Quote Originally Posted by JusticeZero View Post
OK, I'm going to stop you right there.
I did NOT know my gender identity. I just knew I was completely awful at living life like I was supposed to, inexplicably exhausted by a lot of innocuous situations, and had a bunch of really strange privacy twitches.
Then I found out that the issues I had were symptoms of textbook gender dysphoria.. BUT I STILL WASN'T SURE WHAT MY GENDER ACTUALLY WAS. because non-binary is a thing, and all I knew what what I was NOT.
It took some pretty aggressive experimentation and some odd situation with an enby before I could actually get it narrowed down exactly. So do not for an instant think that it is the overwhelming norm for everybody to know what they were from the time they were young. I can identify the clues that WOULD have tipped me off if I had known at the time what I know now stretching far back, but i had NO clue how to interpret them at the time.
Start by just getting everything together. Look for change or a general absence of it. Start digging through all your clues. TRY things. Try out gender-flipped pronouns and terminology for a bit. AT LEAST a month of regularly getting that stuff, because it will likely sound beyond strange the first few times. For me, it took about two weeks, and then the 'new car smell' faded and it was like finally coming home. READ stuff. Talk to people.
I don't know about that. I tried all of that myself and all it did was make me even more anxious and confused than before.