Hey everyone,

I used to be an active poster on GitP quite a few years ago before a temporary disinterest in RPGs in general had me become inactive, and since then for some reason i never really became active again. Back then I made it a point on the boards here and really wherever possible to hide my gender. On the boards here in particular I found it fun to liken myself to Vaarsuvius in that way. This was only one expression of my journey to discovering who I really am. People active on the paizo.com forums may recognize what follows as it is mostl a copypaste of that.

Yesterday, I came out to my Significant Other as trans, which is the first time i actually verbalized my identity as female, which I only in the past few weeks fully realized about myself.

My SO themselves being gender nonbinary, was very happy for me and happily accepted calling me their girlfriend from now on (one of my greatest fear with coming out was that they wouldn't)

I remembered there to be a very lively and sweet LGBT+ communit thread here, and wanted to share my journey to finally coming to terms with who I am now at the age of 31, and also how it relates to gaming as well (since this is after all the LGBT Gaming thread). And please forgive me, I find it a bit difficult finding the right words for everything, since I never really actively dealt with what it means to be transgender and the vocabulary attached to it.

I apologize in advance for my habit of constructing long, meandering sentences. And I'm thankful for anyone wiling to suffer through this.

Spoiler: A very long, detailed look at my past and all my mistakes
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In my early teens i noticed for the first time that I didn't always feel entirely comfortable within the male identity. I think at the time the most significant part of this was my desire to wear skirts, which at the time i didnt think too much of, because men's skirts were already a thing and really, wearing a skirt does not a woman make.

As time went on I would always wear one of the skirts i had bought or made myself along with feminizing makeup whenever I would go out to parties or clubs with friends. I also started wearing more traditionally female articles of clothing, really anything that woudn't reveal my all to male body hair. My circle of friends have always been a rainbow coalition of all sorts of identities and sexualities so I fit right in, but at the time i would still refuse to (or perhaps be afraid of) call myself female, I just told anyone who would ask im a guy who likes to look feminine, or a crossdresser.

In my gaming life i had a parallel development. I've been playing videogames since childhood and started TTRPGs (in the form of the German game the Dark Eye) in my early teens, in which at the time i always made male characters. Whereas in videogames I found myself gravitating towards choosing the female options, even in games where this choice made little to no difference, such as in Civilization II. I later started playing D&D a few years later with some of the abovementioned circle of friends, and that was when i made my last male player character before playing almost exclusively female characters. I have made two or three male characters but would always quickly find that i never really feel those characters the way i did any of my female characters, even those that were much less well developed. I didn't realize this for a long time and always thought my preference for female player characters was based in the fact that i found them more visually appealing, and while I do, i only later and in retrospect realized how much more i connect to these characters than male ones.

When I started my relationship with my SO just over 12 years ago now, it didn't take long for us to find that we both were a bit gender nonconforming, and in our conversations, which at the time were purely online, because we lived in different countries at the time, we started using opposite pronouns.

Later as i picked up more about transgender, genderqueer and nonbinary identities more through cultural osmosis than active research, I thought perhaps calling myself nonbinary would be more appropriate. At the time i told myself I didnt really mind about what anyone would call me and what pronouns they used. But really, it always felt right to me when people used "she", or when i used it for myself when chatting with my SO, it made me feel affirmed, even when it was more in jest. The same has always been true when someone called me anything that is linked intrinsically to the female gender. I ignored these feelings however, and never acted on them by asking people to use female pronouns, partly for fear of ridicule, partly because some part of me still denied it.

In between, I sometimes felt a conscious desire that I would rather be a girl and even told some friends, but I kept dismissing these feelings every time.

As I grew older, i gained some weight and started growing rather strong body hair, (I already was slightly overweight before) which only pulled me further away from the image of the girl, or the woman, I would want to be and started me down a path where i almost completely blocked out my feminine side for several years. I told myself its better to be a hairy guy than a hairy girl, and almost completely stopped dressing in feminine clothing and using makeup. I grew a beard (more of a goatee) to hide my fading jaw line and really would only make any effort to dress up for dates with my SO who by the time had moved in with me.


I think in someway i was also afraid to actively claim any sort of trans or genderqueer identity because I felt inadequate claiming a label of a grou of people who have had to suffer so much historically and even now, both with the society around them and their very own bodies, when my life was always quite comfortable and dare I say, privileged.

We're both currently staying at their parent's home (it's been nearly two weeks now and we're going to stay until the end of the month) and I haven't taken anything with me with which to express my feminine side (for multiple reasons which I feel I shouldn't get into). and it's only since we came here that these thoughts have been building up, and i have been reflecting back on my life so far, that I realized that i'm neither male nor nonbinary, and I wasn't for all this time.

I'm a woman.