[Esme nha Maire]

Thank you, Dapper. See, what puzzles me is that whilst I know it's certainly not the case for all MTF's to know, from a very early age, as I did, that they are female (I was somewhere in the range 4 to 5 - essentially, I can't recall ever having any sense of gender identity other than female), I get the impression that it's rarer for FTM's to have such strong gender dysphoria at such an early age, and if that is indeed the case, I cannot help but wonder why.

One would imagine that if it didn't take puberty for me to realise that something was horribly wrong (and at that age, I had no concept of sexuality, let alone homosexuality) that the same would hold true for FTMs. I take your point re the tomboy identity (funnily enough, that was kind of how I thought of myself, once I knew that word!) possibly seeming a 'nearest fit' , but as my gender dysphoria was a very strongly physical thing, the social stuff was very much secondary to me, I'm surprised if it isn't so in others, I guess.