Since coming out as transgender almost two years ago, a few times people have worked up the nerve to ask me, how did I know? How could I be sure?

Didn’t I understand what I was saying?

Yes, I understood what I was saying. I was saying I was going to undergo major surgery. Yes, I understood, testosterone therapy would shift my face and body into a reflection that not even I would find familiar. I admit, at the start of transition, I really couldn’t know if hormones and surgery were going to be helpful for me. It was a leap of faith I took, faith in an idea that I hadn’t been aware of for all that long. If I hadn’t known transgender people existed five years earlier, how could I be a transgender person?

I had spent two decades trying to be cisgender, meaning, I tried to live as the gender I was assigned at birth. As a child, I can say definitively that I did not feel like a little girl. Did I feel like a little boy? I don’t know; I was only ever the person I was. Being categorized with the girls, I wasn’t insulted to be associated with them. The label felt incorrect, similar to what one feels when called the wrong name. I had a girl’s body. I wanted very much to be a girl. I just wasn’t one.

The result? I was a very depressed and anxious child. I hated the way I looked, and puberty magnified this. Despite these feelings, I was able to form friendships with other kids across gender lines. I learned to live with the subtle, low level jealousy I felt toward boys, not understanding that the hurt I felt was a longing to be accepted and seen for the person I was inside. My friendships with girls were a complicated mix of being glad to be near them, with the background noise of wishing they saw me differently, wishing for an impossible reality where they wanted me not for the me I was, but for an invisible version of myself where I could be the ‘boy next door’.

As a teen, I was obsessed with masculinity and femininity. I watched Fight Club almost every day, while also reading books on applying makeup and watching the women around me. Like a method actor, I practiced feminizing my mannerisms, my walk, my pattern of speech. I hated my breasts, but knew that other people found them to be beautiful and that there was a sort of power in that, and I learned to use my sexuality to distract from my masculine temperament. If I could distract people, I could hide in plain sight.

Hiding in plain sight became the status quo. When I became unexpectedly pregnant at 18, I saw an opportunity to throw myself into motherhood, to connect with the womanhood assigned to me. In the span of five years, I married the father of my child, and gave birth to three children total by age 24.

Giving birth, breastfeeding three infants, being married to a man. None of these things made me a woman. None of these things connected me to my femininity. I loved my family fiercely, but looking at my husband filled me with jealousy, with pain. I looked at his shoulders, and wished mine were strong like his. I would buy him button downs and oxfords that weren’t his style and try to convince him to dress in them, but when it came time to buy something for myself, I ordered it online, didn’t try it on. I even ordered my wedding dress online.

In my children’s baby years, I befriended many incredible women, and witnessed the strong love that female friendship could be. Being around these mothers, it highlighted to me that I would never truly be one of them. I couldn’t make myself fit, no matter how much I wanted to, and there were times in my life where I would have given just about anything to feel at home as a woman, to be cisgender. When they confided in me, I felt like a liar. They wouldn’t be telling me these things if they knew I was a man, I thought to myself. What an insane thought, I would chide myself. You can’t be a man; look in a mirror. The internalized transphobia and cissexism caused me to doubt something that felt incredibly real to me.

How did I know I was transgender? I didn’t, exactly, but I knew I wasn’t a woman.

Transition cost me many things. It put every relationship I had in my life under strain. My spouse and I divorced, and I moved back in with my parents. I was suddenly known in my small town as the ‘mom that became a guy’. I’ve been misgendered and laughed at, and still deal with awkward and hurtful moments on a regular basis. I highlight this to draw notice to the argument that the incentive to ‘opt in’ to being transgender, a common defense of transphobes and bigots in general, as an argument without basis. Nobody opts into oppression. The sheer awkwardness of a pronoun change is enough to keep a person from transitioning out of fear of being rejected socially, let alone the actual physical harm that comes to many as a result of being trans. The pain I dealt with is a small fraction of the danger and upset I would deal with were I not a white man who is perceived as such, an intersection of privilege that insulates me from the violence of racism and sexism, and affords me the benefit of the doubt whether I deserve it or not.

Changing my body to align with my gender identity afforded me an authentic and full life, a life that feels beautiful and connected. While not all trans people need or want medical intervention, for me those interventions have allowed me to think of myself and my body as a single entity for the first time in memory; I am no longer disassociated from my physical form. I believe that a person cannot really be fully invested in a life if they are not living it as themselves.

Transition freed me from a life lived for others, and introduced me to an existence where I have a will to live, for it’s own sake. I still struggle with anxiety like many people, but no longer do I lose days to laying in bed, or have long crying jags for ‘no reason’ or spend my time fixated on distractions that don’t matter, just to avoid looking inward. I am in a healthy and fulfilling relationship where I am myself, without the dark shadow of my unresolved gender issues. I have been able to become a parent who is present, who is paying attention, and who can envision a future worth participating in.

I know I am transgender because I spent my whole life trying to be cisgender. I know I am transgender because transition allowed me to be at home in my body. I know I am transgender, because transition allowed me to live, instead of just being alive.