I used to lurk on this sub when it was on Reddit, but I never felt the urge to post. However, I am frustrated with the banning of it and would like to share my story. It isn't exactly a "peak trans" story, so I decided to make a new thread.

I have always been a "tomboy", so to speak. As a little kid, I used to be jealous of my brother, since he wasn't judged for playing with "boy's" toys or wearing boy's clothes the way I was. Since I had a limited understanding of the world and how it functioned, a lot of my knowledge of adult life came from the people around me, the internet, and television. Being in a conservative small town, I saw that women were, in some ways, seen as lesser than men. I was always told about how I would grow up to marry a man, while my brother would marry a woman. Whenever I complained about how I didn't want to do that, they would chuckle and say I was too young to know that. On screen, all of the characters that I looked up to were boys. In a lot of the shows that I saw, the boys were allowed to have more fun and be the central focus, while girls were frequently side characters. This could have been the product of my brother being the one allowed to choose shows, but I digress. Regardless of the reasons why, I came to the conclusion that my life would be easier had I been born a boy. Still, I knew that wasn't possible, so I lived my life as I always had.

When I was around 11 or so, the transgender movement became something mainstream. I saw Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings all over television and the internet at that time. Suddenly, my desire to be a boy became something more. After all, I was practically the poster child for a young "transboy". So, like a stupid kid, I began to look at the transgender subs on Reddit, like ftm, egg_irl, and a few others. Everything seemed to just click, so to speak. So, I made a post on the ftm subreddit, detailing my life story to ask for advice. I told them about my "masculine" tendencies as a child, my desire for a wife over a husband, my low self esteem, my fear of puberty, and my social problems at school. Now, I know better than to ask Reddit for advice, but I was 11 or 12 at the time.

Quickly, I had commenters pointing out how I was obviously transgender. I had mentioned being afraid of puberty and hating myself, and they called that dysphoria, ignoring the fact that every kid is scared of puberty and low self esteem is common at that age. Some of the advice was honestly scary. I was told that I needed to talk to my parents right away about therapy because the longer I waited, the more my body would be "ruined" and I would never be able to "pass". Nobody encouraged me to stop and think about things; they wanted me to rush into permanent body modification. This kind of put me off a bit, so I turned away from these subreddits for awhile. Still, I was absolutely convinced that the root of my problems could be traced to my sex. I drifted in and out of these subreddits for the next few years, until I was 14, convinced that I was transgender but too afraid to tell anyone in my real life.

It was at this time that one of my friends came out to me as bisexual and revealed that she was dating a girl. Suddenly, I began to reevaluate everything. Part of the reason I had thought I was a boy was because I wanted to have a wife, not a husband. I didn't know I was allowed to be a lesbian until then. This caused me to really step back and think through everything. I wanted to be a boy because I hated what society expected out of me as a girl. I had low self esteem because middle school absolutely sucked, as did puberty. I wouldn't figure out the root of my social problems until I began therapy a year later, but I was eventually diagnosed with very high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, technically Asperger's Syndrome. So, that too had a logical explanation. So, at 14, I broke away from the online transgender community and mindset. I started coming to terms with myself as a gender non-conforming lesbian, not a "transboy".

I'm 16 now, and honestly scared of what could have happened to me. Had I ever actually come out as transgender, I could have been given hormones and damaged my body. This is my problem with the transgender movement. If they see no problem in encouraging a preteen to permanently alter her body, how many kids are they messing up? No child is old enough to say with certainty that that is really what they want from life, so why is this allowed? I fear that there could easily be other kids like me at the time who actually decided to publicly come out. What happens when they realize that they were never trans all along? I am afraid that the movement's presence has gotten overwhelming to the point where gay or gender noncomforming kids would hear of being transgender before anyone ever told them it is okay to be themselves, regardless of sex.

Anyway, this may be kind of long, but it is a story that I have kept to myself for years. I don't know if this is a common thing, but it is enough for me to be wary of the transgender movement and its effect on confused kids.