When we think about our past self, especially thinking back after a significant change, our natural impulse is to reinterpret things then in the context of what we know now. I'm not immune to that by any means.
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This isn't really a hard question to answer - the answer is yes- but it gets complicated in the context of theories of self.https://twitter.com/AnthropObscene/status/1290416248254337024 …
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I now believe I had gender dysphoria starting at the onset of puberty, and I can go back and find evidence for that in my past. I can tell a story about a true trans self which was hidden by a lack of words or knowledge about what HRT could do.
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But, it's hard to say how true this story is. It deals in counterfactuals (if I had known this, I would have done that). It deals in unknowns (HRT would have relieved these symptoms, if anyone had known they were symptoms, and if I'd had access to HRT).
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So, while I believe this story, I have enough distance to also feel skeptical about this story. I transitioned in my 30s, which means I told different stories for a long, long time, which makes it easier to feel doubt about the story I'm telling now.
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Mind you, some of the old stories were proven false, because they made predictions about the future. I'm not suffering from incurable lifelong mental illness, which was a story I told and which was told to me, but didn't turn out to be the case.
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But, there's no falsifiability to my story about having always had gender dysphoria and not knowing it. The best evidence will be, if I die without detransitioning, the relative stability of the trans story vs any earlier story. For that we'll have to wait and see.
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yeah, this one is really weird for me bc i don't have that absolute certainty that i was a girl from like five years old that i hear some trans women talk about. but what i DO see, upon a lot of reflection, is behaviors/thoughts/activities that make a lot more sense
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viewed w/the framing of "a child who has gender dysphoria." things that i am more likely to have in common w/other trans women or even cis women but decidedly not trans/cis men. things that are hard to even interpret if you don't realize i experienced dysphoria.
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