This entry discusses knowing you’re trans at an early age, briefly mentioning suicidal ideation and puberty.

One of the hardest parts of growing up transgender is knowing the truth long before you can even understand it. 

I knew at seven, not in a way I could explain; I had no words, I didn’t even know what transgender meant, or that there were people like me. I just felt deep in my bones that something was wrong. Not wrong with me, per se, though I would carry that belief for years, but wrong in the way I had to exist. Wrong in how the world saw me. Wrong in the future waiting quietly for me, hanging over me like a shadow. 

How do you say that at seven? How do you express a grief you can’t yet name? How do you tell someone that being seen as a girl feels like being buried alive, when you are still a child who barely understands what being a girl even means; only that it isn’t you? 

So, I did what most children do when the truth feels dangerous: I hid it. I shoved it down so far I almost believed it had gone. I had no words, no safety, no courage to bring it into the light, so I survived by refusing to acknowledge it. 

That is its own type of trauma. Not just being trans in a world that denies your existence and validity, but holding that knowledge completely alone.  Being a child who knows, with certainty, that something is terribly wrong but has no way to explain it and nobody to tell because nobody was safe. Living with a secret you can’t understand. Splitting yourself into two halves: the quiet self bubbling away under the surface, and the self the world expects you to be – the self you perform so no one asks questions. 

Hiding from your life is exhausting. 

Puberty made hiding impossible. Before, I could almost pretend. Pretend I might outgrow it. Pretend being silent would make it fade. Pretend my body wouldn’t betray me… but it did. 

Puberty felt like a betrayal. A slow, relentless betrayal by my own body. Not just uncomfortable, but horrifying. Watching my chest grow felt like my body was turning against me, forcing me into a life that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t insecurity or ordinary discomfort. It was panic. Grief. Revulsion. A feeling of being trapped inside something that no longer felt like mine. 

And then my period came. Even now, writing about it hurts… thinking about it. Bleeding in a way that felt tied to a body and a future I couldn’t bear was violently alienating. Being told, directly or indirectly, that this was womanhood, this was natural, this was normal, when all it made me want to do was crawl out of my skin, or curl up and die. 

The loneliness was crushing. Everyone else saw these changes as milestones, something exciting, a rite of passage while I was drowning. Quietly. Secretly. Completely. Because I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t say, “this is destroying me”. I couldn’t say, “I am terrified of what my body is becoming.” I couldn’t say, “I think I am a boy.” I couldn’t even say, “I don’t think I can survive this”, so I said nothing. And silence turns sour if you hold it too long. 

This is what people don’t talk about; how traumatic growing up trans really is, and I am not just talking about the bullying, the rejection, the violence, but the years spent swallowing yourself whole. In dissociation. In avoidance. In learning, even as a child, that it was not safe to be you. 

So you detach, you minimise, you try not to think about your future; you survive by shutting down. 

There is heartbreak in knowing a child carried all of that alone – knowing I did. Seven years old and already believing my truth had to be buried, that honesty was dangerous, that silence was survival. 

It changes you. It teaches you to distrust yourself, to fear being known. It teaches you to live in fragments, and the worst part is how normal it becomes. Misery settles, dysphoria becomes constant. You stop asking if this is sustainable and start asking how long you can fake it. You stop imagining a life where you can be yourself, because imagining something you will never have hurts too much. You survive by enduring. You survive by making yourself smaller and quieter, further from your own pain. But the pain never leaves. 

That is what I wish people understood. Growing up trans and closeted is not just confusion, or awkwardness, or a phase or “feeling uncomfortable in your body.” It is grief before you can even name it. Trauma unfolding slowing. The unbearable experience of watching your body move further from who you are while silence swallows you. 

What haunts me most is how young I was; when I first knew, when I learned to hide it, when I began lying. Seven years old is too young to feel that wrongness in your bones, to fear your own future, to believe silence was safer than honesty. But that was my reality. 

My childhood and adolescence were shaped by a truth too heavy to carry openly, and too painful to carry silently. it hurt. It was lonely. It was suffocating. And yet, I carried it.