Just realised something from my past too. Spent a lot of time at hospitals due to low testosterone levels and getting injected with it… I wonder if that is related?
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Wait, you were hospitalized for low testosterone? Yeah, this is one of those things that is very much in transition right now. What is “low” for testosterone is not really based on a fixed number, but on what is it you (the patient) want. For someone who is fine with less masculinization, “low” may be just fine. It’s once again, all clouds and boxes and letting people be themselves.
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Yep, specifically that at Great Ormond Street Hospital in london…
I remember the trips every few years…
Was a childrens hospital, i was too young to have an opinion at that time though… (for better or worse)
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Wow. Don’t know your age, but gonna guess you are closer to 50 than 30? There was a time when TPTB really worried about men having less masculinizing juice than the Ruskies. That is no longer a thing really, though.
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Quite close: 44
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One of the steps along the way to my coming out, someone asked if I could press a button to become a cis woman, would I press it? The answer was an emphatic YES
To me, that was confirmation that maybe yes, I was actually trans.
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My thoughts immediately went to Richard Green and his attempts to stop children from showing gender variant behaviour. He also worked with John Money, need I say more?
Does anyone know when he started working at Charing Cross? The best answer I have got so far is “sometime in the 80s, maybe”. If the NHS was willing to employ him at a GIC then they probably already bought into his abusive ‘treatment’ of children.
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I am now somewhat scared by my past that i don’t remember…
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Thank you so much for that reply. I now have a lot of things to think about.
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That’s why I created this thread. If you want to know more about any of that, you know where to find me. 
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I have heard of the button thought experiment from a very dear friend. In her case, even though it came with the stipulation that everyone would accept it, she didn’t think she would at first. It took some time to decide she wasn’t non-binary but a woman. (I am so very honored to have been trusted being there through the decision process.)
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I had daydreams when I was a kid of being put into this sarcophagus like machine that would turn me into a girl. The really odd part about that, looking back on it, is that (a) I didn’t think it was odd at the time, and (b) the light bulb didn’t go on until much later in life.
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One of my last straws was reading a Reddit thread where people were discussing wishing to be the opposite sex, and most people were much closer to 0 than my multiple times a week/almost daily. I mean, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but I had managed to convince myself it was just part of the experience of being a guy. Denial is a powerful drug!
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I also identified as a crossdresser for a long time. I never really felt like that was me, though. I just landed there because of reading too much trans gatekeeping bullshit online in the 90s and early 2000s that basically said if you weren’t hyper-stereotypically feminine, you weren’t trans. Then I read Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and that changed everything for me.
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I had a short croasdressing phase as a teen, but I crammed that urge down after getting caught 2x in short succession, once by a friend and once by my dad. It was humiliating. I also knew it wasn’t me.
I considered myself an ally for the longest time but I pretty religiously avoided any queer spaces because even limited exposure to queer folks caused feelings to reemerge that I was desperately trying to keep down. Reading anything about queer theory was a hard no. I even refused to watch shows with trans or lesbian representation unless absolutely necessary to deflect suspicion about why I was avoiding them.
The closet is a terrible place to be.
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I identified as a crossdresser for a long time as well. I started when I was about 8-10. Then puberty hit and with that came dysphoria. I’d lay in bed every night hoping, wishing, praying, that I’d wake up as a girl. By the time I was 15 I had done enough searching online to realize I was trans. I then found Susan’s Place and filled out the COGIATI numerous times. The stuff I looked at was all bad information that resulted in me thinking i just had a fetish. I stopped crossdressing and began to feel worse. The self hatred started, got very bad and continued until my late 20’s when trans people started becoming more visible. I started crossdressing again; more and more frequently as the years went by. I was miserable, but didn’t hate myself like I once did. Then one day I randomly decided to use a gender swap app and as soon as I saw the picture, I broke down. I was seeing a version of myself for the first time. After I worked through the months long break down, I made the decision to transition.
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It really is awful.
This is my favorite song about being closeted…
This part always gets me.
It opens at a young age
That all-protective closet
Just lock the door
And settle in among the raincoats
The longer you stay in there
The more you’ll get distorted
The more contorted all your lies will have to be
I feel like I’m still working through all the ways staying closeted for so long impacted me.
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I am one year into therapy, digging through a pile that has a lot of that kind of stuff in it. 
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Same. I’ve managed to find a queer nonbinary and polyamorous therapist and I will be devastated if I lose them.
Being closeted for so long made me such a people-pleaser, uncomfortable expressing any form of preference or opinion about anything that others might dislike. I became the most go with the flow chill kinda dude, because I was scared that showing preferences might make it harder to keep the desire to transition suppressed.
I’m getting better about it, but it’s not easy to overcome 40 years of conditioning to behave like that. I can actually advocate for myself now, but it still fills me with terror.
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