This is a great thread.

I struggled with eating disorders, social alienation, and sex dysphoria as a kid. I was in my head, I was reading, I was role-playing online, and always as a boy. Sometimes I would feel a terrible sense of guilt that may have been connected to imagining myself as a boy (with a penis) in various situations.

But I was going to start high school and I wasn't going to do it as this shapeless, genderless mass of a person. So I bullied my body into conforming to societal expectations, because I craved external validation - which I hadn't gotten from my father. I lost a lot of weight and cut my hair into a pixie cut and dyed it black, and basically tried to be Winona Ryder with the natural frame of someone more like, say, Danny Devito - at least in my mind. Anyway, I was somewhat successful and was brutally inducted into the harsher trappings of being a sexually viable female person. So all that is real and not thought experiment.

I empathize a lot with FTM people and was seriously moved by that "Socialized Trans" essay a few years ago. I can easily imagine that at 12 or 13, fantasizing about escaping my social reality, I might have transitioned instead of beating myself into the anorexic mold. I had pretty real "sex dysphoria" insofar as I was incredibly alienated from my body, hated my body, was mortified at the idea of being sexually present with someone who could see me, because I didn't want to see me.

I used the Internet as an outlet because of its anonymizing effects and this increased my alienation from myself. At the same time, I met a good group of young women online in my early years with a similar interest (modding a game) and this provided me key support during my antisocial years. They were the first people that helped me see that my monolithic idea of women and girls as being effortlessly perfect/feminine/untroubled was bullshit.

But if I hadn't had them, I can see that I might have transitioned instead. I might have found a support group (maybe with my mother's help - something that would likely have cemented the desire in me) and had lots of friends in school instead of none, and they would be genderqueer and trans, and there would be no question to me that I was too, and I would happily insulate myself in a happy self-righteous lefty bubble. Who knows, I'd probably have three advanced degrees by now and throw fancy dinner parties in San Francisco or something. I'd probably be trying to figure out how to adopt without flaunting my Western privilege, or something. I'd probably be more confident and more successful in work, and may never have given up on my younger ambitions to be a scientist, philosopher, programmer, etc. Maybe I could have never wrestled with that terrible moment as puberty hits, when it's impossible to disappear into the groups of boys anymore, when I realized I had no female friends at school and felt like I had been stamped undesirable because of my failure to learn femininity. I have no idea what a blessing avoiding that trauma might have been for me, as I have dealt with fairly awful anxiety and depression ever since. (OTOH, I have come to love my body and to know that I'd be far worse off if I'd made irrevocable physical changes to myself on an adolescent whim.)

But I think I'd also be setting myself up for one hell of a mid-life crisis, which I hope my less comfy approach to physical dysphoria perhaps proves to soften. I've come around to the immense value of being true to myself and would never, ever consider my prepubescent dysphoria to be anything but the workings of a traumatized female child looking for a way out of the femininity box - or into the femininity box, which is of course the narrative of ED. It's simply unfair to my child self to burden her with the expectation of objectivity about a body she was still adjusting to; it's unfair to ask a child how things really are and obviate the social support that they need. My mother did not help me to conform, which felt like torture as a very young person but for which I am now very grateful - I think that part of my distress was groping around for a role to play when I felt like my mother hadn't thought I was right for the role of girl. Of course, she was trying to protect me from stifling gender expectations and that has helped me, in the long run.

So! There's that. There is a real possibility I will get self conscious and delete this, or edit compulsively. Sorry for that!