Heck yeah, chiming in with the “parents had two names picked out” backstory. I like to tell people my mom picked my name, we just needed a little redo to correct it to the right one!

If I could go back and talk to a younger me at the start of her transition, we’d talk about how this is the chance to ACTUALLY learn about myself and to really take time and care to not sweat the details or get stuck in a rut. Try everything and figure out what’s actually you and what is just some baggage or ideal you’re trying to live up to. Don’t be afraid to say yes. Also, don’t be afraid to say no. Keep both open as your options for everything: clothing styles, makeup (if you wanna), hair stuff, sexuality and attraction, etc.

To be clear, I still feel like I managed my way through it and found my way to a rough approximation of what’s right for me eventually, but I was often too hard on myself and placed restrictions where there really weren’t any beyond what I was enforcing on myself. It really is Puberty 2 in so many ways, and you really need to lean into the lessons about how much any of it actually matters from Puberty 1… if at all possible.

So, I’ve been through a few of these tectonic plate shifts in my life on the internet, and I know that there will be others older than me with even more experience or alternate experiences along similar themes.

I am not even kind of an early adopter online. I tend to find something I’m comfortable with and stick with it for quite some time, and it takes a number of “throwing my hands up in disgust” events to get me to consider a change. From my own timeline of use, it was AOL as the “front page of the internet”, followed by 4chan for a very short while, followed by Digg, followed by reddit, and now it’s starting to feel like we’re on the brink of another plate shift. Is this something on that sort of scale? No idea. It would take someone with a far keener eye for these things to tell you for sure, but I can confidently say that if someone like me is here, then I’m certainly not the only one, and that means something’s up.

Make of all of that what you will, but it’s going to be increasingly interesting to see where this goes in both the short and the long term.

Just tagging in to agree with both points (hands?) and to self-report another newcomer fleeing the growing hellscape that is reddit to this increasingly relevant thread. So, there’s two of us, at least?