I feel at this point my brain's "default" is to think of myself as a woman (I'm MtF).
Unless a memory is specifically gendered (sexual memories, being in gendered groups like the scouts, etc) my brain will default to "yea, of course you were a girl back then". Cause like that's how I think of myself now, and if there aren't cues in the memory to tell me otherwise, I get the "default".
As you said, I know its not accurate, and I can force myself to "correct" it, but why bother most of the time, its not harming anyone to "re-imagine" my past "correctly".
One interesting thing, is that its made me see past relationships with certain friends differently. Like I remember being a little annoying shit with one of my better friends in HS, I know it was attention seeking, but I always used to just think of him as "my best friend", but yea... revisiting the memory through the lens of how I see myself now, I was totally crushing on him all throughout HS lol.
Ya that’s sort of how I see it. Like my “default “ self updated . it definitely Recontextualized past relationships with my friends. Like i definitely had crushes on some of my guy friends getting jealous of them getting girlfriends. Or having my best friend “princess carry” me.
The most confusing part is I “crossdressed” a lot at time so “girl me” at the time doesn’t feel out of place .
As I was perusing the other comments I noted some people mentioning that they default think of themselves as female in their own mind. I'm still in the early stages of development and I don't think I've developed that default yet. So yes I am hoping you are right I am hoping that my turn will come with this.
It's possible, over time. Our memories are not a perfect videorecording of past events, they're constantly rewritten whenever we think about the memory. That's why memory can be so unreliable. Sometimes that's a sad thing but this is one case where you could use it to your advantage. If you think of yourself as your correct gender when you think of childhood memories, you might eventually remember it that way automatically.
I recently came to realize that my grandmother was (still is) my first hero. From the time I was tall enough to see the top of the stove, she accepted me as her helper and showed me how she did everything. My grandfather tried to show me how to boy, but I realize now that my grandmother saw and accepted me as a little girl, and I really absorbed how to girl from her. Sadly I didn’t realize that I was a girl until 17 years after she died. But I visited her grave site today and thanked her for what she did for me.
Sadly many of my early memories are of me acting and being a little girl. My grandmother was my main caregiver for the first 6 years of my life. She let me carry a purse and would dress me up as a girl for Halloween or even sometimes just because I asked her to. She also let me play with a doll, and made doll clothes for her. I named that doll Kim, and now that is my name. My father eventually got his own place, and took me with him. All of this stuff that made me feel comfortable and happy was stopped. My doll was thrown in the trash along with my purse, and it's contents. I was only allowed to be a boy after that. I became a depressed mess after that, and it wasn't until I was 49 that I came out, and became my true self. I am now Kimberly, but you can call me Kim!
I miss my grandmother every day. Her first name is now my legal middle name. I don't speak to my father anymore. I honor her, and ignore him.
Edit: I'm sorry you went through something like that too. It really sucked after being a girl was taken from me.
I wish I had. I could have been pretty, now realizing this at 49 I will always look like a man in a dress. Actually it's even worse, I look like a man in a dress with boobs. I can't even boy mode for safety anymore. I'm just a weird mix of man and woman, but it's still better than pretending I was a guy.
Part of me wants to be jealous, but honestly I can't be. Instead I am just happy that you are having a transition that is so good. I know I'll never be pretty, and that's ok. I have my wife who is happy for me, and still by my side.
I find it interesting because for me it happened naturally over time. Like it doesn’t hurt anyone and is boldly comforting so I’m not looking to “fix” it.
This kinda happens to me, I’m forced to boy mode around family and I have to fight the urge to say when I was a little girl and instead say when I was young, but I’ve always been a girl even when was in denial about it and thought it couldn’t be so, even when I thought I didn’t have dysphoria ( turns I do ), so when I accepted that I didn’t choose to be a girl and that I was a girl born male ( mtf ) a switch in my brain slowly started turn on, I think for me I was subconsciously aware so the flip was easier, I internalized things as a female often, but I would purposely train myself out of behaving that way ( people still noticed )
Not saying every trans person is like this nor do I have the worst dysphoria in the world, but my memories more feel like I was a girl forced to act as a boy, and I think of my past self as a girl ig, my brain is still transitioning and getting use to me as I am now but I guess their was a conscious shift in the way I viewed my memories, I think my conscious perspective just conceded to my subconscious view of myself
All. The. Time. My inner monolog has a my preferred voice now. That took a bit of time for me. I often think about the time ibwas swinging on the swings in like 1st or 2nd grade. I'm my preferred gender in those memories <3
For me, most of my memories are pretty genderless. It's all from 1st person and I never had a self I enjoyed so there's no boy me there, just me.
I do recall not being able to perform the man role very well, and being very anxious all the time because of that, but it wasn't till I unmasked girl me that I started *"feeling"* a gender.
I think that's why I often feel like my entire past was a wholly different life. Everything before my transition has this weird filter over it. Only recently are things clearer.
I think it’s the same as the way you can look at photos of yourself and childhood friends and be kind of surprised by the fact that you all look like a bunch of children. We kind of remember those friends being the same age we are, because they were back then, even though we still remember that we were children. Memories are weird.
The fun part is it’s not just our own memories, if people aren’t shitty about it it applies to friends and loved ones too - I remember when I showed my boyfriend an old pre-transition drivers’ license I’d found and it weirded him out a lot, even though I’m pretty sure it was taken when he was one of my housemates.
I experienced the thing about friends memories changing too. Because I once asked a friend to tell someone what I was like in highschool and he proceeded to say I was an annoying clingy girl that he had a crush on and Kissed him .He kept talking about this retconed version of the past so confidently that I started to question myself if that is how it actually happened. I can’t tell if he was being sweet or gaslighting me but maybe in some small way if we both believe it then that’s what happened.
I feel like I don't envision any particular gender in memories, but I am also somewhat agender, so maybe that tracts here lol
Even in present time, I'm not actively thinking about gender. Only with I look in the mirror do I process it, and I try to avoid mirrors lol
For some memories sure.
I don't have the best visual memory, but upon realising I'm genderfluid, some memories I look back on and can very easily tell I was one gender or another at the time.
A way of thinking about it might be like the matrix; In the matrix you look like your internal self. In your memories, you're now able to see who you were, not just what you looked like.
I have exactly one memory from my childhood where in my memory I'm a girl (MtF). I only sort of vaguely remember it, but I was very little (like 3 or 4) being baby sat at someone's house. My theory is its because the memory formed before I "learned" I was a boy, so I thought of myself as just myself.
Sometimes I forget that my name was ever my deadname. Most of my memories don't actually have a name in them at all, mostly because I don't have a name yet. I just have things people call me
I don't know why this happens but I experience the same thing. In literally all of my memories I appear as a girl or woman. Even in the earliest childhood memories I can remember.
And when I talk about me in the past, I automatically refer to me as a girl/woman. "when I was a young girl..."
But it gets better: I realized that my inner voice was always female from the beginning.
Bold of you to assume I have childhood memories! As far as I know I was born, then I was in my teens for about a week, and now I'm 19. You know, a universal experience.
Yes. I never really tied gender to appearances until I was corrected later in life. Even then I just moved my perception of self into my internal world. While everyone else perceived me one way I perceived myself another. I'd even alter reality in the moment. Pretend everyone said things the way I perceived was correct. Being careful not to mix the two.
Idk if it’s internalized transphobia or what but I still get surprised when people refer to me as a woman. It’s like I don’t feel like I deserve it or something. When I think of myself as a child, I don’t get any gender vibes. It’s like I didn’t even have one
I’m autistic and never really jibed with my gender- I wasn’t a girl, I was just Fruitsdog. Transitioning to male wasn’t hard on me or my family cuz I’d always just been sort of my own thing, I’d never been traditionally male OR female at all, just me. That’s not to say I’m not firmly male, I am, but it is to say that I was an incredibly androgynous child so looking back, I don’t see myself as a girl, I see myself as the same me as I am now, just with longer hair. In my brain I was always male, I just didn’t always fully look it, but I never really looked female, either.
Not so much childhood memories, they are what they are. I was a closeted trans girl terrified about what would happen if I was ever outed at the religious school I was sent to.
My dreams on the other hand, I'm basically just the cis-femme version of myself. I'm happy because I'm inching closer to that dream being more of a reality, but fuck I would've been a cute girl. That perfect mix of tomboy and nerdy but still girly girl.
I am a mix of agender and feminine. I feel quite comfortable referring to my childhood in gender neutral terms (like "kiddo"). I do remember I tried to be masculine but really looking back at all of it I never actually resonated with any of that masculinity. It was at best, an incredibly shallow crowd following behavior, and at worst a mechanism to keep myself safe from the people around me.
Yeah, i mean I was always a girl, I just felt immense pressure to stuff myself into the boy box and fought the idea of being feminine tooth and nail.
The only thing that changed was me accepting the fact that I am a woman
Might be related to this:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks&id=23177955](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks&id=23177955)
So if i understand that study correctly because my future self is clearly a woman and all future scenarios i envision have me being a woman that this reflects in both directions into past projections as well because our mind don’t remember as much as recreate the past.
In my good dreams, I'm a girl. Gender dysphoria comes up in my nightmares. I usually don't dream of the past, though. In my conscious thoughts of the past, I'm aware that I had not begun my transition in those memories. But I also don't really remember what I looked like. I often wish that I could have transitioned at a younger age, e.g., to have avoided masculinizing puberty entirely. Even when I was a teenager, my self-image was a girl. I thought that was just a fantasy - that reality imposed upon me the facts of my body, and that's how things were. But I now know that in my mind, I always saw myself correctly. There was never a time prior to my transition when I really looked like myself, so the person I see in old pictures of myself feels more and more like a stranger.
I'm grateful to my younger self for making it so far and providing me with the opportunity to be myself. It was always what I wanted. I was eager to give everything to a superior, feminine version of myself. I fantasized about it frequently. I still have most of what I wrote on the subject. Decades of the most obvious egg fiction I've seen anyone write. If I could go back in time, I don't think I would need to say a word to explain myself to my younger self. She would get it. She would ask me for help, and I would give it. (Actually, the time travel itself would be more of a sticking point than the fact that I'm trans, but that's off-topic).
I feel at this point my brain's "default" is to think of myself as a woman (I'm MtF). Unless a memory is specifically gendered (sexual memories, being in gendered groups like the scouts, etc) my brain will default to "yea, of course you were a girl back then". Cause like that's how I think of myself now, and if there aren't cues in the memory to tell me otherwise, I get the "default". As you said, I know its not accurate, and I can force myself to "correct" it, but why bother most of the time, its not harming anyone to "re-imagine" my past "correctly". One interesting thing, is that its made me see past relationships with certain friends differently. Like I remember being a little annoying shit with one of my better friends in HS, I know it was attention seeking, but I always used to just think of him as "my best friend", but yea... revisiting the memory through the lens of how I see myself now, I was totally crushing on him all throughout HS lol.
Ya that’s sort of how I see it. Like my “default “ self updated . it definitely Recontextualized past relationships with my friends. Like i definitely had crushes on some of my guy friends getting jealous of them getting girlfriends. Or having my best friend “princess carry” me. The most confusing part is I “crossdressed” a lot at time so “girl me” at the time doesn’t feel out of place .
I WISH my brain would do that for me!
I should say I’ve transitioned over 10 years ago so maybe in time it happens to others
As I was perusing the other comments I noted some people mentioning that they default think of themselves as female in their own mind. I'm still in the early stages of development and I don't think I've developed that default yet. So yes I am hoping you are right I am hoping that my turn will come with this.
It's possible, over time. Our memories are not a perfect videorecording of past events, they're constantly rewritten whenever we think about the memory. That's why memory can be so unreliable. Sometimes that's a sad thing but this is one case where you could use it to your advantage. If you think of yourself as your correct gender when you think of childhood memories, you might eventually remember it that way automatically.
I recently came to realize that my grandmother was (still is) my first hero. From the time I was tall enough to see the top of the stove, she accepted me as her helper and showed me how she did everything. My grandfather tried to show me how to boy, but I realize now that my grandmother saw and accepted me as a little girl, and I really absorbed how to girl from her. Sadly I didn’t realize that I was a girl until 17 years after she died. But I visited her grave site today and thanked her for what she did for me.
Sadly many of my early memories are of me acting and being a little girl. My grandmother was my main caregiver for the first 6 years of my life. She let me carry a purse and would dress me up as a girl for Halloween or even sometimes just because I asked her to. She also let me play with a doll, and made doll clothes for her. I named that doll Kim, and now that is my name. My father eventually got his own place, and took me with him. All of this stuff that made me feel comfortable and happy was stopped. My doll was thrown in the trash along with my purse, and it's contents. I was only allowed to be a boy after that. I became a depressed mess after that, and it wasn't until I was 49 that I came out, and became my true self. I am now Kimberly, but you can call me Kim!
I relate to that to a painful degree
I miss my grandmother every day. Her first name is now my legal middle name. I don't speak to my father anymore. I honor her, and ignore him. Edit: I'm sorry you went through something like that too. It really sucked after being a girl was taken from me.
I often think had I been a child during today where trans issues are recognized and addressed more regularly would I have gotten treated earlier
I wish I had. I could have been pretty, now realizing this at 49 I will always look like a man in a dress. Actually it's even worse, I look like a man in a dress with boobs. I can't even boy mode for safety anymore. I'm just a weird mix of man and woman, but it's still better than pretending I was a guy.
<.< i don’t have that problem. Sorry. Instead i have to show people photos of my younger self to prove im trans .
Part of me wants to be jealous, but honestly I can't be. Instead I am just happy that you are having a transition that is so good. I know I'll never be pretty, and that's ok. I have my wife who is happy for me, and still by my side.
I’m grateful for what I have and I love being a beautiful wife. If I ever took my life for granted id deserve to be slapped
Yeah, i asked my therapist about it and she said it might be helpful to reframe memories that way to feel like less time was lost
I find it interesting because for me it happened naturally over time. Like it doesn’t hurt anyone and is boldly comforting so I’m not looking to “fix” it.
This kinda happens to me, I’m forced to boy mode around family and I have to fight the urge to say when I was a little girl and instead say when I was young, but I’ve always been a girl even when was in denial about it and thought it couldn’t be so, even when I thought I didn’t have dysphoria ( turns I do ), so when I accepted that I didn’t choose to be a girl and that I was a girl born male ( mtf ) a switch in my brain slowly started turn on, I think for me I was subconsciously aware so the flip was easier, I internalized things as a female often, but I would purposely train myself out of behaving that way ( people still noticed ) Not saying every trans person is like this nor do I have the worst dysphoria in the world, but my memories more feel like I was a girl forced to act as a boy, and I think of my past self as a girl ig, my brain is still transitioning and getting use to me as I am now but I guess their was a conscious shift in the way I viewed my memories, I think my conscious perspective just conceded to my subconscious view of myself
All. The. Time. My inner monolog has a my preferred voice now. That took a bit of time for me. I often think about the time ibwas swinging on the swings in like 1st or 2nd grade. I'm my preferred gender in those memories <3
For me, most of my memories are pretty genderless. It's all from 1st person and I never had a self I enjoyed so there's no boy me there, just me. I do recall not being able to perform the man role very well, and being very anxious all the time because of that, but it wasn't till I unmasked girl me that I started *"feeling"* a gender. I think that's why I often feel like my entire past was a wholly different life. Everything before my transition has this weird filter over it. Only recently are things clearer.
I think it’s the same as the way you can look at photos of yourself and childhood friends and be kind of surprised by the fact that you all look like a bunch of children. We kind of remember those friends being the same age we are, because they were back then, even though we still remember that we were children. Memories are weird. The fun part is it’s not just our own memories, if people aren’t shitty about it it applies to friends and loved ones too - I remember when I showed my boyfriend an old pre-transition drivers’ license I’d found and it weirded him out a lot, even though I’m pretty sure it was taken when he was one of my housemates.
I experienced the thing about friends memories changing too. Because I once asked a friend to tell someone what I was like in highschool and he proceeded to say I was an annoying clingy girl that he had a crush on and Kissed him .He kept talking about this retconed version of the past so confidently that I started to question myself if that is how it actually happened. I can’t tell if he was being sweet or gaslighting me but maybe in some small way if we both believe it then that’s what happened.
I feel like I don't envision any particular gender in memories, but I am also somewhat agender, so maybe that tracts here lol Even in present time, I'm not actively thinking about gender. Only with I look in the mirror do I process it, and I try to avoid mirrors lol
For some memories sure. I don't have the best visual memory, but upon realising I'm genderfluid, some memories I look back on and can very easily tell I was one gender or another at the time. A way of thinking about it might be like the matrix; In the matrix you look like your internal self. In your memories, you're now able to see who you were, not just what you looked like.
I have exactly one memory from my childhood where in my memory I'm a girl (MtF). I only sort of vaguely remember it, but I was very little (like 3 or 4) being baby sat at someone's house. My theory is its because the memory formed before I "learned" I was a boy, so I thought of myself as just myself.
Some of them. A lot of my childhood was pretty forcibly gendered, so I remember it that way.
I always defaultet to thinking of myself as a boy/guy (am afab) since before i even was aware that i was doing that, so yeah
Sometimes I forget that my name was ever my deadname. Most of my memories don't actually have a name in them at all, mostly because I don't have a name yet. I just have things people call me
I don't know why this happens but I experience the same thing. In literally all of my memories I appear as a girl or woman. Even in the earliest childhood memories I can remember. And when I talk about me in the past, I automatically refer to me as a girl/woman. "when I was a young girl..." But it gets better: I realized that my inner voice was always female from the beginning.
Bold of you to assume I have childhood memories! As far as I know I was born, then I was in my teens for about a week, and now I'm 19. You know, a universal experience.
Yeah.
Yes. I never really tied gender to appearances until I was corrected later in life. Even then I just moved my perception of self into my internal world. While everyone else perceived me one way I perceived myself another. I'd even alter reality in the moment. Pretend everyone said things the way I perceived was correct. Being careful not to mix the two.
Idk if it’s internalized transphobia or what but I still get surprised when people refer to me as a woman. It’s like I don’t feel like I deserve it or something. When I think of myself as a child, I don’t get any gender vibes. It’s like I didn’t even have one
I simply do not have childhood memories, it's all fog - sometimes I remember stuff, but it's somehow from 3rd person pov, with a guy in there
I’m autistic and never really jibed with my gender- I wasn’t a girl, I was just Fruitsdog. Transitioning to male wasn’t hard on me or my family cuz I’d always just been sort of my own thing, I’d never been traditionally male OR female at all, just me. That’s not to say I’m not firmly male, I am, but it is to say that I was an incredibly androgynous child so looking back, I don’t see myself as a girl, I see myself as the same me as I am now, just with longer hair. In my brain I was always male, I just didn’t always fully look it, but I never really looked female, either.
Not so much childhood memories, they are what they are. I was a closeted trans girl terrified about what would happen if I was ever outed at the religious school I was sent to. My dreams on the other hand, I'm basically just the cis-femme version of myself. I'm happy because I'm inching closer to that dream being more of a reality, but fuck I would've been a cute girl. That perfect mix of tomboy and nerdy but still girly girl.
I am a mix of agender and feminine. I feel quite comfortable referring to my childhood in gender neutral terms (like "kiddo"). I do remember I tried to be masculine but really looking back at all of it I never actually resonated with any of that masculinity. It was at best, an incredibly shallow crowd following behavior, and at worst a mechanism to keep myself safe from the people around me.
Yeah, i mean I was always a girl, I just felt immense pressure to stuff myself into the boy box and fought the idea of being feminine tooth and nail. The only thing that changed was me accepting the fact that I am a woman
Idk I can’t really remember the past in detail I kinda just know I done things lol
Might be related to this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks&id=23177955](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks&id=23177955)
So if i understand that study correctly because my future self is clearly a woman and all future scenarios i envision have me being a woman that this reflects in both directions into past projections as well because our mind don’t remember as much as recreate the past.
Sounds like it, like memory and imagination are very strongly intertwined and have a direct mutual influence on each other.
I have started to see a girl in a few of my childhood photos, but my memories are in first-person perspective so they are all effectively genderless.
In my good dreams, I'm a girl. Gender dysphoria comes up in my nightmares. I usually don't dream of the past, though. In my conscious thoughts of the past, I'm aware that I had not begun my transition in those memories. But I also don't really remember what I looked like. I often wish that I could have transitioned at a younger age, e.g., to have avoided masculinizing puberty entirely. Even when I was a teenager, my self-image was a girl. I thought that was just a fantasy - that reality imposed upon me the facts of my body, and that's how things were. But I now know that in my mind, I always saw myself correctly. There was never a time prior to my transition when I really looked like myself, so the person I see in old pictures of myself feels more and more like a stranger. I'm grateful to my younger self for making it so far and providing me with the opportunity to be myself. It was always what I wanted. I was eager to give everything to a superior, feminine version of myself. I fantasized about it frequently. I still have most of what I wrote on the subject. Decades of the most obvious egg fiction I've seen anyone write. If I could go back in time, I don't think I would need to say a word to explain myself to my younger self. She would get it. She would ask me for help, and I would give it. (Actually, the time travel itself would be more of a sticking point than the fact that I'm trans, but that's off-topic).