I had made a similar post on reddit r/trans as well with the same account name.
Hello, if my account name was not a dead giveaway this is a throwaway account.
I am a twenty year old AMAB from India and I am very confused regarding my gender. I live near Delhi and though the culture is very open, there is no one in my circle who is trans. I have tried exploring my gender identity (mostly by comparing my feeling with those that other trans women have wrote they felt, anything aside from this, like cross dressing, might be too costly for me) but I feel like I am working in a vaccum. My question is if there is some resource than can accurately tell if I am trans. For reference, I have already read the gender dysphoria bible, I tick some but not all boxes in imposter and social dysphoria descriptions.
I have read accounts of various trans women and my experience is very different from them. I never felt uncomfortable due to my penis, I never felt as if I was better off as a woman as a kid. As a kid, up until I was 16, I was bullied as a “Chakha”, it is a derogatory term for trans people in north india, I don’t know if it is influencing my feelings. Due to that it took me some time to stop lashing out to be my knee jerk reaction to being called or compared to a girl.
As for reasons I think I might be trans is that nearly every few months I get these intense feelings that I wish I could be a woman. During one of those I nearly cried thinking that I can never be a mother. But these feelings pass by very quickly. Even though I prefer interacting online and even in games through a female persona most of my hobbies are male coded (like FPS games, wargaming, etc). I also hate keeping a beard and hate my belly, others tell me I am not that fat but I don’t feel great about it. Also sometimes I need to stop myself from acting a little too feminine. There was this one time when a friend used a male to female filter on me, I kept gushing about how cute the photo was the entire day.
Any help in this is very much appreciated. This is my first time writing in a forum so please forgive me for any mistakes. Thank you
I never cross dressed before accepting my trans identity either. And my private part does not make me uncomfortable. These are not requirements for being trans. As far as the rest of your post goes, I would not say your experience is “very different,” in fact it seems very similar to my own and other trans women who I know.
But I don’t feel ‘trans’. Is there a way for me to be ‘trans’/‘woman’ so that I can know for sure whether or not I am one. Sorry I don’t know a lot about this.
The closest thing to that would be to come out to a few trusted friends and ask that they refer to you with feminine pronouns or a new name, and see if you like it or not. You could explain that you want to try out these pronouns or name for a little while and see if they make sense for you.
If you don’t feel trans because you are worried that you are not feminine enough, remember that women can sometimes be masculine, and that you do not have to force yourself to fit into traditional gender roles, even as a trans person.
I live in a very conservative area so I don’t have a single friend who supports trans people. They have bullied a trans girl in front of me both online and offline. Neither are my parents accepting of trans people. However would doing this in an online setting be similar?
Yes, you can do it online. I am sorry to hear about your situation