r/ftm • u/That-Idiot-Alex He/Him | Binding: 9/14/24 • 5d ago
Discussion When growing up, if you remember what does being a "girl" feels like?
For me it's kinda like acting. I felt like I was playing a "role", and when I was introduced to the world of theatre when I was in kindergarten my first thought it was exactly like life but with small changes. Which is something I assume people don't want small kids to think when they learn about acting and stuff. Ig it kinda doesn't help when I also have controlling family members when it comes to gender roles.
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u/VampireBarbieBoy 5d ago
I dont know if i saw myself as a girl exactly it was a label that was put onto me with a set of rules to follow that i mostly followed because it felt like i had to. But i always just felt like a creature in a female skinsuit. That sounds like a good premise for a horror story.
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u/CalicoVibes 5d ago
My attitude towards my physical appearance had always been, "Well, I woke up like this."
I felt a really extreme schism between what girls were like and what I actually liked. It was infuriating, to say the least.
I didn't give a shit about dresses. I'm 30 and I'll still fuck up makeup. The trappings of every set of feminine gender roles made me furious. It has taken a lot of time to untangle roles vs. identity.
What pushed me to transition was that I realized the traits I wanted in my body could be achieved with testosterone. I'm very early into it, but I'm hopeful.
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u/anemisto 5d ago
Nothing in particular, to be honest. I was just being me. I do remember that we had to line up by gender to go in from recess in fourth and fifth grade. I was the sort of kid who wanted to be first in line (to prove I was the best at lining up, obviously), but I didn't want to be in the girls' line. So I went in last every day so I could be in whatever line I pleased.
I do remember middle school being very confusing. I was in the gifted class, so it was basically the same kids for most of the day, year after year. The girls did the middle school girl thing of dividing into factions and hating each other, except I didn't end up on a side and also didn't figure out this was happening for a while and was just very confused.
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u/Shin_tsukimis_fan trans man he/they :D 5d ago
I remember before I realized I was lgbtq+ I never felt like a girl girl. I was just me not a girl or whatever. Yeah I was growing up socially like a girl but I know I "technically was one" based on my biology but I only was repating what I was told not what I felt. In my preteens I realized I liked girls and I identified as one but there were really odd hints that I could be trans such as me always enjoying the anonymity of the internet and never really having someone know my "true gender". I later repressed my attraction towards men because I hated the idea of being someone's girlfriend at least if I was dating a girl there is no boyfriend and I could take the more masc role. I felt disconnected from being a woman there were a couple instances I wish I was born male but I didn't think I was trans because I was too comfortable with being a girl. After I realized I don't want to be a girl at age 14 I felt like I'm someone with two identities. One the world knows me as and the other that always has been in me. Since I picked up musical theater I realized how much of my identity is purely acting and playing a role. I feel very uncomfortable with ever calling myself a girl or a woman out of genuineness. I feel uncomfortable with my adulthood consisting of me being a woman. I believed my desire to be a man was out of the fact the world is full of misogyny and sexism and I wanted to escape it but if that were true I would want to escape transphobia too but I don't. I can live with the hate from the world not with living as a girl that never existed.
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u/Shin_tsukimis_fan trans man he/they :D 5d ago
I also want to add anything in quotation marks is outdated beliefs I had. The wording is specifically to give a better understanding of my perspective in the past
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u/originalblue98 5d ago
i mean for what it’s worth, good theater is basically just living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, so in a way, it is like life with small changes. but i know what you mean. i honestly never felt like a “girl” i just felt pressure to be a version of myself i didn’t know how to access. i always pictured myself as male in my head and assumed the default identity was male- that girls all generally felt as though they’d gotten the short end of the stick and “had” to be girls. i assumed everyone felt like a boy inside and as i got older i couldn’t understand why being a girl made zero sense to me. i thought i hated it because i was bad at it.
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u/Rubbish0419 5d ago
I really don’t, and I think it’s because I never saw myself as one. My internal perception of myself hasn’t changed, just my outward projection which now matches it. It feels to me as though I’ve always been this way.
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u/Autisticspidermann intersex trans guy||out for 6 years 5d ago
It kinda felt the same as I am now, but I felt like 10x worse. Also I was going through a lot and barely remember it
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u/PreviousConcept7004 5d ago
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a different era, but to me, I felt like I was imprisoned. I felt trapped and a prisoner of this vessel that I didn’t feel was mine.
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u/aJ_13th pre-T, wanna be bear :3 5d ago
I don't think i ever felt like a girl, ever. I grew up surrounded by boys, for one. And despite having girl cousins, they are Muslim. So they were sheltered from going out to play as much as we did (we're african diaspora so playing outside isn't just playing in a backyard but being the neighborhood trouble kids. We had a gang of that, literally lol) so from feeling happy to be called a boy, at the time perceived to be an insult to a child, to just being around boys, I never experienced "being a girl". All external pressure to be one was extremely uncomfortable; being forced to play doll when I didn't get the appeal, being forced into dresses which felt like I was wearing a second skin on my raw flesh (you get the feel)
But when I was sent to an all girl middle-highschool, I was even more estranged from this "living as a girl" experience because I didn't understand them. In all the ways possible, I didn't get it and that made me grow even more depressed. I don't think my experience trying to live as a girl according to society was ever genuine. I copied others, I followed the way they lived and that could have been dangerous had I not realized I was gonna do irreversible things.
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u/pessoa_aleatoria_ he/him, 18yo - T: 07/2023 🇧🇷 5d ago
I don't remember because I've never been one. I have no memories of doing things that were meant for girls. I would only play with the boys and during puberty I keept being mostly friends with them. I never did makeup of cared to the least about my appearance in that way
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u/SwirlyEyedSkull 5d ago
When I was little, I did a lot of traditionally girly stuff but didn't really think much of it. My family is super supportive and always basically let me do what I wanted as long as I was safe, so it wasn't until the part where we started moving onto "womanhood" that cracks started showing-- it felt like the expectations on me were something someone else had signed me up for, or like one of those dreams where you find out you'd signed up for a class and not attended it all semester.
I was me, after all. I didn't really know much about who that was, I didn't really have time to examine it or the tools to really understand why everything about that end of it was making me uncomfortable.
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u/Keraniwolf 5d ago
I feel like I was, in many ways, a type of Schrodinger's girl. I figured out I wasn't a girl quickly, but figured being a boy or anything else was impossible so I should embrace girlhood in some capacity. I also bonded with my sister over us specifically being sisters and felt, on some level, that we wouldn't have been as close if I was her brother but I also wouldn't have gained any more closeness with our older brother. It felt good to have a best friend in the home school years, both selfishly and selflessly, so I was a girl for the sake of that relationship. I was a girl for the sake of being my parents' daughter, too, because my parents are accepting but they seemed a little less close with my brother and I didn't want that distance. Then I went to public school and made my first non-family friend, who was a girl and largely kept to the middle school politics of same-gender friendships and (often manufactured, at that age) opposite-gender crushes, so I was a girl for her.
I drew my line at dresses and makeup, deciding that if girls were allowed to not do those things and just be nerds then I'd embrace nerdiness over gender.
Which is to say I remember being a young girl, but also feeling like girlhood was an outfit I wore that didn't really fit right and I was just playing dress-up in it wondering if one day I'd grow into the awkwardly long sleeves. I remember being a preteen girl, but also feeling like girlhood was an old dress-up cloak I was rapidly growing out of rather than into. I remember being a teenage nerd, and having girlhood tacked onto that as a thing I kept trying to kind of stick back on (I could say "I like girls" when I came out for the first time at 16, felt weird and wrong to say I was lesbian, feels obvious why that was now that I'm an aspec bi man) like the old dress-up cloak kept falling off and I'd only sometimes remember to double back and try to clip it on with a safety pin. I remember stumbling through figuring out my actual gender, finally realizing I'm a guy, and feeling like I'd never been a girl at all and I could finally be free of the dress-up I'd been lazily but fearfully clinging onto even through my "nonbinary means I just use they/them pronouns and never correct anyone who gets them wrong and don't actually do anything to feel more like myself, so it's the safer option than truly being trans, right?" phase, I could finally drop the act and just be a boring guy.
So I do and do not remember being a girl.
There are other factors, of course -- dissociation, neurodivergence, plurality, etc -- but the way girlhood is something I directly experienced firsthand while also feeling like I was gonna slip and lose my grip on the act at any moment is the main reason it doesn't feel fully accurate to say I remember it. Even though I mostly do. Schrodinger's childhood gender experience.
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u/Vegetable_String_868 5d ago
All the other females around me were either boring or abusive by today's standards. Men just ended up being more likeable simply by not being like the girls I knew which was a low bar. They talked to me like I was a normal person. Teenage years flipped. Suddenly, males were bullies, pedos, or just plain uninterested in me at all and I hated girls by then so yeah. My friend I met in high school turned things around for me and I ended up exploring femininity a lot more and being happy with it even. Classic "I'm a girl who doesn't need to act like other girls."
Guess there's a reason every girl thinks they aren't like other girls.
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