The way I understand my feelings and experiences has changed so much pre vs post transition.
I wanted to see what other small misconceptions you all had from pre-transition that you see differently now, or that maybe you wish you had understood before.
There are so many to choose from, but I'll start:
Probably as a coping mechanism I never saw the gendered components to my self-loathing.
For example, I hated my breasts because they were malformed-looking, to me. I would sometimes think, if I were a woman it would be worse (like the same, but larger), but I never once thought having a flat chest would be better. Instead I seemed to need to feel having female breasts would be worse, so I could feel better about my situation.
Or how I always loved how little hair was on my body, but never thought that was abnormal. I never got back hair and only had thin hair on my belly and a small, thin strip on my sternum. I never thought of this in terms of gender, I never thought about how my body ideal was curvy and hairless, or feminine. It bothered me when I was compared to male beauty icons, but I never could quite be honest with myself as to why.
I ignored (or repressed) the gender in everything, but it was still there.
So my misconception was about gender itself, I thought of it as primarily social and malleable, and thus was some great social evil, gender was The Enemy or The Problem.
Now gender is extremely important to me, but before I would say being a man was irrelevant to me, or even obviously unwanted - it was a moral choice, to be a woman was to be a better person in my mind, to abandon a toxic social role in favor of an enlightened one.
Now I think you can't really choose, that we have these implicit gendered feelings that we can't really change, and so being a woman feels good to me because of what I am, and now being a woman is just a precious gift, rather than a moral imperative.
I totally botched this post, I wanted this to be succinct and lost my sense of purpose and have rambled along.
Looking forward to hearing from you all. 💚
@dandelion I guess one misconception I had before transition was that I thought you needed to know you wanted to be a different gender early on as a child. The thing is when I was a child I never even put any thought to what I wanted to be or what I looked like. When people told me I was a boy I believed them because what do I know. I might as well have been a pair of floating eyeballs because I had no sense of my body. Only when puberty hit did it occur to me that I would rather be female because of the changes to my body and sexuality.
The misconception I mentioned was something I used as an argument why I could not be trans, ignoring that there were still signs when I was a child, just not obvious ones. I think I used it as a coping mechanism since transition seemed so far out of reach in my early adulthood.
This was a major hang-up I had, too - I basically thought as a child I had to know I was a girl and not a boy, which did not mesh with my experiences, so I thought I was certainly not trans.
I would say I didn't live happily as a boy, but I certainly adapted and lived as a boy without what I would consider constant and severe distress. I did have to adapt, though - once I transitioned, a lot of memories came back that I had not interpreted through the lens of gender, which I realized were probably related. Being upset that my parents wouldn't let me have or play with dolls, for example.
After a while I recalled when I was maybe 5 years old being recounted a story about how everyone in the family thought I was going to be born a girl, and they had even bought girl clothes and so on, and I remember thinking that made sense because I felt I was supposed to be born a girl (like on the inside, it felt that way, it didn't feel "right" that I was born a boy, and for the first time they were giving me an explanation for why I felt that way!). So I figured there was a kind of cosmic error, but I still thought I was born a boy, just that it was a mistake somehow and I was supposed to be a girl.
Now that's what a psychologist would look at as evidence from early childhood that I knew I needed to be a different gender, but I never saw that memory that way.
A lot of my misconception is in interpretation of my experiences, I didn't have the tools to understand my feelings or what they meant. It's made worse when you adapt and cope well to life in the wrong gender, it masks the symptoms and leads to strange places (like taking on a mentality of assuming all men wish to be women, and so on).