This is going to need some preamble, methinks.

I was a precocious little kitten from the get-go, and my parents encouraged this. They started teaching me to read over a year before I started kindergarten and instilled in me a voracious appetite for literature. I grew up with an analog childhood, so I exhausted our local library's kids section and moved on to young-adult novels while I was still in elementary school. When one of my friends called me in terror and confusion at having his first erection, I gave him "the talk" when I was only 9 years old.

One of my earliest memories is of asking my mother why the hero always gets the girl at the end of a bedtime story, so I think I've always known I was different. But back in the 90's there was basically no queer representation available in Texas public libraries, so despite being very mature for my age, I still didn't understand what made me feel so different from my peers.

That changed very quickly in my 11th year when we got dial-up internet, it was only a matter of hours before my first forays into the information superhighway brought me the knowledge that gay, trans, and gender-nonconforming people exist. I felt a kinship with these queer folks and soon after I was pretending to be 18 so I could join adults-only chatrooms. That environment gave me the safe space I needed to introspect and the context to understand what I was learning about myself, but I repressed the realization that I was nonbinary because that simply wasn't an option in Texas. Even a binary transition required jumping through hoops like "Living as your preferred gender for a year" before one could qualify for hormone therapy. So I dismissed my feelings as mere fantasies, to the detriment of my mental health as puberty took its course.

Things began to change in high school, I went through a couple of awkward first relationshps before falling in with a couple of guys with whom I am still in a polyamorous relationship to this day. Their affection was unconditional, so I was able to admit to them that I enjoyed crossdressing in private. But it was a ladyfriend I met in college who most encouraged me to embrace the parts of myself I had been holding back.

Still, I couldn't allow myself to internalize it. I couldn't be a weird inbetween gender in Texas and I knew I wasn't a trans woman, so I must be one of those fey pansexual cis dudes, right? Fast forward to the pandemic, when the Texas legislature started pushing abortion restrictions I knew it was past time to go. So I took the first job I could get in a blue state, we packed up all our stuff, and got out of there. A few months after settling in to the new place, a visit from that college ladyfriend reminds me of how nice it feels to be pretty, and I dig out the box of dresses and skirts I hadn't worn since before the move. The D-cup breastforms I had felt awkwardly large, so on a whim I bought a pair of silicone A-cups.

Putting those on and looking in the mirror was the final crack that shattered my egg forever. I saw myself in the androgynous figure looking back at me and immediately broke down in tears. In that moment I realized the part of me that I had been suppressing was the truth, and the fantasy was the notion that I could sleepwalk through the rest of my life as a man without regrets.

That was about a year ago now. I started hormone therapy just a few months later.