Story #2498

When I came out as trans at 10 years old, my mom told me that I was just depressed. I had recently had an early start to puberty, and my developing chest had inspired a new and profoundly dysphoric discomfort with my body. Because I had never met another trans person, never heard of it being a possibility, I didn’t have the words to fully describe what I was feeling, and as a result I wasn’t able to properly express what I was experiencing. She told me that everyone hates themselves during puberty and it was just a combination of my hormones and my genetic predisposition to mental illness. It would pass, she said. I was wrong, she said. I went back into the closet for another two years, and when I tried to refind my identity I remembered what she said and for a long, long time I was so afraid of being wrong that I refused to admit I was a man. I cycled through a million identities, sets of pronouns, before I finally decided that no one knew me better than me and announced to the world at 16 that I was a man and nothing was going to change that. My mom came around eventually and now I’m 18 and 5 months on hormones. Things got better, but it was hard. (FtM/18)