Dear diary, it is necessary for me to speak more about matters of my identity, for they need to be considered more precisely.
I think interpreting my life story as someone who was deep down actually a woman makes much more sense.
Let me explain further.
It all adds up. In the past, I felt some strange and unexplainable sense of resonance or of homecoming when I would embody a feminine character, which started off, at first, online. It happened multiple times over the years, even when I was as young as 8 - I felt the word female hit closer home than male. Like the 'male' was the default, the expected, something external yet imposed socially, which I couldn't really question on a deep level when I was a young person before even puberty hit. I felt I didn't identify with this term. However, I did feel a pull to manifest the other kind of presentation, which was 'female', to the point where I even created a female account on one of these flash game websites and tried to feel like a woman inside of this character. I think I liked it yet I couldn't describe exactly why. It felt like home, but I didn't know what it meant for my future self.
Well, maybe that you are a woman, actually.
And that's the point. Looking back at my life, it all makes much, much more sense, when I realize that I was actually a little girl, then a bigger girl who disidentified from masculinity, to now when as a woman I had a phase where I felt forced to hide my more vulnerable, deeply feminine identity - to ultimately, finally grow out of this prison of lifeless, soulless masculinity. For it is the masculine that is external to my soul, not the feminine.
This pull towards a feminine presentation - an unexplainable urge to do it even if in isolation from other family members seeing - was just so consistent and recurrent that it is bext explained by the fact that I just felt home there. I was a woman finding resonance in a feminine presentation; masculine presentations always felt external, since I couldn't exactly see myself in them.
For one, when I was 7.5 years old - in 2014 - I had created a female account on this flash game website called Plaz(s?)ma Burst 2 because I felt I liked the feminine characters there more. I felt that since I was a 'boy', then I should have chosen a male figure - and I did play with one for some time, actually - yet I didn't exactly see myself in them. Of course it was a game and the characters weren't so detailed or personally deep - they were more so cosmetic, but, based on their gender, they did have different voices. And, for some unexplainable reason, I preferred when my character made female voices, something seemed closer; yet at that age it was too early to internalize anything as deep as a gender and sex incongruency. I just preferred being a girl on that website, when I was joining servers... I just liked it, it hit closer home. And I preferred the look of the feminine characters, as I previously felt it was strange that I couldn't choose them, that I had to go with male characters. Until I realized I didn't have to. In fact, it may have been that the male characters seemed quite external to me, unlike me on some level I couldn't yet explain when I was little. While the possibility and actual reality of embodying a female character in-game struck something within me that I didn't feel when playing like a boy. When playing like a girl, I felt noticeably more at peace, more congruent. As congruent as a young brain could have felt. I realized I didn't feel as good when playing as a male character. In reality, I preferred to play as that female character, on that female-presenting account - with an account name that had 'girl' in it. Everybody playing on the same server saw me playing with the name 'girl' on me - because that's what I put in when I was creating the account. I felt the need to put 'girl' in there. But, of course, other family members round the house couldn't see me playing as female!
The very fact that this tendency would come back in multiple ways, over many years, consistently and with the same kind of energy - that being 'girly' feels like being home - points to something very much at the core of me.
For two, when I was 8.5 years old - in 2015 - I spent quite a substantial part of my summertime on a Minecraft multiplayer server. I was playing as a male-presenting character although I probably didn't really internalize his gender. If anything, I felt kind of neutral playing the character since I don't really recall playing him and being like I see my masculinity in him or whatever, I never had that feeling. But this was a factions server and I felt the need that my character needed a girlfriend. Lucky for me, months prior I saw on a different server a female account with a gorgeous-looking brunette as their skin, and I thought that I would get their username and log in with it to that faction server (since it was a cracked server). It was basically an alt account, and at one point I was logged in to the server with two Minecraft sessions running - one with the girlfriend, the other with the boyfriend. And, honestly, when I was playing her, sending messages to the chat and walking round the base, I felt some kind of... weird resonance. In a way, I felt more like her than the default character I was playing. I wanted to be her, to be the girlfriend, not so much the one who has a girlfriend, but one who is a girlfriend. Again, I didn't think much of it, but later on when I realized I felt such a resonance, a "click" back into place, I logged back into the server and actually played as her, played on that alt account, because I felt this peace, this lining up of my online presentation with something deeper within me. In a way, I felt more like myself when I played as a girl and when I was a girlfriend.
No, I didn't want to be the boyfriend, I wanted to be the girlfriend - and I felt some kind of weird, yet deep and penetrating resonance when I heard that latter word. Like it was somehow about me, more so than 'boyfriend'. Indeed the female character was beautiful, yet in a way I wanted to embody that beauty, to be that walking beauty and have that as a trait of my own, be this female presentation and walk around the server like a girl. Once again, this was when I was 8.5 years old, and it was the second distinct time I felt more resonant when being a girl and not a boy. Yes, it was online, but my world was mainly online, and I identified with what I was doing there. Honestly... I think I wanted to be that girl character in Minecraft. Genuinely. At first it was meant to be a kind of roleplay, but I started to identify with the character, somehow feeling the female character resonated with me more than the male character.
I didn't think much of it as a young child, but I knew I preferred to be playing as the female character, and I didn't identify with being a 'boy'. I had the pull to be the feminine character and I didn't internalize being the masculine character, really. It's like I secretly wanted to be a 'girl' instead, but I hadn't yet integrated that to my consciousness. I just 'liked' being a girl. It was something more so my body felt, but not yet what my mind thought.
The very fact that this tendency would still come back, would still arise, would still give me the feeling of being home... It's like I was actually meant to be a woman, through and through, both mentally and physically.
For three, when I a little less than 10 years old - in 2016 - I was thinking about making a Roblox character that also resembled a woman. I was looking at the catalogue inside some Roblox game, something related to an adoption center that was a popular concept back then - and with the avatar editor I remember I chose black hair with some cherry-red band. I was walking around like that, in such a character. The very fact I felt a pull towards this presentation is, once again, telling, considering my past when I did actually also embrace a feminine presentation and felt at home. In this instance, though, I recall my euphoria wasn't as pronounced. I think it was there, but I probably didn't really like the character I made. She looked too much like that kind of girl that would have been the 2016 Roblox ODer (online dater), although I couldn't really come up with anything better at that time. Still, I felt that pull again, and it didn't pull off because the presentation didn't fit me exactly. Not necessarily because it was a woman, but because it was presenting a woman I was not. Just like I don't envy every woman on the street, this case was not as pronounced as the previous two. However, considering my present existence in general, I've never felt the envy to be like certain men; but I did feel it towards some women. The pattern stays, it's still there, because I would still come to recognize myself in women, not men.
Of course not every case of presenting as a woman will be the case of gender euphoria. Maybe my distant memories are kind of right insofar as a certain kind of resonance is concerned, but that's not the woman I wanted to be. If anything, the manifestation of womanhood was off, not necessarily the womanhood part itself.
For four, however, this time it was on Roblox again, and this time I must have felt better since I actually now created a feminine account that had free items from the platform's official catalogue, not from the avatar editor inside some game. I recall I felt greater euphoria, since I felt more at peace. It was at a time when I already had a masculine-presenting account and, to be fair, I did like its look. In some way it looked like Johnny Bravo for that matter, haha. But I liked the image. Was I the image? I think not, I couldn't really bring myself to it. To identifying myself with that boy, it was just not quite right. Not quite well. There was distance. There was something off. This was also a kind of gender dysphoria, but it was subtle. No less valid, though. But in terms of my relation to that blonde-haired girl in Roblox, I felt myself there. It was me there, I could see myself there, something once again clicked. It was the same experience I had on Plaz(s?)ma Burst 2 and in Minecraft. The pattern of identifying with the feminine character was repeating - I felt oddly resonant with it.
The very fact that this tendency to be a woman on Roblox would come back not only once, but twice, points to a more general pattern that made itself manifest both at 7, 8 and 10 years old - that it was my home, even though I couldn't really say that out loud to my own inner monologue.
And now this is where a longer break occurs, and more of my feminine energy seems to be manifested outwards towards interacting with girls in my peer group. For about 4-5 years I don't have this pull to experience myself as a woman, which is somewhere around the period I was entering puberty and realizing I actually may have liked women in some way, recalling once how I liked a girl's butt at around 12 years old. Something worth considering in this period, though, is when I started to view gender expression as not just something online, but something I would like to feel in the real world too. This is when gender started to become physical and when my first thoughts of wanting to have breasts came up. There was this one time when I was around 10-11 years old when awkwardly, in front of a standing bookcase that had a glassed door, I lowered my shirt to try to see some kind of breasts there. Perhaps that's for the first time I tried to imagine I was a woman explicitly. Well, maybe rather a girl. But in either case, I didn't really feel like a boy. I tried to see how the skin and fat structure of a male nipple was actually more of a female nipple, and there was some imagination going on there.
Somewhere in that period I also felt how my butt was too 'girly' because it was rather big, and that led me to feel like I have to lose weight, to weigh less - which, again, is something very much experienced by young girls, but not by young boys. A boy doesn't worry about his weight; a girl does. And I did worry that I was too fat. Which was actually not really the case. Although, fair enough, that perception may have also arisen because during a visit to my (not quite competent) family doctor I was told I was rather big, even though I just had a full stomach from having eaten lunch. There was something going on here during this bizarre phase of my childhood but I also felt I didn't like my butt because it made me look too 'girly'. I felt some kind of aversion to femininity, actually, because it was seen as weak or a little humiliating, especially if a boy was like it. I remember telling my grandpa I wouldn't buy a pair of shoes from a certain brand, because only girls wore shoes from that brand. I probably just didn't like the shoes but I needed some kind of quick excuse. Although why was it that excuse?
With this kind of perception towards myself and the feminine setting in at around 10, I would not have experiences with being feminine or wanting to be feminine for about 5 years, up until I was 15. I felt distance from femininity during 2016-2021 which wasn't actually countered by a sudden connection to masculinity. If anything, I felt completely genderless, with strong undertones of femininity running in the background since I much preferred my girl peers than my boy peers, I felt more like myself around them. Between 10 and 15 years old I really didn't feel like a boy at all. I would never call myself that during that period since it didn't feel like a relatable label. Even in 2020, when I was starting to have longer hair, I was starting to feel a little scared since some of my hair would go below my cap and cover my ears a bit. I felt I was becoming too feminine. Although, once again, it wasn't countered by a rising need to be masculine per se. I really started to dislike my male peers during that period of online learning and in the summer of 2020 I really didn't want to go back to school to those 14-year-old male boys. I felt like I didn't fit in at all anymore except with maybe two of the boys who were more decent. But in contrast I felt like I could walk up to any of the 8 to 9 female colleagues and feel better around them, and I had a couple "girlfriends" - about 3 or 4 - with whom I felt closer, with one who I could have called my friend. Female peers were somehow closer to me on a level I couldn't really explain, but I could have felt it. I didn't even like all of them, but I felt they were somehow... closer to me, like they were less different from me; like they were on the same team as me. I wasn't friends with every one of the girls, but they kind of seemed like me. Unlike the boys. It wasn't necessarily because of how they treated me, but rather just how they were. It was closer to... home. I probably could simply see myself in them, in the way the girls were.
I certainly didn't feel like I was one of the boys, I never could relate to that culture both online and offline. I could never vibe with them. I just didn't have the necessary temperament or energy. It felt like I had to be forced to relate to male culture, while culture among women seemed more relatable, even if those women were of middle age like in their 40s. I'm saying that because I liked that one book about self-transformation I read in early 2020 that was written by a middle-aged woman. Although this relation was probably also in line with the fact that I was quite close to my mother, especially since I was becoming 13 in 2019. Speaking of resonating with femininity in a way I was yet to fully recognize and internalize, in 2020 (like everyone else) I was starting to have longer and longer hair, and I didn't really have anything against it. I would just let my hair grow out because, well, why not? I kind of liked that longer hairstyle. And so I would just let it grow and grow. I knew it made me more feminine-looking, but I somehow just liked having this hair.
I don't recall feeling acute dysphoria because of my body, but in general I ignored my physicality. I was off in my own head perhaps as a form of dissociaton, since I didn't really see myself in the mirror. I didn't feel euphoria seeing changes in my body. As a matter of fact, I was actually kind of scared when in 2020, as a 14-year-old, I started having erections in the shower. I didn't like them at all. I wouldn't want to look at that parasite.
As perhaps an interesting piece of trivia: there were biology lessons on male and female sexual reproductive organs when I was about 13.5 years old in early 2020. Of course they were online which maybe was a really good thing, since I didn't see my stupid peers' reactions. I remember that when we were learning about the phallus, testicles etc. I felt so weird like I preferred not to know about this, even though I was into biology and, to some extent, anatomy at the same time. This was maybe some kind of aversion to sexuality although I reckon it was combined with general asexuality too. I really didn't feel any kind of sexual attraction and to me it was so weird to desire somebody romantically and what not. No wonder that 3 years later, when learning about sexuality labels, I would mostly identify as aroace (until the hormones hit harder and I started to get aroused, but that's to write about later). However, when learning about the female sexual organs, with the vulva, ovaries, and how periods worked, I felt like I could take in the information normally. Maybe even I felt oddly, subtly comfortable. I didn't feel weird about it, and I certainly didn't make jokes about the female reproductive system like my boy peers in the group chat. It was just something to learn and honestly I probably enjoyed taking in this information about how women are sexually wired because in general I was into biology. Maybe it was my general emotional intelligence and being a bit beyond my age, but maybe this has some significance too, since I didn't laugh about my girl peers having vaginas, that was so stupid to me. I don't know if I related to the female sex organs or wanting to have them, but I didn't like relating to the fact I had male sex organs, it made me disgusted to learn about the male sex organs. I really didn't like having a penis, perhaps I even wished I didn't have it but I can't confirm that. So why was I not disgusted nor aroused when learning about the female reproductive system?
Also, I'm realizing that at 13 or 14, or even 15 I just wasn't horny at all. Perhaps my early puberty was relatively calm, or maybe I was just more feminine to the core so I didn't develop the male gaze. I didn't get sexuality entirely, it flew over my head. Again, for a young 'boy' to not be sexually activated, or sexually thinking about his female peers - it's kind of weird and certainly worthy of observation too.