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 used to think I’m not trans enough, that the thoughts I might’ve had were just about my gender expression, that I’d be alright with being a femboy, that I wouldn’t ever feel a desire to change parts of my body.
But once I got to it, I just couldn’t help but browse the trans and egg memes, read the stories, see the pictures. Not all, but many of them felt relatable to me.
But I guess how the veil of “I just want to be a feminine guy” came down was thinking of if I wanted everyone to think of me as a man for the rest of eternity. I felt the pressures of toxic masculinity already trying to punish me through being labeled as “gay”.
Once I realized I didn’t want to be a guy, I just had to figure out where to go from there. I was already transgender at that point. All the validation of “real trans people” which I hadn’t previously thought of as applying to me was all the sudden empowering. I couldn’t really believe it at first, how unlike would it be that I would be trans. But I guess someone has to play that part. And since I am trans, I can nudge or redefine my identity anywhere I feel like…
Throughout all of these, journaling really helped. Writing down daily thoughts, often about gender, did help me see the thought patterns.
I now feel like there is no me without being transgender. I don’t wish to be normal. If you take away my transness, you take away a core part of me.
That’s why I am now slowly planning to transition.
I don’t want people to see me without a core part of me being there.