Back when I was pretending to be a boy, I had just hit 9th grade and moved to a new school. I was always a late bloomer in terms of my first puberty but it hit me like a freight train when it did.

All of a sudden my legs, arms, belly, nipples (weirdly) got hairy and I was terribly self conscious about it. Not that I had an obscene amount of hair, but it really felt like I did. It felt gross and uncomfortable. Never wore shorts or short sleeve shirts because of it. Even in the dead of summer.

After a few months of this curse, I decided enough was enough - stole one of my mom's super cheap bic razors and hacked away at my entire body. Took me a few hours to get every inch. Many cuts and scraped, but I finally felt like I could be a bit more comfortable in my skin.

Felt great about my decision until everyone at school noticed and made fun of me because it was really "weird" and I didn't have a good enough reason for why I did it other than "I felt trapped under all of the hair, I just really don't like it"

Peer pressure took over and I eventually stopped after a few months. A decade later, my egg finally cracked.

Can you guess what the first thing I did was after realizing I am a woman?

electric razor noises

The first time I heard the phrase “do I want to be with her or do I want to be her” was a major holy shit moment for me. It made me realize that my relationship with the concept of “attraction” was way more complicated than I thought. At that moment, I had a realization that what I thought was attraction to women is actually a mix of both attraction and envy, and the reason I had always denied my attraction to men is that the idea of being in a mlm relationship made me unbearably dysphoric

Egg went splat and things made a bit more sense.

• complete lack of care about my own appearance (recently realized that while becoming a big buff muscley man doesn't appeal at all, becoming a visibly fit woman sounds pretty alright to me)

• always been uncomfortable within my own body/skin (too big in the wrong places, too hairy)

• a lot of longing for transformation/shape-shifting abilities (Christopher Paolinis Inheritance series goes hard about magic enabling elves to be exactly as their heart desires)

• upon learning FtM transitioning was a thing, absolutely confused about why anyone would ever WANT to be male/masculine

• started speaking a lot less after my voice literally changed overnight, no periods of cracking voice just immediately deep (it is irredeemably masculine and i hate it)

Edit: Oh and can't forget

• never being comfortable being shirtless, even as a prepubescent child.

And (edit2)

• giving up and growing a beard because trying to keep my chin clear of hair is borderline impossible.

Most of my pre egg cracking symptoms started at around eleven or twelve, but I was a pretty masculine child in personality.

I greatly exaggerated having voice cracks when I was going through first puberty. It made me feel masculine.

I always spoke in the lowest possible vocal register.

I refused to shave any body hair and never even entertained the idea despite significant outside pressure to.

I rarely showered because I wanted to stink like a teenage boy. I also dreaded any puberty pains or growth that was happening. It felt like body horror.

I had so much trouble understanding pubescent girls in the media, how they were so excited to have their first period or wear their first bra. I thought everyone experienced the absolute dread that came with puberty and they were all just pretending. I was fully expecting to get a huge growth spurt one day and grow to be 6ft tall and look like Jim Morrison. It felt like someone had made a mistake and it would correct itself naturally.

I remember getting on my knees and praying to God (i didn't even believe in god, that's how desperate i felt) not to let my chest to develop at all. I remember one time I read in a news article about moms in indonesia or something would put hot rocks on their daughter's chests to prevent any breasts from growing and it was being touted as a gross human rights violation. I tried to put burning hot rocks on my chest when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. Didn't work, unfortunately :'(

I always wanted to go shirtless all the time. My mom had to practically wrangle me into a bra. At the same time, my newly developing chest seemed wholly foreign to me. It felt like a completely separate entity that was latched onto my real body.

I never really related to any girls my age when I was growing up. Always felt like an outsider in large groups of girls. Felt like they spoke a language I couldn't understand. Of course, I always had extremely codependent intense "friendships" with one girl at time. Took me a while to realize that was me liking girls.

I watched a lot of anime around that age, and for about a week after finishing one I'd adopt the personality and mannerisms of any male character that I thought was cool. One time I barely talked for a week so I could be just like jotaro from JoJo's bizarre adventure 🤦🏼‍♂️

Despite all of this, it would take me a while to figure out that I'm trans. That was never an option for the longest time.

Lots, but the biggest for me was how I could never feel comfortable with the type of man I would become. I knew I didn't want to be like some of the unkind men I knew, but I also hated the idea of growing up into even the kindest and most fun men in my life.

I spent so many years trying to figure out how to do manhood, always feeling like it was wrong. Sure, I wanted to be a woman. Sure I wished I could live and present as myself, but that's not manly. (Lived like this for years without being able to acknowledge I was trans btw, crazy looking back)

Finally accepting that I could be who I wanted to be is so freeing, and makes me see the years of dysphoria for what they were.

My god so often.

• That time I was obsessed with/cluelessly envious of Kim Petras for like a week in 2009.
• Wishing that I could grow up in a fem cybernetic body the way Motoko did in Ghost in the Shell.
• "Boy clothes are so boring, girls are so lucky they get to wear all these cool things"
• That weird empty/jealous feeling I got when looking at pretty girls and even artistic renditions of women. One time this feeling was so bad I typed some rant describing this into my friend group's "art" channel in discord. Nobody responded thankfully but I'm sure they had questions.
• Never being comfortable with being referred to by my full name but being alright with the shortened version/nickname that is much more gender neutral.
• Unexplained platonic attraction to trans women and gnc people (I guess this one's not so much dysphoria as it is just a possible sign)
• Hating the idea of my voice deepening, and feeling kinda weird when I got mistaken for my dad over the phone. I think I subconsciously altered my voice over the years because my voice comes out very breathy now despite being somewhat deep. (Could also be social anxiety, still figuring this one out)
• ~~Crying~~ Bawling the year I got a gift box of Old Spice cologne and deodorant for Christmas.
• Feeling uncomfortable with picking male characters in games that give you the option. Like actual physical and emotional discomfort.
• Wearing a hoodie every day all day during middle school and high school even in the California summers.
• An inability to refer to myself as a man, and being uncomfortable having to refer to myself as a boy. I would almost always just say guy because it felt less loaded. Even typing this out gave me pause.
• Depression beard
• That time a friend called me our mutal friend's waifu and our mutual friend played along which gave me (unbeknownst to me at the time) gender euphoria
• In the same vein, after I married a good friend in final fantasy xiv, he (jokingly? idk it was a little sus) asked me to call him darling and I leaned into it HARD. I thought this was my bisexual awakening but thinking about it now, knowing I'm trans, I think I just wanted to be seen as a woman in the context of a relationship. (and in general as well obviously) This gives me a lot to think about. Thanks OP.

Probably more I can't think of at the moment.

All of this and I still have doubts and imposter syndrome. Sometimes I want to grab myself by the shoulders and scream.

The moment my egg cracked was when I felt my child kick in my partner's belly. I realized that all the jokes I made about wanting to seahorse a pregnancy was just making light of that being a deep desire of mine.

After that a number of things just started to click that I was not someone that fell into a gender binary: -Feelings of euphoria when I got when wait staff would call me miss/mam. -How I would buy clothing I thought was unisex sized, but I would end up walking away with women's cloths that did not fit my normal size. -Being happy when my group of friends called me the den mother of the group. -Realizing that I felt the most in common with relatives that broke gender norms. My mom who wore men's shirts/pants her whole life, only wore a dress for a funeral or wedding, and was the bread winner of my family. An aunt who was a kick ass drummer. A friend that was exploring her gender, and just doing her best to see where things landed. -Thinking that it was interesting that women that presented with 'masculine' behaviors were so wonderful, and that there was an absence of men displaying 'feminine' behaviors when I was going through my rural home town. -Having thoughts about how I wished I was born a woman, but that I would want to grow my body hair and that I'd hope I could be as tall as I am now. -That most people probably don't look into the mirror and think that something doesn't look quite right or that some of the features that they saw would be beautiful on the opposite sex.

Ultimately I'm happy with how I present, and I'm not sure if I'll ever go the route of HRT. It isn't off the table, but I'm not sure if it is going to be a part of my journey.

That said if there was a realistic option for me to become a birthing parent I would pursue that doggedly. I also know that when we try for our second kid that I am expecting to have to go through another long and hard period of dysphoria. It'll be worth it, but I need to remember to be kinder and more patient with myself.

Yup. Having to rethink my past in the newly discovered lens of "Wait this is who I've always been?" was an eye-opening experience for me.

Like suddenly remembering a previously suppressed memory of being 10 years old and fantasizing about growing up and being able to get surgery to "be a woman" (I've always been a woman) and then being sad after then realizing that the only way to do that would be if my whole family died. (I wasn't being murderous, don't worry lol.)

Remembering that event and how painful a realization it was was a real "holy shit I've always known I was a woman but didn't make the connection until now" kind of moment.

It was always obvious to me that what I felt was dysphoria, but somehow I never made the connection between that and what it meant to be trans. The biggest moment I had was once when my aunt was talking about somebody's cat and used a cutesy voice, and I felt a pit in my stomach as if my heart had sunk straight into it. I thought "I will never be able to do that with my voice", yet somehow didn't come to the conclusion that I wasn't cis.

For me it was "gender euphoria" that I realized after the fact. During the pandemic we had to wear masks and people constantly addressed me as a girl until I spoke, since my beard and masculine facial features were obscured. It gave me a lot of confidence, and suddenly I realized that the only way I've ever felt confident in my appearance is through feminine expression. Then I told someone I was playing with in Overwatch about all of that, and they said something like "I don't know any cis people that do or think like this" and I had a moment like this.

(edit): Some more moments...

• When I learned how to write, I liked how my mom wrote more than how I was being taught to write so my Y's looked more like this than this. The teachers told me I wasn't allowed to do that while the girls would go on to do it anyways, and it really frustrated me as a child.
• I've always texted like a teenage girl, using lots of text emojis :3 :P :D and one time a friend of mine said "you text like a 13 year old girl." And I just thought...well that only makes me want to do it more! Still cis, though 🫠
• I always wanted long hair, and when we moved I saw a lot of boys with long hair and after getting over being nervous, I decided to start growing it out. My mom protested because she thought it was me being lazy, but eventually she realized maybe I just wanted long hair and we drove back home.
• When my hair started to get really long, I was going to turn off my light to go to sleep one night and saw my silhouette on the wall looked like a girl. That awakened something in me and we've only been going deeper ever since. Still cis, though 🤦‍♀️
• At first I always picked male characters in RPGs because I thought I was supposed to. But one day I decided I wanted to restart Pokemon Diamond to try a different starter...and I chose to play as the girl, and it felt scandalous lol. But it felt so right! From then on, I always played a girl if it were an option, and when my friends started to notice they called me out on it and I'd sheepishly pitch the excuse "well choosing to look at a man the whole time over the woman is gay" (jokingly) knowing it was a lie, but not really knowing the truth either.
• One time in middle school I was talking to my very progressive girlfriend and she said I was handsome and whatnot, and I told her I didn't want to be handsome, I wanted to be beautiful like her. She asked me "are you sure you're not trans?" ... "No... I don't know. But I'm not willing to say I'm trans."
• There's been lots of moments where girls want to braid my hair or do my nails and I loved it, but I was definitely hoping people thought I was doing it to get closer to girls. I didn't want anyone to know I liked it.

Those all make a lot more sense in retrospect lol. I've also had similar experiences with dysphoria but not as much.

• I've always wanted my handwriting to be neat and feminine like the women around me. I hate my handwriting...
• I once read a post about a blind man who judged attractiveness on dates by a woman's hand, and I was suddenly hyper-aware of how manly my hands are
• In middle school Spanish class we had to wear weird outfits for an assignment while the rest of the class described it in Spanish, and one of mine was a pair of my girlfriend's leggings. It was windy when we went to the bus, and the leggings were flapping around on the lower thighs because despite me having the same length of legs as her, my legs were a different shape. dysphoria.exe

Makes a lot more sense in retrospect...

wanting to wear the same type of leggings that I saw girls around me wearing in middle school and high school before I had any experience buying my own clothes and wore whatever my parents gave me.

• wearing a jacket even in 80°F weather
• being disappointed when my accidental assignment to the girls' locker room was "corrected"
• disordered eating to get rid of belly fat
• fantasizing about being a woman
• obsessing over female D&D characters

I could probably hunt down a few more signs, but they weren't obvious at the time, even if I felt guilty about them

Oh yeah haha. More than one moment.

Why did I hate shopping for clothes? So much that I only did so 2-3 times over a decade.

Why did getting dressed feel so wrong? Why couldn't I ever picture myself with a clothing style?

Never wanted to talk? Never wanted to be seen? Never wanted to dance? Never wanted to be touched?

And then I realized I was trans, literally all that stuff changed. I'm sure there is so much more too. It's pretty wild how little I lived before, and pretty exciting how much I can live now!

I actually had a fight with a friend of mine about her never wearing any makeup and dresses. Like at least she could do it sometimes, right? Like how can you be so lucky to have that privilege only to squander it so casually.

Let's just say that we don't squabble about that any more.