Wanting to use they/them pronoun tag on twitch, but refusing to download the pronoun add-on and doing that because I thought it would somehow would be insulting to real trans people (for anyone in a similar circumstances: even cis people can change their pronouns without being insulting. Just do it). I also regularly watched trans creators and just thought trans women were cooler.

Going without deodorant because the store was out of stock of the vegan stick I usually got that didn’t have a gender label and instead only had the one labeled for men solely because of that label (and didn’t get a different brand because it was the only vegan one I knew of off the top my head).

During college: Looking up excuses totally normal reasons for a cis man to get an orchi. I assumed I just had internalized shame related to sexuality that I was somehow secretly unaware of. I also did find my libido annoying, but chemical means of reducing that weren’t of interest in the least.

Sexual fantasies were regularly gender swapped compared to my assumed gender. For my brother, this was the thing he personally thought was the least cis sign.

I finally decided to make a girl character in Pokemon for at least the first time since middle school (when I started hanging out with a friend on the bus whom I played regularly with). Figured it would at least be a while till he found out. Decided to just feminize my name for the character and suddenly I cared about characters appear, which I never had before when playing as guys. My friend did tease me about the name when he eventually found out.

High school:

I was required to self-ID as a crossdresser one day for a school assignment. Was meant to be a bit of a joke (see next item), but that felt like it was a little too close to the truth people didn’t know about.

For one org, there was a hazing tradition where new members had to wear costumes all that that an older student picked for them. I was happy when mine was choosing women’s clothes, but they specifically went old-lady’s clothes and I wished I’d have had an excuse to wear something cuter.

Middle school (context: didn’t really know what trans was back then… Learned like the basics of binary trans by the end of high school):

Felt the need to see how my sisters bra was in me (she’s smaller so didn’t expect to actually be able to put it in) while she was presumably taking a bath. She still has to leave the bathroom to get something from her room, so I was caught. Think this experience made me a lot more repressed, but I can’t even really remember what people’s reaction was since I was too caught up in my own embarrassment. I kinda feel like my mom probably just told me not to do that and she’d get me my own if that’s what I wanted, but I was too caught up in my own thoughts to listen and I had no clue why I would want that anyways.

Would wake up sad magic wasn’t real because I would never wake up in a female body from time to time and would have dreams about going to the women’s bathroom and being worried about getting caught regularly.

At a photo machine that had lots of gimmicky options (well before things like phone apps had filters), one was putting your face on like a bikini model. For some reason that option really appealed to me, but I didn’t want others to know? So despite having another photo that we paid for that we didn’t know what we wanted to do with, I didn’t. And then later I went back and paid again solely to get that.

Elementary/younger:

Generic stereotypical trans fem things like playing princess dress up, playing with Barbies with my sister, watching sailor moon.