I don’t tend to say that I’m trans even though I, by definition, am definitely trans. It’s just not something that registers to me as anything of note or requiring distinction. But fuck does it eventually get inconvenient to find literally any other way to explain my condition. I am a man. I have never not been a man. And that's the thing that people often don't understand when I use the term transgender. I didn't even have the social context to ever be considered a girl or a woman growing up. That was something I learned about as a teenager, after I started eating absolute fucking shit for having a uterus. But nobody actually really *gets* that because the fact is that people grew up in a society while I grew up in the hollow shell of two dead species and everything they left behind.
I'm uncomfortable with the presumption that I have any direct experience with girlhood. I stand at a strange crossroads in that regard where the media I consumed definitely impacted me but nobody was there to tell me outright that was the role I was allegedly meant to play. It makes my relationship with it inherently removed from the standard relationship with gender as a whole. It's probably why my relationship with dysphoria is the way it is, too. And maybe that's what it is when it comes to someone presuming I have experience with girlhood in a way I never had the chance to. Not that this is the only area where something so minute a detail is something I notice not lining up with other people's perceptions of the context. The lenses we observe these things through are fundamentally different. Half of these things weren't even properly a concept I understood until I hit the double digits. I was too busy figuring out that an electric stove is hot and hurricanes are a fact of life. Or, were.