So this post is about my gender adventures and what I have setteled on.

Essentially, all of this discovery started with an interest in crossdressing. My male self was curious about female clothes. When I was 16, curiosity was taking into action and I ordered some girl clothes myself. I think the first item I owned was a maid dress, which is quite funny if you think about it. And let’s say I really enjoyed wearing that!

The desire to try living as a girl was always present though. I always knew I had a female side and that I want to express it. The thought of becoming a girl always seemed faint though, as I was certain it would be impossible.

I also was always a weird kid. I always got along better with girls of my age. I even had some really sweet friendships in elementary school days. That was until being friends with girls became “ewwww” and everyone started hating girls. I felt so disconnected to the world around me and I remember giving up friendships because male friends started shipping me with them and I couldn’t handle that.

At the same time I never truly felt connected to any of my male friends. I don’t even have contact to any of my male elementary school friends.

I never managed to go out dressed female until much later though. It has always been an activity I did on my own or together with my partner behind closed doors. Funnily enough this has also always kind of been connected to sexual activities in my head. I always thought it was a fetish or kink of some sort. But it never truly felt like it was just a kink.

Then in 2021 I slowly started to realize that this female side wasn’t just crossdressing. Although what also happened in that year was my post about crossdressing in public. What I didn’t write about is the fact that my friend also dragged me onto the womans toilet. I just mentioned it as a joke and she went full in lol.

Femboy

Anyways. Everything about this day felt so rewarding, so real, so colorful, so reviving, that I also started rethinking what I wanted to label myself as.

I came to the conclusion that my female and male sides can best be described by telling people that I was a femboy. This label got carried along for many years. But it never felt like this was describing the situation accurately enough.

Up to this point, I had already cleared out most of my closet of male clothes. Most of these got replaced with very gender-neutral clothing, mostly from the womans-section though. I found skinny jeans together with a T-shirt or hoodie to be the most comfortable for me. When it gets warmer, I also switch to shorts and hot pants.

Throughout 2022 and 2023 I started feeling even more girlish. I could really express myself properly that way. There was a female side, that always made me feel good when I showed it. And that was during very dark times at the beginning of 2022.

There also was a relationship in 2023 and the person encouraged me to dress more female. To dress more like the way I am. The “crossdressing in public” has turned into a regular activity throughout the relationship, many times even with makeup. I felt so accepted and so safe with that person that it really made myself come through.

Genderfluid

That is when I started changing my label from “just a femboy” to “genderfluid”. I had that in mind for a long time, one of my friends is genderfluid aswell. And the idea that gender is something I can influence myself and that I can manipulate however it suits me best was very empowering for my self expression.

This also ment that I could deal with any situation that required my male persona in an easy way. I would just “switch” to male mode and try to present as male as possible. With mixed results. It was a way of coping with body dysphoria until I better understood what I was feeling.

Static

As it turned out later though, this was very much a static phenomena.

So I had an entire mostly happy relationship where my partner used she/her pronouns on me,
called me a girl in front of her friends,
treated me like a girl
and exclusively used my female name.

I held an entire talk presenting female, using a female name, being refered to as she/her in the moderation. And it felt right!

And I still did not get it?!

People came to me after EH21 and just assumed I was a trans-girl. Of course they were right, but I didn’t see it. I mean I wasn’t even out to myself at this point in time.

I never looked back at any of those times and thought “oh I want to be more male right now”. I never felt the need to express my male side. It was always just tolerating the fact that I may act male now as society requires. And it wasn’t until much later that I relised how hard this actually was for me. I am in tears now as I am writing this.
At no point in time did I ever feel wrong when presenting female. The desire to become female is so insane that I am struggling to not fall back into the despair that is called a depressive episode. I am struggling really hard.

I am doing my second theraphy right now because of unrelated reasons. Always being more of a feelings-avoidant type, I have learnt to take my feeling seriously and I can now even handle feelings that would have made me explode from a fear of loss just over a year ago.

I have lost a parent when I was a teenager.
I have lost trust in the other parent a couple of years ago.
Both of these things have been beyond my ability to handle. I managed to get over these traumatic experiences with help and manage to live with them every day.

And yet, these feelings of gender dysphoria completely wreck me every day. Any social situation, any day to day activity, any part of my existence is filled with this constant thought of being in the wrong body. Every day I wake up and consider the cost of confronting myself with body dysphoria before I manage to get up and start my day.
On some days I loose.

I call this the cost of coming out to myself. The cost of confronting myself with those repressed feelings. How was I even able to repress such strong feelings for all those years?

Shouldn’t I have realised the moment I wrote that story about living a day as a girl at school when I was 14?

Overall I feel more alive now. More happy, more connected to my friends. Ever time one of my friends uses the name “Lucy” to get my attention or refers to me as she/her I burst out into a bright smile internally. It makes me feel so validated, so incredibly happy, so like I am myself.

And that is before I even consider the positive effects of hormone theraphy.

Every day I desire changes to my body that would make the days where I can’t even look at myself in the mirror just a bit easier. At least I now know what to do against a feeling of numbness that has been created by repressed feelings (of body dysphoria). Every day I curse the effects that my first puberty had. My first puberty was also the first time I started noticing that something was off.

How did I find out?

Well I met a certain Anna some time ago who said just one simple thing after I told her about my gender identity: “I feel like all of what you just told me boils down to that you are just scared.”

Oh she was so right. This single sentence started a chain reaction of self-discovery and “oh fuck”-realizations that ultimatly lead to the conclusion that yes I am in fact just a girl!

Thank you for making me face my fears. Thank you for being my transition-endboss, Anna.

Cheers,
Lucy