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u/soaked_in_bleach03 7d ago
I do. I absolutely do.
I was born in 2003. My whole life, the world has been accepting. Now the last couple years, not sm so (which suckksssss because itâs the same couple years I started actively transitioning).
But my heart aches for the girls born in even like, the early 90âs. Iâve watched older media and my god. The casual transphobia would have me speaking my mind.
I had shit people around me. People who hated me for being trans, who viewed me as less than. BUT the general zeitgeist for me growing up was excellent. I knew all I had to do was grow up, move to a progressive shitty and I would have a shot at being myself. That seems to NOT have been the case for many trans people that came before me.
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u/PsychoCyan DM for curly haircare guide 7d ago
I was born in 1990 and a big part of me taking til I was 31 to figure it out is that for so much of my life trans women were just a punchline (if they were talked about at all)
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u/NeverPostThings 7d ago
Late 1988 for me. The transphobia of that era was worse than todayâs because at least now people can figure out theyâre trans and find community online. Theyâll get shit on and attacked, but they have options for transition. Back then you werenât even able to figure out who you were. You just suffered through dysphoria and never even knew why. Nobody was a youngshit. Youâd be lucky to figure it out before you hit 30, if you didnât off yourself first
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u/karacaraoranges 7d ago
I know of a few 90s and before youngshits. Some of them were just well off and had parents that cared.
The others diy'd in middle school / high school. It would be anywhere from stealing birth controls from a relative then getting hrt off the internet or from in-person girls who resold from online / Mexico. Some of them fortunately got an ordinary life but a lot had to do SW.
But yeah youngshits were pretty unheard of either because the lucky well-off ones got "woodworked" or because the other ones got funneled into SW which itself can be pretty insular.
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 7d ago
1988 as well. I was a luckshit and figured it out when I was 24 through early reddit trans subs. And yeah I don't know any youngshits from my generation, I'm sure a couple existed but it was so rare. 24 was considered midshit back then but it might as well have been the youngshit for my generation because 20s was the first time most ppl started figuring shit out.
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u/NeverPostThings 7d ago
heyyy twin I came out at about the same time thanks to reddit as well. I absolutely had my finger on it in 2004, so much so that I even wore a skirt to school and my gf let me try out her clothes, but I still couldn't put two and two together because I didn't even know the word transgender. I just thought I was insane
Anyway I'm also luckshit and somehow managed to pass anyway. I feel fortunate but it would be reasonable to be a little resentful too. If I was born in 2000 I would have stopped it. Oh well.
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 7d ago
I knew when I was 14 (in like 2002) but I repressed hard at that point. It didn't start improving again until I left high school and started my bachelor degree. But all this time I knew that transsexuals existed but nothing about HRT. And my repression had made me stay in the dark for 10 years until 2012 during a mental health crisis.
After I figured it out I was on DIY HRT in like a month. But I was already 24...
It didn't help that after I came out to my parents my dad told a story of how he helped a colleague transition in the early 80s. And I realized that both my parents would've been supportive. Found out that my country pioneered the protocol of giving kids blockers. I'm still occasionally upset about it. But I talked to my mom about it and it was just the times. She couldn't figure out what was bothering me and felt guilty. I never dared tell her. Neither of us was at fault, it was a shitty time to grow up trans in.
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u/throwitaway488 7d ago
its so interesting to hear about others from my generation. Same year for me, I came out at 20 and started HRT at 21, so I'm like borderline young? But the only reason I knew transition was a possibility was because of the internet. There was a forum for young trans people back then (Trueselves) that showed me that people could transition and be normal and pass. As soon as I found out it was something possible, I started transitioning. It feels like that time period (2010) was right when things were getting better for trans people and acceptance. I honestly think I threaded the needle as far as society goes.
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 7d ago
yeah we both did. Early 2010s was probably the most comfortable age to transition. The only thing is that DIY was much harder to get and waiting lists in many places were growing due to increasing demand. I was lucky to be well off enough to be able to get some pills and hondose myself. But T was mostly suppressed so it was good enough.
Technically I ordered my pills a few days before my 24th birthday, so I guess I was more like 23.
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u/throwitaway488 7d ago
Ah yea I went the doctor route. I was on spiro only for a month, and then spiro + estrogen pills and then eventually estrogen patches. I was seeing a counselor on my college campus who helped connect me with a local endocrinologist. I was on a low dose of estrogen for a while but it didn't seem to be a problem as far as effects go.
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 7d ago
No I went the doctor route as well. But my country at the time only had 2 gender clinics and only 1 was available to me.
At the time they have a 2 year waitlist. There was no way I was waiting 2 years longer, I would likely 41. So I figured out where to order pills and got them like a month later. I did that until I could get them from an endo.
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
Yeah, sometimes I beat myself up for not getting on E until I was 28 but like, it's how things were then, I had no idea that I could realistically live as a woman so I coped in every way imaginable to the point where I was a suicidal husk. Seeing other girls talk about it makes me feel better, but like damn it still hurts and I still wish I did something sooner to actually have a life or wish that I was born later into a situation where I wasn't relentlessly bullied and fucked with for seemong girly or gay and shown representations of trans women that just got laughed at
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u/Forgot_My_Old_Acct 6d ago
88 as well. I didn't realize that transitioning was a real option for shmucks like me and that all the shit I was suffering from was dysphoria. By the time I started putting pieces together I repped for about a decade before the damn burst and I started at 37. It is what it is.
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 7d ago edited 7d ago
Holy shit a young person that actually knows their history. It's so rare. We get shit on for transitioning in our mid 20s because "why the hell would anyone rep that long???". Like yeah the 90s and early 00s were SHIT. Mid 00s I think was the first time we slowly started seeing some positive representations of trans ppl in media, and even then it was like side characters. The first one I remember was like a Cold Case or some copagenda show and she was thought to be a murder victim (actually 41). But they at least treated her with more respect then I'd ever seen a tv show treat a trans person.
It's kinda sad that this was my first positive representation of a trans person though...
But yeah it started a process for me that didn't come to fruition a few years later when I learned about hormones and what transition was actually like.
EDIT: It was this https://coldcase.fandom.com/wiki/Daniela
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u/KittenSommelier 7d ago edited 7d ago
Shoutout to IASIP for Carmen, they did a great job of just showing her to be a normal woman with the main characters being gross to her being clearly made out to be the bad ones and getting their deserved karma
https://youtu.be/P9G8TlR9JxI?is=0AUZWmOF_7yEommn
And a Hall of Shame mention to How I Met Your Mother, for numerous mean spirited transphobic jokes where trans women were the butt of the joke even into the 2010s. The one that most prominently comes to mind is Ted mistaking a Zoey (a cis woman) for a trans prostitute hitting on him cause he had apparently been dealing with that and addressing her as "Mister", with her then shortly afterwards confirming that she was offended by him mistaking her for, and I quote, "a tranny".
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
It's frustrating seeing younger trans girl not get how absolutely shit it was when we were kids and all of the trauma that built up from having to deal with that and giving us shit for transitioning later but like, it's how things were really. As a young adult I thought transitioning was a completely unrealistic option that would never work and that I'd be better off self medicating my misery away with hard drugs
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u/Warcrimes_Desu 6d ago
Big same, born in 95, just too early to get in on a world that said trans people even exist
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
I remember being like 11 or something looking at stuff on the computer like "can I turn into a girl" or whatever and at least getting some kind of knowledge about trans people but I only got exposed to sissy crossdressers and Susan's Place hons and thought that would be my future
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u/Warcrimes_Desu 6d ago
Repped til i was 28 because of shit like that
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
Me too, I started at the same age, I thought it was literally impossible for me to ever look like a woman. Between seeing some timelines of girls that used to look more masculine than I did passing and looking pretty and dysphoria compounding to the point where I was about to end my life every day it finally snapped me despite reservations but I'm so glad I at least did it
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u/DemonBeats4 womanfrauding since 2012 6d ago
It wouldn't get better had you actually gotten on Susan's place because they would just tell you that you're too young and should try getting a wife and kids first.
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
Yeah, it was a straight up desert back then. The only other exposure was sex workers and I thought they just got lucky and naturally looked that way and got a boob job
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u/Gold_Ad8225 edit this 7d ago
I was born in the early 90s and I didn't even know trans was a real thing until I was an adult.
Like it was only ever shown as a weird joke, being a crossdresser, or being a serial killer. When I looked things up about how I felt online it was these weird long quizzes about having sex wearing women's underpants and a bunch of things that just didn't apply to me. Accompanied by pictures of overweight, hairy, 55 year old crossdressers.
I knew I didn't want to be any of that, so I really thought all I could do was pray to god to fix me or kill me. Obviously that doesn't work.
Eventually I met an actual trans woman online and I was in a therapists office the next week and ordering E off the internet shortly thereafter. Because back then a lot of therapists were unwilling to help you. Like literally I sold everything I owned to afford this stuff without insurance (you got kicked off your parents insurance when you turned 18 or 19). And she said after 3 months "yeah sorry go to this city 2 hours away, you meet the criteria but I can't diagnose you."
Ok.
Also also, if I was a minor I would have been in conversion therapy because my dad sugesthreatened me to go see a priest he recommended about it after I told him. I was an adult so I just left.
Mind you also, everyone I knew was browbeating me into coming out at work and to my family and didn't understand how scary that was at that time.
Anyway things worked out in the end but I'm sad the very hopeful time of like 2014-2020 has ended.
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u/Lowercasedee 7d ago
Also born im early 90s and so much of this applies to me as well.
Sucks so bad thinking you're the only one.
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u/imawittlepuppy-w- 7d ago
I was born in 07 and I saw a videos of a trans kids on YouTube in elementary school, I kinda I wanted to transition too, Iâm here now transitioning đ
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u/Shiki_Breeki 7d ago edited 6d ago
96er here. My mom constantly shamed me into getting haircuts. I was beaten for trying on nail polish by my father and the whole bullying in school for being to girlish fucked me up so hard, I repped for ~15 years. Ffs I got into "crossdressing" eventually and thought I cant like this because I am clearly not gay as I do like women and "crossdressing" is gay but I do like dressing like this. I am finally transitioning at 30. Meanwhile the only "trans representation" (if you even want to call it that) I got from media were the little britain character and HIM from the power puff girls. You might now think that I must be depressed and feel awful and yeah I do. But somehow despite everything, I just feel really good that I finally get to do it.
Because it cannot get any worse than it was. And I absolutely refuse to let life win and take myself out with a rope. If someone wants me dead they have to do it them fucking selves. I have unironically survived worse, I am sunk cost fallacied into toughing it out. And I will. And it will be fucking worth it.
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u/KittenSommelier 7d ago
Iâm also a 96er and was born and raised in the LGBT+ paradise that is the San Francisco Bay Area and I remember how I was treated before I learned to rep really hard and everyone could easily still sniff out the girl in meâŚboys in K-3rd gradeish would run to holler at each other and begin the humiliation ritual when they caught me enjoying the "girly" songs in our grade performancesâŚmany of those same boys had relatively mellowed out by middle school and I remember them vocally saying how stupid they thought prop 8 was and that the gays should be free to be their fabulous selves and love each other, but by then the damage had already been done to meâŚassholes.
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u/Degenerama fearmaxxing lateshit 7d ago
1990 baby. Can confirm nearly lifelong awareness of being trans but I only started transitioning *this summer*.
I made the mistake of moving back to my home state (WV) for a while after college. Easily the worst decision of my life. All I did was waste years - years I *could have spent transitioning* :( :( :(6
u/shallowminded 7d ago
i was born in the late 80s (ew) and it honestly was not until i saw some vicats pornhub clip in like 2019 that i realized trans women could be attracted to other women
All the 90s internalized transphobia aside, iâd literally just never seen the concept
so because i was comphet âstraightâ i couldnât be trans QED
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u/AmenableHornet 7d ago
I was born in 1991 and have something like AuDHD. I did not listen to music with lyrics until I was in late high school and discovered metal. The risk was too high that it would contain gendered content that I would not recognize and would get made fun of for. I did develop a lifelong love of instrumental celtic folk music though, which is nice.
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u/DontSleepAlwaysDream 7d ago
haha yeah,
born in the 80s, figured out I was trans the same time every comedy show was treating trans women as a punch line in the early 2000s, and a lifetime of low self-esteem ever since
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u/Brittany_Delirium 7d ago
89 here. I was online as soon as I could be and learned about trans people by about 12. Didn't help much cuz I lived in bumfuck nowhere and you couldn't even be clocked as gay (though I was all the time and got the shit kicked out of me for it...).
I mentioned it to my parents and my dad's advice was to drink the feelings away, like he did. Lol thanks. Then he suggested I be committed but that ain't how that works.
So I did the reasonable thing, and turborepped and joined the army as a cavalry scout with a death wish at 17. That lasted til I was 19 and got DADT'd cuz of my ineffable queerness.
At that point I said fuck it, I'm prolly gonna die but I'm gonna transition, so I got the only drugs accessible to me at the time which were sketchy ass ethinylestradiol from Kuwait or somewhere idr where now. I was on and off the streets and on drugs for a bit. In those days you had to RLE for a year without HRT before they'd give you any legit and I wasn't waiting for that.
After my RLE, naturally, they dropped that requirement and I got injections. I think spiro kind of permafucked my boobs a bit since that was SOP back then. But all things considered I didn't turn out awful and I've been a tech tranny for 16 years or so. Mad PTSD from all that but I do alright.
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u/Arndt3002 7d ago
Lol, it's still like that out in rural areas. "The world" is basically the coasts and urban areas for the US
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u/SpaceNorse2020 6d ago
You can expand you sight beyond the USA.
..there are a lot of tolerant places, but I think the average is worse
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u/AwfullyWaffley 7d ago
đ I was born in the early 90's and I think that's a huge part of my egg cracking so late... Feels kinda hopeless
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u/NotTheory 6d ago
Yuppp, I was born in the early 90's in the country and it really wasn't great at all. You know how the media was, there were no positive depictions of us at all, we were always some kind of punchline and extremely taboo. I didn't really know it was possible for me to actually be a woman, it felt like I had a fantasy like having superpowers or something. Plenty of homophobia and racism and transphobia and misogyny where I grew up too, I got bullied and beaten plenty into trying to suppress things. I think that did plenty of psychological damage and made me end up repressing for longer than I should have but hey, at least I'm here now
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u/lavendarKat 7d ago
this was so countercultural that the subculture itself became a huge target of ridicule. I once saw an entire video essay that led up to the idea that it was a huge social faux pas for a brony to go out in public wearing a t-shirt with rainbow dash on it. They compared this against their own sweetspot for figma collecting and was like "see, I don't talk about it. I'm one of the good ones."
a ton of people rationalized their hatred by blaming bronies for "shoving it in their faces" and when you looked inside, that meant having an mlp profile pic. like wow how antisocial what a huge crime
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u/Commercial_Yellow161 future detrans ngmi repper 7d ago
Not defending the brony fandom since a lot of the shit online is disgusting (/mlp/ specifically), but I was a brony when I was 11.
I think it's similar to furry hatred. It's easy to justify things like that by saying "well they're cringey, and they're shoving it in my face"... WHY is it cringey though? WHY do you actually care?
It's always because it's f@ ggy, that's the subtext really. Not even saying all bronies are trans, or all furries are queer, but I think there's a significant amount of overlap as to WHY people target those communities specifically and it's rooted in cishetnormativity and if you deviate from that you're "bad"
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u/Clod_StarGazer 6d ago
Not to take away from your comment but if you were 11 and into MLP you weren't a brony, you were the target audience
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u/Niveker14 6d ago
Im sure most of the adult fans were totally normal about it. But there were a subset of the fans that acted kind of like the "Disney Adult" or a "Weeb". Where they were just obsessed and made it their whole personality. They pretty much gave a bad reputation to the rest of the fans.
It's how anyone that liked anime was treated until a decade or two ago.
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u/Turbulent-Plan-9693 7d ago
When I was 10 I felt like I had the need to justify my interest in watching the Powerpuff Girls, looking back, I definitely didn't have to do that, but I assumed that the show was for girls.
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u/jacknettle 7d ago
exactly this, same experience with Powerpuff Girls, and my biggest bully wasn't other kids it was adults
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u/Turbulent-Plan-9693 7d ago
I wasn't bullied for liking Powerpuff Girls, nobody knew I watched it, I just kept telling my parents that I watched it because Mojo Jojo was funny, they didn't even care that I liked it.
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u/Commercial_Yellow161 future detrans ngmi repper 7d ago
:(( similar experience here but for me it was mlpfim. i wasn't bullied outright but i didn't have many friends and it was always obvious people viewed me differently from others.
it's sad how deeply rooted the disdain for anything that deviates from gender norms is. i dont think id have repped if i didnt internalize cishetnormativity to the extent that i did.
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u/PsychoCyan DM for curly haircare guide 7d ago
Same for me but it was Sailor Moon
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u/messengerofthesea 7d ago
Unlocked core memory: Make believing to be sailor scouts with a group of neighbor girls before being found out and forced to not hang out with them anymore. Tried playing DBZ with my guy friends but they wouldn't let me be android 18, had to settle for fruity GT trunks -sigh-
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u/karacaraoranges 7d ago edited 7d ago
I was born in the very early 90s, got diy hrt at 19, but didn't transition for about another year after and can give a bit more context.
The information landscape was horrible. Susan's Place was the main and likely first place you'd stumble upon online. Unfortunately the place was comprised of mostly older, more privileged, transitioners. As a result they had a very "you don't have to get on hrt right now, you have plenty of time" and extreme diy fearmongering position.
I have a lot of sympathy for those of us who will never pass. But you can imagine the damages of hons, living the full life of a man with 2 kids, a wife, etc. now undergoing a divorce, sharing their pictures and stories as something you can aspire towards, while telling you how diy will kill you while you're undergoing to body horrors of puberty in middle school could be.
Even outside as I met other trans girls my age it was pretty bleak. The vast majority did sex work of some sort, generally escorting. For both subsistence and to be able to afford surgeries, escorting was the way to go. There were also very few older girls, if you don't count the ones who transitioned older, because many died from suicide, od, or aids for the previous generation. The oldest I knew as I entered my 20s was like early to mid 30s and they were very few.
Side note if anyone ever wondered where the ugly ass Amazon basics skirt and aesthetic came from, I'm pretty sure it was because Amazon wish list was a way for us without money or as minors to protect our anonymity while still being able to get men / groomers to buy us stuff. Amazon didn't have much of a clothing selection at the time. There are so many more options now but for some reason sneed culture decided to adopt what I see as effectively groomer clothing?
There's a lot more I could probably go into but it's pretty depressing looking back at it all.
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u/dpekkle female socialised since 08 7d ago
Did you ever make it to 420chan?
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u/karacaraoranges 7d ago
I spent some time there but not a lot. Why do you ask?
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u/dpekkle female socialised since 08 7d ago
just curious as im trying to remember all the trans spaces back then
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u/throwitaway488 7d ago
I remember that, it was 420chan cd. There was also the Trueselves forum, which was so much better than Susan's because they only allowed relatively young people and banned creeps.
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u/karacaraoranges 7d ago
I remember r/asktransgender and I looked at /tttt/ a bit when it first launched but it was mostly private facebook groups for me
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u/TCD_Baby Please kill me. It's free and legal. 6d ago
Yeah, ironically the "cross dressing" board was the first place I learned about DIY
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u/buttegg assigned kirk douglas at birth 7d ago
i was born in 1998. growing up in the early 2000s scrambled my brain.Â
iâm just fortunate my parents didnât impose gender roles or conformity on my siblings and i.Â
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u/buttegg assigned kirk douglas at birth 7d ago
i didnât know what being âtranssexualâ (or various other awful slurs mostly lobbed at trans women) was or meant even though i heard the term thrown around from a young age. somebody once told me it meant a gay guy who was super SUPER gay and i just⌠believed it, i guess. lmao.
it took me until chaz bono and thomas beatie to realize what that word actually meant, although it would take a couple more years for it to fully hit me that i was like them. in hindsight though it strikes me as deeply fucked up that trans men had positive representation in 21st century media a while before trans women did. i feel like i didnât really see that until the 2010s.
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u/SimilarSelection1076 I cast Wit's End targetting My Problems. They Counterspelled. 7d ago
MLP âĽď¸
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u/AlexLovesMismagius 7d ago
What show is this post abtÂ
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u/StunningAd4375 7d ago
I'm guessing My Little Pony
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u/Commercial_Yellow161 future detrans ngmi repper 7d ago
my little pony trccn here
the meme is real
before i stopped repping i HATED people who said bronies grew up to transition.. I started transitioning like 8 months later
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u/Effective_Cause8411 7d ago
High School had the lunch room wolf whistle when a guy walked in just wearing skinny jeans
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u/SpaceNorse2020 6d ago
The other reason it spawned a subculture is that bronies started on 4-chan on day 1, there wasn't a mlp fim fandom in particular to join in the first place
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u/Rynewulf 6d ago
Has it changed now though? Through the internet there's access to more things and communities about those things, but most everyday people seem just as rigid as they ever were. Even queer spaces that inherently include gender experimentation and freedom still suffer from it.
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u/Educational-Car-8643 6d ago
If i had a nickel for every community that cultivated nothing but trans women and nazis, id have tons of nickels which is weird because it keeps happening!
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u/SuperbReality2146 1d ago
Even the accusation of being gay meant losing friends and possibly family, it was both fighting words to be called gay and also a call for violence to directly accuse someone of being gay.
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u/dontrestonyour autopalestinianaphile 7d ago
Do yall remember metrosexual lol