I had made a similar post on reddit r/trans as well with the same account name.
Hello, if my account name was not a dead giveaway this is a throwaway account.
I am a twenty year old AMAB from India and I am very confused regarding my gender. I live near Delhi and though the culture is very open, there is no one in my circle who is trans. I have tried exploring my gender identity (mostly by comparing my feeling with those that other trans women have wrote they felt, anything aside from this, like cross dressing, might be too costly for me) but I feel like I am working in a vaccum. My question is if there is some resource than can accurately tell if I am trans. For reference, I have already read the gender dysphoria bible, I tick some but not all boxes in imposter and social dysphoria descriptions.
I have read accounts of various trans women and my experience is very different from them. I never felt uncomfortable due to my penis, I never felt as if I was better off as a woman as a kid. As a kid, up until I was 16, I was bullied as a “Chakha”, it is a derogatory term for trans people in north india, I don’t know if it is influencing my feelings. Due to that it took me some time to stop lashing out to be my knee jerk reaction to being called or compared to a girl.
As for reasons I think I might be trans is that nearly every few months I get these intense feelings that I wish I could be a woman. During one of those I nearly cried thinking that I can never be a mother. But these feelings pass by very quickly. Even though I prefer interacting online and even in games through a female persona most of my hobbies are male coded (like FPS games, wargaming, etc). I also hate keeping a beard and hate my belly, others tell me I am not that fat but I don’t feel great about it. Also sometimes I need to stop myself from acting a little too feminine. There was this one time when a friend used a male to female filter on me, I kept gushing about how cute the photo was the entire day.
Any help in this is very much appreciated. This is my first time writing in a forum so please forgive me for any mistakes. Thank you
everyone’s experience with gender is different, that’s why online tests don’t really work. you might not want to call yourself trans despite feeling like you don’t fit in your AGAB, just as wel as you may call yourself trans even if you do feel like it. it’s all a matter of what makes you comfortable and what that label means for you when you use it.
for example, in my local LGBTQ+ community, transgender is viewed as a term specifically for people who still fit in the gender binary (MTF or FTM) but not non-binary people. I think that is horseshit and NB erasure, and as a non-binary person, i use the term trans anyway to describe myself, despite not being ‘trans’ in the way my local community would use it.
i can’t tell you that you’re trans or that you’re not. that’s for you to decide. what i can tell you however is that cisgender people don’t cry about not being born a woman, but i’ll give you that they don’t generally ask themselves these questions in the first place. you also may or may not (again, up for you to decide) be genderfluid, where the gender you feel like may fluctuate.
as far as experimenting with your gender, there are many safe online spaces in which you are free to experiment with pronouns, names and labels. as always, labels are not fixed and neither are people, so feel free to change a label you describe yourself with if you feel like it isn’t you anymore. a label is a language tool that you use to communicate with others about what you experience. if i tell you i am bisexual and nonbinary, i am offering you information about how i feel about myself in a succint way, just like i could tell you what city i live in and that would tell you some things about myself.
I am sorry, I never meant to do NB erasure. I am just very confused and even though I read NB or gender fluid accounts, they don’t match up as close as trans stuff. Also can you tell me more abou the safe online spaces, I only found social media like reddit as far as I could find.
Absolutely no worries, that was much more of a commentary on my local community who should know better. It’s totally ok to make mistakes as long as you don’t make them on purpose ( and I don’t even think you made one here, I was pointing out my own experience) :)
I suggest looking in the sidebars of various LGBT subreddits for discords, at least that’s the spaces in which I’ve felt the most free to be myself. I am partial to https://discord.gg/lgbtqplus but there are many.