How do I know if I’m trans?

Is this a question you’ve asked yourself? Is this a question someone has asked you?

When it comes to knowing whether you are transgender, it takes taking a deeper look at yourself. I want to start this by saying I’m not a therapist or a medical professional in any respect. I’m just a transgender man who grew up confused, feeling alone, and wanting to be understood, just as much as I wanted to understand myself.

So how do you know if you’re transgender? For me, looking back, my earliest memories of being self-aware of my body and myself included me not understanding why I was so physically different from my older brother if we were both boys. It was a lot of questioning my mother and ultimately being told that I was not a boy that lead me down a path of being overly self-aware that I was not in the right body.

If you listen to a lot of transgender people speak about how they knew they were trans, they’ll talk a lot about not feeling like they were born in the right body. Or how their body felt like it was somehow separate from how they felt about themselves in their head.

Some research has shown that being transgender can be linked in part to the body being influenced by one hormone, while the brain is influenced by the opposite. While physically the body develops as either male or female, the brain will develop the opposite. This idea gives a greater understanding to why someone may mentally and emotionally feel male or female but physically not present as such.

Ultimately there isn’t an exact science to know whether you personally are transgender. However, discussing how you feel about yourself and your body with a mental health professional trained in gender dysphoria, can help you understand and decide if transitioning is right for you. Just remember, there isn’t one exact way to be transgender, so keep an open mind when having these discussions.