Sorry this ended up being longer than I expected, I might add a tldr in the morning lol.

For me, I had recently turned 16 years old and I was sitting in the library at school and then out of nowhere the thought that I am trans just appeared in the front of my mind. It was a very loud and persistent thought and it didn’t go away. I remember leaving the library that day and walking to class, and I finally noticed that I was envious of women. There were so many emotions going through my head, I felt scared, depressed, and confused for like the first 2 weeks. Everytime I saw a woman loads of thoughts and emotions flooded my head and it was very overwhelming.

After the first 2 weeks I started to accept myself, but I was still scared and depressed. One of first things I remember doing to expirement was shoddily photoshopping long hair and makeup on me, and being happy. I also shaved and made a few picrews as well. A few weeks later I bought some women’s clothes and I would wear them in my room at night, and that made me really happy as well. I was still super scared to come out and presenting masc most of the day made me very depressed. My mom noticed my smooth legs one day and critized them, but I don’t remember much else from that interaction.

I eventually decided to come out to one of my friends by sending them a meme and their first response scared me because they replied “No way, you can’t be serious” and then they followed it up with “I’m actually trans too” so that was a nice surprise even though she did not phrase that well. Shortly after that I decided to go to school with painted nails and my mom noticed and started asking me a million questions. Eventually she asked me if I was trans and I just looked at her and then she said “You are, aren’t you” and I gave a small nod. She then told me that she was proud of me and gave me a hug and I felt relieved. And then she proceeded to tell me a story that I don’t think is true about a trans woman she supposedly saw once, but she was essentially telling me with that story that if I transitioned I’d be ugly and never find love and that feeling of relief disappeared real quickly after that.

I still hadn’t come out to the rest of my family yet because of that weird reaction from my mom, and then covid happened and i started doing school online, which meant I could grow my hair out and not worry about the awkward phase. Shortly after my mom kind of pushed me to come out to my younger sister, which I felt kind of obligated to since she had recently came out herself as lesbian. So I texted her and I knew in the back of my mind that it’d probably be fine however I was still scared, but my sister was of course very accepting.

Nothing new happened for a while after that, but then my mom decided to tell my grandma and other family, but not my dad, I was upset she did that but fortunately they were accepting so it was actually relieving in a way since I was worried about doing it myself. A while later, I don’t remember how long, it could have been a few months to year my mom decided to tell my dad with me in the room and I was very upset and also scared. My dad’s reaction was “y’know some people don’t like that” and I was like “why do I care” and then he left the room. Fortunately, he never intentionally deadnamed me, but he still misgenders me pretty frequently, although I’ve noticed that he is gendering me correctly more frequently now that I have started hrt and voice training.