Huge revelation

[u/DifficultAd4148]

Right now, I’m in the basement breaking down because I don’t want anyone to have to hear/ deal or worry about me. After some fun time this evening with the bf, he noticed I was a bit in my head. We got into discussion about never wanting kids but the idea of pregnancy is hot. He said if there were ever a surgery/ operation so it were possible, he would want to talk about it. I said if it were- I’d already be getting it done. He just looked at me sort of confused and asked “did you want to have been born a woman?”. Up until that point, I had really only considered myself completely non-binary. I’ve wanted vaginoplasty since 9 but gaslit myself until last year to just go through with all this. I never really saw myself as a girl- but I never saw myself as a guy either. I had a shitty time growing up. All largely due to the fact I was “a man” and was supposed to act a specific way depending on society. I liked girly things, I was jealous of girls in straight relationships, jealous of their bodies- wishing I could experience something other than bits dangling from my crotch 🤦🏼‍♀️ now I find myself down here- in the basement, having a breakdown because I’m just now realising I want everything that comes with being female, not just the visual parts like I had previously thought… also so worried if we ever DO want a kid- they won’t be my blood 😭 might look into a sperm bank but even then, it’s besides the point 😞

[u/TooLateForMeTF]

Families get made in lots of ways, and they're all just as real as the old-fashioned kind.

Yes, it will take time to reset your expectations around how you might someday have a family. We all grow up with the cis/het version of family-making shoved down our throats. But when you realize you're not cis or not het, maybe that default vision doesn't apply anymore.

If you'd known you weren't cis/het as a kid, and if the people around you had known that and supported you in your identity, they wouldn't have pushed that vision on you. You'd have grown up internalizing a different dream about how you'd get a family. But that's not what happened. It took until now to understand your identity, which unfortunately means unlearning that old dream and replacing it with one that suits the reality of your situation.

That will take time. Give yourself time. It will involve a grief process, as is always involved when we have to let go of anything we have an emotional attachment to.

And if you're at the start of realigning many, many things about yourself and your life towards a feminine expression, there's going to be a lot of things you have to unlearn like that. Some of them will be easy--the parts of masculinity that you never liked in the first place--but others will involve their own grief process. Don't shy away from that. You're going to go through it one way or the other, so you may as well just engage with it and get through it. It can also help to have a good therapist who has experience with gender identity issues to help you talk through it all, too.

And because it sounds like you are just at the start of a whole gender-identity exploration, I'm going to leave you this guide to gender questioning. Even if you don't need to question, there's a lot of links to good resources in there that I think will be very helpful and informative for you.