Taken from a post on Reddit: the_story_of_how_i_got_over_my_gender_dysphoria

Note: I am born female and I'm not trying to be an example of all people with dysphoria. There are obviously different levels and I can't know how it's like for everyone. This is simply my story.

Like many my story starts in childhood. I was the typical sporty tomboy, I played hockey with the boys in the neighbourhood and all was fine and dandy. Unlike many my parents were very liberal and even though they tried to get me to wear dresses they eventually let me dress and like the things I want. I have a twin brother so even though my parents bought me barbies we would share our toys and play with barbies, hot wheels and legos all at once. To me barbies were simply pretend people the same way the beany babies were. I never saw toys as feminine or masculine.

Issues started in fifth grade when I started puberty. I started very young, before school taught us about anything and my parents just expected school to tell me about these things. This was distressing because I didn't understand what was happening to me but what really hurt was how boys started treating me.

Children are children and I hold no grudge, but it really hurt to suddenly be left out because girls were icky. They would basically leave me behind and not invite me anymore but would invite my brother. I relented and decided to try being friends with girls.

Girls were weird because the man topics of conversation were boys and puberty (getting their period and growing breasts). They all had a boy they liked so I tried to do the same but in reality I wasn't interested. I missed simply having fun with the guys but was told I simply couldn't. Around that time was when I found myself staring at women's bodies. I knew it wasn't normal but I just couldnt help myself. I would look into the cleavage of my teacher or how tight pants were around hips of women. I shurgged it off as part of growing up. Eventually I would look at guys crotches or fantasize about touching their muscles because that's what girls do, I thought I just needed to wait. Keep in mind at the time I didn't even know homosexuality existed so I couldn't even fathom liking women as a possibility.

By the time I was 12 and starting highschool my parents got broadband internet. I had used computers a lot as a child but mostly playing offline games because being online for too long prevented us from recieving any telephone calls. Now that this wasn't an issue anymore I fully immersed myself and got many more penpals as well as visiting many forums. Through the internet I met other young people who identified as bisexual. “This is what I am!”, I thought. It suddenly became okay to look at girls and women but the idea of not liking men was still far away.

Now comes the sad part; there had been a build up for many years (possibiliy as young as 8 or 9 years old) of major depression. Like homosexuality, depression was something that was simply not spoken of when I was a child. I thought it was normal and would eventually go away when I became a teenager. I had been told that highschool was the best years of my life so I was excited to start and become happy. I became obvious within the first year that it was a lie but I had nobody to tell this to. I was scared to make others sad so I only told my friends online who also had some sort of depression and could understand what it was like.

What bothered me a lot was that unlike my online friends nothing horrible had happened in my life. Why was I so incredibly sad? As a child I developped what I now know as deep disassociation. I lived through books and then the internet and created a fake tragic life for myself where I was sexually abused and such things. That way I could have the sympathy I so desperately needed. It was to the point where I really believed it. Only now I know the truth because I found childhood diaries that spoke of the sadness but not the abuse.

I could go on a lot about my mental health during those years but the gist of it is that I've had borderline personality disorder since childhood but wouldn't diagnosed for it until I was 20.

Through the internet I discovered subcultures that didn't exist in my hick hometown. The ones I especially liked were goth and emo (note this is during the early 00s). I started with the angsty music and pain I could indenify with but then also the clothing and style. The first guys I actually found attractive were the androgynous emo guys. Finally I liked guys! and I could tell my friends about it! I especially liked how the guys and girls looked the same. You couldn't tell which couples were straight or gay, and I loved the ambiguty. So I dyed my hair black, cut it short and bought mens shirts and skinny jeans.

It was around the age of 13 that I discovered transsexuality. My french teacher tried to open our minds and showed us the movie “Ma vie en rose”. It's about a very feminine boy identifying as female as a child. She wanted to show us that transexuals were born that way and couldn't help it. I now realise how horribly misleading the message of the film was and how it fucked up my perspective. It seeded the idea that maybe I wasn't gay and was simply a man.

I didn't reject the idea of men but the reality was I wanted to attract women. At such a young age there weren't any other girls that were more than just bicurious so I slowly push the androgyny. Maybe if I looked more like a guy a straight girl would give me a chance. I tried to be the skinniest possible to minimize curves but would still wear make up because I actually liked that aspect reserved to women. I was generally really confused and didn't know where I fit.

My idea of relationships were of the masculine and feminine. Even in lesbian relationships there needed to be a butch and a femme. I eventually realised that didn't like emo guys, I wanted to be one. The really feminine women liked those guys so if I was one of them I could get these feminine girls. Around 13-14 I was deeply unhappy because I couldn't fit anywhere. I couldn't be one of the guys because not matter how masculine I presented myself. My supposed guyfriends still wanted to sleep with me and the women found me weird. If only I could be a guy then I could be myself around everyone. There wouldn't be any judgement. The untreated BPD plunged me into major depression that started at 11 and only got worse with age. I was at the end of my rope and simply could no longer live this miserably. After a few attention seeking attempted suicides that got no attention I tried it for real but failed pathetically because I didn't know good instructions were on the internet.

Bleeding everywhere got parents attention enough to be put on suicide watch and get to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Today I wouldn't see myself as excpetionally brighter than average but I was many years more mature back then. The system failed at taking this in consideration. I was assigned a children psychiatrist that made me read kids books about anxiety and treated me like an idiot. There was only one available psychiatrist in the region and she, in particular, made me hate the system. I asked to have an adult psychiatrist because she simply didn't get what bothered me but they wouldn't do it because I was “so young”. I was prescribed many different anti-depressents that never helped. They failed to see I had deep existencial issues that adults went through. I didnt care if my classmates didn't like me or any of that normal teenage anxiety. I was way beyond that and thinking about how I could live in such a disgusting world where people live in poverty and nothing was done about it. How I felt forced to take a path in life that didn't make any sense to me. It was all an incredibly frustrating experience that made me never want to get help again.

I did see the psychologist for over a year until I accepted that I would spend my whole life unhappy. That happiness and joy was something I simply would never have. By then I was almost 16 and had major depression for 4 years. The acceptance of this sadness brought some relief because I no longer had any expections. I told myself I would wait it out and end my life when I was 18.

At 15 I would take pictures the right way and pass as a man online. I could flirt with straight women and they knew nothing. The most vidicative when passing as a man in world of warcraft. Back then women in MMOs were seen as a joke and I loved that I was so good at it and they had no idea I was a girl. I eventually joined a local guild that used teamspeak where my feminine voice gave me away but there was another girl in the guild (this is important for late).

By 16 I started binding my breasts and pass frequently as a man in public. Guys would make fun of me because they thought I was a gay guy but women thought I was a guy which is all I really wanted. I would go to hardcore shows and made friends with guys in their 20s. They all thought I was feminine guy and I even gave them a fake guy name. Those moments made me happy because I could play music and be one of the guys instead of a groupie. I don't know what my parents thought of me, I didn't talk to them.

Deep down I felt the pain of living a lie. That if my friends knew I was a women they wouldn't like me anymore. Even more troubling, somedays I wanted to be a women but felt I had to pick a side. I also started working at 15 and couldn't pass as male there because everyone knew my real name and I had to wear a female uniform. I was always scared someone who thought of me as a guy would see me at work and find out. At 16 I went to work at a gas station where I found out one of my guildmates worked. It was really weird meeting in real life but we became fast friends. A year or so later he got the female guildmate a job there and I found out she actually was a man with a really feminine voice, lets call him S.

This confused me because S had a twin brother in the guild with a very masculine voice. I had assumed they were fraternal twins like my brother and I but they were actually identical. S was very feminine in mannerisms too so I just thought he was gay and didn't put two and two together until S told me himself.

He was the first trans person I had met in real life. At the time this was still very rare. I was fasinated and asked many questions. He had started Estrogen 2 years earlier at 17 and was now at the point of starting to try passing as a women. I was at the time 17 and it occured to me that I too could do this. If S had the strength so could I. An issue S had was passing properly. He was 6'3 and had a masculine face. He told me how people online told him that he didn't have broad shoulders and passed well but we both knew it wasn't true. S looked like this weird thing, not quite man or women. He told me about online friends being miserable because they could never truely look like women and he was scared to be post-op and still unhappy.

This made it clear that it wasn't that simple. I'm tall for a women but have an incredibly feminine face. Even though I initially passed, when people got a good look at my face they would correct themselves. S had an out of town straight bf that he met online. He told me how he was happy that he saw him as a women and didn't touch his penis during sex but also how he treated him like shit and probably cheated on him all the time. How his bf wouldnt even introduce S to his friends. He dealt with it because he called S pretty and was a straight guy, not a gay man.

S moved away before getting operated and I never spoke him/her ever again. People had been very supportive around S. Our boss even let him dress as a women at work but I saw that deep down S would never be happy because he could never be a women. This brought a lot of doubt in me. I crossed dressed but was I transexual? Was being a man really want I wanted? Deep down I knew I liked being a women at times but I couldn't be both. I had to pick a side.

During my first years of college I continued to dress as a man. A few times girls that didn't know me would flirt with me and then leave revolted when realising I was a women. This made me sad, I was decieving them, lying to them and myself. So I stoped wearing the binder. If a women approached me I wanted her to like me dispite my breasts. I started realising that I wasn't a man but a weird he/she.

At 19 I had made it past my life deadline and was still miserable so I decided to move to the city and try being a butch lesbian. I had been surrounded by dumb people, maybe there was a place where people could like the weird not women or man me. Even though my classmates were 2 years younger than me, computer science was filled with rejects and I easily found a place among the guys. I still dressed butch because I wanted a feminine women to like me and believed it was the only way. Slowly through having the right friends and environment I let my guard down and started feeling okay as a women.

There was still the issue of my mental health. After a dramatic event, my best friend convinced me that it was unfair that I hurt people like I did. I may be kind and amazing at times but losing it and blaming the people I care about wasn't acceptable. He told me that there are better doctors in the city and to atleast give it a chance so I did. Through a horrible process I discovered I had BPD most of my life and bipolar disorder for atleast the last few years. The meds were horrible and made me incredibly sick. After a year I started feeling better and after another 6 months I started to feel what it was like to be normal. My mental illness and recovery is a long story but when it was taken care of I was finally able to let my guard down and accept myself as a women.

I realised there are men out there with the maturity to treat me as an equal. That I didn't have to fit in a box. Slowly I started discovering what being a women is and started to display femininity. I still have have masculine mannerism and like guy stuff but now embrace the women side of me. I now present as feminine most of the time but still have my guyish days. I realised that two lesbian femme couples existed and met women who also liked this. In the last year I've finally felt comfortable in my skin and even though I still struggle with BPD I have a system to control it and can proudly say I'm happy.

My story started out as the typical trans story. From a young age I felt in the wrong body and thought being a man would make things better but I'm glad I didn't because that wasn't real the issue. I'm pretty sure that if the divide between men and women wasnt so great, if women were alowed to be masculine and vice versa, this idea of becoming a man would've never happened. I don't know how it's like for others with dysphoria but in my case the cure wasn't transitioning. It was healing and surrounding myself with the right people.