"My gender dysphoria made itself known ....etc." in around 60 words.

[Guest cerise]

My gender dysphoria made itself known when I bought a Honey West comic book in sept of 1966.

I had just turned 9 and although there might have been inkling, such as wanting to wear woman's skates, that was when I first wanted to be the woman I was looking at.a few more awakenings happened in my 9s and 10s but it was in a dream I had where I saw myself as a woman when I was 13 or 14 that my transgender nature flowered.

Love Cerise

[tracy_j]

I remember when I was pre-school although I often wore a cowboy outfit (at least the hat and guns) I always wanted to be the pretty Indian Squaw. It never happened . It is only now I know what it meant.

I used to read and look at books when I was little as well as watch the TV and look at girls of similar age with very unclear feelings which I am still not sure of. I never knew whether I wanted to be with them as friend, lover or even be them. I suppose if I really think it is that all of the options were correct. That is looking from what I know now.

It didn't half complicate relationships though!

Tracy x

[Charlize]

I knew i had gender issues early. When the girls started to chase the boys around the playground in first grade (6) i knew i was somehow on the wrong team and felt badly left out. I had no idea i was transgendered until much later in life. I considered myself a cross dresser. I wasn't sure what i was even though i dressed and traveled through as much of life as i could without my families knowledge. I would change after leaving the house and do all my shopping and some of my work as a female. I met a transgendered person at a meeting and liked her. We chatted. Eventually i came out to a group i had spent time with for 5 years. They accepted me. One night i found Laura's after coming home from a meeting. I started reading and posting and getting honest with myself. Soon after i was at a therapist and living full time. It took me a long time. I guess i'm a slow learner and hopefully i'm still learning, especially how to accept this reality.

Hugs,

Charlize

[MarcieMarie12]

Mine didn't show up until I was around 9 or 12, for some reason I thought I could change my gender if I did X (it hurt), Y(that's crazy talk), or Z (what's up God, don't you listen?). I pushed into the background, and did cross-dress then purge cycle over the years. Stopped for the last 7 years, then just went totally obsessive about it. This past may I accepted that cross dressing is a part of me and supressing it is bad for my mental health. The question for me is how far do I need to go? The more I get to cross dress, the more dysphoric I get when I am not. I'm in therapy to get a hold of all this and not end up a suicide statistic.

[Wynnie]

Since we are sharing... I was around 6 when I got confused. One Halloween, a boy from the neighborhood showed up at the church's Halloween party in a Cinderella costume. I always stayed away from the crowd, so we were on the outskirts of the function and visited. Turns out, his family bought the outfit for his sister, but the party wasn't on Halloween and she didn't want to go, so they just had him wear it. The folks didn't have money. Back then in our neighborhood, nobody did. He was embarrassed about it, but came to the party anyway. I couldn't imagine why because I would have loved to be in his place. Truth is, he looked pretty. It took 20+ years before I got to feel pretty.

Wynnie

[Guest April Kristie]

I knew around five I was on the wrong side of the gender thang. As a Roman Catholic drone, I prayed to their God every night, but nothing changed. I would be found standing in my mothers heels late at night and shoo'd to bed. My older sister who made a pillow in home economics out of old nylon stockings she had run ( fifties) , I poked a hole in that pillow and pulled out those nylons and put them on. I was playing with my sisters dolls and was told not to do that, I later got the dolls and hid behind the furniture to play with them. It was like that when I took to drugs in my teens, a family totally hands off. Thank goodness I survived.

[Callie15]

It first became apparent to me that something was wrong when I was about five or six. My mother took me shopping for school uniforms(I went to Catholic school) and I had been asking her for a while to take me to the bathroom. She kept telling me to wait and finally I could no longer. While she was cleaning me up she didn't have any underwear for me in her purse like she usually did(I had infantile displagia wich causes alot of problems, least if all bladder control), but she did have a pair of my sisters panties. She put them on me all the while calling me sissy boy and shaming me about wearing my sisters panties and telling me that only little girls wet themselves. I remember then thinking that if that was the case I must be a little girl. Ever since then my awareness for who and what I am until it expanded into seeing a therapist and being mostly out.

[SoSarah]

Elementary school was all about triggers for me. When I saw so many bright colors on a garment ( dresses ) I thought how lucky a girl student could be, and you could wear your hair long, well that was for me. Hope scotch and the social network I observed was not a option for a little boy by mid sixties standards. I prayed to wake up as girl through 5th grade then life as it does came knocking and I prayed about other things. I do though think I knew much earlier 3-4, I saw a picture of me at christmas, I was a in a new pedel car fire engine and my sisters were holding their new teddy bears, my dad was so mad at me for being more interested in the soft bears ( remember we are in the early 60's ), I at this age in 2015 I have several teddy bears, as does all my grandchildren from me....boys and girls.

[Guest VioletDharma]

I really don't know what first happened, but some of the earliest, significant moments that I remember are when I was around 6-7ish and I would sing and impersonate every Cindy Lauper and Madonna song (and other 80's female singers)... "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!" But I was surprised at how disturbed people were by this!

Around that same time, I was always getting invited by girls to go to their birthday parties. I was always playing dress-up and wanted to be the princess, rather than the prince. But I remember one was a slumber party and I was not allowed to stay for the sleepover part. I was so confused and rejected and couldn't share my feelings with anybody. I remember asking my guy-friends at a sleepover if they ever felt like they wanted to be girls, and they just laughed and teased me. I never spoke of it again.

I would often fabricate outfits out of bits of clothes, cutting pieces and pinning them together to make my own "skirts" and "tops" and I wanted to be Boy George so bad. And that movie "Just One of the Guys" was one of my favorites. I felt like I was the main actress: a woman pretending to be a guy. I think that gave me some context to understand what the heck was happening.