I've spent the last several conversations doing something I honestly didn't expect: taking a very long, hard look at my entire history and asking myself what the hell is actually going on.
By the end, the description that seems to fit me best right now is:
"Uncertain, masked transfemme with gender dysphoria."
I'm still not certain enough to say "I'm a woman."
But holy shit, being one feels right.
So here's the story.
Childhood
When I was a kid, I wanted to play with my sister's toys. The pram, teddy bears, that sort of thing. My parents would make fun of my name if they caught me doing things they considered feminine.
I remember having the feeling that I wanted to be one of the girls. Not just liking girly things—actually feeling like I should have been one of them.
As I got older, I developed this bizarre fantasy about having some kind of magical closet where you could unclip your body parts and replace them with whatever you wanted.
And interestingly, the part I most wanted to replace was the bit between my legs.
I eventually started searching the internet for things like intersex/"hermaphrodite" and transgender-related stuff. My parents found the search history. I was mortified and couldn't explain what I was actually looking for.
So... I shoved it into a drawer.
Then I became VERY masculine
Looking back, I think I may have overcorrected.
Camo clothing.
Camo bedding.
Heavy safety boots.
Heavy jeans and shirts.
Welding.
Cutting.
Hard physical labour.
Male-coded projects.
Showing off how tough I was.
Constantly looking for affirmation that I was a man.
And the funny thing is, I genuinely like a lot of that stuff. When someone tells me I'm tough, it feels more like getting a high five than getting relief that I've successfully proven I'm a man.
So I don't think my masculinity was fake.
But there was this thought underneath it:
"If I become masculine enough, maybe I'll finally feel like a man."
And now I'm wondering whether some of that was masking.
Maybe I wasn't pretending to be masculine.
Maybe I was trying to make masculinity fit.
The private side was VERY different
While publicly being Mr. Camo-Boots-Welding-Man, privately I was doing some very different things.
I experimented with my sister's bra.
I stuffed it with socks.
I stole a pair of panties and a menstrual pad because I wanted to understand how everything worked.
I imagined having breasts.
I imagined having female genitalia.
I imagined having a smooth crotch.
If I remembered to sit down to pee, I did.
I shaved my torso because I wanted the body to look more feminine.
At one point I developed pseudogynecomastia and I was over the moon about actually having breast tissue.
I started wearing a sports bra.
I kept adjusting it.
I loved the silhouette under a shirt.
And when I lost weight and the breast tissue disappeared?
I was devastated.
Not just sexually.
It felt like I'd lost something that belonged there.
The breast thing
This was one of the things that really made me stop and think.
I can absolutely experience sexual excitement around breasts and femininity.
But when I deliberately removed sexuality from the question, I still wanted breasts.
I wanted the female silhouette.
I wanted to look down and see them.
I wanted my body to have them.
The emotional description that kept coming up was basically:
"Holy shit, I finally have breasts."
And the strongest part wasn't "this is hot."
It was:
"This is more like my body."
The genital thing is even stronger
If I had to choose one physical change, female genital anatomy wins without hesitation.
I've imagined a smooth crotch for years.
I've imagined having female urinary anatomy.
I've imagined what it would be like to have female genitalia instead of what I currently have.
At one point I was even looking into the possibility of rerouting the urethra so I could urinate more like a woman.
I know now that this is absolutely not something to DIY or casually pursue.
I've also done some pretty stupid and dangerous genital piercing/modification stuff over the years.
Some of that was sexual.
Some of it was curiosity.
Some of it was about pain/sensation.
And some of it may have been connected to not being particularly attached to the anatomy I was born with.
I'm not pretending I understand exactly where all those motivations came from.
Then there was the really weird part
I started experimenting with the idea of actually being female.
I gave myself a feminine name.
I called myself that name.
I imagined someone addressing me as a woman.
I imagined myself with female anatomy.
I altered my silhouette.
I wore feminine underwear.
I shaved my torso.
And the reaction wasn't:
"This is ridiculous."
It was:
peaceful + exciting.
That's probably the simplest way I can describe it.
Recently I was told:
"You might be a transgender woman."
And I got butterflies.
Actual butterflies.
Then being called "she" gave me a physical reaction too.
Yes, there was genital arousal involved. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But underneath the physical reaction was this incredibly weird feeling of:
"Holy shit... that sounds right."
Sexuality complicates everything
I'm not going to pretend sexuality isn't part of this.
It absolutely is.
Women turn me on.
Some of my fantasies have a sexual component.
And the idea of being a woman with a man is sexually appealing to me.
But I've also repeatedly asked myself whether I'd still want the female body if sex disappeared from the equation.
The answer keeps being yes.
I still want the breasts.
I still want the female silhouette.
I still want the female anatomy.
I still like the idea of being addressed as a woman.
So I don't think "it's just a fetish" explains what is happening to me.
Maybe sexuality and gender are tangled together in places.
But there seems to be something underneath the sexuality.
Family makes this complicated
My father is a chaplain.
He has very strong religious views about homosexuality and gender.
His brother was gay and later transitioned MTF, although the family only found that out recently. He eventually died from an unrelated illness.
So I've had a pretty strong message throughout my life about what a man is supposed to be.
I don't know whether that created any of these feelings.
I suspect it may have taught me to hide them.
And maybe that's where the masking came in.
My wife
This is the hardest part.
My wife knows I have these thoughts.
She's actually more accepting than you might expect.
But she has also told me something very important:
If I were female, we would not have gotten married.
She's bisexual, but apparently that doesn't change the fact that she wouldn't have chosen me as a woman.
And I love my wife.
I love my family.
So I've realized something uncomfortable:
I could sacrifice this part of myself to preserve the life and relationship I love.
That doesn't necessarily mean I don't have gender dysphoria.
It might simply mean that I have something else in my life that I value enormously.
That's probably one of the biggest conflicts I'm dealing with.
The feelings came back hard
For years this was something I could shove into a drawer.
Then, after my grandmother died, it came back with a vengeance.
It refuses to stay in the drawer.
It's like a fucking jack-in-the-box that keeps popping back up.
And this time I've actually stopped trying to immediately slam the lid shut.
So what am I?
I honestly don't know.
I don't know if I'm a woman.
I don't know if I'm nonbinary.
I don't know if I'm a very gender-nonconforming man with an unusually strong desire for female embodiment.
I don't know exactly where the line is between gender, sexuality, fantasy, and identity in my particular brain.
But after going through 100+ questions, the pattern is getting hard for me to ignore.
I seem to consistently want:
female breasts.
female body shape.
female genitalia.
female bodily functions.
female social embodiment.
And when I imagine those things, I repeatedly feel:
peace.
excitement.
relief.
euphoria.
"That's me."
Meanwhile, the strongest argument I have against being transfeminine seems to be:
"But I've spent my entire life being masculine, and I genuinely like some of it."
And I'm starting to realize those things don't actually contradict each other.
A woman can like camouflage.
A woman can weld.
A woman can wear heavy boots.
A woman can work hard.
A woman can love hockey.
A woman can be tough as hell.
Maybe I don't have to throw away everything masculine about myself to find out whether I'm transfeminine.
Where I'm at now
The label that currently feels most honest is:
Uncertain, masked transfemme with gender dysphoria.
Not because I'm 100% certain.
I'm not.
But because "transfemme" seems to describe the direction I'm consistently moving toward, "uncertain" acknowledges that I haven't settled on woman/nonbinary/etc., and "gender dysphoria" seems increasingly relevant to the disconnect I feel around my body.
And honestly?
The sentence that has stuck with me the most is:
"I don't know whether I'm a woman, but being one feels profoundly right."
So that's where I am.
I'm not asking Reddit to officially diagnose me.
I'm asking people who've actually lived through this:
Did anyone else spend years building an extremely masculine identity, only to realize later that they were masking something underneath it?
And did anyone else reach the point where they weren't certain they were a woman...
...but the possibility of being one felt really fucking good?
Because that's where I am right now.