Why am I suddenly now wondering if I am transgender? Like I look in the mirror and do not feel pretty at all anymore and when I talk I feel like I worry about sounding masculine, as well as if people think I look masculine, etc. I am a straight woman and have been battling with intrusive thoughts about my sexuality for some time now, and I am now suddenly questioning my gender identity too. Has anyone else with SOOCD experienced this, where you develop TOCD as a result of endless rumination cycles surrounding your SOOCD? Like I look into the future and know that I want to be a wife and mother and I want to have a husband and kids, but my OCD is telling me that I will be and act like a man and that will never happen. This is literally 10000x more distressing to me than my SOOCD was because I have honestly never understood the concept of being transgender but now I fear that that is who I am and who I have to be. Please help I cannot be the only one suddenly feeling like this. I want to feel confident and pretty and feminine again and I feel like I am never going to be able to. How do I know that this isn’t gender dysphoria/that I really want to become a man

TW: GENDER OCD Okay, I posted a lil while ago about SO-OCD, but I have recently been suffering Gender OCD too. And unlike SO-OCD, this one is blowing a hole through my heart. I have never once questioned my gender. I’ve helped my trans and NB friends come out, and never once thought about my gender. But ever since my SO-OCD started and then died down, the thoughts about my gender cropped up. They range from two thoughts: I’m nonbinary, or I’m a gay trans dude in denial. And the latter one freaks me out so much, because I love reading queer media (I’m bi, and so many of my fave book series focus on gay couples), and my brain uses that as an excuse that I like it because I actually AM a gay guy. The thought is paralyzingly, and I can’t even begin to think of a way to overcome it like SO-OCD because the thought of me ‘accepting’ it as true scares the hell out of me. I can’t enjoy my favourite books anymore, or my favourite TV shows/movies. Anything with a gay couple makes my brain think I want to literally be one of them, when before I could just enjoy it for what it was, a story with queer characters. My connection to my gender is something I’ve always held dear to me, and the thought of being pulled from it is heartbreaking, and also makes me feel extremely guilty because I support trans rights so much, so why am I so scared of being trans/NB? How do I even begin to get over this when the idea of accepting the thought terrifies me? How do I begin to convince the anxiety that just because I enjoyed reading/watching something doesn’t mean I actually want it to happen in real life?

So basically I’ve been dealing with obsessing thoughts about my sexuality and gender orientation. Although the majority of my thoughts are about my gender. It’s really freaking me out! I had a really bad issue with this when I was a freshman in high school. The thoughts became much less intense and I was able to live my life although I still got anxious about it from time to time. Now I’m in college and I recently began another very intense and distressing obsession about whether or not I’m attracted to girls or whether or not I’m transgender. It’s been six months of never ending anxious thoughts that really bother me. I want to be girl (which I am now) and date boys but I have these thoughts that what if I liked girls or wanted to be a boy and that causes me sooo much anxiety. I just worry so much because I sometimes have thoughts that I am uncomfortable being a woman and with feminine things even though I really like traditionally girly things and have all my life. There was never an ounce of evidence in my childhood but I’ve heard that some people don’t find out until they’re older and they sometimes don’t have any evidence from childhood so this doesn’t reassure me. Anyways, sometimes I have thoughts that it would make sense if I were a boy and that would be more like me even though I don’t want it to be and have never really felt like that. Lastly, I get really anxious because although I’ve felt much better with these obsessive thoughts over the past few years, it still came around once in a while. Why wouldn’t it go away? If I weren’t transgender, wouldn’t it have gone away? I just need some help. I don’t know what’s happening to me? I get scared because I just want to be me but sometimes it feels like it could be wrong and I can’t tell if it’s just my anxiety or what?

I've been struggling with my gender identity since about 2018 and have reached the point where I am currently on hormones. For a little bit I thought I was a woman but as time has gone on I've settled more into nonbinary as an identity. Now that I am on hormones, I'm noticing that some changes are positive in my mind and some give me a pretty decent amount of distress and doubt. I then discovered that TOCD is a thing and it's kind of thrown me for a loop since I already know I have OCD. I already had doubts but now I'm like, "Could I just be lying to myself and I actually have TOCD?", "Is this just a transphobic diagnosis that keeps people from living as they want?", "Is it possible for me to have TOCD and still be trans/nonbinary?". I'm going to have to talk to my therapist about it but in the meantime I would love some help understanding this whole issue. Thank you.