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I treat the whole male thing the same way other people treat their cringe teensge phases. I don't erase it but I do generally avoid talking about it or acknowledging it when not relevant. Because yeah it really does feel like a cringe thing I did when I was younger and hadn't figured myself out yet.
And if relevant I transitioned at 20 a decade ago
Started my transition 2021 (holy fuck that was a long time ago?!)
There is no right answer, nor does your answer have to stay the same.
There's a lot of processing that comes with this. I wouldn't recommend burning photos, but maybe putting them in a box where you no longer remember they exist.
I started wanting to burn it all, but I find myself wanting to show that pretransition me live, rather that disgust now days. It's still me, it's still made me who I am, but just like I'm no longer 14 year old me either, I'm no longer that person.
In trans communities there's a team "going stealth" which generally means when you've reached a level of presentation that people can't tell you're trans unless you tell them.
I coined the term "going ghost" to mean when ALL your professional and governmental documentation has been changed to reflect your true identity - both name and sex
I myself have gone ghost, I've either actively erased or mentally suppressed most if not all aspects of my past self. To be fair, the last time that person existed was over a decade ago.
I own it, it's part of the route I took to be who I am today, good and the bad. I don't talk about it much unprompted but I don't mind talking about it.
This is the healthy, well-adapted approach. Never run from things only because you dislike them, you'll never stop running.
I think this is a little prescriptive. There might be some truth in this but everyone needs to find acceptance on their own. Sometimes running works just fine.
For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner's got phenotype preferences that don't match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It's still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn't go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.
I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and "clean up" is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having "dead eyes" in them and they make her feel weird.
I can't really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that's kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we've definitely had conversations of "hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn't cool, please don't." but stories where the tale's context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn't feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there's a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it's enough.
Quite frankly, I don't know how I would. Granted, I haven't even started yet due to my current living situation, but I kinda doubt it's something I'll ever be able to fully purge; if for any reason because I doubt I'll ever have the money to fully transition. Even then, however, I've lived too much of my life as male. I think it'd be impossible to erase or dissociate from +30yrs of me. Hell, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop seeing myself as a man.
sigh
girl me too 😭 lets swap chromosomes
Fuck yeah, gimme your extra chromopenis so my Y becomes an X bby.
Edit: don't mind me, I'm just being a fucking weirdo, lol
I've lived too much of my life as male. I think it'd be impossible to erase or dissociate from +30yrs of me. Hell, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop seeing myself as a man.
I totally get this. As a 40-yr old with extremely masculine features, there's no way I could ever successfully transition. Maybe if transitioning was a thing back when I was like 12-14 years old, I might've had a chance. But I've been male for so long, and even more masculine in appearance than most men I know, so I think it's only something I can fantasize about at this point.
Im here, on the other side ladies.
I am a woman well into my 40s. I used to insist people call me by a man's name as a small child and growing up for a bit. I was raised in a very churchy midwest town, only child. The Thought of transitioning, then, in that area, was well kept out by church and lack of internet for us younguns. I barely knew what gay was, mostly from all the folk who called me butch and tomboy, got me curious to find out. Learned about cross-dressing but didn't realize there could be more than my jeans n tees already. Cried so hard the day I woke up with boobs as a teen, late bloomer and thought I'd be spared. And yeah, if I could have been a dude, I'd be a hella gay one. Was very confusing growing up with all nuclear family ideals and not fitting any of them, including their idea of the variety of the gender and sexuality spectrum that "wasn't allowed".
I also wonder if we had the internet media tech, medical knowledge and availability earlier, or was born later, who I might be.
🫂
I'll try to nuke it to the best of my abilities, erasing isn't far enough.
It's a bit OT, but I was wondering how the realization process worked for you guys? I don't have the feeling my kids feel uncomfortable with their assigned gender. But what would be the signs in your opinion where a parent should pay attention?
Honestly there's not really a way to know short of them telling you. There's a difference from folk just not liking the gender box people put them in and rejecting all the cultural trappings of gender (being a tomboy or a femboy) from them being trans. Transness goes a little further than just cultural markers, it's a reaction to one's body. Oftentimes that struggle on the outside just shows up as them not flourishing... And sometimes you don't recognize what them actually flourishing actually looks like because they never did until after they changed.
I grew up in the 90's and from sheer lack of exposure just didn't have words for what I was going through. I was aided by being fairly androgynous but really didn't talk to anyone about how good it felt to be read by strangers on occasion as my gender. I relied on gender neutral nicknames. I starved myself or overexercised to stay lean at points to keep myself from putting on weight that would go to areas that would outwardly show my body through clothes and avoided mirrors while naked but none of that clicked as me being trans until when I was 21 and living abroad in Japan where basically everybody read me as being what I was, either assuming me as a trans man or reading me as a cis man. None of this really caused me to self reflect until I was near the end of my visa and realized that going back to all my friends and family whom I loved dearly was a double edged sword. I would be locked back in to where people would enforcing my gender, lightly mind you. They weren't trying to force me to act any way at all but there was a gentle tyranny just by them correcting people who "got it wrong" or using my name or by men I saw as friends and peers treating me as a delightful oddity like I was some sort of ideal romantic though not nessisarily sexual conquest because I liked hobbies and masculine dominated spaces that few women participated in which in modern context would probably outwardly make me appear as some kind of "pick me". This realization that I didn't want to go back cascaded into me crashing hard up against all the novel fantasies I had neen distracting myself with that I would somehow go through some kind of magical event and instantly change body type and all my friends would just have to except me because "oh well magic..." I never believed this would actually happen mind, I wasn't delusional but I would amuse myself while walking around with these little daydreams. All at once though I realized that that was never going to happen. I was gunna be in this form until I died and I broke into a full on dispair. I didn't even know trans men existed and my only experience with trans women was representation where they were ridiculed. I backwards engineered that trans men must exist because that was the only thing that made any sense.
I stuffed it all under my hat for another 10 years, growing more distant with old friends and not making new friends. I read a bunch of feminism and chased out my internalized misogyny thinking that was the problem. It muddied the waters awhile but I couldn't shake that no matter how I told myself that being a woman and being a man were value neutral it didn't shake my feelings like I was playing out Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and all people saw was the roach. I tried non-binary pronouns and a name change more or less as proof to myself that I was okay without and discovered the opposite.
My mom took me coming out hard only in the way that she felt she should of seen it sooner and it threw into sharp relief all those times where she'd tried to pressure me in little ways to be more fem. I don't begrudge her any of that. She says it should have been obvious but really no. If I had known that there were options I could have asked instead of hurting myself the way I did and struggling with the isolation then I might have. But I lived in a conservative town where just growing up in an agnostic household had seen me get literally have neighbor kids throw rocks at me growing up. Even if knew my friends and family were cool, there were medical options that would reduce all the regrets that I have now I might have buried and denied my needs anyway. My family had kept me alive by being awesome in other ways and I always knew that me dying would have destroyed them... And that's really all you can do. Let your kid know they are loved regardless of anything and let them sort themselves out. No need to brace and seek the signs one of them potentially trans, just let them know that you love them and if they are then you will still love them and want to do right by them.
Thank you.
I have a trans son, and really I don't think you need to worry about it - if you are caring enough to even ask this question, your kids will be fine, just let them grow up, they will figure themselves out. I literally just thought my youngest was a butch lesbian not a boy, my concept of womanhood is broad, he had to "come out" and he's not at all traumatized by that.
I'd been thinking about this for a bit today, I used to own it but I see it pretty differently now.
I kinda realised that I'd basically done all my growing up over the last 4 or so years. That wasn't my past, I was in someone else's life and I didn't know how to play that character. I didn't grow or change or do anything interesting, I just coasted to some destination I was meant to reach to finish a story I wasn't meant to be part of.
Now, I'm living my life instead, making my own decisions, liking the person I've become and telling my own story. The only downside is that I started with 20 years of baggage that I've gotta slowly get rid of.
I think of my past self in a sympathetic way because my past self endured so much pain so that I can be happy today. I'd rather not think of my past self because I find it rather depressing so I generally avoid my past but I do recognize it's existence. Although my old self really just feels like a husk and not a real person. In addition a lot of my past is a blur so I don't remember much anyways.
I do keep old pictures so I can reminisce about the past if I feel like it. I generally feel bittersweet when looking at those old photos because I am reminded of how depressed I used to be but it also allows me to see how far I've come since then. Other things such as my deadname are entirely negative for me so that I something I have erased as best I can.
i dont go out of my way to erase it but i also hate being reminded of it if that makes sense
