I am writing this so that the world may understand who I am and where I came from. Maybe it will be helpful to you in some way.
I had no idea I was trans until March of 2026, and until September of 2023, I had no idea I even liked anything feminine. For me, discovering I was trans was like having my world tossed completely upside down: the sky became the ground, if you will. The signs were always there, but I had decided long ago what my life was to be, and it involved me being a man.
When I was young (5–6), the other boys would often call me a girl on the playground. I can't remember why exactly, but it was probably because I acted like a girl or preferred something girly. In some cases, it was because I wasn't very athletic (I still am not). Nonetheless, I looked them squarely in the eye and told them I was not a girl: "Look at me." From then on, I blocked out anything feminine from my life.
I was to be successful, someone who did not have the financial difficulties my parents often did. I studied hard in school, tried hard in my career, and rose through the ranks to be a senior software engineer. I tried my hand at running my own company a few times. I was always thinking of new ideas to make things better, never unwilling to try something new.
In the past six years, I began to run into problems. I could not grow my business without social contacts, and for some reason I couldn't seem to make any. The male-dominated tech field felt foreign despite me being in the thick of it. The truth was that I could not relate to my peers, but I didn't know that. I kept hoping I would find something that stuck, but I never did. I went through cycles of trying new things and inevitably failing.
One night in September of 2023, I wrote something and thought to myself, "A woman would've written that." After I took a shower, I looked in the closet and saw a rack of dresses there. I thought to myself, "Hmm, I've never tried one on." I'd recently lost weight and thought it could be attractive on me. I honestly had no expectations when I did.
I say now that the mirror shattered when I saw myself, but the shards of glass were only proverbial. My first thought was "I look good," and I began to get excited. This was my very first experience with gender euphoria, although I did not know that's what it was. I thought to myself I had picked up a new hobby: crossdressing. But in the back of my mind, I was already thinking to myself: what if I just become a woman? I thought about transition before I ever knew that's what trans people often did, or knew that I was trans. I didn't think about it often, and when I did, I thought to myself, "I couldn't do that."
So, off and on for two and a half years or so, I "crossdressed," learning more and more about dressing as a woman. In this phase, I wasn't changing my body (e.g., permanently removing hair) or doing makeup. I got a wig, shoes, a dress, and some other implements/accessories and dressed up when I had a chance. I liked what I saw more and more. What would inevitably happen could not be stopped at this point; I just really hadn't formally thought too much about it because I considered it a hobby.
That all changed one night in early March of this year. After not crossdressing for several months, and even getting rid of my stuff, I began again in late January. It picked up intensity, and I began to wonder what it was all about because I wanted to do it more and more. Like many trans women just discovering themselves, I began to think I was sexually attracted to myself and that this was why I did it. So that's where I began searching. I found something called "AGP" (autogynephilia), and it made sense the first time I read about it. For a day or so, I rested with the idea that I had that, but then I read more about it, and I read that the trans community had discredited this theory (indeed, AGP is rubbish!).
That's when I began reading about the trans community. I distinctly remember the first time I saw the words "egg cracking," and I was like, "What the hell is that?" Not too much later, I learned that this is what had happened to me in September of 2023, although it hadn't fully cracked then. March is when my egg burst open. I began to read about transition, HRT, and all the things. I hadn't yet decided to transition, but I knew that's what I wanted. Soon, I was obsessed with it and starting to think of names in the back of my mind.
But I still had doubts, and the main one was: why the hell hadn't I figured this out in 43 years? Everyone, and I mean everyone, in my life was going to be surprised. Eventually, I figured out I had blocked it, but there were a lot of red flags that it was there: essays I'd written in high school and college, the way I thought of women growing up, the female mannerisms I'd unwittingly picked up. Eventually, I came to understand I completely had the brain of a woman and simply had blocked out the idea that this could be the case.
Once I began to connect the dots, my old self began to shatter. Thought patterns I'd used for 30 years to maintain the status quo of my life were disrupted or outright eliminated. I could no longer maintain the life of my deadname.
At first, I thought I'd take the name Ellie, because it's a pretty name and the name of a main character in a story I'd written a few years back. But I kept accidentally calling myself Evelynn! Not once, but multiple times! Eventually, I knew it was fate because it rolled off my tongue just right. Seven characters, the same number as my deadname. It means "desired," something I wanted but had never been.
On the night of the 16th of March, 2026, the last bastion of resistance within me caved, and I cried tears of joy as I accepted myself as trans. On the 17th of March, I awoke and assumed Evelynn as my internal identity. I knew right away that I represented hope, and that I'd be a positive force for the world I'd come to inhabit.
Over the ensuing months, I reorganized my life and began HRT/transition. My identity wasn't in question on the 17th of March, but it has only gotten much stronger since that day.