How common is it to have the idea of wishing you could change sex cross your mind at some stage

At one point I wanted to know how it felt to have a penis.

That why I don't get the trend in regressive sexual stereotypes. Non binary makes more sense but still contributes to compelled speech

This is a great summary

@Blimpton
Try testosterone as part of your HRT!

That's so shocking! But I do always have to explain that I'm the worker to teachers who make assumptions

The idea that female role models are increasingly more adventurous etc is not necessarily accurate. As you say Violet Needham and Geoffrey Trease had strong female leads.
I grew up reading Arthur Ransome books about children having adventures which featured girls as leaders doing exciting and heroic deeds. They were written in the 1930s. See also Malcolm Saville and Enid Blyton.
When it comes to adults, I don't know how I feel about female heroes or superheroes who can fight as well as men, because it's not realistic.
When I first heard about parents bringing their kids up "gender neutral " I thought we might see more girls out being active like playing football, riding bikes. In reality, by me roughly zero girls play out at all, or ride bikes to school. Boys run/ cycle around in groups from about age 8. So the gap between actual male and female strength maybe increasing.

I noticed at age 12, men didn't have to do any work around the house. Then I read the female Eunuch. Then came Brideshead Revisited and its aesthetic which I loved. I also fetishised women and as lesbianism wasn't even mentioned growing up, becoming a man seemed a very attractive option. I wore my dad's shirt and tie, some cricket trousers and brogues. The phase was so short lived, I don't even have photos. I read in woman's own in about 1985 about surgeons experimenting with the idea of making a penis for sex change women, out of grafted skin; but that just made me feel sick.

When I was a teenager I longed to be a boy just for a day to see what it would feel like and to see how men think . Just curiosity not wanting a permanent change

Never thought about it.

The ironic thing today though is that girls CAN play football, play with cars, are encouraged to do engineering degrees etc!

If a mum says her daughter refuses to wear a dress everyone will reassure her that it’s fine to let her wear joggers - which is good!

I guess it was the perceived unpleasantness of realising that WHAT I was, meant something beyond WHO I was.

I just thought being a male would have been so much easier and have given me more anonymity. I was never into particularly ‘girly’ things but not particularly ‘tomboyish’ either - childhood to me was a neutrality. To me being a girl now required effort and constant thinking and negotiation. I didn’t think I was a boy. But I did think I possibly would have been better as a boy.

Interestingly, I’ve come to realise that I’m neurodiverse in some way (won’t bore you with the details) My sense of difference - from ‘all the other girls’ - could possibly be down to this - a slight dissociation. Currently under investigation - jury is still out. But the number of ‘trans’ children who have a diagnosis of autism, BPD etc makes sense to me.

So if I had been a teenager now I might have embraced the ‘non-binary’ label. I don’t think I’d have had the audacity to try and make others feel the same and insist I be perceived by them as this ‘other’ status. I think thats the crucial difference. But now it’s all part of ‘celebrating’ who you are isn’t it. And that must be quite something to resist when everyone is cheerleading you and wanting to be part of a gang. I was totally aware that this fleeting desire to remove my breast(s) was a complete and utter unrealisable - and brutal - fantasy - it would have been a crazy and wrong thing to do. But hey look at us now - a whole generation of young females seeing this as a totally acceptable thing - an actual ‘solution’ FGS. Because they are being told and shown this as a solution. I might have found that totally intoxicating.

As I said, I’m glad I’m not a teenager now. And I’m glad my DD is proud of who she is and recognises that it’s the world that needs to change, not her.

I've often thought what it would be like to be a man. Funnily enough the things I would do first are all penis related, have a wee standing up on a beach and try to write my name in the sand, have a wank and have sex with a (real)woman. Oh and lift heavy things.

Never. I love being a woman and have never had any issues with my sexuality.

Like @IwantToRetire my guess is that many of us who said we had briefly wished we were male-bodied were thinking of the day we were out with the school on a nature trail and the boys could go and have a wee up against a tree while the girls had to find somewhere 'safe' to whip off their underwear and crouch and hope the boys didn't creep up and trying seeing up their skirts. The unfairness of it all was a huge issue that led me to feminism.

@RepresentMe I'm sorry and horrified to think that anyone would think that it's natural and normal to hate your body to the extent of wanting to mutilate it. A few years ago that would have been considered a really serious MH issue. But this is where Gender Ideology has got us — the idea that it's perfectly normal to feel that way. It's like encouraging young women to absorb the patriarchy and unfairness and sexual predation and manifest in their scarred bodies.

I remember wanting to be a boy around the same age as you OP

I was looking up how to buy testosterone over the Internet at the start of adulthood, a few years later I was a mother. If I had been born 20 years later I'd likely have transitioned and it would have been a mistake.

Never wanted a penis. It was so easy though until the age of about 10 to just be a tomboy and do everything the boys did and not to need a crop top to cover the start of breasts, or to deal with periods a few years later. I wouldn't have wanted to be stuck in childhood but I didn't want a woman's body. I now present as a (mostly) masculine woman and I've come to accept my body but puberty was very difficult.

Im actually surprised I’m in the minority thinking this (on this MN thread).

I think the difference is that some of us (in a childish unthought out way ie me having trantrums) recognised we weren't allowed to do the same sort of things that boys were encouraged to do, and it was JUST NOT FAIR!!

But this didn't translate into thinking being a boy was the answer.

I just wanted it to be fair. And couldn't understand.

And I know many girls I was at school thought like me that our brothers were favourites because they got to do what they wanted. But in reality it was parental favouratism, but parents who had grown up and still believed in gender stereotypes.

I wanted to be a boy from about the age of 12. I knew I couldn’t BE one.

But I was sad, frustrated as fuck and raging that I had been born a girl. I too had visions of excising at least one breast (Amazonian-style) so it didn’t get in the way of my playing the guitar. I hated that everyone saw me as a girl first before seeing me. I hated my breasts and wore sports tops and minimising bras in my teens. I wrote shit poetry about the injustices of being born a girl and how I wish I’d been born a boy. I knew I was viewed as a second-class citizen, I know no one believed me when I spoke about being into the music and not into the male band-members. I thought girls who screamed and swooned over boys were stupid and pathetic.

But I accepted that I WAS a girl and aligned myself with feminism and realised I had some internalised misogyny.

I do wonder how I would have got through my teens unscathed in this era. I could easily have bought/brought into the belief that I was actually a boy mistakenly decanted into the body of a girl.

Im actually surprised I’m in the minority thinking this (on this MN thread).

I wanted to be a boy when I was a child, because I wanted to play football at school rather than crappy netball, and continue to run around shirtless without adults telling me to put a top on. I didn’t want to have the hassle of periods, and I preferred the company of boys - less bitchy. But I never felt in the wrong body. I just wanted the same freedoms that boys seemed to have.

As a teenager, I started to better understand sexism, patriarchy etc, but it set me on the journey to fighting for women’s rights rather than wanting to be a man.

I went through a phase of really wanting a penis when I was 8-10ish. No idea why I wanted one but I really did. If someone had introduced me to the idea of packers at the time perhaps I’d have wanted one. I don’t think I was dysphoric about my actual body, it was probably just curiosity about penises.

When I went through pregnancy and childbirth I felt really lucky to be able to have that experience. I know many women don’t enjoy pregnancy and birth, and not all women are able to (or want to) do those things, but it honestly felt like a privilege to me that I got to experience it. I felt sad for my husband that he didn’t get to grow our baby 😂

Never! I’ve sometimes/often wished that male norms applied to women eg. Wearing same suit, no make up, no hair removal, flat shoes etc. but as I’ve got older I’ve just done what I like in terms of these.
I have quite an androgynous body type anyway and have always been relieved to have small boobs so they don’t interfere with sports etc. so maybe I’m just lucky I have a body that suits me. I think I’d struggle with big boobs and curves but I still wouldn’t want to be a man.

I've never felt like that.

Never have I ever wanted to be a man. Ever.