The classic idea of being sad and longingly gazing into a mirror and being like, "I've known from birth that I was supposed to be a girl, even though I have a penis," these are narratives that were created by Hollywood, and created by men in Hollywood. And a lot of trans people adopt these narratives when they're trying to get their meds, but it's such an oversimplification for most of us. What transness and especially a pre-transition dysphoria actually feels like, to me at least, is much more internal and intangible. The language that I use to try to talk about it is language that I'm borrowing from the surrealism of David Lynch — the dreamlike nature of his films — or the body horror of David Cronenberg.
I felt a tug. A pull. The feeling of a door under the stairwell you walk past for years or decades but never open. A draw that can't actually affect you unless you stop and look and ask "what IS that?" A blurry, unreadable captcha whose solution is glaringly obvious only after you walk around and see it from the other side. I was captivated, obsessed with the allegory of the cave and I was in the cave the whole time.
What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
- some movie in 1999