I was 30 when it finally clicked that I was transgender.
It was something I had suspected for years, but maybe wasn't ready to admit to myself until recently. I've always felt disappointed by my body, sometimes even betrayed by it. But I told myself that this wasn't really dysphoria. There was never an acute crisis of feeling like I was in the wrong body, and so I convinced myself that the disappointment was normal, the product of someone who is overconscious about their appearance. But deep down, I think there was always a hint that there was something more to it.
The first clue, and a screamingly obvious one in hindsight, is a recurring childhood daydream I had starting when I was 9 or 10. I would imagine myself as a magician with power over the elements, particularly ice and water. For some reason, it felt right that this alter-ego should be a girl. But it was something I never felt comfortable expressing to my parents for two reasons. First, any time I ~experimented~ with "girl's stuff" as a smol kid (what kid at 5 or 6 doesn't want to know what wearing high heels is like?), I would get a stern reprimand from my strictly conservative parents. It also came during the height of Harry Potter-religious mania, and while my parents viewed it as generic fantasy reading material I knew that it was a point of contention with my grandparents, and heck, I wanted to read about wizard adventures. Sharing a fantasy that I was a magician - a girl no less - was something that I knew would put me in hot water.
Another clue, and just as obvious, was that I gravitated towards playing female or genderless characters when given the option. Peach and Yoshi were my go-tos in Mario Kart, Kirby in Super Smash Bros, the girl in Pokemon once it was an option, and pretty well near every character I was able to design in an RPG. I wasn't really interested in playing male characters, although I didn't fully understand why. Choices like this grew increasingly less "acceptable" to peers as I moved into middle and high school, and because I didn't really understand why I felt more comfortable in these roles, I justified it with "lol it's fiction so I can be the opposite!". Subconsciously I was beginning to absorb that it wasn't a normal behavior, but I felt so different from other people my age that it was hard to put my finger on exactly why I felt different.
A significant barrier to understanding the root symptom was the abysmal attitude towards queer people in rural America in the 00s. Being trans genuinely wasn't a concept that existed for me. The options presented were "male" and "female", and no one truly wanted to switch between the two. If you did, you were acting out for attention at best, at worse, you were looking for the opportunity to prey on unsuspecting people. Ther was no voice inside or outside my community that said different. Movies portrayed trans people as mentally-unstable freaks, the conservative media that my family saturated me in spoke of them in the sorts of black-and-white moral terms that they're still using today. Being a shy child, I certainly didn't want attention, and I certainly didn't want to engage in the lurid behaviors that cross-dressers were accused of. So, I just accepted that being trans wasn't a thing that existed. And by the time I did start to understand what being trans meant, there was close to two decades of mental programming to overcome.
Those first glimmers of recognition began when I was in my early 20s as people in my online friend bubble began to come out as trans and non-binary. Most of us met through an anime forum between 2007 and 2009, and our initial bonding came through something of a sense of teenage superiority to other posters. We were an IRC clique through and through. We bonded over bad wordplay, online drama, and absurdist sensibilities. Over time that friendship gelled into something closer to found family. LGBTQ+ people are often the pathways through which their family members start learning about those experiences, and our found family was no different. But because we had chosen one another, we slowly discovered that there was a deeper thread binding us. I think that thread was a recognition that we were more vulnerable than the average person, although we didn't recognize that that vulnerability was from being queer in relatively conservative areas. Our bond was forged by our vulnerability and our willingness to give each other the space to be ourselves.
As the coming out stories piled up, there were a few shared experiences I identified with - particularly the comfort they found in playing as the opposite sex in video games. I regularly started asking myself if I was trans as well, but as I read other people's experiences with dysphoria they never felt quite right to me. I never felt a sense of acute distress looking at my body, I didn't feel like gender roles put me in active rebellion against my sense of being - truly one could never accuse me of suffering severe dysphoria. So it never dawned on me that there were gradations of dysphoria, like "male" and "female" it was a "have it"/"don't have it" binary option.
I finally escaped rural America in my mid-20s, and moving to an urban center was a breath of fresh air. Despite leaving a handful of close friends behind, and experiencing the difficulties of being neurodivergent and getting to know new people, I immediately felt more comfortable. I felt like the pressure to live the life expected of me had been lifted off my shoulders. As I explored my new surroundings - particularly hopping around punk shows in the city - I realized that I felt a comfort in explicitly queer spaces that I had never felt before. It felt like home. Over the next few years I started absorbing the queerpunk attitude, experimenting around with fashion, trying out different apperances, and more often than not those changes allowed me to feel more comfortable in my own skin.
The final breakthrough happened near the start of quarantine. Yet another friend in my friend bubble was Questioning, and linked to a freshly-published Medium article describing a different experience with dysphoria. Right off the bat it started describing my experience, nearly point for point. It made me realize that I had become profoundly disconnected with my body starting around puberty, and that disconnect had festered into years of depression. At once, it felt as if a key had turned, and an incomprehensibly vast internal mechanism began clicking into its proper place. It was exciting! I think I surprised my friends with the immediacy with which I accepted it, to the point where they were saying "don't let one article tell you whether or not you're trans!", but everything made so much sense that I knew it wasn't any other way.
Three months on from that recognition, I'm feeling much happier. I've come out to most of my close friends in real life, started experimenting with more gender-affirming appearances, and exploring with what I am and am not comfortable with. It's a realization that's been a radical improvement in my sense of well-being. Even though this is an absolutely terrifying world in which to be transgender, I am who I am, and I would rather face the world as who I am rather than meekly engage with it in some diminished form.
First draft published August 2, 2020.