Looking back, I should have realized I was trans a lot sooner.
I always had few friends — I really wanted to be one of the girls, but I wasn’t really one of them there. I didn’t want to hang out with the boys on the playground in elementary school. I was pretty sensitive as a kid, not itself a girly trait, but I think the feelings were starting then, and it was easy to upset me. My 11th birthday party was ice skating. I invited mostly girls. (I think my mom figured my hormones were kicking into gear. I really just wanted them to be friends outside of school, too.)
I’ve always gravitated toward situations where gender lines either don’t matter, or where I could slip into hanging out with the girls without being noticed. The theater company was good for that, the drama class at the high school was good for that, and the art classes I’ve taken were good for that, if relatively solitary most of the time.
It wasn’t until NBTSC that I really started developing relationships — the open, accepting atmosphere let me really be myself, or at least started me developing with no fear. Each year, I felt more like me and less like I was pretending.
Oh. And I’ve also had a strange propensity to end up with pink things with no effort on my part.