somehow I’m both?

EDIT: I “knew” since some of my earliest memories (4 - 5 years old), when I was trying on my mom’s heels in her closet, and when stories of my birth were told and everyone in the family thought I was going to be born a girl, and I was pretty sure they were right and I was supposed to be born a girl, etc.

I also grew up wanting to be a girl, which especially got more intense after puberty started. I definitely played with barbies growing up (in the limited way I could under the watch of my father, who projected his fragile masculinity onto me by threatening violence for even minor mis-steps in my gender).

But I also ended up repressing hard and thought I could never be a woman or a girl, and I lost a lot of my memories of childhood and ended up very dissociated and unhappy. Therapy and meditation actually caused me to regain a lot of my childhood memories, which was very weird - I woke up one morning with access to them after months in EMDR + 1 hour vipassana meditation / day (which … I tend to think EMDR is quackery, but it sorta works because it’s like exposure therapy for traumatic memories? something like that).

I’m curious if other autistic trans people have similar experiences. Although looking back there were clear signs, I never had that “aha” moment until my 30s. I always knew something was wrong but could never place my finger on it. I also have bad interoception, which is apparently common in autistic people.