This hit me like a week ago. I straight up panicked. I still kinda am. I don’t know what to do. I’m fucking terrified. How do you learn how to be a girl in your forties? I don’t even know how to do makeup, every time I tried it looked like shit.
I thought I was a femboy. A kinky weird femboy with a supportive girlfriend that didn’t mind the occasional dressing up. This is probably way too much for her. I think it’s too much for me. But now that I know this I can’t not know it. It’s like my subconscious just came out of nowhere and was like, “Hey you know that quirky thing about you? Well it turns out that’s entirely you, and you’re miserable trying to deny it. By the way everything in your experience tells you that people will hate you for it, and the state is actively trying to harm people like you. Also crazy people will probably want to kill you about it Byeeeeeeee!”
What do?
Edit: Thanks everyone for all the helpful comments. All this is still big and scary right now, but I feel a little better about where I am now, and the first few steps. This is a good community here.
At least now you know what has been eating you for so long. Like Morpheus said to Neo in the movie The Matrix:
Neo: I can’t go back, can I? Morpheus: No. But if you could, would you really want to?
You can’t unlearn it, it would only hurt you more trying to pretend like nothing has changed. I hope the people in your life will support you through this.
I wish more people in my life understood that. Like, most do and are supportive, but the ones who don’t…
I could pretend it wasn’t true, but I can’t un-know this about myself, and so however it looks from the outside, my life will never quite be what it was before. It’s like I’ve learned an Eldritch secret about the world: nothing has changed, but somehow everything is different.
Transintolerant people don’t care about the wellbeing of trans people because they don’t see them as people in a similar way racists don’t see minorities as people. The transintolerant people in your life delude themselves into thinking they are helping by trying to convince you not to transition because they subconsciously believe you will lose your humanity once you transition. This is the same reason gay kids were subjected to punishment by their homointolerant parents including literal torture, because the parents believe that being gay makes you less of a human and they think they are saving your humanity.
If you’re an adult, they have less power over you, and it’s perfectly reasonable to distance yourself from them, or cut off contact entirely for your own well being.
As a cis guy, I may never know what it feels like to come to such a realisation, but I can empathise and support my friends who go through with this kind of experience, and I believe that it is the duty of people like myself who are in a better place to support the ones who aren’t by both directly supporting trans people emotionally and also to attempt to educate transintolerant people to be more accepting.
Thanks for this.
Unfortunately, in order to succeed in distancing myself from them, I have also had to increase my distance from a bunch of my family that are supportive. My family is really connected, and one of the two main offenders is my dad, so making more distance with him means going to fewer family get togethers.
And the other main person is my wife and my daughter’s other mom, and that’s another relationship where adding distance is difficult to impossible…
I’m sorry to hear that, and I hope you can interact with the positive people in your life more while establishing boundaries with the worst ones if not avoiding them all together. Also, hope you manage to add new supportive people into your circle.
Chin up. My cousin went through the exact same thing and she’s been taking it well. She talked with her doctor started taking E and grew out her hair. A year later she had laser hair removal to remove hair from around her mouth and neck she was real happy about that.
Not to say there werent downsides, her family was very accepting but her wife did want a divorce but they still remain close friends.
I think one of the things that really helped her was to find a supportive community that can help you through this and let your girlfriend know if you havent already, fear of rejection is normal but telling her is necessary for relationship and friendship.
Hope this helps. Im a cis-male but want to be supportive. Go get em
I’ve talked to her. It was difficult to be coy about it the way it happened, and so far she’s been a big help. But we both know this is way above her pay grade.Unfortunately money’s tight, and getting a therapist isn’t in the cards short term.
I’m cis, so I’m not gonna try to give you advice about your feelings because that’s not my place. I can maybe help with the makeup though - check out Lisa Eldridge on youtube. She has some great tutorials for simple looks that are a good place to start. Alexandra Anele is another one who does tutorials focused on the way certain techniques change the way your features look and she’s a great resource for learning to blend. Drag queens are obviously the masters of things like color correcting a 5 o’clock shadow and feminizing features, but their other makeup is generally super advanced shit I wouldn’t even try to imitate.
Something I found helped with me is thinking about genders not as something I fit into but something that loosely describes me.
The words themselves are more just to give others a sense of where you stand and they also help bring like minded people together.
But they’re descriptions, they don’t define you. If you find it comfortable, and find fulfillment in doing things like a “girl” then sure go ahead. But I always think it better not to force that kinda stuff.
Just live how you want to live, live in a way that makes you happy to be you. We’re only here for so long so try to enjoy what we have.
just be fluid, no neeed for a 1 to 1 replication of a gender needet, reduces a lot of stress and dosent make u replicate steriotypes
Yeah, I’ve been trying to let everything settle in my mind before making any big decisions. It would be so easy to just jump in go nuts and make everything worse.
See a therapist if you can, preferably one who has worked with lgbtq.
I’m not saying anything is wrong with how you’re feeling but they can help you digest all the emotions and help settle your mind.
Thank you, thats part off my plan going forward, when I can afford it.
Congrats on cracking through your shell, former egg!
I know it’s scary, but you’re gonna be okay. There’s an internet-full of trans sisters, brothers, and others who are eager to help each other up. You’ll be on this side of the conversation sooner than you think.
The most important thing to know off the bat is the Egg Prime Directive, https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/am-i-trans
My good friend Lily coined the phrase “Egg Prime Directive” to describe the fact that trans people have an unspoken agreement not to tell people who are questioning their gender whether or not they are trans.
When someone is just told they are trans, that opens ground for denial; it activates defense mechanisms built by internalized transphobia, and it has a high probability of pushing them further into the closet, if not making them outright transphobic. Even when it doesn’t, it leaves ground for their own subconscious to reject their dysphoria, claiming that they were just manipulated or deceived. The much more effective strategy is to talk about your own experiences with dysphoria so that they see the common grounds and come to their own conclusion about their gender. The code doesn’t forbid helping them to explore their gender; it forbids assigning a gender to them. Or, to put it more succinctly, you cannot be told what the Matrix is; you can only be shown.
After that, the most important thing is to be true to yourself. There’s no one right way to be trans, it’s up to you to decide how open you want to be with your identity, whether you want medical assistance to transition, etcetera.
It’s definitely not too late for you, I started my transition in my late 30’s and I’ve seen trans folks who only got started in their 60’s. Learning to be a girl is something you can do at any age and there’s lots of resources for it, but equally important will be the unlearning of internalized transphobia and habits that don’t serve you anymore.
So, just relax, take a breath. Spend a few minutes meditating on how weird it feels when the relief of finally acknowledging the dysphoria is combined with the fear of how trans people are treated by normative society. Let the initial wave of panic, excitement, and existential dread wash over you. Then, start thinking deeply about what you want from life as a trans person and how you’ll achieve it for yourself. Everything else will flow from that~.
The paradox is that most closeted trans people are absolutely terrible at trusting their inner voice. When you spend your whole life with a nagging disconnect between how the world sees you and how you see yourself, it becomes easier to rely on other people to tell you “who you really are.” Even if you know deep down that all the people in your life are missing some fundamental fact about your identity, it’s nearly impossible to avoid listening to others over oneself.
This right here. my instincts are all off because every external voice told me i was wrong my whole life. Like I was always bad at tests because any time there was an obvious answer I had to question the wording or the context because me feeling right about something is always wrong.
Those aren’t instincts, they’re self-defense mechanisms that become habitual in people who have been raised to believe that they can’t trust their own feelings.
But you’ve already broken through the wall of that prison and into the light of self-awareness. Now is the time to start sweeping up the rubble and deciding how you want to use the newly liberated bricks. You’re free now~.
Good luck with your journey. I just came here to say that being a woman doesn’t require makeup, because you write as if that’s a requirement
Thank you. It’s not about the makeup so much as that’s one thing that is complex and intimidating among many things that are complex and intimidating about being a woman. It’s the first thing I thought of, and I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t even have to wear makeup, many women don’t. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a hill that looks steep and intimidating, I don’t know if I can get to the top but at the same time this is just the first hill of the rocky mountains, and I have to get to the other side.
Don’t try to be what the world thinks “girl” means. Just try to be you, and let the world be what it’s gonna be. There’s enough pressures on women in society already, let alone on trans women. Don’t try to carry all of that yourself.
There will be people who put you down regardless of how you present, so again, just try to be comfortable as yourself. If that means you wear a ladies tee one day a week and nothing else changes, so be it. If it means you look and present exactly as you did before, but now you know yourself better: great. And if it means you dress up more eccentrically than lady gaga and scare people away, well… You do you.
But don’t let everybody else tell you that you can’t be comfortable as yourself, because they’re wrong.
I know someone who was 50 when she figured out she was trans, and she’s so much happier now. Yes, the state is awful, but there are a lot of allies even where I live in horrible South Dakota.
Congratulations on learning this about yourself! I wish you the very best.
