As many are already aware, I am a younger-to-older transage person. When people outside of the community think about transageness, they typically imagine someone who’s a chronological adult and identifies as a child – which would fall under older-to-younger spectrum of experiences. So I feel like my sector of transage is not visible enough and not spoken about enough, and I want to fill that niche.
I didn’t use to be transage all the time. I never enjoyed being a child, a teenager, a young adult, but I did not feel a disconnect between me and my chronological age up to somewhere between 2018 and 2019. I turned 21, and the next year I was already 32. I don’t remember if I already called myself transage back then or not yet, but I was open about my mental age (we did not yet say intra age) being older, and people took it rather calmly, because I attributed it to my plurality.
For a while my transage feelings coexisted with my ability to age-regress. These felt like very different things, and I never considered myself an ageslider because of it.
During the following several years, up to now, I aged in an uneven manner and became 40 years old. I will probably continue aging as I keep living, but I hope it will slow down and reach a normal human speed.
So what does it actually feel like? It started as a strong feeling of disconnect from my chronological peers, the things that bother or interest them, their own desire to stay young for as long as possible. Early 20s are when people identify as “college kids”, talk about “problems adulting”, start anti aging skincare routines. And a little after noticing and describing this problem, I also realized I have physical dysphoria about looking too young. It’s hard to say now which one came first, because my age dysphoria mixed too well with my gender dysphoria. Despite what my weirdly specific age updates look like – 32, then 37, 38, etc – I do not actually feel a precise difference between one number and another, and I calculated them by adding 1 each year when I did not feel anything extraordinary, and some round number, 10 or 5, each year that felt like a sudden boost.
After I became more public about being transage, I started dealing with comments from people who were seeking to invalidate my identity. Some of them claimed it’s natural to want to be older – but I’ve wanted to be older before I became transage, and it felt less pronounced and more like an abstract wish than an identity. Some said I cannot identify as older because I can’t know what it feels like to be older – but by the same logic I wouldn’t be able to identify as a man either.
Right now I feel pretty certain in my identity, it’s not difficult for me to pass as my intra age online, and as for offline, I believe my body will catch up. Being transage does affect how I feel around people though – I feel some mix of envy and distrust for cisage people in their 30s-40s. I don’t think I need to explain where the envy comes from – and distrust appeared because quite a few of them took my coming out somehow personally and tried to persuade me I need to “enjoy my youth”, and that I’ll understand when I “get older”. I’m trying not to have that experience affect my connections with new people, though. I do like hanging out with young teenagers, because even if they don’t see me as my intra age, I am still significantly older than them. I also like company of people in their 60s-70s, because being treated as young by them does not feel wrong.
I feel like this text came out pretty abridged, there’s more to say, but everything else on my mind right now is not a separate new fact of my life, but some clarification on what I already said. If you have some further questions, you can ask them here.
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