ah, the great question of how. why? when? where? who?

[some nsfw, mostly a reflection about my past with identity.]
[if talk of puberty and dysphoria bothers you, click the button again to collapse the box.]

not everyone has a moment where their brain goes. huh. i guess i'll be transgender today.
i however kind of did and kind of didn't. technically i did after starting testosterone, but let's hold off going into detail with that for now.

like many people who are older than like, 20 as of 2024, my internet journey started in the wild west of ishoutbox chatrooms (hey, that's on my home page!) and forums, along with strange various websites that were social but not great and made for shitty computers or the dsi/wii/psvita/other game consoles back when they had opera browsers built into them around 2007-2014.
during those days, there were three choices for identity. 1. you could just not lie at all like how kids do it now and use your full name like a dumbass. 2. you made a fake name you could remember because you knew that internet safety existed but also didn't really want to be called your username, or 3. your username that you made would be your name. (which, now a days i'm more prone to #3, since there's so many fucking alexes out here like holy shit)

now i was #1 for a little while. not super long, but a little bit of time. but i knew i shouldn't be doing that, so i had to think of something. i didn't have a username on stuff yet, as i mostly roleplayed on sites, and it wasn't quite at the time where i wanted to "establish" myself as a regular in the places i went.
so, i did as most people who were trying to think of a cool name for strangers to call them and went onto baby name websites to pick something out.
something to keep in mind is that i was extremely into pokemon. i still am. but as a kid? holy shit you had to practically tear my gameboy or ds away from me to get me to stop, and even then, i'd be daydreaming- can you tell i'm autistic- about it or drawing pokemon.
so... looking through baby names, i wanted something that was similar to my (now dead)name so i could remember it but something that sounded cool and epik

then it hit me. on my shitty android tablet that i had i tapped on "Alex". the meaning it said? master.
like pokemon master

it was a match made in autistic heaven. i could brag that my name meant i was a pokemon master and really great at the games! ..nobody ever, until i was an older teen, asked why my name was alex nor asked the reasoning behind it.

that didn't stop me from using it. i did consider finding other names, but there was something distinctly nice about the name. it was short, it was androgynous, it was cute- ah. hold on a minute.
the name had started making people assume i was a boy, or asking what i was. and as an EPIK GAMER i knew one singular thing: i knew no girls online that i... well, knew were girls, and that there was one social meme and rule that stood out whenever anything involving girls online came up.
G.I.R.L.

i linked the context for that above, by the way.

so... naturally, i lied.

and people took that bait. yeah, that could be bad wording, but that's what it was. i didn't want to tell strangers, of whom i didn't know if they were my age or not, that i was a tween girl online roleplaying pokemon shit and talking to them about games and such on anonymous chatting sites. i knew it was dangerous, and i knew i wasn't even supposed to be on those sites anyways.
but something about it didn't feel wrong.

this coincidentally aligned pretty well with my discovery of tumblr and the start of my queer life, as i didn't realize that the way i felt for a girl who i thought was really cute and cool because she was a military brat from japan was a "crush". around this time puberty hit me hard, and with it came a large distinct disgust around my body. i hated my curves, i hated my chest, i hated the way my hair felt, i hated everything about it.
...but somehow my crush still liked me, and thought i was safe enough to come out to. i wasn't super into queer culture or knew much outside of Yaoi so i really had no issue, and i especially had no issue when she wanted to experiment.
after my first kiss, one that had some complicated background that i'm not going to share for privacy reasons, but one that i did intiate, i proceeded to be giddy for an entire week. it was the best feeling in my life, and it felt right

so... i knew that i liked girls. but got bullied into dating a boy when she left. i didn't care for him, but he was a really nice friend. but there still was something that troubled me.
i hated looking like a girl. i hated being treated as a girl. but the only time i ever enjoyed it was for my childhood crush. when she saw me as a girl, it felt right.

it felt right to be seen as attractive by a girl, moreso. that's something that didn't really occur to me until i started to reflect on this.

once those feelings started hitting me because of puberty, i took a hard turn into hating pink tomboy territory. i still wore some skirts and dresses- mostly ones that went down to my knees and kept my frame boxy. but i started asking for jeans, tees, flannels- especially the flannels. i'd layer my clothes up in a manner that made me look silly in retrospective, but it was anything to hide my fat and to hide my curves.

as time went on, i slowly learned more about LGBTQ identites through tumblr. i learned about nonbinary identites, mspec identities, among other things. in secret i switched around labels as i tried to figure out what felt right. i was scared to "abandon" being a girl or feminity, since i spent so long with it. as the years went by, i kept one thing the same: i loved women, so i had to be a lesbian, but i didn't feel fully like a woman.

at a point however i did understand something- moreso once i was started to get to the end of [female] puberty: my body was masculine. it was built to be masculine. i was born to be masculine.
i didn't grow taller. my shoulders grew wide, my body kept muscle well, i had naturally high T for someone AFAB, and i had a phantom penis.

wait.

that last thing wasn't the tipping point, but it was something that i had realized at a point that began to give me significant dysphoria. it, however, was something that helped my tipping point and made me understand truly what my feelings about my body were.

at the end of my [female] puberty, i had started to see things about butch lesbians on testosterone. i saw things about butches getting top surgery, getting meta, getting various transmasculine "things" that i had really associated with binary trans men. identifying as butch at the time, it made my mind race. i was old enough at this point that i had a job that paid me enough that i could start testosterone to test the waters.
i spent hours watching videos and reading through reddit to understand the side effects and what could happen.
i spent hours laying in bed, wondering if it would be worth it.
i spent hours laying in bed, realizing that my curiosity was of something rather obvious at this point in my life.
i already used he/him pronouns mostly. i already referred to myself as a guy a lot of the time at this point. my girlfriend already called me her boyfriend and husband at points. i already dressed masculinely, and whenever i wore women's clothes, it felt like crossdressing.

so a week after she left after a visit, i said fuck it. and put my information into FOLX and then talked to a nurse.
i told my brother and my girlfriend that i was starting t. they both congradulated me, and when i told my mother, she was apprehensive.
..but ultimately, she understood that it was something that was in my best interest, and while she struggles, it's fine. i personally don't find any issue in it. others may feel awful in the same position, but she's my mother.

so i started. i video called my girlfriend every week for a year me taking my shot.
it was subtle, but there was something involving it that was changing me mentally. not for the worse, but for the better.
i got more confident. i immediately was getting voice cracks, and they were euphoric.
but also i noticed that i was very much more euphoric than usual over having masculine terms be used for me, and dysphoric when i got seen as a girl.
that feeling got stronger when i realized my bottom growth began to come in- getting an immense amount of euphoria from it. finally, that strange feeling of phantom penis was starting to fade.

hair started forming on my face, i started to sweat more, and in general, when i looked at myself i saw a gentle little guy instead of a depressed woman.
i denied the idea that i was fully a man for a few weeks though.
i was used to being in circles where joking about hating men was common and demonizing them was rampant. this isn't to say that there isn't truth to some of what people say- cis men, not as a collective, often end up being awful towards anyone who isn't a cis man. i couldn't blame any of them for their jokes or for their takes on men...
but it made me feel rather uncomfortable with sitting there and saying, "I'M A MAN! I'M A GUY! I'M A BOY!"

i still feel that some times, especially when i see MEN DNI in things- but that's a me issue.
especially since i still feel ties towards lesbianism, as i spent so long as a lesbian. especially since i still don't know, with how i feel, if i get seen as a hypermasc lesbian, or if i get seen as a heterosexual male.
for the sake of comfort towards others, since i know that non traditional identities are frowned upon by a LOT of people, i simply label myself as a heterosexual male. but i can't deny there's something wrong with that.

for now i'll leave that as what my "final" identity is.
but that may change, as nothing is ever static.

:3

:3

:3