It is interesting you bring up confirmation bias as I relate GID to cognitive dissonance. Obviously the tag of ‘disorder’ is being made redundant as there is no real ‘order’ for this to be based on and is being referred to as ‘dysphoria’ which better encompasses the way it is experienced by the subject, not just the observer. But the mind indeed will seek to justify this through life’s experience and in reality, who are we but the sum of our life experiences, good, bad & all levels inbetween.

I can indeed look back at key occurrences through life & pick out moments where my thoughts leaned in a direction that many people would not have. Each time I got a scar on my face, I thought about how much harder it would be to be female & be passable. This happened in my most ‘male’ of days. I have asked many guys what they thought when in the same position & they just look at me with a blank stare & of course they would, why would that even be considered by them. I remember seeing a vagina on a school friend & feeling sad that I didn’t have one. The same happened when the girls started growing boobs around me. The clothing seemed better. The conversations seemed better. Step by step this accumulated over time & by my teens, I was pretty much sure I was ‘trapped’ on a course that I could not avoid not to mention the reaction my father had when he would find me entertaining the thought of being female which ranged from the violent to the extreme – being sent to an all boys school to man me up & being told to ‘not’ live with my mother as there were ‘too many females influencing my life’ which also coincided with my mothers cancer & her death 2 days later.

Looking back, I can see a track record of occurrences that all scream my transness but that in reality does not change the weight of the decision to do something about it. Hindsight is always an easy observation to make. What if I decided to not do anything about it? Many trans people decide this, it’s not as if it is a given that one must transition. My transitioning & the subsequent ramifications to me feels like the difference between navigating busy city traffic to cruising on a country road. Even the lower testosterone levels feels like hearing the odd cricket to hearing revving cars, noise & pressure from standing at a busy intersection when level were higher.
-But to some, it may very well feel the opposite.

For an analogy, I would point to being ‘In Love’. What is this but a one sided infatuation that is simply validated if the object of ones love acts in kind. When this happens it is hailed as one of life’s best treasures & all justifications (confirmation bias) is hailed as cute yet if it is not returned, it is hailed as the exact opposite & further justifications as psychotic.

There are no real answers we can offer anybody in this respect, all we can do is tell our personal experiences & hope it encourages introspection in others so they can map their course of action that better suits them with no pressure being applied.

After all, it is social pressure that makes being trans sometime hard to endure, why inadvertently apply this to anyone especially our own.

TL;DR: So, how do I know that I’m trans? It’s the wrong question: I want to be understood, and I want to feel like I’m an actual human that exists in the world.

I could point to how I always wanted to play as the Princess in Mario 2, even though my friends though Toadstool was better in a level, or how I took paper making and cake decorating classes around when I was in the third grade. Or how excited I was to discover that in AD&D there was a belt that changed your characters gender, and how crushed I was that it was ‘cursed’ and therefore bad.

But those are all things a cis-person could do. There’s an element of stochasticity, though, in that while each individual thing might be, I suspect I’m a few standard deviations off norm in the sorts of things I could name.

Really, though, it comes down to two things: being understood, and being happy.

First being understood. So, when I was 11 or 12, I played a game called Metroid. The hero is Samus, in full body armor. Samus is a bounty hunter. You kill all the alien pirates and Mother Brain to win. In the end, Samus strikes a victory pose and takes of the suit’s helmet to reveal long green hair. Samus, the bad-ass bounty hunter, is female.

When I first saw that I felt validated.

A second or two later, my friend happily explained that the faster we beat the game, the more of her armor she’d take off.

I was deflated. I was initially validated, but then by proxy I was objectified. He didn’t know what I was feeling, though, and he couldn’t have anticipated it. How could he? I was a boy and these were private emotions that I never expressed. Had he seen me as a girl, I could have possibly been more open about my feelings, and he might have been more aware of the way his comments would be received.

If people saw me as female, the opinions I hold, the way things in the world affect me is more comprehensible. People would understand ME better. Not perfectly, or cleanly, but better.

Regarding happiness, there’s a lot of body dysphoria going on. This has less to do with other people (although how my body looks certainly affects how I communicate gender to other people), and more about how I interact with myself.

There’s a lot I could say, but the key thing is this: the first time I wore breast forms as an experiment to see how I could look, I worried that the artificiality of it would push me into depression. When I did it, however, and initially saw myself in just a camisole, I felt the world move. I felt organic, connected, sweaty, and female in a womanly way. I buzzed from the top of my scalp to the tips of my toes.

And then I cried.

There was no shame. There was no doubt. For a brief moment, I saw MYSELF in the mirror, and I looked HUMAN. I felt three-dimensional, like I finally could step into the world.

So I want how I associate myself, how I intuitively derive mental support to be more easily understood by people, and I want to feel like I’m an actual human being. Short hand for communicating that is to say I’m trans. So I’m trans, and that’s why I know.