I’ve observed that many crossdressers and transgender women recognize their gender identity at a young age. For some, it’s an early realization, while for others, it unfolds later in life.
I’m curious about your experience…
When did you first realize you were female or had a feminine side? Was this something you felt as a child, or did it develop over time?
I’d love to hear your story! Feel free share your thoughts in the comments below!
Love,
Lucille
I discovered my fem side at about age 7 when I began secret dressing in my sisters clothes. At this early stage my dressing was the rare occasions when I was alone. I began to increase the dressing slightly at age 12 and took every opportunity to dress. The next stage in my fem development was about 1984 when at age 21 I bought my first item of clothing. It was a fairly cheap suspender belt and a pair of seamed stockings. It was quite nerve racking stepping into a lingerie shop but the sales woman was very good and told me that lots of young men were customers. I got some very strange looks from another customer when I went down stairs to but the stockings though (suspender belts were sold upstairs, stockings downstairs).
Over the years I’ve embraced my femininity with not just clothing and makeup but by visualising myself in a female role and taking on some of the mannerisms and behaviours I have noticed it genetic women.
I now dress on a daily basis – not during working hours – I work in severe mental health and wouldn’t want my dressing to interfere with therapy sessions with my clients. I know most would be accepting but that for others it would be a problem and it’s not worth the risk when challenging a psychopath – for example – to let then have anything that could affect therapy, or even worse give then any ideas that they could hurt me / try to kill me. One never knows.
I save my dressing for when I get home and for weekends. It superficially satisfies my needs, though I do wish that I could be 24/7/365 – perhaps someday.
I have more clothes than your average woman and vast quantities of make-up, perfume, dozens of shoes and boots. Drawers full of panties (I always wear women’s panties, mainly thongs, and have done so every day for years – It helps me to remember who I really am),almost a dozen corset’s, six basques etc. I have developed noticeable man-boobs which I love but they are not quite big enough to draw comment.
I would have loved to have SRS in my earlier years and transform my body and appearance to be more feminine but Mum confronted me and said I would break her heart. I loved her to much to risk that. I frequently look back though and wish she had been more accepting and my 20’s and 30’s were hard as a consequence. These days I am quite comfortable with my identity though there are still some personality conflicts but I no longer have bouts of guilt and throwing all my gear away only to then begin to replenish my female wardrobe. Perhaps one day I will transform fully – I certainly dream of this very frequently and would love to experience woman’s role fully – sex and all. I think however that if I do someday transform my ideal relationship would be lesbian and I know that this is quite common for many TS women.
looking back, its been a colourful 40+ years, long may they continue.
Hugs
Anne-Marie
I think now I actually should have figured out when I was 3. Or when I only played with the girls at recess in grades 2,3,4,5.
But I was so dense and oblivious, even though I knew definitely I had real differences from any boys and men I knew; that it took me until my eyes were opened one night by another transwoman at age 72.
I am now in my SIXTH year as the woman I truly am. I am always accepted as a woman everywhere. Men flirt with me in spite of my age.
My experience is of the slow learner’s sort. I grew up Catholic in an Ozzie and Harriet world and knew of only 2 roles. I realized from 3 or 4 that I never fit in, never felt like myself, but had no idea why. I loved soft, silky, fuzzy, brightly colored clothes, and cross-dressed a few times secretly, but it wasn’t easy to get chances with 4 brothers, and I lacked to identity to actively pursue it. So I grew up, followed a career, married first at 30, then at 37, and again at 46, each a disaster for me personally. I flirted at times with a gay identity, and actually tried it after the third marriage. In the gay relationship I definitely wanted the femme role, and then I discovered, I didn’t really feel gay at all, I wanted to keep going in the femme role and be a woman. I was 62 when I realized this, and am now in transition.
I started cross dressing at age 8, after a school mate asked me “Don’t you wear you Mother’s clothes” and I answered “NO” he said, “Oh, I love them there feel so good” So the next time I was alone, my folks worked a lot, I found some of my Mom’s stuff and got dressed, I remember stuffing hand towels in her girdle to widen my hips and stuffing Dad’s argyle socks in her bra. I was off and running. The biggest problem I had was putting everything back the correct way in her draw. As I got little older, her clothes fit better, and I discovered a closet full of her old clothes from the 40s. I was in heaven. I dressed on an off, till I went in the service, and didn’t dress till I came home, got married and used to wear my Wife’s clothes, she knew, and helped for awhile, but wasn’t into it. So I dressed in private. Now I’m retired and have a place to dress, and I have more Women’s clothes than Men’s and a lot more than my wife, we’re about the same size, she would faint at my collection of sexy dresses and lingerie. I don’t feel guilty anymore and have come out on the internet last year, it’s been a great experience and I’m continually amazed at how many of us are out there. I go through stages, can’t wait to dress, and other times, it’s kinda in the back ground, I just go with the flow and enjoy being Kathleen, I wish I had the courage to come all the way out of the closet, maybe someday.
I have wanted to be a girl for as long as I can remember.3or4 years old maybe younger.They say no one can remember earlyer than 5 but I think I can I am now 67 and have way more Weomans clothes than mens.I went trough all the male things,when I got out of the Navy I got A construction Job ,and kept the real me from everyone.After I got married I would ware some of my wifes things.Always trying to deny my self what I realy am.If I had my life to live over I would come out right off,now I have lots of regets.
I’ll be 48 years old this July 1st… It is one of the great misconceptions that middle-aged natal males with transsexual experiences are somehow fundamentally different than those who “emerge”, or are visible as transgender when they are young. My lived experience that I have had a profoundly powerful sense of being, and longing to physically become female and live as a girl/woman since the time of my earliest memories. For me these persistent and pervasive feelings, thoughts, and/or experiences have been with me since the age of three—(1967). They have never subsided, or found resolution of any kind at any point in my life, namely through childhood, adolescence, young-adulthood, early married life, the birth of children up to and including today.
As a person who has suffered tremendous internal loss and personal trauma, who has never felt truly at home in myself or my life, I have fallen victim to the burden of a lifetime of depression and anxiety. As a person with a tremendous instinct for survival and need for acceptance, as well as great intelligence and creativity I have managed to “tough” it out, up to the breaking point. On paper I have always looked successful, and I learned to appear confident and happy because that is what everyone expects. Despite a Ph.D. and several years as a Professor at a Research University, $600,000 in research grant funding, and 30-40 peer-reviewed publications I could not sustain. Three years after a stint as an inpatient at McLean Hospital I finally dropped out of my pursuit of tenure for having really fallen behind. I lost my job and have been on Disability (into my third year).
I would probably be seen as a “late onset” transsexual because I never even mentioned a word of anything, or got “caught” dressing until I was almost 40. However, I was a child with GID as clearly as anyone today who is “visible”, on puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones or not. I didn’t hang-out with girls as a child… I would have been beat up. I didn’t play with dolls, but I played with cars the way a girl might have. I didn’t insist I was a girl, or ask to wear girls clothes—I did that in secret. I didn’t think I was overtly feminine, but I often had very long hair and was teased for years by older kids who called me “fem” or “so-and-so’s sister”. In public I think I appeared unambiguously as a girl for several years and generally didn’t “correct” strangers who simply assumed I was a girl. But I hated being harassed by kids and their vitriol. I learned to be tough.
I was tucking my penis at the age of three. I was dressing in my sisters clothes from the age of five. I learned about “sex-change” when I was 8 and was, from that moment on totally fixated on my eventually transformation into a girl. Even my early love interests were with boys—first crust at 10 and then the big one in HS. I did not once think or feel gay. I felt like a girl who wanted to be a girlfriend. But, the idea of transsexuality was so abhorent to me I NEVER considered that I was indeed transsexual despite the fact that everything pointed me their for my entire life. I was so desperate to be so-and-so’s girlfriend in HS I became very suicidal. But I hid everything. He “knew”, but only by inference. He must have been conflicted, for though he “rejected” me, he never outed my or really hurt me. He just told me what he saw like he was sort of teaching me… At first he kept telling me how “soft” and “delicate” I was… A year later he was telling me I was “exactly like a girl”, that I “so much like a girl” that he couldn’t believe it. Then, by Sr. year in HS he was telling me “you should be girl”, “you are totally a girl”. He even told me about “sex-change” operations. He said “you really should do that. You should have the operation so you can be a real girl.” I still never connected what was actually happening in my life and “transsexuality”. In 1982 that was still a horrible perverted sickness. I was completely disconnected, even though what I wanted and needed most in the world was to be female… to become a woman in every way.
So… there it is…. I was child transsexual. But, like most was invisible. No one ever knew and I was being conditioned to deny and bury all those feelings. Little has changed for me. I know the pain of being honest about these feelings when you are told you have betrayed your wife and your whole life must be a lie. It isn’t. I am the sum of all my experience and feelings. One aspect of my reality does not refute the others… Humans are very complex. I don’t believe this will ever be resolved. I don’t know if I will make it. If I die (if even partly because of my trans experience) no one outside my small circle will know that truth. I am invisible and will disappear into the invisible well of our cultural obsession with hetero-normativity.
When i think back i was always playing girly games with girls and hanging out with girls at a young age but i think i first realised i wasnt supposed to be male aged nine. This was when i started cross dressing. I wish i had been given the chance back then to transition….
Its never to late, you have the looks to carry you over the top
you look very hot lady
mine hit me at age 5, when a father of a female friend said something along the lines of “well, you know how girls are” and i thought , but i’m a girl too. never shook that inner conviction ever again, and now i’m 57yo and STILL believe i’m a woman!