Things You Do When You Was Younger

[Guest Marco]

i would always run around shirtless before puberty also. i even convinced my parents to let me wear swim trunks without a shirt at pools.[it got me kicked out of swim class.] the day i realized that the things on my chest weren't pecks i locked myself in my room and refused to come out until the strange things on my body left.

[Guest Mina]

I used to tell my mom I wanted to be a boy. She would get upset, and I learned not to mention it. I would sometimes sneak into my brother's room to play with his cars and other toys. I was very ashamed when I started to get my period and refused to talk about it. I was also mortified when I started to get breasts, and I slouched a lot to hide them. I wore boys clothes from a very young age, at first mostly because they were hand-me-downs, but pretty soon I kind of refused to wear anything else. But some things I did at that time were rather feminine, too. I was always encouraged to be very girly, and have only recently begun to undo that conditioning.

[Guest JackKat]

I remember when I was 5 I couldnt understand why 'grown up girls' liked 'grown up boys.' I thought it made more sence for girls to be with girls and boys to be with boys, I didnt know boys and girls had diffrent stuff down there! I thought when a baby was born the doctor just picked if it was a girl or a boy, so i thought it would be easy to get mixed up!

Jack

[Guest Michelle M]

My first toy was Hello Kitty. I used to try wearing my mom's swimsuits, or wear them under my clothes, and get slapped for it. I used to wonder why I was forced to wear shorts. I played with stuffed animals. I gave them all names, and family roles. I gave them moral dilemmas, or episodes with their neighbors they had to deal with, the neighbors were also animals. I had way too many of them. I'd build houses for them out of pillows and blankets. I once introduced myself to a grandmother's friend as 'her grand daughter'. I roleplayed females 80% of the time, or thought a strong female lead was cool. I had a high voice that really wavers when I'm excited or talking fast. I got "ma'am'd" on the phone often until I was 18 and learned to talk deeper. (Which I shouldn't have, Gosh darned society) In gradeschool and middleschool the blind lunch ladies would sometimes call me "she" or "that girl". In little league baseball while I was batting once I heard from the audience "Is it a girl?" My first car I ever wanted was a Dodge Neon or VW Beetle; my dad told me "You can't get one of those, that's a chick car." Grrrr.

[Guest Mr. Fox]

I wasn't really a tomboy as a kid, although there are signs. I liked playing with toy cars, but I liked dolls too. By third grade I hated Babies. I don't recall wearing skirts or dresses more than once every few years in grade school, but I didn't mind them, I remember thinking the dress I wore to a wedding was very pretty (it was, it had cherries on it). I remember that there was "Girl's Club," which was when a bunch of girls would stand against the wall and do nothing, and I left because it was boring and I thought it was sexist. I never understood the constant gender war of young children. I wished that boys would play with me, but I didn't think about it much. Most of my stuffed animals were male, and I even had one that alternated from being a dude to being butch (ha, these stuffed animals prove that I'm manly). My favorite subject was science, and I liked learning about bugs. My sister told me about an operation to change a man to a woman, and wondered why anybody would want to do that. I always would touch myself down there because it felt like there was something down there other than a girl thing (phantom genitals . . . My third grade teacher asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom one time when I did that, and I said no. She probably thought that I was self gratification!) I was uncomforable with public changing even as a child, and thought that my breasts were freakish when they came. I wasn't thought of as masculine very much, but as very weird.

[Guest Silver]

There weren't many signs that I was trans when I was little. Ok, so I hated wearing my shirt in summer and didn't like skirts. I never liked pink either. But I did dress up in female and male clothes when I was a kid. I think I knew I was different when I was very young. Growing up in a gender-neutral enviroment, I never said "i'm not a girl." Then again I don't think I knew there were different genders, just "mommies can wear skirts" and "daddies were suits and can have beards." other than that, I really didn't know. All of the girl characters I played in games were masculine, sometimes mechanics, sometimes girls pretending to be boys...

Around eleven I think, when I got "The Talk," I noticed I was different. I didn't realize who I was until I saw a movie in blockbuster mom was considering getting, featuring a transsexual. She didn't get it because she thought it was too mature for her kids.

Ok that was long. Long story short, not many signs for me.

[Guest Kelly]

hmm i had the opposite of you F2M's.

i used to go to my sisters friends house's and they used to talk about

how they were exited to grow their boobs. and i used to get all mad when they told me i wouldn't get any.

i also always role played females

[Guest Lee]

huh, I don't remember a lot from when I was little. I do remember that my favorite toys were pogs and action figures from some alien movie, but I did like playing with Barbie, too, though most of the time I killed Barbie. I remember I would hide behind this big, EZ chair (or whatever they're called) and make my voice as deep as I could and try to sound like a guy. My mom also says I tried to pee standing up and I couldn't understand why I wasn't like my brother. And when I was about 6 or 7 I refused to wear skirts and dresses.

I always tried to be as macho as I could. It worried my mom, but only because I would do stuff like fall down, then jump back up with a gash on my knee and blood running down my leg and go "I'm ok!" and go running off.

[Guest JAB]

As a young child I preferred playing with boys, and playing with boy toys, I was very rough, loud and roudy.

As I got a bit older around 5-6 I rebelled against dresses and demanded to wear my step brothers clothes.. The roughness continues.. Beating up boys became an enjoyable hobby.. I was very competitve with boys... didnt seem like a fair compitition if it were with a girl... As I got abit older and my mother forced the dresses and such I would get mad and cut them up shredd them burn them whatever felt best at the moment and I;d straw inhaler it up and accept whatever consequences followed for doing it... I demanded to be called "chris" and would not answer to anything else no matter what (even a pop across the back of the head) lol believe it or not it actually worked although I must admit I got in a lot of trouble all the time for ignoring them before they actually gave in... I continued my hobby of fighting with the boys.. boys toys boy clothes etc

These things progressively intensified as years went by and I honestly couldnt consciously link it to the fact I felt like a boy.. I knew I felt different and that i didnt fit in.. I knew I was a target for the popular kids who teased me constantly refering to me as a a small levee or wanna be boy... I honestly didnt understand why they felt that way..till late teens.. then it all started making sence..

[Guest Kitue]

I've not really posted much other then my intro, so I guess I should stop lurking about in silence and actually join in.

Hmm, I suppose there are a few things I did when I was younger that could have been signs. I always hated dresses and skirts, though when I was young I was made to wear them. But as soon as I could I shut them all away and refused to wear them again.

When I was little I always wondered why the boys didn't want to play with me, I didn't really understand the difference in gender.

I loved collecting bugs and frogs and such things and found it highly amusing that the other girls were all squeamish about them. I had a pet frog who lived in my paddling pool. I'd hand feed him bugs. xD

In a play I got to play a boy and bought a guys shirt for the part(normally I wasn't allowed to buy guys clothes). After that I used to wear it everywhere and it was my favorite piece of clothing.

I didn't like it when I started to grow breasts, I was embarrassed about them and always tried to hide them. I refused to wear anything other then sports bras because they squashed them in a bit rather then showing them off like other bras seemed to. I was also very uncomfortable about having to change with the girls, it felt wrong somehow.

I refused to shave my legs and underarms, which got me a lot of teasing in PE at school, but I didn't see why I should have to since the guys didn't.

And I always got along better with guys, we had more in common, could talk easier, and to be honest girls just confuse me.

[Guest Blake]

Heh heh. Yeah, I remember that stuff. The most prominent thing that I remember is I HATED my birthname, and so I went by 'Tom' instead. That, and when given a choice, I always, always went on the boys team during games. In fact, even if I wasn't given a choice, I would insist on being on the boys team, or I refused to play the game.

That, and I 'hated' girls. Heh, good times xD

- Blake

[Guest GoldenKirbichu]

I've not really posted much other then my intro, so I guess I should stop lurking about in silence and actually join in.

Hmm, I suppose there are a few things I did when I was younger that could have been signs. I always hated dresses and skirts, though when I was young I was made to wear them. But as soon as I could I shut them all away and refused to wear them again.

When I was little I always wondered why the boys didn't want to play with me, I didn't really understand the difference in gender.

I loved collecting bugs and frogs and such things and found it highly amusing that the other girls were all squeamish about them. I had a pet frog who lived in my paddling pool. I'd hand feed him bugs. xD

In a play I got to play a boy and bought a guys shirt for the part(normally I wasn't allowed to buy guys clothes). After that I used to wear it everywhere and it was my favorite piece of clothing.

I didn't like it when I started to grow breasts, I was embarrassed about them and always tried to hide them. I refused to wear anything other then sports bras because they squashed them in a bit rather then showing them off like other bras seemed to. I was also very uncomfortable about having to change with the girls, it felt wrong somehow.

I refused to shave my legs and underarms, which got me a lot of teasing in PE at school, but I didn't see why I should have to since the guys didn't.

And I always got along better with guys, we had more in common, could talk easier, and to be honest girls just confuse me.

This sounds quite a bit like me... I had a pet frog when I was younger, and adored her (I know she was female, because she attempted to lay eggs at one point). My cisgirl classmates, not so much... I played Santa Claus for a play once, because I was the heaviest kid in the class () and besides the merciless teasing for my being fat I was happy... I even got the beard

I didn't like changing with the girls either, but only because I felt severely out of place. I didn't shave either, which earned me the persistent nickname "The Beast"... *sigh*

[Guest Firegirl]

Signs when younger that I was actually a girl? God there are so many sadly, most of them end up with me repressing it =(.

To go along with having tons and tons of stuffed animals, but I had to get rid of them when I got lice one time =(, there was this time,I don't remember what age I was, but I went to this like shopping fair with my mom and my brother and his friend. They had everything from knives to jewlery to clothes. I was just wondering around looking and I came up to this stand that had these pretty rings. One was this yellow gold one, with a red ruby in it and I wanted and surprisingly enough, my mom bought it for me! So, I got the ring and walked out wearing, but of course my jerk of a brother and his jerk friend picked on me for it calling me a sissy and everything until we got back to my dad's house. That night I ask my dad about it, and he told me that it was a girls ring and that if I wore it to school I would get picked on, *sigh* so that night while I was brushing my teeth, ring in hand, and I through it away. I miss that ring =(.

*sigh*

-Lessa

[Guest washougal]

Yikes, a lot of this sounds really familiar. I was always called a tomboy and got in trouble constantly for playing soccer with the big kids when i was in 1st grade(it just so happened that they were all guys). After about second grade i refused to wear dresses. Always hated them because they made me look like a girl and my parents would pregnant dog that I got them muddy playing soccer at recess. I played co-rec soccer and basketball all through elementary school and loved to be on defense so I could really be aggressive. I was basically obsessed with sports and only hung out with guys, until they refused to be near me because other girls would say i was their girlfriend. I loved tonka trucks and didn't know what to do with the barbie my grandfather gave me for my birthday. I think i tried to make it look like a guy and then threw it in the back of my closet. I had a lot of social trouble in school cause i acted like a boy. I ended up homeschooling 4-8th grade which was good because at home i could be myself. Sometime during middle school some guys on the track team knicknamed me Larry to try to insult me. Much to their dismay I loved the name. ....Lets see, high school i never shaved or wore deodorant, i always wanted to cut my hair short but my parents never let me.(They claimed it wasn't appropriate for a girl to have short hair). I never went to a dance till senior year and then i went in a suit. I almost didn't go to prom because i wanted to wear a suit and my parents wouldn't let me. They said that the principle wouldn't let me in the door in a suit.(which was true because he was a total donkey). I ended up going in a dress and with a boy(ugh) because the girl i was going to go with ditched me for her ex-boyfriend. Much to my astonishment i got voted prom queen and had to dance with some random guy. I did after first informing him that if his hands went anywhere near my butt i would kill him(i'm pretty sure he believed me). This is really stupid, but i was mad i was not prom king, i guess somehow i had hoped that everyone would vote for me as prom king. I guess the only reason i never figured out before that i was trans was because i was so isolated i never even knew it was an option.

[Guest gwenthlian]

^^ I always liked school plays. Ive been the fairy godmother in Cinderella and Mary in the nativity. Apart from that i always hated football and rugby and i think my stepdad found this hard to take. I used to dress up with my sister in Mums clothes until everyone thought I was weird and wouldnt let me . There were countless other clues at that age but in the end I had to push them all back and pretend .

[Guest Gabriel]

Much of what has already been said rings a bell for me...Choosing the male roles, going by boy names, hating dresses etc. When I think back about it though, what really stands out in my mind are my dreams. I've never, never dreamed of myself as anything but a male, even when I was making such a genuine effort to conform to what everyone wanted me to be and thought I was someone else, I would go to sleep and really was this young man. I never heard my birth name either and the first time I ever heard any name in reference to me in my dreams was after I took my real name. I recall at the time when I was trying to conform being very "weirded out" by having these dreams and extremely confused, but after I came to terms with who I really was it all made perfect sense. The whole hit me like a brick type of deal...The subconscious is so amazing...No one, not even me could cover up the fact that I knew as young as I could remember that I wasn't the person everyone else saw and that in reality as well, I was male.

[Guest Jack Solomon]

When I was a child I made the barbies and the beanie babies go to war and they had complex social relationships in their towns. There were two opposing towns who were occasionally at odds and sometimes either side would take prisoners of war. There was also a complex economy. I always liked the fiercest beanie babies (dragons, snakes, lizards, etc). I never considered myself female but I didn't know what I was either, and I did have a perceivable feeling of 'difference'. I always felt like I was wearing a mask I couldn't take off. Wearing dresses was distressing. Luckily my parents caught on early that I felt there was something insulting about wearing a dress and I was never forced to wear one.

I usually chose the male roles in roleplaying games. I was always discomforted by my birth name, and disliked hearing it because it was a female name that 'didn't belong to me'. Most of my role models (or people I admired to have similar character traits as the ones I wanted for myself) were male, or otherwise they were very masculine-like females who were basically androgynous who I admired for their strength of character.

I really didn't like it when I started developing breasts, I've always found them awkward and like they shouldn't be there. I could talk fairly well to either guys or girls when I was younger but guys would often exclude me or they wouldn't give me a chance despite my easy-going, humorous personality. Maybe I was just unlucky in that regard, the later teens became much better in terms of having guy friends. With girls I often played what I now recognize as sort of a 'surrogate big brother' role in my friendships with them. I was never into sports but I always loved swords, weapons, and action anything. Unfortunately, I didn't get into fights since I kept to myself when young, but I would have liked to and it became part of my odd sense of humor as I grew older to insinuate I'd attack someone or commit other acts of bravado. My dreams have also consistantly served as a fairly obvious indication that I wasn't a female. There were many other telling signs, but these are just a few.

Solomon

[Guest Seth]

When I was kid, Easter Sunday when I was 3 was the last time I wore a dress. I told everyone in kindergarten that my dad shrunk my penis with a laser beam. I was a bit of a player in kindergarten and all the girls loved me.

I used to imagine that my best friend at the time, Rodrigo, and I would switch bodies so he'd have my vagina and I'd have his penis.

[Guest JayJaye]

I remember a huge temper tantrum because I did not want to wear a dress for some occasion, so bad I got spanked. I devised secret plans to wear pants to school. I dressed as a boy. I used the men's rooms in public, in stores, if my mother wasn't looking. I made a cloth penis and stuffed it in my pants. And I prayed and prayed to God that I be a boy when I woke up.

I don't remember specific instances of claiming adamantly that I was a boy, but if I went somewhere new (bible school) I'd tell other kids I was a boy and usually got into trouble. I brought army men to girl scouts for show and tell and got into trouble. I wore boy's sneakers to school against my mother's wishes and remember getting teased.

Most of my friends were boys. There was this TV show in the late 60s or early 70s called Land of the Giants or some such. I don't really remember the premise, but there were like these 8" tall people (mostly men) going on adventures. We used to play this all the time. We played kickball and rode bikes and caught frogs.

I was kind of a shy kid and kept to myself, and as I got older and hit puberty I couldn't stand growing breasts and was afraid of getting curves. I was anorexic for a while which kept my body small. Since I've always been attracted to guys, I ended up living as a straight girl, though when alone with my thoughts and thinking of sex I was always the guy on top. Always the guy. For a while I thought I was gay (not really knowing what that meant, but because I always thought I was a guy and should have been a guy and was peed my anatomy was not correct). My family was very anti-gay and you just didn't talk about sex at ALL.

Most of my friends in college were guys, too. And very interestingly the one guy I did date in college was also transgendered -- he was convinced he was supposed to have been a girl. But this was a religious college, his family and mine were religious, and these things weren't really discussed. At the time it was easier to do what I was 'supposed' to do than be myself.

I always wondered what became of that old boyfriend and maybe 3 months ago did a huge search online and finally found him. I always imagined he'd have killed himself or gotten into drugs because he was always uncomfortable being himself as a guy and having super-controlling religious parents who he couldn't come out to. Would you believe he's married with 7 children and gives talks on raising kids God's way, under the scope of his parents uber-religious business?????? I was floored. He still can't be himself and is trying SO HARD. wow

There's more but I'm getting verbose.

Jay

[Guest My_Genesis]

I posted a lot of this already in my intro, but this thread's more relevant..

I don't remember exactly what happened, but my mom told me (she remembers it as a joke, completely not gender-related, just funny) that when i was about 3 or 4, i told her "i don't like dresses; dresses are for girly girls, and God made me sporty". I probably meant that God made me a boy, I just never really thought about it that way until a few years later..

Similar to what Matthias said at the beginning of the forum..this might sound crazy, but I used to...umm..."pleasure myself"..when i was really little, but i didnt know anything about sex yet, so i just thought i was pretending to pee like a guy..like Matthias said, it would be a kind of "fantasy"..but i felt like i was the only one doing it, so i always did it when no one was looking; i can remember being as young as two years old. once i found out about sex and what i must have REALLY been doing the whole time, i stopped...i just couldn't, and still can't, picture myself doing anything sexual with female anatomy, and if i did, i might as well just get raped, it would be just as traumatizing...anyways i found that one a little unusual, i dont hear much about it. maybe most people just dont like to talk about things like that

i was also at the beach with my parents when i was about 4 and my dad took his shirt off, and i copied him. my mom freaked out and told me to put my shirt back on, and i kept asking her why daddy doesnt have to put his back on, and she told me it's because daddy is a man..or some other male adjective of the sort i dont really remember lol

i also used to walk around my house w/o shirt before taking a shower (with a flat chest) and my mom would get mad and say "you can't do that, youre a prepubescent girl, you're going to be developing, and you can't just walk around the house like that...just writing about it makes me shudder...

now that i feel sick to my stomach lol...oh yeah i also used to ask my closest guy friend in preschool to pull his pants down (for me to "admire" so to speak..just because i wanted what he had so badly..) mind you i was only about 3 at the time..i feel bad for him now..i made him do that for another 6 years or so after that..too bad, he woulda been cool to hang out with now, if i wasnt looney and thought about that everytime i mention him..i wonder if he remembers any of it...eww..ok this is getting weird..

yes, i was a very troubled child

[Guest StrandedOutThere]

When I was a kid, I always thought I was a boy. My favorite toys were action figures and toy guns. I had some Barbie dolls, but I cut their hair all short, colored it punk colors with a marker, and used colored pens to give them tattoos. Finally, I just pulled off Barbie's head, and drew on some crazy face paint. From that point on she became "Floating Head of Death" Barbie and she frequently tormented my G.I. Joe men and Battle Beasts (less well-known Hasbro action figure from the mid-1980's).

Also, even now, I play only male characters on RPG's and on Rock Band/Guitar Hero. For example, here is my primary Rock Band character:

I never wear skirts or dresses, though I am not opposed to occasionally donning a kilt. As a child, I sometimes had to wear dresses and it felt humiliating. My mom would have to bargain with me to get me to do it at all. When I got older, she eventually gave up and let me wear pants.

When I went through puberty, I used to try to wear tight things so my breasts would stop growing. I even had this idea that if I slept on my stomach at night that they wouldn't grow.

[Guest Cody_T]

Yeah, I had very little, if any hints about my gender when I was young. When I got to be about seven or eight, I started loathing dresses.... But they were pretty ugly dresses my family wanted me to wear. When I was in first grade and there was this one girl who went around asking every girl "Are you a girly girl or a tomboy?" I said I was a tomboy. I didn't play any sports, but I definitely wasn't a girly girl.

I also looked forward to going through puberty... I dunno, that may have been because I wanted to be older. (It was actually almost an obsession for me. I NEEDED to be older) When I started to grow breasts, I can remember messing with them, squeezing them together to get the tiniest amount of cleavage and being proud of the fact I had and stuff.

It wasn't until later that I started de-identifying with them. Social conditioning is a rather powerful thing.

I was a lot like that... they do a good job with family life (which is what my school called it), to get kids excited, and then there's the social pressure of "ooh, who's gonna get it first? I have a bra and you don't! Mine are bigger than yours" so that you kind of get excited about it even just to be competitive. I was even happy for my period, at least until the second day when I realized that it didn't just happen once, and it lasted more than a few minutes.

I also abhored the term girly girl, and my best friend's mom would call us "girly-girls" all the time. Often while we were doing karate or playing laser tag lol. I always saw myself as a tomboy also.

I had a lot of other things to say, but I just went and looked through roughly 12 photo albums from when I was 5 until I was 12, and I am appalled to report that I wore dresses on like a DAILY basis until I was like 9. Oh my goodness. I seriously had no recollection of this, and knowing about it and seeing myself in the dresses is making me kind of sick. When I used to think back to my childhood, I just thought that my mom dressed me in pastels and pinks which made me seem really girly... but... dresses???? The first one I consciously remember is when I was eight, and that's around when they fell off to only include christmas and easter... all of my pictures from 5 and 6, and a lot from 7, have me in those cotton play dresses or some frilly bathing suit. I even had girly hair styles (but only like 3-4 times... I was adamant about that). You only get pictures on semi-important occasions, so that might be a reason, but I wouldn't have imagined I even owned more than one dress as a kid. I guess at very least, this permanently defeats the early theory I had that if my parents had dressed me girlier I would have been comfortable with my birth sex. Luckily at about 8-9 I started being allowed to I guess, shop for my clothes, and it's all guys' jeans and hoodies from there on out.

[Guest Keane]

I can't remember much of my life before age 12. As a young kid i played like a girl and I was my mom's little Barbie doll. I had a slight feeling that i was different, I always sort of knew i was supposed to be a boy but i didn't think about it much because I thought there was nothing i could do about it and so i just went on being a girl.

I've always had Phantom Limb Syndrome, and when i'd get called something masculine (this happened rarely) I'd be secretly flattered, even it was an insult, and people would give me weird looks for the reaction i gave.

Puberty didn't really affect me, when i saw something was different i'd just be like, "Oh, okay," because when i was young i just accepted everything as is, never questioned anything. Eventually when I realized how different i was I wanted to get my breasts and ovaries removed to stop the periods and never wanted to have kids.

But i knew that i wouldn't be accepted if i tried to change into a boy completely and i didn't want to go through all that trouble so i became subconsiously obsessed with making myself as female as possible :/ I wasn't happy but when i gave up & accepted myself as trans then i started feeling more settled.

[Guest Alex1952]

Another excellent topic. I was not especially a tomboy growing up, but I wasn't super-feminine, either. I do remember preferring the male role whenever I'd fantasize...which I did a lot, being an only child. I used to get a lot of flak from kids, as in "are you a boy or are you a girl?" kind of stuff. It didn't help that I am tall, and was very flat-chested. Now I'm totally flat (hoorah!) and being six feet tall, I pass very easily. One of these days I may grow a mustache, but not until Mom is gone...I consider myself fortunate that she understands me as well as she does. Growing a 'stache right now would just be too much.

[Guest Michelles_husband]

Stranded - I love the Rockband character. That's how I dress on the weekend hahaha.

When I was little, my mom babysat a lot of kids. There was me and 7 or 8 others on a daily basis. I would only hang out with the boys that were my age and we're just like brothers even still. When we were about 4 and 5, we were the Ninja Turtles. I was always the rough and tumble one. I ate an entire sandbox over a period of time, built a 3 storey treehouse (that died of a hurricane haha) and coasted down hills on the fastest sled in town. My mom is pretty cool with everything to the point that she makes jokes about the "signs." At the baby shower that her friends threw for her, I was about 2 weeks old and someone had the bright idea to put me into a dress with puffy sleeves. Apparently I pooped non-stop until someone changed me into a plain plaid sleeper. But the turning point for her, her number one "mistake" was the Purple Snowsuit. In grade 3 she let my dad go out and buy me a snowsuit. They thought it was the best thing ever. It was a one piece snowsuit with mittens that buttoned onto the sleeves and probably more stuffing in the jacket part than there is in my couch. But it was this disgustingly neon purple, like a purple so hideous that one glimpse brings on nausea. So according to my mother, that's why I should have been born a boy, as fate's little jab in the side to her for the snowsuit.