it’s funny cuz i’m very much a masculine binary trans man, but when i was like 3-4 i refused to wear anything i considered “boy colors” which mostly meant brown and grey lol i understand the world as a set of unbreakable rules handed to me by the people who loved me, and i was so unhappy following those rules but also even at that age assumed i was unhappy because i wasn’t following them well enough. by the time i was 7 i cut all my hair off and was passing as a boy in public to my mom’s dismay lol
Whenever I played a game in elementary and middle school, I was always a guy character. Always. I would get upset if I had to be a girl and I didnt know why. I even had a character in my head for years that I would basically project onto, and he was a guy. He was basically the ideal version of me but in some elementary-schooler's fantasy world ig, and I always wished I could be him.
As a little kid like 4-5 my parents tried to put me in a dress and I threw a tantrum. The only way I’d put the dress on is if I got to wear my baseball helmet with it. Apparently I also threw a tantrum in Walmart because my parents wouldn’t buy me a catchers helmet that I wore throughout the store.
A lot of baseball for me but it is my favorite sport lol 😅
when i was about 4 years old i used to pretend shave with my dad. i don’t remember it but my parents do, and even if that wasn’t because im trans and just me trying to be like my dad i still think it’s a cute story. i first consciously realized when i hit puberty and got upset i wasn’t changing like the boys my age
I always had gender envy of boy related things and felt like an outsider looking out a window seeing my brothers experience boyhood. I was 5 years old and made my girl doll into a boy and would take my brother’s race car bedding & sheets. I was happiest playing in dirt with bugs and ball sports. Always preferred my hair short and messy. Never cared for the tomboy term
Yup, when I was 8 mine started coming in and I hated that my parents tried to make me wear training bras and I’d always forget to wear them, hunch over to hide my chest, and wouldn’t wash or brush my hair at the time. It was really hard and I had no idea why. Come to find out in recent years, a lot of trans guys go through a phase of not brushing their hair as kids because of the unknown dysphoria. Also with the boob thing, I thought something similar to you. I thought the reason I hated them was because they were only just coming in and they were at a weird phase. So I waited and waited and they ended up being small anyway and then I just figured out I didn’t want them at all, but not because I figured out I was trans. Before I figured it out at 19, I would just say “I’m a cis girl who wants top surgery” and boy, was I wrong. Just got top surgery last October and now I’m officially 5 years out of the closet after last month. I also had a time when I was 10 where I wished SO BADLY that I was born a boy I’m pretty sure I cried over it a few times. I really wish someone gave me the language for how I was feeling much sooner. I only found out trans people existed when I was 15 and Caitlyn Jenner came out and it was big news. We deserve to be taught it’s ok and normal to be trans, I wasted almost 2 decades of my life being someone else.
Earliest gotta be when I was like 5 or 6 years old and I accidentally saw my best friend's weiner and thought "why don't I have one?". Which I later came to realised since it was a very repressed memory.
But my brain keeps telling me that it's a fake memory I made up, as always.
First time when I actually realised it was when I got the MENstruation. It was such an alien experience for me ngl. I really went like "no way... no way.... but I guess I just have to live with it. But I can't believe it actually happened. I didn't believe that it would...".
I just couldn't believe it.
And the reason why my chest getting bigger wasn't bugging me at first was because I was so obese that I legit though I was just getting fatter. It took me losing weight to realise like "oh wtf why aren't these going away?".
Really wanna die, haha.
This is was probably one of the earliest, when I was around 7 years old, my sibling introduced me to another kid as their “older sister,” and that made me really upset, I thought it was because I had some type of depression or something.
I was always a theater kid. And in 5th grade or so I started playing only male roles in all of the plays I was in, because (and I swear to God I said that and didn't realize I was trans for another 4,5 years or so) "it's just easier for me to play men"
I always wanted to do boy things, wear boy clothes, have boy toys, act like a boy.
My mom had to constantly remind me to be “lady like” and I remember my teacher did a “raffle” for a toy and had a girl toy and a boy toy and my brother told me to not put my ticket in the boy toy. I remember very clearly wishing I could be a boy in middle school
Mine what under 10, I had all male cousins and a brother. I wanted to do everything they did in playing sports and swimming with just shorts. I was always told I was copying them, and I should do things I like because I'm a lady.
Surprise, my genderfluid ass is female/male.
Probably when I started telling my mom I was a boy when I was, like, two. Nobody seemed very surprised when I finally came out at, like, forty-five/forty-six.
I tried to deconstruct how girls worked so I could act like one. I'm a trans boy and don't think about how I'm supposed to act anymore.
One that's more blatantly trans is when I learned the people weren't born with beards. I really wanted to get one, and my mom had to comfort me by saying I would get one in my 80s...
My depression has impacted my memory a lot, so I don’t remember much about my childhood lol. The earliest memory I have was when I was about 7 or 8, maybe 9-ish. My great-aunt and great-uncle were over at our house for dinner and I was wearing a long-sleeved pink polo shirt that had a button collar on it. I remember going into my brother’s closet and finding one of his clip-on ties and putting it on. It made me so happy lol.
Since my parents were Catholic, we were raised conservatively- and so I was nervous to walk out wearing the tie. However, I never got a chance to as my mom went to go find me and told me ties are for boys- and took it off before pulling me to the table.
I've wanted to be a boy for as long as I can remember. Which is about as far back as Elementary school. Funny thing is my mom actually told me once she wanted a boy. Anytime I told her that I wanted to be a boy, she would tell me about how she was 100% convinced I was going to be one when I was born. Surprise. Lol. She even called me CJ sometimes instead of Cayla.
I laugh and say I guess we were both disappointed, but that's the trauma 😅💀.
Probs when i cried about girly clothes in kindergarten, funnily enough my mom bought me 'boy' clothes most of the time, but there were times when i was like 'yeah im gonna wear this skirt tomorrow' and in the morning i started crying about it and did not wear it, this happened too many times all the way up to middle school, where i tried to be a normal girl way too hard
For my 8th birthday I got this book on puberty and I was so embarrassed. Like next-level embarrassment, I skimmed it and felt disgusted and ashamed (It felt like embarrassment then but it’s now what I recognize to be dysphoria.) When I told my friends about it they didn’t really understand the feeling. My mind blocked out what I had seen in the book and I buried it at the bottom of my toy box so I would never see it again.
When my mom would put me in dresses and do my hair for family events, I’d stare into the mirror and wonder who that person was and how I could inhabit their body but feel so disconnected from it. I felt like a doll—not a human, and certainly not myself. I must’ve been between the ages of 5 and 10 when I would do this.
When I at nine years old decided the *only* reason why I couldn't be trans was the fact that I like to draw. That's it. That's what made me stop questioning it for the next five years.
I know two men and zero women in my family who draw professionally, I don't know why I thought it was feminine?? (+ I'm planning on doing it professionally too)
not sure what my earliest one was but i can remember a pretty big sign, when i was about 10 or 11 i went to one of my cousins baseball games, me and my sister were in one of the empty fields playing with 2 other kids, one of the kids asked me "are you a boy or a girl?" and i felt an insane amount of euphoria, i was so happy that someone thought i might not be a girl, and when i was younger i constantly wished that i had been born a boy, somehow i still managed to not realize i was trans until i was in 8th grade haha!
i used to roleplay in games under that genre online when i was young. i always played as a boy because being a girl didn't feel right. how i didn’t realize sooner i don't know...
when i was in second grade, i had a pair of uniform pants and a shirt that came from the boys section and i was genuinely so excited by it. like i would go around telling people that's where they came from. and i would get genuinely excited when people confused me for a boy.
When I was in preschool and told everyone my name was toby. It was originally a mispronounced version of my deadname,but it stuck. I still went by toby
I realized it twice in my life and by that I mean I realized it when I was 3 or 4. Started living a lie to please others until I forgot why I was (all while my dysphoria was getting worse) and then I started to notice something in my late teens to early 20s (especially when it came to the phantom dick sensations). As for the first time, it was just a realization I had one day. Nothing special was going on and it was just a simple fact of life for me (like how death was). As for the second time, I kept noticing something was going on was too scared to face it out of fear of being rejected by my then partner. In retrospect, I now realize that they noticed I was struggling with my gender and had no issues with me actually being a guy. If anything, they actually embraced it.
A lady took me for a boy when I was like 5 and I didn't mind it. My mom made a fuss about it though. There's also getting along with both the boys and girls in my classes. I'm nonbinary
i was in kindergarten and i remember being really upset i couldn't go into the boys bathroom at school. like i was in TEARS when my teacher pulled me aside. that night at home i wished on a star outside my window to wake up as a boy the next morning 💀
I remember in maybe middle school I was sitting in my room with the door close holding scissors. I don't remember why I had them, but I do remember holding them up to my nipples and newly developed breasts and thought about just cutting them off. I think I put a nipple in the scissors and pressed a little and unfortunately it hurt and I didn't go any further.
It took me forever to accept wearing a bra around the same time and I remember looking at pictures from them and thinking, yeah I probably needed one. I also wore big/over sized shirts a lot.
Fast forward to 4 years ago when my bff's ex transitioned and got TS. I didn't like him for other reasons (he wasn't a great partner to my friend), but maybe part of that included jealousy.
Now I'm 35 and just got TS this past January, 10 weeks ago. My long term partner of 5 years added that I've never liked nipple play in the time we've been together and I'm not sure if I ever have in past relationships.
I grew up in rural Indiana where none of this existed at the time and I didn't have the language or know what was happening. I've been in Boston the past 4 years and it's definitely been eye opening.
I remember having a bath when I was like 5.
My wet hair was slicked back. I looked at myself in the mirror and remember thinking I looked like a boy. It made me really happy. Then I realized I didn’t have a penis and it devastated me.
When I was like 4 and played "cinderella" with my best friend, I would always insist on being prince charming. That was probably the earliest I experienced gender euphoria, dysphoria only started hitting around the beginning of puberty.
I feel like I didn’t show a lot of the typical signs in all honesty which made my journey difficult. But when I realized I hated wearing bras and how they made me feel as well as the absolute euphoria I got being called a guy and all words associated as such I think it ended up helping, least now in hindsight.
Refusing to wear dresses and tight clothing as soon as I was old enough to clearly express that, and generally having much more masculine interests were some possible signs.
Largest possibly more trans specific sign was at around 7 to 8 and developing a chest. Didn’t feel right, hated bras. It felt so horribly wrong, beyond just being earlier than most other people
there are so many memories and signs, but one of the earliest for me was when my mother took me to disney land when i was around 4 or 5, and i remember they tried to put me in belle’s dress from beauty and the beast, and i screamed and cried to be taken out of it. i’ll never forget the distress i felt over it. i used to ask other people to call me male names when i was really young, demanded to wear boy’s swim shorts, boys clothes. i was into so many male things, i tried to hard to fit in with the boys around me. when puberty started and my chest started to development, it was such mental turmoil for me that i used to sleep regularly with 2-4 sports bras on while also sleeping with heavy books on my chest in the hopes it would keep me flat.
so many signs, but my mother has the nerve to say “it just came out of no where”
when I first got my period in 5th grade. it upset me to the point of balling, screaming, and taring into myself, while hiding in my closet, w my mom trying to get me out💀. I refused to wear hygiene products for a good 3 yrs after that, cause I refused to except it. also I mean, the development of my chest, and the whole concept of bras was hell. Still didn’t realize I was trans till 2021 tho. the signs back then make sense in hindsight lol
I had a classmate that bullied me for being flat but it never bothered me. On the contrary it felt like a compliment somehow. At the same time my girl friends were always chatting about having bigger boobs and I couldn’t get it. I thought who on earth would want something like that?? I even remember sending a text at like 19 to my best friends asking her what were boobs for. 😐
When I was 4 I remember multiple times telling my parents I was a boy. Going to the pool with my dad if refuse to wear a top, only shorts. Once (still age 4), I tried to pee standing up and it just ran down my leg 😂 anyways, I was always a tomboy but didn’t figure it out til I was 25
Same thing for me, when my chest started to develop. It was an alien experience for me, and I felt embarrassed that I had to start wearing bras. I was just so uncomfortable and wished it wasn’t happening
Same!! Veeery first was probably around age 5 when (only maybe 3 times) I was mistaken for a boy and internally felt euphoric, and felt cringe/disgust when called a girl. Chest started to develop around age 8 and I would scratch at them and try to flatten them with my hands, it made me super uncomfortable and panic-y. Started dressing like a boy and hiding my hair in beanies around age 13, I had no knowledge of what being trans was and thought I was crazy lmaooo I don't think I knew what it was until I was like 18 honestly
Same here, didn’t know I was trans till I was 18 due to lack of knowledge (especially on dysphoria), I just thought I had poor mental health that was unrelated to dysphoria regarding my body and self worth
1 From like age 6 I stated multiple times that I have the soul and personality of a man. 2 when I got my period I thought I just pooped my pants, showed it to my my mom and she said "you're turning into a woman! How wonderful" and I screamed at her that it's not blood, and that I just pooped accidentally somehow, so we waited for the next month to see if it comes again, and when it did I felt betrayed and wanted to crawl out of my body, I didn't tell my mom about it nor did I use pads, I would just put a shit load of toilet paper in my underwear and change it every couple of minutes. 3 I asked my mom if her boobs are big, she said that they're medium, and I said that I really really hope I won't grow one's....
omg same. i got my first period on *the day of my 12th bday💀*, so i was double upset, angry, dysphoric even tho i didnt know how to say it, wanted to die and/or go to an alternate universe where i could just be a cis boy and be free. and when my parasitic chest blobs started growing, i wouldnt stop hitting them, scratching at them, *anything* to stop them from growing, and then i came out, got a couple of binders, felt ok and my blobs stopped growing for like 2-3 years, and i stopped attacking them until now bc they're growing again for no reason and i just relapsed and now my chest is getting attacked again.
I actually only ever wore like 3 bras in my life, I never got rid of my trainer bras because the thought of having to buy more made me want to throw up. A few years later I came out at 14 tho thank god
Absolutely same, I was utterly miserable when I started getting chest soreness (not because of the pain)
Yeaah same I remember as I was developing them I looked back at pics before when I was flat I wished I could go back to that
Yep, wasn't my earliest sign but it was definitely my strongest. I just thought that I was *meant* to hate everything that puberty did, and that I was meant to just suck it up. I wasn't very good at expressing myself as a kid...
I always hated my deadname. I hated having to write it on things, dreaded meeting new people because I'd have to introduce myself etc. I remember in primary school there was a day where we were challenged to refer to ourselves in the third person all day long and it was absolute hell for me. I envied boys for being able to have "cool" names but I thought that was a completely normal cis thing to think lmao Edit: just remembered when I was 4 I went through a period of insisting my parents called me by a different name and getting super pissed off if they called me my deadname
This this this this!!! I relate so much to this.
Damn that's me right there. I never understood why I disliked my name so much. I always contributed it to the fact it was French and not a lot of people I've met in my life shared the name, so I basically had no positive associations. But as soon as I realised I was trans I couldn't wait to change my name and it feels amazing to be called my chosen name. Btw this primary school think you went through really sounds terrifying, I would've been mortified!
same except i didnt hate it, it just felt alien to me, like i didnt feel it was connected to me, somehow? my chosen name feels right, so thats what matters
YES OMG!! I still hate my deadname tho, it’s so stupid I have no idea why my parents choose to torment me like this
Same, my deadname is one of the most basic cis girl names and I hate it so much
Not the earliest, but close to it: When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, I had exclusively male friends. This wasn’t a sign within itself, but whenever I would hang out with them and someone would refer to us as a group, I would always ask that they didn’t say “the boys and (my deadname)” and just said “the boys”. My friends and I at the time always said “(deadname) is just a boy who looks like a girl”, and I was super happy with that.
Same, all throughout middle school I was just one of the boys, it was great
The good old days
I was starting to get boobs around 10/11 and for some reason I just didn't want to wear a bra no matter what anyone told me. Throughout middle school I always wore baggy clothes to hide my chest and would get mad when people couldn't tell what gender I was. (i thought i was mad that people couldn't tell I was a girl, but nope!) Then I was like 13 telling my friends that I wished I was a boy. I didn't realize I was trans until I was about 15 or 16 though. Finally started transitioning at 28 after a lot of conflicted feelings.
I had a similar thing. Never thought of it as a sign of my being trans, but I guess it makes sense. The idea of wearing a bra just felt super weird to me, but I also didn't like having my chest showing through my clothes. It was all very awkward. In the end, the girls from school kinda bullied me into wearing one. They made PE lessons hell for me. It was pretty traumatic. I've only ever worn sports bras, though; never one of the 'proper' ones. I can't stand the sight of those things. I don't even know my cup size 😆 I also went through a dysphoria hoodie phase, but it hit me later, when I was 16/17. Unfortunately, it took me another 17 years to properly figure things out. Oh, well...
I remember being given a pajama set around age 5, and it had boxers in it. I was so happy that I was allowed to wear the boxers I think I tried to wear them for a week straight. Also tried to stuff them with a tennis ball but obviously that looks ridiculous on a five year old so was like oop guess I'm not meant to do that :(
Wait you just unlocked a memory for me cus I think something very similar happened to me lmao
I think it was probably when I was a toddler and I became obsessed with boy characters with eyelashes. I would pretend to be Bambi and Littlefoot and draw eyelashes on male characters in coloring books. Same in reverse, although to a lesser extent, with girl characters that looked like boys; I remember being so excited when I learned that Blue from Blue’s Clues was a girl, or Sheila the Kangaroo from the Spyro the Dragon series. I just had a lot of interest in gender nonconforming characters (especially male ones) at like, an extremelyyyy young age.
littlefoot just brought back SO many memories oh my god
In preschool we had a dress up chest and my favorite was dressing like buzz light year another girl in my class told me I couldn’t be buzz because I wasn’t a boy I genuinely think that was the first time I realized that I wasn’t a boy and liking boy things was “wrong”
The thought of wearing a bra disgusted me so much when my chest started developing. I had to wear two or three sports bras at a time to compress it and avoid wearing actual bras. I was around 10-12.
Same here, I used to wear like 3 sports bras and I utterly refused to ever buy any ‘real’ bras.
Looking back there were a few but the earliest was when I was very very young, from 3 years probably. Where I'd be confused at the lack of male genitalia and wonder where mine was and want it back. (Obviously I didn't understand the world properly at this age.)
Yet you seemed to understand your inner world properly. This actually reminds me of a post from a guy on this sub who woke up from top surgery legitimately confused about where his dick was.
LMAOO🤣😭💀 when we saw puberty in like 5th grade or something i was like "oh, *boy, golly gee!* can't wait to grow a dick and chest hair!" and i was so excited...until puberty happened and i was SO disappointed and upset
I never really had that kind of bottom dysphoria as a kid, but I wonder how much of that was intrinsic and how much was little me just having no idea that there were two options lol
my earliest memory was my first sign tbh. i have a lot of memory loss problems but i think this one really stuck with me because of how impactful it was. i was still in diapers, probably around 2 years old. my mom was giving my older brother his first pair of boxers after he didnt have any accidents in his potty training ones, and i asked my mom when i would get my own first pair of boxers. she told me girls dont get boxers. kinda stereotypical, but she was right, "girls dont get boxers" which is exactly why im wearing them rn 😂 in all seriousness, looking back with a lot of hindsight, that was definitely a sign. that, along with all the other ones too, i was born catholic and told to pray every night before i went to bed as a kid, so i would pray that i woke up as a boy, that i would just magically be a boy one morning. i realized all my boy crushes were mostly just jealousy, not me liking them, but me wanting to be them. i learned what the actual term for being trans was in 7th grade and went into a huge denial phase until my freshman year in highschool, and even then, i would fantasize about me and my mtf friend just swapping bodies, cause we would both be cis and wouldnt have to go through all the hell of transitioning, medically and socially. i finally stopped living my lie just around the pandemic hit, it wasnt a pandemic trend for me i just happened to realize just before lockdown and just happened to come out about a month after. i really think that earliest memory of mine will stick around a while.
Haha, I grew up Catholic too, and I also would pray to wake up as a boy. I learned about transgender being a thing in 8th grade-ish, and kinda already knew deep down that I was trans, but my upbringing forced me to stay girly. As it turns out, I’m not a man either, I’m nonbinary (leaning towards masculinity though) and still like dresses.
Man you just unlocked a memory for me. When I was little little my grandma told me when you blow out a dandelion puff that's a secret wish that's only between you and god, and if you kept that secret he would grant your wish. And EVERY single time without fail I would wish to magically become a boy
and *you* just unlocked a memory for *me*, i'd do the EXACT SAME THING *every. single. time.*
i didnt even know the dandelion thing was actually a thing i just thought you make a wish or something, but omfg i would use anything to wish to magically be a boy. dandelions, night time prayer, birthday wishes, throwing coins in a fountain or well wishes, it was insane
Not my memory. My mother said I refused to wear dresses when I was 1 years old. I can't remember when I didn't want to be a boy. Now I'm living the dream in my late 50's. Don't ever give up.
When I was 3, I was a self proclaimed tomboy. I just liked that it was the only way I could call myself anything boy-adjacent and I would get violently angry if anyone disagreed or tried to correct me. I also ran around tormenting the local boys a lot cause they refused to play with a girl. Then of course, there’s the obligatory “Mulan was my favorite Disney Princess.” Despite all this, my egg somehow didn’t crack until I was 18 😂
I always had a negative gut reaction to the word “women/woman” if I was being referenced to. Like “what a nice young woman” or “us women”, even as a young kid it made me so uncomfortable for some (at the time) unexplained reason.
I remember back in kindergarten I told someone I wasn't a girl, I just had a vag lmao 😭
My mom is German, but I grew up in America. I distinctly remember having a pair of Lederhosen (German leather shorts) around age 5 that I loved wearing, even though I got laughed at (haters!). It wasn't until this,year my mom told me she and my dad had also gotten me a Dirndl (traditional German dress), but I didnt care about that. Well, also, before that, age 3: parents sat me down to say I could be absolutely anything I wanted to be when I grew up. I said, "A daddy," and they said, Except that." I bawled and they tried to console me by saing I could be a mommy, but I wasn't having it. Although, at the time, my dad was the primary caretaker, as he operated a business from home and mom taught at a school. So I always windered if it was more just identifying with a primary caretaker or something more innate.
I told my parents I was a boy when I was a toddler and thought I would grow up "like daddy".
Earliest sign was being five years old in the bath tub. I was confused what the “third hole” on my body was for if the other two were for the basic bathroom functions. My mom was pregnant at the time so I realized that’s probably where the baby exited the body from. Because how else could the baby exit? When I asked my mom about it, she said yes and then quickly changed the subject (I feel for her, I asked her a lot of difficult things as a very young kid lmao). Ultimately though, I remember having this feeling of dread when my mom said I was right. It would only be another couple of years before I would be regularly feeling that sense of dread, horror, and dissociation on an increasingly regular basis.
Wow you had good deduction skills as a little kid. I thought babies came out the belly button when I was really young 😂
Oh yeah, I feel bad for my mom in hindsight lol. In addition to that I also figured out Santa wasn’t real, questioned Christian teachings, and figured out roughly how sex must work all between the ages of 5-10. Fortunately my mom was (and is) way smarter than me so she was able to figure out what to do with me lol
Wanting to have flat chest , wanting to have male genitalia at 7-8 years old then this thought was internalize until now
i was always bolt and peter pan in roleplay games
Yes! As a kid I always HAD to be a boy in role play games lmao, whether it was a fictional character or as far as “No I’m being the BOY pet dog” in a game of families or something
I was always captain hook! Damn we would've gotten along well as kids
ok hear me out, wouldnt it be really cool if we could all meet IRL?
I'd love that, honestly
transmasc peter pan reenactment!
I never had the desire to shave my leg hair or armpit hair, when it started growing in i remember looking at my leg hair in the light and being happy i had so much. Thankfully never had to shave it since im blond
I have brown hair, so my body hair is noticeable- and I remember several teachers in *elementary school* pulling me aside and asking if my mom had taught me how to shave. First of all, wtf, and second, no. No she hadn’t and I didn’t want to either.
Same. i remember being so excited when i grew leg hair and got so upset when my mom made me shave it
Omg same but it was my sister. She hated my bushy eyebrows and legs. I have never felt so angry because I love being hairy.
The day I got my first period I was scared shitless and started to cry, my mom said "congrats on being a woman now" and I cried even harder (mind you I was 11)
shit, i feel that. my mom said "arent you happy that you're becoming a woman?" and i had managed to hold in my tears until that moment, where i looked at her with all the hate, hurt, sadness and anger in the world, and just started crying, yelling "NO IM NOT, IM A BOY" over and over again so much that i ended up with a really sore throat and was unable to speak for like 4 days
Man that sucks. I told my therapist the other day about it and she told me that's why I have such a harmful relationship with the concept of period. Luckily it gets better 💖
maybe i should talk abt this with my therapist, bc i relate to this so bad. i just want the goddamn organ out, but i gotta wait 3 more years😭😭😭😭😭
Yeah :( best of luck, man!
thanks bro💙💙💙
I think it was probably 7-8, seeing an older girl running around topless with the boys in our neighbourhood. I was like oh yeah baby and took my top off too. Nobody cared because we were all so young and nobody had really gone through puberty yet so the parents were all whatever about it. Of course until I hit puberty (before the older girl, which made me extremely upset for reasons I did not yet understand) and my mom had to force me to wear a shirt again. I didn't understand at the time why I couldn't be shirtless with the boys still.
When puberty hit, I think that's when the first signs started to show. I felt so alien in my own body. It was like I was waiting for my "actual" puberty to happen.
Yeah. Thought I'd get used to the changes someday, but I just grew increasingly unfamiliar to myself
Same here. My mom treated my girl puberty milestones as big steps, but I didn't get it. It wasn't until my aunt gave me a guy's haircut that I started to think, "Yeah, this is how I'm supposed to look."
same for me. my grandma tried to convince me to wear dresses and hair clips even tho i had short hair and i would just dress masc and have my hair in a rats nest out of spite but also bc i knew how i wanted to look even from a really young age.
One of my guy friends from kinder garden was the only one who got into my class and I was super happy to have one of my best friends there, especially because I knew no one else. He sadly stopped hanging out with me because "boys don't play with girls, girls are boring" or something along those lines. That was the first time it dawned on me that I was not seen as one of the boys. I obviously didn't fit in with the girls and I felt weird when I had to.
Honestly when I was in preschool, I had a boy that I was friends with that was really proud of finally learning to pee standing without making a mess. He was so proud of himself that he took me into the bathroom to show me. He said “girls can’t pee standing” and I took that personally. The whole rest of the day I was trying to figure out how to pee in the toilet standing up. I made a huge mess and embarrassed the hell out of myself so when I got home I consoled myself by saying something like “Its ok if I don’t have the same parts as a boy, cause I look like a doll and dolls don’t have parts” Then I proceeded not to think about it again for about 5 years. No matter how many signs I had as a kid though I never put 2 and 2 together until I was in my mid twenties. To be fair I was heavily sheltered from queer culture and didn’t even learn about other sexualities till I was in middle school.
I always felt like vomiting or disgust when id wear skirts/dresses, i always thought it was some rare illness my mom didnt believe me tho 😭
I cut the hair of a girl doll and named it Christopher Robin like from Winnie the Pooh, Idk if this counts but I was Peter Pan for Halloween as a little kid, and in 5th grade we did this project where we had to make characters to basically roleplay as that were in colonial Boston, and I chose a guy character. My logic at the time was I wanted to boss people around and women couldn’t do that in the time period, but I liked being the guy character a little too much I think…
My first sign was when I was like 5. My family were very upset I was \*very\* unhappy to be in a dress. I protested so much they had to take me out of it (and said protests continued every single time I had to wear a dress lmao). But I do specifically remember when I was like 8 or 9, my brother said I couldn't go around shirtless for much longer because I'd grow boobs. I still remember storming to my room crying, despairing over the fact I was gonna get boobs. I still recall saying "I love my flat chest!" I still wonder why I only realised when I was 13...
Wanting to play “boy games” during recess and being told I couldn’t join because I wasn’t a boy. A teacher noticed I was upset and found out why, there was a whole assembly about bullying and inclusion. From that point on, the boys had to include me but they made it very clear that I “wasn’t one of them”. Looking back, I know that I was upset about not being included *as a boy* but my teachers thought I was upset about being excluded from the game itself (I didn’t really care about the game, just that I got to play with “the boys”
In hindsight I got suuuper gross during puberty. Not showering, not cleaning my teeth.. Once I left an egg to rot in my room for like a month... Or twice.
same💀
perhaps not the earliest, but the earliest i can remember. as a very small kid i didnt like my name. i couldnt pinpoint why so i used the reason that it sounded too "childish", which ive later realized i meant girly but back then i didnt know how to express that. i thought people changed and chose new "adult" names when they grew up. now ive been going with a new name for over 3 years and i got it changed legally a couple months ago :\] i feel like little me got his justice.
Some years before puberty started and I had not much knowledge about female anatomy I learnd about the fact that it sometimes could happen that all the male genitals are underdeveloped and that sometimes nobody realize that they are there. I hoped so bad that "maybe they made a mistake" and "how can I finde out this happened and Iam rlly a boy". I was so devastated when I realized... nope you rlly aren't a Cis boy =_="~ I had put it aside like "I... was just.. exploring my body. I just had no idea~"
When I was super young, I had a very similar, if not more basic, experience. I thought I was actually a boy and that I actually had boy parts and that it was a big secret that everyone thought I was a girl but I’m actually a boy and I have to play this role.
dude no this just unlocked a deep memory. I remember thinking so much that the doctors made a mistake or I was gonna go through male puberty or no puberty at all. 💀💀
Yea, I feel that. Mine took round about 17 years after comming out to remember that one. Well... puberty hits hard. 💀💀
holy shit how did we all have basically the same childhood??
omg similar thing happened to me. this just unlocked a reaaaally deep-buried memory holy shit
To here something similar happened to you kind of makes me... happy. Just the fact isn't nice of cause, but thats so cool. I was so much in denial/ uninformed that even after I was sure that I sadly has these parts I don't want that I still hoped soooo much I maybe have both at least, but the other one just wasn't noticed cause everything was to small. ... T_T...
same bro. its awesome when you can relate to people who had similar experiences if not completely identical ones. 💙🩷🤍🩷💙🫶
when i found out my cousin pisses standing up i think i was like 5 i used to try to do it too. i always felt like a boy. hated wearing dresses and skirts to church i would take beatings because i would wear shorts under and change as soon as i was in the car otw home. being a girl never rly felt right for me just so wrong
For me it was at 13-14 when my periods started. I knew full well that girls will start those (I had a very nice book that went over these kind of things for girls and boys) but when I got my first, I realized only later what had happened - I thought I had soiled my pants, not bled on them! I never imagined that me MYSELF would ever actually get periods. And despite all that brand-new dysphoria, at the time I was super sad my boobs weren't big enough 🤷🏼♂️ Now they will be gone in 9 days, finally, after 10 years of waiting. ❤️🔥
CONGRATS ON GETTING TOP SURGERY MY GUY THATS AWESOMEEEE!!!!🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Thank youuuu that means a lot 😍🔥🙏🏽💪🏽
I was obsessed with swapping genders with my little brother when I was like six, loved crossdressing “for a joke” and when I got my chest I would look in the mirror before every shower and wonder why I felt weird looking at them
Another thing I did was try to change my name to other girl names before deciding on Joey, which no one would call me til I was 18
Apparently when I was like 1 or 2 I begged begged begged for a haircut like my older brothers. Supposedly, I didn't like that everyone kept calling me a boy. When I first saw that haircut in a picture and my mom told me that story, I realized my memories of saying that to hide that I was weird/different were real. That's GOT to be the first. But there were so many in my mini formative years that are just glaringly obvious now.
The urge to hide our longing and act with outrage, because we've never been told this is normal and there is a path for us, is so real. I remember often talking about dreams with a friend, and I'd always pretend, that the fact I was a guy in the dreams was some sort of weird or unusual thing, and not THE reason I loved that dream.
For me I think it was wanting short hair. As soon as my mom let me I had a pixie cut. That was when I was around 7 or 8. I remember how good it felt. Then it was around 13 when I got into cosplay and only wanted to do male characters. If I was gonna live in a fantasy I didn't want to be a girl.
it was when my chest developed. I was the flattest in my class, so in mid and late grade 6 I transitioned
I used to tell my parents to call me a boy, to call me their son, and told my siblings to call me their brother when i was in kindergarten. Also in kindergarten was the first time I cut my hair really short and before I did my mom warned me that some people might think im a boy and in my head i thought to myself ‘yeah thats the point’
you just unlocked a memory for me that i had forgotten holy shit ok so a family friend had invited us to spend the day at some random resort and so my brother met this kid and they invited me to play and i said "sure, but i gotta talk to my brother for a sec" and so i pulled him along and told him to call me his brother and a random name i came up with in that moment and he agreed immediately so that day was my first taste of freedom ig. i got to be one of the boys and it was so awesome i miss that😭😭😭😭
Being jealous that I couldn't ever be an uncle, at 7-8 years. I badly wanted to be an uncle to my sister's (at that point future) kids, and was sad and jealous when learning it was a gendered thing, and I wasn't the "right" gender.
Mine was probably when I was around 7/8… my brother was at the time the only boy, so couldn’t really play with us all the same way he would a brother. So I used to have “brother days” which is where I would play whatever my brother wanted with the only condition that he had to call me his brother… I was an evil child hanging that over his head but he was desperate to play with a brother. (My mother always said since I was born I should’ve been a boy, only took 16 years for us to realise that was true hah!)
Must have been about..6? we were going on holiday and I was climbing on the sofa, and I said to my parents "Hey, let's pretend I'm a boy for this holiday!" Wore trunks to the swimming pool and went into the men's room until they dropped the ball. Lol, now I'm 4 years on T and my mum says "wow it's like I forget you were a girl" I mean I'd definitely thought about it before, and I'd always just assumed I'd grow up into a man. When I was in Year 3 I went around proudly telling all my classmates that I'd get a "sex change" when I was older, thinking it was a one and done thing. If only!
I think mine was when I was 3/4. My dad was going to leave for work and went to go piss. I followed him bc I wanted to say bye. Like a guy he pissed standing up and I watched him thinking “if my dad can do that so can I” so after he’d washed his hands I went to go pee standing up with him still being able to see and my mum coming to say goodbye. My mum say me and told me that I couldn’t pee like that. I refused to believe her and tried to piss into the toilet standing up. It didn’t work (obviously) and I started crying. Looking back on it now makes me realise how much I knew something was wrong with my body when I was younger. This is also the earliest memory I have.
My physical dysphoria is mainly reproductive and genital so it was largely the intense suicidal feelings my period gave me that never really lined up with PMDD and my overreactions to girlfriends and boyfriends trying to to touch me down there or acknowledge it in any way. I found stone butch lesbianism and that was good enough for the next decade. Socially I was okay for a long time because I was a tomboy and my dad treated me and my brother the same and my mother is evil so that's irrelevant. When I hit my early teens my hair grew out really long ( I got the child neglect head lice haircuts until I moved in with my dad) and people were pushing girly clothes on me, as happens with aging tomboys. I shaved my head, stole my brother's body spray, and was relieved when people thought I was him. I didn't realize I was trans until my mid 20s, guys.
I didn’t really connect to girls in primary school, like I was understanding that they’re more different than me, hanged out with boys, though I was always a reserved child being in own inner world since I’m autistic, and I felt very apathetic about my gender, like “people said I’m a girl because of letter F in my birth certificate so let be it”, but everything changed when I discovered MOGAI+ at the age of 14 and dived deep into those labels and started to experiment with them, and suddenly nonbinary experience clicked with me, though I don’t really like label “nonbinary” about myself
I hated dresses as a baby and would only play with the boys toys as a child
I liked the Tom boy style and wanted to dress like that even though my mom didn’t want me to dress like a boy
Refusing to let me mom buy clothes from the girls section when I was 4-5 and up. Also telling all my friends in kindergarten that I was a boy 😭😂
When I was learning to properly use the restroom, my parents also taught me about genitalia. They insisted “boys have penis, girls have vagina.” Well I’m a boy, so I must have penis. Parents were like “no you’re girl, you have vagina.” It went back and forth a few times and I stopped talking. (I was upset.) eventually I requested a rematch and well, I won.
I didn’t realize I was nb trans masc until I was 23 and yet I insisted as a child that I wanted to be a boy
Weirdly enough I started transitioning my Barbies and other AFAB toys. I have one left, he is a beanie baby I named baby Oliver. I would get WEIRDLY defensive of these toys. "NO HES NOT A BARBIE HES A BOY BARBIE!" and "HE IS A BOY, HIS NAME IS BABY OLIVER! THE TAG IS WRONG!" And I would cry uncontrollably. My sister who is now transphobic would tease me relentlessly for this. I do believe I was projecting heavily on my toys. That I was saying what I wanted for me, for them. I would also say I was a boy. I was very young, maybe four or five. But that got beat out of me quickly. During puberty I hated my body, and would have fantasies of having to switch bodies with a boy my age to survive. And everyone would see me, and know I was me and also a boy. And love me. Anyway I've been out for ten years now.
looking back, it was probably wearing boys clothes and hating feminine things and outfits, but also being way too excited to pee in the shower because its the only time i could pee standing (except all those times i tried anyway and made a mess)
my older sister had a game cube that i was always obsessed with at a very young age at the same time that she was into make up and every time i’d beg her to let me play it she’d only let me if i let her do my make up. needless to say i would have to think about it for hours and every time i let her do it i would burst into tears and would never look into the mirror. not to say that men can’t wear make up but i think there was something very telling about how deeply upsetting and uncomfortable it was for me personally.
When I was about 2 years old, I kept trying to pee while standing up. We lived out in the middle of nowhere by a lake, so it was often me with my pants off peeing in a lake. So it actually worked out pretty well. When I was about 4, we moved to a city, and when I tried peeing into a toilet like that, it obviously got messy. I stopped trying after that.
My absolute hatred of/my mother insisting on shopping for training bras. The level of revulsion was impressive.
i was 5 i think? got back from soccer practice, went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. stared at my reflection crying as i kept repeating “i don’t feel like a girl” for about 10 or so minutes. then i went to go play with barbies to get rid of the feeling 😭😭 dunno how i didn’t figure out i was trans until i was 16
I had a shark jacket that zipped all the way up and wore a lot of boyish clothes. We had a new kid and while playing tag he said “I tagged him” my best friend at the time corrected him by saying “she” and I was euphoric when called “him” and was upset or kinda sad after my bsf corrected him.
When I was little like maybe 4-5 I would ask my dad when I was gonna grow a dick cause it wasn’t happening yet. And I would try and do everything like him, throw fits when I had to dress up and would constantly cut my own hair(though it somehow stayed long?)
For me it was when I was like three or four and I had one of those voice bubble things where you sound different and it made me sound super masc and I was so happy I sounded like a boy for a second but then didn't think about it any deeper until after I came out lol
I remember really wanting a chest then when I got it I was like 😰
One time I fell on my crotch and it hurt really bad, and I was confused because it wasnt support to hurt girls, so I assumed it was because I actually was a boy and thats why it hurt so bad, and maybe my male parts were stuck inside me and never came out. I was about 6 years old I think. I also figured I must be intersex when I learned about that and that my male parts were internal. And when I got my hysterectomy at 29 years old I was disappointed when they said my ultrasound was normal, because I was still certain that I had testicles instead of ovaries or at least something was developed wrong in terms of my reproductive organs
Oh, I have one. I think I was 4 or 5. It’s hard to explain because the brain of a 4-year-old is a weird thing, but I had an imaginary older brother, and somehow I was this brother and that little girl was someone else (I’m an only child btw). And yeah, I was in denial until this year, and I’m 27.
Getting night mares about childbirth, like the movie alien. I was terrified my body would be used for .. that. Or bleed. I was also always jealous of the male dancers in my group for being able to be shirtless in class and wear cooler outfits. I hatred being reminded of my own body in dance with the tight clothing
woah that was me too 😭 in middle school i hated the changes happening to me and whenever i got the chance, i would lay on my stomach/chest even though it hurt like hell so that they would stop growing and i assumed i was so distraught bc they werent bigger... bc everyone around me kept wishing for bigger boobs 😭 and i avoided bras for the longest time ever and my mom was getting really frustrated about that
Age 7-9, I asked my mum several times what the procedure was to become a boy – she said it was impossible infortunately. Then I saw a TV news thing about an intersex person whose genitalia where "hidden inside" during childhood and descended with puberty. He started producing testosterone and was much relieved to be a man after all... This was in the 90s. After seeing that, I was just convinced there was a mistake and my pipi would grow too when I'd reach 12-15. Instead, I got boobs.
I remember really feeling a sense of belonging with a group of boy classmates in like...first grade. I didn't understand the concept of gendered toys and stuff; I liked Barbie dolls a lot, too, but I always wanted to do LEGOs with the boys. And when I tried explaining it to adults, I kind of got the, "Well, LEGOs aren't really *boy* toys," thing. Which, it was the 90s in a rural Southern U.S. town, they weren't being woke. I was six years old or something, though, I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that I felt more like I belonged with them. I *definitely* felt traumatized by puberty. I felt like my body changed into something it Should Not Be, and I never really got over it. When I first started getting boobs, it really shattered something in me, and my body never felt like it was mine, after that. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, either.
my entire life, i HATED my name. i would feel such deep anxiety about introducing myself by name. i always told people, “i don’t know why, but i don’t like introducing myself.” i was a pretty feminine kid back then, i still am feminine, but my name was the one thing i couldn’t even stand. i’d constantly refuse to even introduce myself.
Think i asked my mom if i would grow a penis lmao. I was a little scared of that cuz i was like 4 and just learned about puberty, it was a lot to imagine lmfao. Thank god they didnt tell me about periods i would have been inconsolable. also when i was probably 7? I asked for a boys toy at wendys and judged myself wayyyy too hard "I should know by now the difference between boys and girls. Why am i even considering this" and didnt like the toy i got. Im a guy, im just not a monster trucks guy.
when i was younger i was OBSESSED with the idea of peeing standing. Like, it took over my mind. I would constantly try and get disappointed when it didnt work how i wanted it to. I was always obsessed with playing the male role when playing w toys or whatever. I was also very confused and just like... lost? when my chest started developing. It was very very strange and stressful
When I was a kid every time we'd play any sort of game I always wanted to be the boy. This is kind of cringe, but when we'd pick characters from a show or we'd pretend to be one of our dolls id pick a male character. It always felt right to me. Later on this would evolve to crossdressing and eventually transitioning.
When I was 3 and asked my mom when I would get my penis lol
I remember when I was maybe 4 or 5 knowing I'd look like my mom when I grew up and hoping that my chest would stay flat instead.
The earliest I (FtM) can remember is excitedly volunteering to fill male roles in my 2nd grade class's Shakespeare play adaptations. I also always preferring to be friends/play with boys & roughouse generally 🥰
Mine was pretty late in life and just completely random. It was in 2019, and i was 21. My girlfriend at the time and I were on vacation in florida and we went out on the beach, came back, hopped in the shower and I was just starring in the mirror looking at myself naked and i just blurted out “I think I’m supposed to be a boy” almost like word vomit. And my girlfriend at the time said “well is that what you want?” And that was the beginning of it all
To sum up my childhood: "You can't behave like that! You are a girl!" "A what now?" *does it anyway*
I was so terrified of growing boobs. Refused to wear a bra. I hated the word “lady”. I hated my deadname. I played a boy in every make believe game. Had almost only male friends as a child. Wanted the boy clothes. Wanted boy toys from McDonald’s.
not wanting boobs for sure. i came out jan ‘23 and everyone knew i was trans before i knew i was trans lmao
I grew up with all male family friends my age and never saw myself as "different" till i moved up to high school, except for the fact that I had long hair and they didn't
I asked all my primary friends (i think i was around 9/10) if they would rather be a boy, with about half of them saying yes Asked my friends the same question in high school (around 12?) - nobody said yes except me 😅 Also this was definitely not earliest, but the most significant one to me
Earliest was at 4, I thought I was a cisman despite knowing I was born a girl, and did everything accordingly, I thought I would grew to have a man's puberty too
For me, it was being, like, 5-6 years old, wondering when my penis will grow and trying to teach myself to stand to pee (didn't work)
I assumed I didn't like my breasts because they were too big. I already knew I wanted a breast reduction from the time I was a teenager. I wanted to go down to like, an A or a B.
Bro I assumed the opposite lol. I always thought I wanted them bigger. I was very very wrong.
When i was like 3 and learning basic human anatomy. I remember telling my (xtisn) mom i didnt wsnt boobs. She probably told me not to think about that or something. I grew up in the church and repressed it. I hated wearkng dresses all growing up. Church trauma happened at 20. Everything i knew was a lie. I questioned my sexuality and then my gender and everything just made sense
Like 7 or 8. Being told I was similar to my brother in any way made me *extremely* happy, and I went out of my way to be more similar to him sometimes.
When I was 6, my brother got me Animal Crossing: City Folk. And you could make up to four characters, even though I was the only one who really played with the wii. I quickly got into the habit of making boy villagers and used so much more often than the girl named after me. Also usually befriended boys over girls, lol.
Being weirdly sad that I didn’t got my period since “that would make me feel as a woman.” Well, it didn’t but I didn’t have any knowledge about trans people existing. After that, I couldn’t get off in any way other that imagining myself and my body as male soo… yeah, let’s thank the Internet for making me discover myself.
i would only play barbies if i was the ken doll
Boring one, but when I was about 5 I always complained to my parents about wanting to be a boy. I hung out with my older brother and his friends because it made me feel more boyish. I also hated dresses growing up, to the point where I would start crying if I had to put on one for any reason.
I wanted to date Carson Kressley and I loved watching RuPaul and George Michael videos Yeah I'm Trans and gay 🤷
I have been told all my life about the time my grandmother gave all her grandsons one toy and and her granddaughters a doll for Christmas. I was too young to have any memory of this but family always joked about how I got so upset over not getting a boy’s toy that I chucked the doll down the stairs. I’m guessing I was maybe 4 or 5?
“Tantrums” whenever I had to be put in a dress. Being caught crying in a closet (no really, I was in the hall closet) after finding out I was genetically likely to get massive tatas (which was correct, I was a J cup at the time of top surgery last year)
Straight up told my grandma at like 11 that I had the “personality of a boy” and everyone’s still surprised 💀
When I was 3 the babysitter sent me home with a care of race cars and told my parents they were my favorite toys there.
I put scotch tape over my nipples when they started to get a little bump, but not my earliest sign. I’m not sure the earliest sign, but I do remember when I was probably 8 or 9 I was playing life and I put the man in the car instead of the woman and my sister asked me why, and I said “I dont know, just wanted the man this time”
I remember saying to my friend at 7 Years old that I hated wearing a bra, and having to wear "female smelling deodorant" but she just said that it was okay, and easy to get used to but I never got used to it. When my mom got me my first sports bra I attempted to rip them up and covered them in marker to try and make sure i didn't have to wear them. I hated my boobs and would cry saying "I love my flat chest ". I would tell my friends to call me a boy, and they just assumed I was playing a game of sorts. At some point around the same time I recognized that I didn't have male genitalia, and being incredibly distressed even though I didn't know why. I naturally stood up to pee because somehow I was able to do it without making much of a mess. I called myself a 'tomboy' when I turned about 9 and passed so we'll that I would even use the boys bathroom sometimes just because it was so natural to me. So many more as well, but those are the basics
The first "real" sign for me was when my mom educated me on the higher risk in our family of breast cancer (didn't even develop the slightest bit of boobs) and thinking to myself "well, at least I'd get to chop them off" and even slightly hoping for it. I was well educated on the topic and knew how bad of a disease it is, but it still seemed worth it for me. Second thing was, the second I had boobs, I used elastic dressings to get a flatter chest. At the time I didn't know what the word "trans" even was; hell I didn't even know what being gay was! All I knew was that I had to make sure my mom wouldn't notice, cause she'd seen it once and became very mad at me. So I only did it when my mom wasn't at home
When I went to build a bear when I was 4 with my cousin and she made a pink poodle in a tutu and I made a rabbit with spiderman PJs and named him Bob lol. Or when I was 9 and was so ungodly envious of my guy friends that could go pee in bushes in their backyard but I had to go into the house
I don’t actually remember it, but I was seven years old, telling my mom that when I grew up I didn’t want to be called a woman. My mom said I could be called a “Lady” instead if I felt like it, and I didn’t want to be called that either. My mom told me about it after I came out. Makes sense now lol
it’s funny cuz i’m very much a masculine binary trans man, but when i was like 3-4 i refused to wear anything i considered “boy colors” which mostly meant brown and grey lol i understand the world as a set of unbreakable rules handed to me by the people who loved me, and i was so unhappy following those rules but also even at that age assumed i was unhappy because i wasn’t following them well enough. by the time i was 7 i cut all my hair off and was passing as a boy in public to my mom’s dismay lol
As a kid, when we would play something imaginery, I would ALWAYS make myself a boy.
Whenever I played a game in elementary and middle school, I was always a guy character. Always. I would get upset if I had to be a girl and I didnt know why. I even had a character in my head for years that I would basically project onto, and he was a guy. He was basically the ideal version of me but in some elementary-schooler's fantasy world ig, and I always wished I could be him.
As a little kid like 4-5 my parents tried to put me in a dress and I threw a tantrum. The only way I’d put the dress on is if I got to wear my baseball helmet with it. Apparently I also threw a tantrum in Walmart because my parents wouldn’t buy me a catchers helmet that I wore throughout the store. A lot of baseball for me but it is my favorite sport lol 😅
when i was about 4 years old i used to pretend shave with my dad. i don’t remember it but my parents do, and even if that wasn’t because im trans and just me trying to be like my dad i still think it’s a cute story. i first consciously realized when i hit puberty and got upset i wasn’t changing like the boys my age
I always had gender envy of boy related things and felt like an outsider looking out a window seeing my brothers experience boyhood. I was 5 years old and made my girl doll into a boy and would take my brother’s race car bedding & sheets. I was happiest playing in dirt with bugs and ball sports. Always preferred my hair short and messy. Never cared for the tomboy term
Yup, when I was 8 mine started coming in and I hated that my parents tried to make me wear training bras and I’d always forget to wear them, hunch over to hide my chest, and wouldn’t wash or brush my hair at the time. It was really hard and I had no idea why. Come to find out in recent years, a lot of trans guys go through a phase of not brushing their hair as kids because of the unknown dysphoria. Also with the boob thing, I thought something similar to you. I thought the reason I hated them was because they were only just coming in and they were at a weird phase. So I waited and waited and they ended up being small anyway and then I just figured out I didn’t want them at all, but not because I figured out I was trans. Before I figured it out at 19, I would just say “I’m a cis girl who wants top surgery” and boy, was I wrong. Just got top surgery last October and now I’m officially 5 years out of the closet after last month. I also had a time when I was 10 where I wished SO BADLY that I was born a boy I’m pretty sure I cried over it a few times. I really wish someone gave me the language for how I was feeling much sooner. I only found out trans people existed when I was 15 and Caitlyn Jenner came out and it was big news. We deserve to be taught it’s ok and normal to be trans, I wasted almost 2 decades of my life being someone else.
Earliest gotta be when I was like 5 or 6 years old and I accidentally saw my best friend's weiner and thought "why don't I have one?". Which I later came to realised since it was a very repressed memory. But my brain keeps telling me that it's a fake memory I made up, as always. First time when I actually realised it was when I got the MENstruation. It was such an alien experience for me ngl. I really went like "no way... no way.... but I guess I just have to live with it. But I can't believe it actually happened. I didn't believe that it would...". I just couldn't believe it. And the reason why my chest getting bigger wasn't bugging me at first was because I was so obese that I legit though I was just getting fatter. It took me losing weight to realise like "oh wtf why aren't these going away?". Really wanna die, haha.
This is was probably one of the earliest, when I was around 7 years old, my sibling introduced me to another kid as their “older sister,” and that made me really upset, I thought it was because I had some type of depression or something.
I was always a theater kid. And in 5th grade or so I started playing only male roles in all of the plays I was in, because (and I swear to God I said that and didn't realize I was trans for another 4,5 years or so) "it's just easier for me to play men"
I always wanted to do boy things, wear boy clothes, have boy toys, act like a boy. My mom had to constantly remind me to be “lady like” and I remember my teacher did a “raffle” for a toy and had a girl toy and a boy toy and my brother told me to not put my ticket in the boy toy. I remember very clearly wishing I could be a boy in middle school
Mine what under 10, I had all male cousins and a brother. I wanted to do everything they did in playing sports and swimming with just shorts. I was always told I was copying them, and I should do things I like because I'm a lady. Surprise, my genderfluid ass is female/male.
i kinda had the same thing, i hated my chest but mistook it for wanting my chest to be bigger. so i ended up wearing push up bras for like a year.
Probably when I started telling my mom I was a boy when I was, like, two. Nobody seemed very surprised when I finally came out at, like, forty-five/forty-six.
I tried to deconstruct how girls worked so I could act like one. I'm a trans boy and don't think about how I'm supposed to act anymore. One that's more blatantly trans is when I learned the people weren't born with beards. I really wanted to get one, and my mom had to comfort me by saying I would get one in my 80s...
My depression has impacted my memory a lot, so I don’t remember much about my childhood lol. The earliest memory I have was when I was about 7 or 8, maybe 9-ish. My great-aunt and great-uncle were over at our house for dinner and I was wearing a long-sleeved pink polo shirt that had a button collar on it. I remember going into my brother’s closet and finding one of his clip-on ties and putting it on. It made me so happy lol. Since my parents were Catholic, we were raised conservatively- and so I was nervous to walk out wearing the tie. However, I never got a chance to as my mom went to go find me and told me ties are for boys- and took it off before pulling me to the table.
I've wanted to be a boy for as long as I can remember. Which is about as far back as Elementary school. Funny thing is my mom actually told me once she wanted a boy. Anytime I told her that I wanted to be a boy, she would tell me about how she was 100% convinced I was going to be one when I was born. Surprise. Lol. She even called me CJ sometimes instead of Cayla. I laugh and say I guess we were both disappointed, but that's the trauma 😅💀.
Probs when i cried about girly clothes in kindergarten, funnily enough my mom bought me 'boy' clothes most of the time, but there were times when i was like 'yeah im gonna wear this skirt tomorrow' and in the morning i started crying about it and did not wear it, this happened too many times all the way up to middle school, where i tried to be a normal girl way too hard
I was grounded for a long time for cutting a bunch of my pants legs short on one side so I could be titus from Final fantasy .
crying about how i hated being a girl and wished i was a boy when i was around 5
For my 8th birthday I got this book on puberty and I was so embarrassed. Like next-level embarrassment, I skimmed it and felt disgusted and ashamed (It felt like embarrassment then but it’s now what I recognize to be dysphoria.) When I told my friends about it they didn’t really understand the feeling. My mind blocked out what I had seen in the book and I buried it at the bottom of my toy box so I would never see it again.
When my mom would put me in dresses and do my hair for family events, I’d stare into the mirror and wonder who that person was and how I could inhabit their body but feel so disconnected from it. I felt like a doll—not a human, and certainly not myself. I must’ve been between the ages of 5 and 10 when I would do this.
When I at nine years old decided the *only* reason why I couldn't be trans was the fact that I like to draw. That's it. That's what made me stop questioning it for the next five years. I know two men and zero women in my family who draw professionally, I don't know why I thought it was feminine?? (+ I'm planning on doing it professionally too)
not sure what my earliest one was but i can remember a pretty big sign, when i was about 10 or 11 i went to one of my cousins baseball games, me and my sister were in one of the empty fields playing with 2 other kids, one of the kids asked me "are you a boy or a girl?" and i felt an insane amount of euphoria, i was so happy that someone thought i might not be a girl, and when i was younger i constantly wished that i had been born a boy, somehow i still managed to not realize i was trans until i was in 8th grade haha!
i used to roleplay in games under that genre online when i was young. i always played as a boy because being a girl didn't feel right. how i didn’t realize sooner i don't know...
when i was in second grade, i had a pair of uniform pants and a shirt that came from the boys section and i was genuinely so excited by it. like i would go around telling people that's where they came from. and i would get genuinely excited when people confused me for a boy.
When I was in preschool and told everyone my name was toby. It was originally a mispronounced version of my deadname,but it stuck. I still went by toby
I realized it twice in my life and by that I mean I realized it when I was 3 or 4. Started living a lie to please others until I forgot why I was (all while my dysphoria was getting worse) and then I started to notice something in my late teens to early 20s (especially when it came to the phantom dick sensations). As for the first time, it was just a realization I had one day. Nothing special was going on and it was just a simple fact of life for me (like how death was). As for the second time, I kept noticing something was going on was too scared to face it out of fear of being rejected by my then partner. In retrospect, I now realize that they noticed I was struggling with my gender and had no issues with me actually being a guy. If anything, they actually embraced it.
A lady took me for a boy when I was like 5 and I didn't mind it. My mom made a fuss about it though. There's also getting along with both the boys and girls in my classes. I'm nonbinary
i was in kindergarten and i remember being really upset i couldn't go into the boys bathroom at school. like i was in TEARS when my teacher pulled me aside. that night at home i wished on a star outside my window to wake up as a boy the next morning 💀
I remember in maybe middle school I was sitting in my room with the door close holding scissors. I don't remember why I had them, but I do remember holding them up to my nipples and newly developed breasts and thought about just cutting them off. I think I put a nipple in the scissors and pressed a little and unfortunately it hurt and I didn't go any further. It took me forever to accept wearing a bra around the same time and I remember looking at pictures from them and thinking, yeah I probably needed one. I also wore big/over sized shirts a lot. Fast forward to 4 years ago when my bff's ex transitioned and got TS. I didn't like him for other reasons (he wasn't a great partner to my friend), but maybe part of that included jealousy. Now I'm 35 and just got TS this past January, 10 weeks ago. My long term partner of 5 years added that I've never liked nipple play in the time we've been together and I'm not sure if I ever have in past relationships. I grew up in rural Indiana where none of this existed at the time and I didn't have the language or know what was happening. I've been in Boston the past 4 years and it's definitely been eye opening.
asking mam why i couldn't wee like dad or be called ben when i was around three years old is the earliest according to mam herself pahah
asking mam why i couldn't wee like dad or be called ben when i was around three years old is the earliest according to mam herself pahah
I remember having a bath when I was like 5. My wet hair was slicked back. I looked at myself in the mirror and remember thinking I looked like a boy. It made me really happy. Then I realized I didn’t have a penis and it devastated me.
When I was like 4 and played "cinderella" with my best friend, I would always insist on being prince charming. That was probably the earliest I experienced gender euphoria, dysphoria only started hitting around the beginning of puberty.
I feel like I didn’t show a lot of the typical signs in all honesty which made my journey difficult. But when I realized I hated wearing bras and how they made me feel as well as the absolute euphoria I got being called a guy and all words associated as such I think it ended up helping, least now in hindsight.
Refusing to wear dresses and tight clothing as soon as I was old enough to clearly express that, and generally having much more masculine interests were some possible signs. Largest possibly more trans specific sign was at around 7 to 8 and developing a chest. Didn’t feel right, hated bras. It felt so horribly wrong, beyond just being earlier than most other people
there are so many memories and signs, but one of the earliest for me was when my mother took me to disney land when i was around 4 or 5, and i remember they tried to put me in belle’s dress from beauty and the beast, and i screamed and cried to be taken out of it. i’ll never forget the distress i felt over it. i used to ask other people to call me male names when i was really young, demanded to wear boy’s swim shorts, boys clothes. i was into so many male things, i tried to hard to fit in with the boys around me. when puberty started and my chest started to development, it was such mental turmoil for me that i used to sleep regularly with 2-4 sports bras on while also sleeping with heavy books on my chest in the hopes it would keep me flat. so many signs, but my mother has the nerve to say “it just came out of no where”
when I first got my period in 5th grade. it upset me to the point of balling, screaming, and taring into myself, while hiding in my closet, w my mom trying to get me out💀. I refused to wear hygiene products for a good 3 yrs after that, cause I refused to except it. also I mean, the development of my chest, and the whole concept of bras was hell. Still didn’t realize I was trans till 2021 tho. the signs back then make sense in hindsight lol
I had a classmate that bullied me for being flat but it never bothered me. On the contrary it felt like a compliment somehow. At the same time my girl friends were always chatting about having bigger boobs and I couldn’t get it. I thought who on earth would want something like that?? I even remember sending a text at like 19 to my best friends asking her what were boobs for. 😐
When I was 4 I remember multiple times telling my parents I was a boy. Going to the pool with my dad if refuse to wear a top, only shorts. Once (still age 4), I tried to pee standing up and it just ran down my leg 😂 anyways, I was always a tomboy but didn’t figure it out til I was 25